Readers of the Bulletin may recall that the Public Interest Lawyers are also challenging the English government’s increase to third-level tuition fees. Phil Shiner will address this year’s Irish Council for Civil Liberties legal practitioner dinner.

Meanwhile, the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) have been granted leave to judicially review the previous Government’s decision to decrease the amount of grants awarded to third level students in 2012.

The challenge follows the previous Irish Government’s decision to increase the qualifying distance for a student grant from 24 kilometres to 45 kilometres. The Irish Government argue that improvements to public transport should alleviate this difficulty for students.

The USI argue that it could not have been reasonably expected that grants would be cut by such a substantial amount, in some cases over 60%. Commenting on the challenge, Gary Redmond, President of the USI stated “the biggest victims of these cuts are students from disadvantaged backgrounds who rely on the grants to stay in education. If this cut is not reversed many of these students will have no choice but to drop out”.

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