Labour and Fine Gael at odds over college grants

Farmers and self-employed people can “manipulate their income” so that their children are eligible for college grants, Labour Party chairman Colm Keaveney has claimed.

Fine Gael TDs disagreed with this claim as they vowed to oppose any attempts to include productive assets, such as farmland, in means tests for grants.

Education Minister Ruairi Quinn is reviewing the system, which awards grants based on parents’ income and does not take into account assets, such as farmland or businesses.

Mr Keaveney said the poor weather conditions and a difficult summer for farmers would make it harder to introduce any changes this year.

He suggested any new means-testing system should assess families over a longer time frame than one year to take revenue and income into account.

The former president of the Union of Students of Ireland said he was “very aware self-employed people had an ability in the past to manipulate their income”. “Capital expenditure could be ramped up in any year so that in order to provide for eligibility in the subsequent year for full maintenance support,” said Mr Keaveney.

His fellow Galway East TD, Paul Connaughton, was one of many Fine Gael backbenchers to rush to the defence of farmers. “There are no farmers manipulating the system in any way,” he said. “People need to be able to invest in their farms. If they buy a tractor, that’s how they improve their ability to do their job, that’s how they make their income better.”

Mr Connaughton said he would be making it known in “the strongest way” that including assets in means tests “is not a very solid idea”.

Wicklow Fine Gael TD, Billy Timmins, said that including farm assets is the “incorrect way to go” and that anyone who is “pragmatic or in touch with Irish society” will understand that. He also warned that any such move would risk “depressing the value of assets at a time when we are trying to give some stability to the market”.

Chairman of the Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Andrew Doyle, said there were “a lot of people with concerns” in the Fine Gael parliamentary party that the changes were a “simplistic way of achieving cost savings”.

“Less than 6% of all those in receipt of grants are farming families,” he said. “The figures recently show farm incomes have dropped and are well below the average wage.”

IFA president John Bryan said the farming community “would not tolerate any changes which would result in children from low income farm families being excluded from third-level grants”.