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

As I said at the outset, I worked all through college at a variety of things through weekends, evenings in some cases, and all through my summers and, indeed, often Christmas and Easter holidays as well. I would make the point to the Deputy that there is nothing stopping students from doing that. Students can work, and they can choose. It equates roughly to Christmas holidays, Easter holidays and summer holidays. However, if students want to say they are going to work every weekend instead or work one part of the year and not another, it is entirely up to them.
A threshold of €8,830 has been imposed now. To work it through, if we were to take that away and say there is no threshold, theoretically, a student could earn not €8,000 but €80,000 or €100,000. It would actually be a backdoor to the household or family suddenly having their income threshold nearly doubled. I know the Deputy would agree that is not desirable either because we have to have a progressive, fair system that targets supports to those who need them the most. I know that is maybe an extreme example, but there is logic to this and how it is calculated. Originally, the idea was to discourage students from working during term time. That is why it was applied to holiday periods. That is more relaxed now and they can choose to work weekends if they wish. There has to be some level at which it is set, however.

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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