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You are > Home > A partial restoration of fees is called for
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Friday, September 19, 2008
A partial restoration of fees is called for
YES, Minister – but now make it happen. Words are fine, but action is now required. I’m very glad the Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe has said he personally backs the return of college fees in some form. He and his colleagues all know that the effect of the 1995 decision to scrap third-level fees, whatever the intention, was to hand yet another subsidy to the well-off.
The cynical view, bearing in mind that the Minister for Education at the time was Niamh Breanacht of the Labour Party, is that the decision to introduce free third-level education was really a plan to garner middle-class support for the party.
So what the Minister did was relieve all parents, irrespective of their circumstances, of the burden of paying fees, making the State itself responsible for them.
The argument put forward (a very laudable one, at least in theory) was that this would open the way for children from workingclass backgrounds to go on to third-level education. It didn’t work of course.
As Mary O’Rourke, TD, said on radio recently, the abolition of fees “was never the vehicle of social equity that some hoped for”.
Michael Casey, former chief economist of the Central Bank, has explained why. He has acknowledged that the 1995 decision meant that “the Rainbow Coalition handed over huge sums of taxpayers’ funds for the enrichment of a select group of people by abolishing third-level fees”.
The well-off were delighted, and little wonder. The rest of the taxpayers were left to pick up the tab. “As we now know, of course,” added Mr Casey, “few people from lower socio-economic groups benefitted from the scheme.”
Former Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald recently put things in context. “For decades prior to 1995, the State, by paying two-thirds of the cost of university education, had heavily subsidised university fees. An unintended – and, in terms of social justice, totally perverse – consequence was that the only people who benefited were those well enough off to be able to pay onethird of the cost themselves.”
Dr Fitzgerald went on to point out that the “crude – and costly – solution for this gross inequity in 1995 was for the State to take over the whole cost of university education”. In effect, one gross inequity was substituted for another, only it was a bigger inequity.
Now, at last, it is being faced up to. Maybe. The Minister for Education has highlighted a Bank of Ireland wealth survey which found there were 33,000 millionaires in the Republic.
He asked: “Why should we, the taxpayers, fund the people who could well afford to pay for themselves?”
That’s the kernel of the matter. But instead of acting now, the Minister has merely said that his Department is preparing a series of reports on fees which should be ready for Government within six months. Six months! The solution is as clear as the nose on the Minister’s face.
A partial restoration of fees is called for. Those who can afford to pay should pay. And the money saved should be diverted by the State to the primary level of education, where the need is greatest. According to an authoritative OECD report just published, Irish primary schools have 24.5 pupils per class – the second largest of the EU countries surveyed.
If the political parties in the Dáil have even a semblance of commitment to the promise contained in the 1916 Proclamation of “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”, then they would all work to ensure that adequate resources would go, not to the upper, but to the lower levels of education.
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