Manus Lenihan
A recent opinion piece in Trinity’s University Times (“Free Degrees? We’re not there yet”, Max Sullivan, March 22nd) suggested that our not having to pay college fees “serves to entrench social divisions”. The author’s central points: firstly, that things like schools and social housing need more money too; secondly, that despite free fees being around since 1995 college remains a middle class bastion. I don’t dispute that second point- his conclusion proves it. He says we should be paying for third-level education, but that we should have enough grants to help anyone unlucky enough not to be able to afford it.
The election should have tuned us to be wary of this incredible phenomenon: the Cut That Doesn’t Bleed-but still saves money. Look at the mathematics of it. Everyone has to pay for college, because the money that used to go into colleges can’t be taxed from a rotting economy and anything we do get is going into banks and heavy interest rates from now on anyway. But this apparently cash-strapped government should still be able to find enough money to fund the vast number (swelling every month) who can’t afford to pay fees. This is clearly a Cut That Doesn’t Bleed and it stems from a limited and really cuddly view of society.
Ruari Quinn, the man with the power to decide on the fees debate
People who are at or below the average wage are, as the word “average” implies, not some tiny unfortunate minority who can be covered by a few grants. The point of “free fees” is that we pay through our taxes for a quality education system that anyone can use no matter how little money they have. This is not a debate about free college. It is about whether we should pay twice for a system that isn’t even doing what it should be.
Or, I should say, maybe pay three times.
It is terrible that even with free fees, large sections of the lower-income majority are kept out. Clearly this needs to be fixed. But Sullivan looks at this problem through the blue-tinted glass of a right-wing, pro-cuts social discourse and says: it’s not working, so let’s scrap free fees.
Poorer people aren’t going to college for the simple reason that college is nowhere near free. Most students spend hundreds between books and public transport. Owning a laptop is compulsory or else a huge advantage for most courses- that’s another €4-600. If your family lives far from your college or you can’t stand living with them any longer (a factor definitely not to be written off as frivolous, as many will testify) there’s rent, bills and food to worry about. If a student lives at home, the family has to pay for their upkeep. If the family is any way close to poor, sending someone off to college instead of looking for a job to bring some money into the house is a form of madness that can lead to starvation. And then there’s the two-grand registration fee. Of course, families or individuals could find a money lender who would lend them the money needed to cover these fees. Eventually they will need to pay that back, and whilst that isn’t a problem for many, some will be in a situation where they are unsure if that will ever be possible.
We have to accept that fees are not the biggest issue. Around 100,000 people braved the November ice and snow to demonstrate in Dublin last year about far scarier and more harmful cuts. None of these people were out on the streets to have a civilized debate about tax allocation, however. They were marching to say I can’t take this. Austerity means a catastrophe for my life and my community. Sullivan says he was inspired to write by his experience painting a grim council flat with St. Vincent de Paul. Do the woes of the hard-hit workers on the ICTU protest, similarly, put college fees into perspective, leaving the slogans dead on our lips, our placards drooping shamefully?
For me, it’s the same struggle. It would be great if 30-40,000 students would march for better council flats, but generally, huge numbers of people will only put their life on hold for a day and go protesting if it’s a big deal personally. The best thing we can do is link these struggles on a class basis. Class is something that intellectuals in the 1990s liked to pretend didn’t exist anymore. But we can see the division clearly: the class that gets cuts versus the class that gets bonuses and mad pensions, that rubs shoulders with members of the Forbes billionaire list. The class that actually saw their wealth increase in the last year. Plenty of those who marched on November 27th had sons and daughters and relatives who marched on November 3rd. School students, in their hundreds, engaged in walkouts around budget day.
The recent USI protests
Hundreds? Yeah. Not very impressive, no. But it’s a very encouraging start. They were leaderless, unorganized amateurs, 16-year-olds who were scared of their teachers. More and more sections of society are engaging in struggle- look at the student nurses who made the government take a step backwards, because there was decent organization from the trade and students’ unions.
