Third Level Costs
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-29
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James Lawless (FF), Kildare North

In any social democracy, where do we draw the line and where should income levels and thresholds be? We are at a situation now where the threshold to avail of the minimum form of a grant is €120,000 per household, which means 80% of households in Ireland are eligible for at least some form of SUSI grant intervention.
To the Deputy's broader point about how we draw the line, and there are a number of lines as you go through the graduated system, I mentioned to Deputy Charles Ward earlier that there is a disregard for mica scheme payments. There are also disregards for disability payments and bursaries, for example, the 1916 scheme. I think there are several dozen of those because I signed a statutory instrument last year to give effect to them. The many disregards should go some way towards making it easier to hit the thresholds. One thing I intend to explore in the upcoming budget is whether, in the case of larger families with a number of children in the household attending college at one time, there is a measure we could take to ease the burden on them and whether that is a factor or criterion we could take into account. I am pursuing that at the moment to investigate for this year's budget.

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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