Labour Youth re-affirms its opposition to third-level fees by either the front or back doors

Issued : Saturday 19 February, 2011

Chair of Labour Youth, Colm Lawless, said: "Fine Gael plans to target students and their families for €500m worth of a graduate tax, without including it in their budget plans, and without any appreciation of the brain drain of young people, their knowledge, and their talent it will provoke as Irish students opt to study abroad rather than incur these charges.

Fine Gael states that the plan will ask students to contribute one third of the cost of their college course. This will lump young people with an average €12,000 debt at the beginning of their career. Engineering and science graduates – whose skills are fundamental to economic recovery – face a bigger debt.

This will push their personal income taxes up even higher, and will act as a disincentive to them staying in Ireland, or returning home should they live overseas.

In effect it will encourage a brain drain out of Ireland as those who benefit from our internationally renowned education system will be encouraged to seek work abroad rather than incur this charge. This will also create a massive black hole in education funding as money that is supposed to fund the third level sector will never be forthcoming.

Moreover, the €500 million loan required to capitalise the loan fund in the first instance that is mentioned in the Fine Gael manifesto, does not appear anywhere in their fiscal plan – it is utterly absent from their bottom line.

But the costings of this charge are crucial to wider considerations of Fine Gael’s budgetary and taxation proposals. For example, what impact will this charge have on graduates who are making contributions at the marginal rate? If we factor in this charge, it could utterly distort the figures that Fine Gael has presented to date.

So many questions and uncertainties exist about this graduate tax that one can only assume that it is another cost and charge that they would like to conceal from Irish families, only to be unveiled after the election.

Labour is opposed to third-level fees by either the front or back doors. In particular we do not accept an uncosted levy on families and young people that risks exacerbating the scourge of emigration and further deepening the recession by sending people overseas.

Labour abolished third level fees for undergraduates and, unlike others, we are determined that this remains in place.

Students are already suffering from a range of charges on top of which they have to deal with all the day-to-day costs that go with funding an education.

Fine Gael should be considering ways of incentivizing participation in education rather than levying the families and individuals on whom our longer term economic recovery depends."