Grants

I know the following may not be exactly relevant to this blog. I know that I will no doubt display my habitual prolixity. Nevertheless I think there are some things I have to say on the subject of third-level grants. This is all from personal experience, mind you.

I put myself through third-level education thanks to a grant from my local authority. I received the full grant. My parents did not have a big farm, not even a little one. They were—one is still alive—on the borderline between working and middle class. The idea of working through college, so beloved of those who really wish they were born on the other side of the Atlantic, was not an option for someone like myself who was partially sighted.

The grant covered my tuition fees and provided a completely inadequate contribution to my maintenance in Dublin. I was able to supplement this, though, through my means-tested, Social Welfare Blind Pension; a pittance in anyone’s terms, but I gritted my teeth for, as I saw it, I was making sacrifices in the present to earn rewards in the future.

In 1987 Charles Haughey became Taoiseach and appointed that slippy Sligo toad Ray MacSharry as Minister for Finance. The country’s economy was in a mess, so, borrowing from their idol across the water, the government decided that the poor, ill and disabled should be made to bear the brunt of fixing it. In particular the ever-smiling Dr. Tomato, Michael Woods, announced a campaign against the endemic disease of Social Welfare Fraud. I was caught up in this. I just didn’t conform to the “average” blind pensioner: I was young, comparatively well-educated and articulate. I was intent on bettering myself through my own efforts, not through sitting on O’Connell Bridge with a white stick and a coke tin looking for loose change. There was something decidedly suspect about me, but try as they might, they could not find any evidence of fraud on my part—there wasn’t any. So they decided that they would class the measly figure I received as a maintenance grant as income and deduct it from my blind pension, thus cutting it by more than fifty per cent.

I knew all about the sons and daughters of the large farmers who were able to get their full grants, and who could spend the maintenance part on petrol for their cars. Nobody seemed to worry about them. I also knew of the facility with which certain local politicians here in Cavan could get grants both for themselves and their well-wishers. There was a councillor, let’s call him Loftus (this wasn’t his real name of course—I won’t mention his poor niece). He got a grant for a prospective coffin factory, but the facility died before any of its customers. Then there was his adventure into apiculture. This was ill-starred, as Loftus had a wee bit of a drink problem. (He was a publican, but amazingly was not his own best customer.) Everything was buzzing along fine with the bees until—and here I quote verbatim from an informant—”… Loftus went back on the fuckin’ beer and forgot to feed the bees, an’ didn’t the little black and yella bastards swarm.”

I can be awkward when I want, especially when my back is to the wall. I saw myself as attempting to extricate myself from a life of poverty which I knew as the lot of those with a disability. I was, to quote Neil Kinnock, the first member in my family “in a thousand generations” to get to University. I had earned a good primary degree and been accepted for post-graduate study. Yet there was no way I could remain in Dublin on the pittance that I would now got.

The decision was irrational. The money was paid to me for a reason, yet I couldn’t give it back. I could not decouple the maintenance grant from the fees part. My local authority told me that I couldn’t give back the maintenance grant even if I wished to.

So with my family I fought the decision. I even went on Gay Byrne’s morning show to debate the issues with a leading official of the Department of Social Welfare. I’m not boasting, but everyone, friend and foe alike, said I won by a knock-out. Retaining the boxing analogy, I felt it was like going the full fifteen rounds with a very large, very slippery and very cold haddock.

But the Department remained implacable, no doubt hoping that I’d be smoked out and I would be forced to make a bee-line for my ill-gotten million, swherever they were.

I eventually had the decision overturned and I received full reimbursement for the amounts I had been stopped. The regulations had to be changed, and since then local authority maintenance grants have had to be excluded from consideration as income in means-tested Blind Pension calculations.

Two members of the legislature of the day, one a member of the lower house who passed away earlier this year, and a serving member of the Upper House, were of huge assistance to me. Neither of them were members of Fianna Fail: all they would do was sit on their hands, make representations (sometimes strong representations, whatever they were). They could not be seen to be too close to a cripple looking for the restoration of a welfare payment. What would their prospective donors or the aspirant district court judges in the golf clubs have said?

My family had been supporters of Fianna Fail for decades. People used to say to us, “You’re alright, you’re in with Fianna Fail.” Well, let me tell the world that we had a hard job getting what we were entitled to. We never sought anything else. Of course for me at any rate, the clientèlist—there’s a word that was so popular with the venereal democrats when they started—side of Irish politics had little value. I was somebody into policies, using politics for the greater good, not for my own good. I know, I know, naivety gets you nowhere. It would have been nice though if Fianna Fail’s members had shown some loyalty to us. We watched with interest as those whose loyalty was of a far shorter tenure being lavishly rewarded with jobs, grants and patronage. I often wonder what would my grandfather, a good Dev man, had said if he had known that his grandson, the first member of his family to ever go near third-level education, was being thwarted by Dev’s political descendants?

As for me I finished my postgraduate studies, earning a PhD. I think I was one of the first, though not the first person with a disability, to earn a doctorate. It wasn’t much use though. My dear sister Anita, or Bunny, had passed away a few weeks before I submitted my thesis. All the bloody grants in the world couldn’t bring her back.

I would just like to say that my experience of the Department of Social, Community and whatever Affairs has since then been entirely positive. A new generation work there now, inspired by something like humanity.