“An insult to people’s intelligence” – O’Donovan

The alternative budget proposals being presented by Sinn Féin show how out of step they are with the economic realities of funding Further and Higher Education, Fine Gael Minister Patrick O’Donovan has said.

“To be honest, it’s an insult to people’s intelligence both within the Higher and Further Education sector and outside of it,” said Minister O’Donovan.

“There is no detail on Funding the Future, zero mention of the National Training Fund or what they would do with that to improve skills training or address re-skilling needs across the country”, said Minister O’Donovan.

“In some cases, it appears they just copied and pasted parts of the options paper we published a few weeks ago, and they didn’t even do that right – we know that reducing the student contribution fee by €1500 will cost the exchequer €148.6m, but they wrongly have it down as €136.5m”, said Minister O’Donovan.

“Even in relation to funding 200 additional medical places, they have a fantasy figure of €4.4m allocated for that – when the reality is that we are already increasing the number of places to 200 and delivering that will cost almost double their published figure. You have to question whether they take this seriously at all, given the sloppy numbers they have dished out in that document today. The whole document lacks vision.” concluded Minister O’Donovan.