About 1,000 students joined a demonstration at Trinity College Dublin yesterday to protest at increased third-level registration charges and the threatened reintroduction of fees.
The protesters released 1,000 black balloons and later marched to the Department of Education, where a petition in the form of 6,000 signed postcards was handed in.
Addressing the gathering, TCD's Reid Professor of Law, Ms Ivana Bacik, said third-level education should be a right rather than a privilege, in the same way that secondary education had been recognised as a right since it became free.
Recalling her own student protests in the "prehistoric" 1980s, when third-level fees were still in place and increasing annually, she said the Minister for Education's current policies threatened a return to those times.
Conceding that universities had a "very poor record" in admitting people from underprivileged backgrounds, Ms Bacik said increasing charges and cutting student supports would not help to change this.
She called on the Government to "drop this short-sighted and backward policy and keep education a right and not a privilege for future generations". Meanwhile, the Union of Students in Ireland said the findings of a new survey confirmed that Irish college-goers were "among the most hard done-by in Europe".
The EuroStudent 2000 survey - carried out in nine EU states, with the Higher Education Authority compiling the Irish figures - showed Ireland had the lowest percentage of students living in purpose-built accommodation, and that such accommodation was more expensive here than anywhere else.
The survey also found that Ireland also had below-average participation in third-level education from "working class children" and at 0.5 per cent of the total student body, by far the lowest percentage involvement by those with physical disability.
