Grant Payments
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-12
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James Lawless (FF), Kildare North

I worked all the way through second level and third level and afterwards. Then I ended up studying while I was working, so I did it both ways round. I totally appreciate the industriousness and the necessity in many cases for students to work through their education. How we have it structured is that under the SUSI grant scheme, income from employment that represents holiday earnings outside of term time is calculated on the basis of Easter holidays, summer holidays and Christmas holidays. This can be disregarded when calculating the means of the family for the SUSI grant application. In the current budget, we are increasing that from €8,424 to €8,830, which is an increase of about €400, or 5%. That is something I was minded to do. As I said in response to a question earlier, there are a number of choices in each budget. We cannot do everything so we try to look at how we can approach something with targeted measures. This was one of the ones that was important, even if it was only 5%. It was something I was conscious to do in order to keep student earnings in line with inflation and allowing that to be taken into account. Students should not be penalised for going out to work outside of term time.
We have what we call an options paper on the cost of college, which is an analysis of engagement with students. I had a meeting with a number of students' unions and other stakeholders recently in Portlaoise. We examined the different asks they had regarding grants, fees, thresholds, student accommodation and the earnings disregard for students' income at weekends or over term breaks. Next, I will take all those different requests and publish them as an options paper and have a costing and impact analysis against each one. We can make decisions then and I would welcome the input from those in the Houses who are interested in the brief, as to which options are preferable to others and why people believe that to be the case. I will engage in good faith with Deputies in the House as we approach the budget to consider those options.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-12/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-12