Third Level Costs
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-29
============================================================

Naoise Ó Cearúil (FF), Kildare North

I acknowledge the efforts and measures the Minister has taken in increasing the non-adjacent grants, the student assistance fund, etc. I spent a year in student union politics just after university in Maynooth students' union. An issue then, which continues to be an issue, is that there are those who sit right above the threshold for grants, for whatever reason. It is similar in a way to when somebody is applying for social housing and there is an income limit of €40,000. In circumstances where there is a €40,000 income limit, as in that instance, or a €50,000 limit, in terms of the SUSI grant, there is sometimes a reason that the threshold should not apply to someone earning €51,000. In that circumstance, is there any way view of assessing difficulty or hardship or reasoning when assessing that hard line of a threshold?

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:34+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-29