Madam, - Neil Ward's response (August 21st) to Michael Casey's opinion piece on the abolition of university fees (August 20th) is typical of the muddled thinking that the free fees camp uses to justify this absurd subsidy for the middle classes.
In the first point, Mr Ward states that economic benefits accrue to the wider economy from having a more highly educated workforce. This is a red herring fallacy.
While it is true, it does not counter Mr Casey's point that the benefits accrue "entirely" to the individual. The point is, the benefit is fully realised in the individual's higher salary, so the individual is already completely incentivised to obtain that qualification without being given the fees for nothing. That he may go on to spend this money in tax or in further consumption represents a positive knock-on effect for the economy, but that does not justify the subsidy.
Just because a subsidy injects money in the economy doesn't mean it makes sense. If we handed a grant to everyone whose surname begins with "W", those people too would spend this money in such a way as to fuel the economic fires. But it would still be a stupid and unfair waste of money.
Mr Ward's comparison of free fees with free primary and secondary education is the classic straw man argument. The difference between state funding of primary/secondary and third level, is that there are defined "social benefits" - literacy, numeracy and social skills - associated with the lower tiers of education, but not with third level. To compare these two arguments, as Mr Ward has done, is a fallacious device, borrowed from his Aunt Sally.
For his third point, Mr Ward produces another red herring. He cannot refute that the free fees system represents a transfer from working class families to middle class ones, so he talks instead about the tax system and RAPID programmes. These have nothing to do with the issue. - Yours, etc,
GRAHAM STULL, Chaussée de St-Job, Brussels.
Madam, - Michael Casey (Opinion, August 20th) is right about many things, but he misses an important point when he claims that it was just "academics who never had to pay university fees for their own children". In the case of some institutions like Trinity College Dublin, this "perk" was extended to cover more than "academics", including full-time maintenance, administrative and other non-academic staff of the college too.
Some academics, when challenged, defended this advantage on the grounds that the no-fees policy they benefited from was in fact based on a principle of improving access; that it allowed the children of the "less well-off" and "disadvantaged" (in other words, cleaners, blue-collar workers and everyone else other than themselves working in the college) to afford university attendance.
The irony that some of these academics are now the same people calling for the reintroduction of fees because free fees have failed to improve access for less well-off members of our community anyway is one that has not been lost on those of us who had to pay college fees in the 1980s. You might even refer some of the current calls as a "crassly hypocritical act". - Yours, etc,
FIONN THOMAS BURKE, Tullamore, Co Offaly.