The number of third-level students to have so far received their grants has been described as unsatisfactory by Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn.

Speaking on RTE's Morning Ireland programme, he stated that there has been "quite an improvement" on previous years, but the new centralised application system is not as quick as desired.

At the beginning of this week, just 18,000 of the 66,000 applications had been processed, with 9,000 of these refused, the Irish Times reports.

This year, first-time grant applications are being processed by Student Universal Support Ireland (Susi), which is a centralised system operated by the City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee.

Mr Quinn commented: "I am disappointed that the system hasn't worked as well as it was designed to work. Some identifiable problems have emerged and these will be fixed."

The Susi scheme was established to speed up the application process, as local authorities and VECs were struggling to deal with the increasing number of grant requests.

Written by Donal Walsh

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