Patrick Nulty’s Blog

In last week’s Irish Times, Sarah Carey lectures us about how bringing back fees will increase access to education for lower income groups, and asserts that Labour’s abolition of fees in 1995, far from increasing access, has had the opposite effect, and predominantly benefited only those who already enjoyed liberal access to third level education.

Ms Carey’s first (and indeed, only) venture into the realm of statistics to support her claims is itself inherently flawed. She states, “In 1995, about 40 per cent of school leavers enrolled in higher education. In 2005, that figure had risen to 55 per cent. That looks impressive until you realise that the 40 per cent had jumped from a mere 25 per cent in 1985. In other words, the biggest increase in attendance in higher education occurred when everyone was broke and fees were still in place.” It is unclear what Ms Carey is referring to as the “biggest” increase, as the jump between 25% and 40% is exactly the same as the jump between 40% and 55%. However, in any event, such a crude analysis of statistics without analysis of external factors such as the growth in the economy, cannot lead us to the broad-based conclusions, which the author has drawn. Instead, we must examine the issue from first principles, and ask why the maintaining the guiding principle of universality in a system of progressive taxation is still the ideal to which Ireland should aspire.

The Labour Party believes that education is a right, and not a privilege. It is a right, the enjoyment of which should be provided for by the state, through progressive taxation and, where necessary, with a fair and equitable grants system. We currently have neither, and although Ms Carey seems intent on blaming the Labour Party for inequality of access to education in this country, it is the lack of the two aforementioned factors in our society to which any such inequality is directly attributable. Of course, the lack of these elements is not down to the Labour Party, but due to the chronic mismanagement of the education system by successive Fianna Fail administrations. Ms Carey’s logic is astonishing; it is Fianna Fail who have failed to create an effective, fair and equitable grants system, Fianna Fail who continue to tax millionaires at the ridiculously low rate of 41%, but it is the Labour Party, who in abolishing college fees in what was the single most important removal of barriers to education for so many of our young people, who are now to blame for the lingering inequalities that exist?

Ms Carey is, of course, correct in her assertion that those who can afford it should pay more, in order to subsidise those who cannot. Perhaps, if those who earned the most in this country paid their fair share of tax, this aspiration would be closer to becoming a reality.

As the last few months has shown, the Irish tax system is monumentally flawed and based on the need to sustain the doomed property bubble. When all was said and done with the Celtic Tiger, our boom did not result in the high quality public services which the Labour Party does and has always stood for. Education, like transport and health, is a public service which has been failed by that system, and it is only through general reform of our taxation and grants systems with the principle of universality as its foundation stone, rather than imposing an additional tax on our already-burdened young people just because they are educated, that systemic change in access to education will really come about.