SF wants to cut €500 from college fees (but won’t say how exactly)

SINN Féin is calling on the Government to spend €34million of this year’s Budget on reducing college fees by €500 per student.

Kathleen Funchion, the party’s education spokesperson, said Sinn Féin wants to reduce the so-called student contribution charge from €3,000 to €2,500 – and to eventually have genuinely free third-level education.

The Carlow-Kilkenny TD was launching the party’s Make Education Free! proposal at Leinster House yesterday, where she also said that Sinn Féin was not in favour of a student loan scheme.

Ms Funchion said the party estimates that the cost of implementing the proposed policy Plan: Kathleen Funchion TD would be ‘around €34million’ for a full year.

When asked by the Irish Daily Mail how the cut would be funded, she did not go into detail, but said Sinn Féin had taken its figures ‘from the Department of Finance like the Government do, like any party do’. Ms Funchion also insisted that funding the reduction could be achieved through budget planning rather than with cuts elsewhere.

She said: ‘We want to see at least a €500 decrease in the cost of fees for students. We know that unfortunately Ireland is slipping down the ranks in terms of our university status and how students are doing.’

Ms Funchion said we are ‘also seeing a decrease in the amount of people applying for college’.

She continued: ‘We’ve a 4.2% decrease in the amount of CAO applications, and unfortunately a lot of this is due to the cost... If you are living outside of Dublin or any of the major cities where you have to travel for third-level education, it’s a massive cost – it’s about €12,000 roughly per year.’ Ms Funchion also said Sinn Féin would be ‘completely opposed to a loan system’ for students because it puts young people in debt.

‘We see it in the likes of America where people are coming out with around $100,000 debt before they even start their lives... If we introduce a loan system here, it will gradually increase,’ she said.

‘The money is there to gradually reduce the cost of fees and to eventually have that free.’

A spokesperson for Education Minister Richard Bruton’s office said last night that the Government had increased investment in higher education by, in total, ‘€100million more’ than two years ago. The spokesperson added that ‘the National Development Plan had committed over €2billion in additional capital funding... between the years 2018 to 2027’.

Comment – Page 14 emmajane.hade@dailymail.ie

‘Drop in university applications’