The Minister for Education has made a surprise announcement that maintenance grants for Post-Leaving Certificate students will be paid in the next academic year, as soon as possible after September.
It is understood that they will probably be paid in January 1999, and retrospectively for the 1998 autumn term.
On Wednesday, Mr Martin faced strong criticism for not announcing grants for the 20,000 PLC students on Budget day, as promised in Fianna Fail's election manifesto. In an interview with journalists on Wednesday evening, Mr Martin refused to say when the grants would be introduced. Government sources said he was constrained from doing so by the Minister for Finance, on the grounds that the spending involved would be part of the 1999 Estimates.
Mr Martin told the Dail yesterday he intended "to introduce grants, which will be at the same level as the third-level maintenance grant, as soon as possible for students who are registered on PLC courses as of September 1998". He said "the method and timing of these payments may take some time to finalise".
He warned the introduction of PLC grants involved "the development of significant new administrative arrangements". It is estimated the cost of introducing the new grants will be between £11£13 million.
Department of Education sources said totally new arrangements would have to be made to pay the new grants. Unlike the 50,000 students who receive third-level grants at present, there are no income data or means-testing procedures for PLC students.
They said detailed discussions were going on with the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs on the planned new centralised grants authority, and work was proceeding on plans to reduce the current three types of maintenance grants to a single one.
Fine Gael's education spokesman, Mr Richard Bruton, said he could not understand why PLC grants had been left out of the 1998 Estimates when third-level spending as a whole increased by 22 per cent. He said the Minister had missed an opportunity to make lower-income students a priority. There was evidence that 80 per cent of PLC students were from lower-income backgrounds and therefore would have qualified for the new grant.