USI has lobbied independent TDs Mildred Fox and Jackie Healy-Rae to support a private members' bill on student support to be tabled in the Dail today.

The national students' union is also considering placing advertisements in the national newspapers naming deputies who vote against the motion. The Labour Party private members' bill, which will be tabled today and debated tomorrow, calls for emergency measures to tackle the accommodation crisis, an increase in the student maintenance grant and the income thresholds which qualify for the grants, tax incentives for landlords and a cap on the £260 capitation charge which students have to pay at the beginning of every academic year. The students expect the motion to be supported by Fine Gael, the Green Party and some independents. With independent deputy Tom Gildea having promised to vote with the Government in future, and Harry Blaney recovering from a hip operation, USI officers are particularly focusing on Wicklow TD Mildred Fox - who, they feel, would be anxious not to alienate the large number of her constituents who are members of the DIT, a USI affiliate.

The president of USI, Dermot Lohan, says students are "not going to let deputies walk into the Dail, vote the motion down and walk away unscathed. At a time when there's a budget surplus of £1 billion, we're asking deputies to make a clear and unambiguous stand on behalf of students and acknowledge they're getting a raw deal."

Lohan says he is not worried that USI will become too closely identified with one political party. "The Labour Party quite courageously stood up and backed us when other parties have hidden away from it. Labour didn't table this just for USI. They see it as being as important as we do. "We would have been as warm in our congratulations to any other party that had the courage to do it."

The students say they were assured at a recent meeting with the Minister for Education, Micheal Martin, that capitation "would never become the return of fees through the back door". However, the Minister also said that the charge would increase in line with the cost of university places.

Perhaps ominously for USI, Martin reiterated his reservations about the abolition of university fees by his predecessor when he responded to a Dail debate last week. Speaking during a debate on educational disadvantage, the Minister said the free-fees initiative had been "untargeted" and "had not helped a single child from an area of significant disadvantage to go to college".

The abolition of fees, he added, had "put the brakes on improvements in nearly every other area of education", but said he would not reverse the decision because "it relieved pressure on many middle income families".

The Minister poured more cold water on the students' demands when he took Ruairi Quinn to task for supporting their position paper.

"I was struck by the promise made by the leader of the Labour Party to a student demonstration last week to implement their shopping list of demands costing more than £100 million per year. He went as far as promising to abolish a registration fee which his party had introduced. "I cannot take seriously the attacks on me, supposedly on the grounds of concern for the disadvantaged, for implementing an already envisaged increase in a charge not paid by 50 per cent of students."

It is understood that the Minister made clear at his earlier meeting with the students that their demands for an across-the-board increase in the grant were not going to be met. He asked the students to come back to him with more focused proposals that would target extra resources at economically disadvantaged students.

During Tuesday's debate, he promised he would soon announce a "significant development" in funding for "disadvantaged access".

Meanwhile, USI is to move out of its Temple Bar headquarters before Christmas. The building is being sold by its owner, the student travel company, USIT. USI is in the process of releasing a significant chunk of its 50 per cent share in the company, to enable it to float on the stock market.

The union will move to temporary offices nearby and is still on the market for a permanent headquarters. Dermot Lohan says the financial restructuring of the union will "take a lot of time to iron out" but is "slowly coming together".