The fact is, while workers were worrying about paying the bills and accordingly took to the streets on November 27th, all the wise grey heads of politics and the media had to say about the ICTU demonstration was that it was irresponsible, that it would surely lead to violence. The unions made sure the march went nowhere near Leinster House, trying to soothe the fears of the Independent. The union leaders themselves were booed by their members as they spoke and the media found some stone-throwing republicans on Molesworth street to take scary pictures of. A few weeks later, a stupendous six billion was cut from society. The demonstrators had demonstrated, but their leaders, on their six-figure salaries, had understandably little appetite for anything more substantial.
The Union of Students in Ireland with its airheaded sloganeering is the same thing, an institution that’s ten steps behind reality. When Gary Redmond took up his position as USI president, his most prominent achievement in student politics that the Irish Times could find to trumpet was that he’d managed to get some famous band to play in UCD. The USI did put on a good show for the “Education not Emigration” march. Some individual Student Unions, SU officials and class reps have done their job very well. But from ground level, its upper circles look like a clique of wannabe taoiseachs who don’t have a clue what to do about this mass movement that’s boiling up under their feet.
Currently the leadership hold demonstrations to let off steam, while accepting austerity generally- the “education is a sacred cow” approach that, despite “smart economy” rhetoric, convinces nobody unless they really want to be convinced. It’s the argument of people who really don’t know where they stand but know where they want to be standing. The massive concession the USI slip by this winter- a registration fee hike to €2000- they trumpeted as a victory, because €2000 is better than €3000. Paul Gogarty, the darling TD of the students’ unions, said after the march that the fee wouldn’t be hiked to €3000 – just yet. It was too much too quickly, he said. With delight, the Student Unions accepted this promise of massive hikes to come. You see, it’s OK if it happens on the watch of next year’s SU.
But Gogarty did no better than any of the Greens when February 25th 2011 passed its judgment on the Dáil of summer 2007. Already his name seems like a bit of a blast from the past. Sudden irrelevance: we’re going to see a lot more of that as time goes by and vicious budgets knock us punch-drunk. I’m talking about the USI in its current form.
Ireland’s economy has gone through the biggest peacetime contraction of any developed country in history. The media and political consensus now wants us to reduce the deficit to 3% by 2015. No government in history has done a deficit-taming on anything like this scale. Pinochet, the military dictator in Chile, tamed a smaller deficit over a longer time back in the seventies, but he had to kill a whole load of people and tear the country apart economically. And Chile actually produces stuff other than a few pharmaceuticals that can just as easily be manufactured somewhere else that has low enough taxes.
If we accept the EU/IMF deal and the need for austerity generally, the notion that education will be an untouchable kind of sacred Hindu cow is really ridiculous. We cannot just say “cut some other vulnerable group”, that would be unconscionable. We need to unite with those other groups and demand a real alternative to the consensus of austerity. Of course education is important- I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t think so- but so is healthcare, so are jobs, so is a living wage. All will be cut in reverse proportion to how vigorously they are defended on the streets.
Fine Gael's policy to education is still unclear
These things going out the window- and many more, which is the logical conclusion of asking for a deficit reduction to 3% by 2015- would be a social catastrophe worse than anything that can result from challenging the rule of the money markets and the consensus that falsely claims that “they” hold all the cards.
It may seem like that’s another debate entirely, but you cannot for a moment separate fees from the wider situation that determines where the money comes from and where it goes. With the doggedness of suicidal cultists, most of the media still cling to the idea of cutting our way into a recovery. Fine Gael’s million-euro electoral machine has smoothly picked up the ball from Fianna Fáil and will kick it in exactly the same direction- which means that, despite Labour’s soothing noises, students have plenty to worry about.
Furthermore, our concerns about fees- and every student or prospective student below a certain income threshold has concerns about fees- cannot be separated from the wider situation. Maybe you think we have no choice but to play the game, but wait until you’re in a dole queue in a few years’ time drawing a payment that’s been cut to a “fiscally responsible” size by the IMF. Then you will realize that we have no choice but not to play the game, and for students, that means mobilizing and organizing resistance against fees.
