THIS week's column has bad news for those who have applied for grants to Dublin Corporation, the local authority with the single largest number of grant applicants in the State.
The corporation does not expect to make initial grant payments until the middle of November, leaving students in semesterised colleges in particular with an income free period of almost two months.
The reason for the delay is the huge increase in grant applicants to the corporation's Higher Education Grants Section. Before the widening of the scheme in 1991/92, Dublin Corporation was dealing with around 800 grants. This year, it has over 3,000 grants to process: 1,300 new applicants and 2,000 renewals. Unfortunately, its staff levels have not increased commensurately and so the delays.
A corporation spokesman said it was a "terrible deterioration" for UCD students in particular, since the introduction of a semesterised calendar meant that they were now back some weeks earlier than in past years.
"It's the sheer bulk of what we are trying to deal with," he said. The combination of the widening of the grants scheme and the removal of fees had "trebled and quadrupled" the numbers involved, he said.
To be absolutely fair to Dublin Corporation, its Higher Education Grants Section is one of the most conscientious and aware of any of the grant awarding bodies, but it is clearly under severe pressure and the situation has continued to deteriorate despite its efforts.
There is little point in the Department of Education and the HEA seeking to increase the numbers of college places and encouraging those from disadvantaged backgrounds to attend college with grant support if those grants are going to be too late to be of any real benefit.
Elsewhere, Clare County Council has sent its cheques to its finance office and they will be sent out soon, pending the receipt of registration details from the colleges. Kildare Co Council applicants should start receiving cheques this week since the first batch, including both renewals and first time applicants, was sent out last Friday. Similarly, Wexford Co Council was also sending out cheques to both renewals and first time applicants last week.
At the time of writing Meath Co Council had just sent out its cheques so students should receive them by early this week at the latest. Tipperary North Riding was aiming for the beginning of November, while South Riding was looking at a similar time scale or slightly earlier. Most of Mayo Co Council's applicants should receive cheques this week, if they have not done so already.
Meanwhile, the Department of Education was aggrieved at a reference in last week's Grantwatch. We commented that it was unfortunate that no Department representative was on the Q&A discussion panel which finished a recent USI officer training session and at which grants was the major topic of discussion.
A Department representative from the grants section did attend an earlier session, said a Department spokesman, and those in attendance had expressed their gratitude for the earlier presentation, but it had not been asked to provide a representative for the later session.
Grantwatch duly grovelled and tugged its forelock, until it found out that the Department had in fact been asked to provide a representative for the final session but had refused. When corrected, the spokesman suggested this might have been because civil servants and politicians couldn't be seen on the same platform at the same time. A bit like Bruce Wayne and Batman, then, or, more plausibly, Jekyll and Hyde?
Also potentially disputable was the Department's claim that criticism of the Higher Education Grants system was "unfairly directed" in its direction in last week's column. A spokesman said it was "very unfair" to label the system a "mess" (guilty, m'lud) when it was really only a small number of applicants at the edges of the scheme who were affected by amendments made by the Department to the scheme.
A fair point, perhaps, but it begs the question: who has overall responsibility for the administration of the HEG scheme?
