Parents of trainee pilots: We’ve been left high and dry

Parents of up to 80 trainee pilots, who lost up to €80,000 each when a Waterford pilot training college went bust, are livid at how the Government rallied to help out language school students yet left their children high and dry.

It has been two years since the Pilot Training College in Waterford went bust but the anger hasn’t subsided among parents, many of whom are still repaying loans they borrowed to fund training that was never completed.

They argue that the State had a greater responsibility to the PTC students than the foreign language students as the Irish Aviation Authority was obliged to ensure PTC had sufficient funds to complete all training.

In the past three months, five language schools in Cork and Dublin were shut leaving thousands of non-EU students, who had paid thousands of euro in fees, in limbo.

In May, a task force involving the Department of Justice, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Education was established to examine the fallout and then earlier this week, Minister for Education, Ruairi Quinn and Minister for Justice, Frances Fitzgerald announced that students could complete their courses at other colleges with fees discounted by 70%.

Martina and Brian Kealy from Castleknock in Dublin, whose son Richard was among the 80 trainee pilots left stranded in Florida in 2012, said that most of the PTC trainees were also foreign students — yet there was a marked difference in the Government’s response to the language schools’ and pilot training school collapse.

Martina Kealy said: “It is clear that this second initiative, which is funded by the colleges themselves, has arisen because of the work of the high-level taskforce. In contrast, when we appealed on behalf of the PTC students, Minister Varadkar stated that he wasn’t in a position to help us and made no effort to set up a task force.

“Neither did the IAA give any discount on the exam fees of around €2,000 which it charges.”

“So one group of students, both Irish and international, received a very different response in comparison with another larger group who had lost only a fraction of the monies of the former. In the first case, our case, there also appears to be greater failings by state agencies,” she said.

A spokesman for the Department of Education said they had “no engagement” with the PTC in Waterford as it was ” privately-owned and operated flight training school under the relevant oversight of the Irish Aviation Authority”.

“The initiative to offer discounts to international students comes from the private sector English language colleges, and will be provided by those colleges,” she added.

Responding to the discounted fees initiative, the Irish Council for International Students, which was represented on the task force, said that while students now had a clear alternative for language study, the idea of paying again for something they had already paid for seemed unjust.

The colleges were closed followed restrictions placed by the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service on their visa-issuing powers in light of inspections to check compliance with requirements.