Assistance Fund reopened as food vouchers are distributed to struggling students | Stephen Barry

The UCC Students Union has had to provide food vouchers for students suffering from the continuing delay in payment from the new SUSI (Student Universal Support Ireland) system.“In the region of 25 to 30 students weekly will be taking it up weekly and that’s only from this week” said Welfare Officer Dave Carey of the €20 supermarket vouchers after an e-mail was circulated to all students on Monday to alert them to the scheme.In light of this nationwide crisis, Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn announced that a supplementary allocation of €3 million has been allocated to the Student Assistance Fund, bringing the national fund to €11 million. Of this extra funding, UCC students will receive almost €250,000, bringing the total allocation to UCC to just shy of €900,000.While the USI have appealed for an extra million euro for the fund for students in hardship, the allocation had meant that the application process has reopened for UCC students who have not been previously assessed.“We’re processing weekly,” Carey explains, “and that’s done on a first come first served basis. We would have had just shy of €650,000, now some of that was automatically allocated to the UCC Plus section and the rest was open to everybody. That dried up in five weeks, so we were lucky that we get to reopen it, but I wouldn’t be expecting it to last a huge amount of time.” Ninety applications which were accepted before funding ran out will be the first to benefit from this measure.However SUSI continues to provoke criticism of the government’s attempts to reform the public sector.The grant delays have caused a crisis nationally for affected students with the USI estimating that 5,500 students (28% of successful applicants) are awaiting payment. However SUSI claimed that while 1,500 students were due to be paid in the past week, over 3,000 students had still not provided bank details or confirmation of college registration. A further 12,000 have not supplied all of the necessary documentation with 10,000 more having provided no supporting material.Such figures frustrate Carey: “it’s literally the exact same application form that it’s been every other year. The only difference is that it’s gone to the online system and that it’s gone to SUSI. It’s not like the students have suddenly become stupider this year; so I mean the only thing that has changed is their system.”Plans are already emerging of the necessary changes to improve the system, which only took on first-time applications this year. Applications are likely to open earlier, sharing information with the Central Applications Office and the Revenue Commissioners will be introduced, and it may become possible to submit scans, as opposed to the process of sending in documents which had to be scanned onto the online system anyway.But for Carey there’s no end in sight: “I would imagine that it would be going into late March or early April and there will be people only getting their payments then.”As for UCC students, the college have been lenient with regard to the payment of fees but there have been serious financial implications in other ways. “I know of a few people before Christmas who were on the verge of dropping out, now I haven’t heard anything from them since so I think there have been people who have left the college because of it.“It’s far more to do with general living. People who had budgeted that their grant was paying for their accommodation and they’re now four months in the accommodation and they can’t pay the landlord, and the landlord is doing this as a business. Or paying for their food on a weekly basis.”