Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On the national tertiary office and the national tertiary degrees, which, as the Deputy said, are the first time we have provided degree programmes outside of the CAO points system, he is correct to say 23 courses were identified. I will get him a breakdown, because I do not have one to hand, but I can tell him from my own knowledge and from going around the country and engaging with people that the biggest success by a country mile has been the nursing programme. To be honest, the nursing programme was the inspiration for it. Many talented young men and women wanted to go into nursing but, for whatever reason, did not get the CAO points. They might go into a further education college, take the pre-nursing course and get the best marks possible, and then be told to go to the UK because they did not win the lottery to get a place at university. That is farcical and utterly offensive. We have enough challenges with our health service without staffing the NHS in the UK.

The nursing programme has gone really well. It is currently happening in the north west, so that includes Sligo, Donegal, Galway and other places, I am certainly hoping there will be an expansion of that. I know there are possibilities around the Deputy's region too. We will announce the expansion of the programmes next month and I will be very surprised if there is not a doubling of the number of courses next September on last September. The initial feedback is that it is going well. We wrote to every university and every ETB asking them to come forward with their ideas and letting them know we are open for business. If there is a suitable area in the Deputy's constituency, there is nothing to stop the ETB and the university working together to develop that pathway. There has been a huge appetite, enthusiasm and great leadership from a lot of people in FET and the higher education sector on this. We will get a Deputy a note on the matter.

On the mental health budget, we allocate the money and give the universities discretion as to how best to spend it, which is what they and the students' unions asked for. They know best what to do with the resources in their constituent colleges. In a lot of cases, the mental health funding has been once off, which has led to good outcomes such as capital projects but it does not lead to an ability to hire more staff. This year, with a view to helping with the staffing issue, we have tried to put more of it into the core and the base in order that the university will have certainty on the funding and, therefore, should be in a position to hire more counsellors and others to work in the mental health services. That definitely arose during the engagement with the universities. It is for UCC to decide how best to spend the allocation but, where possible, staffing is a key need in a lot of cases.

I thank the Deputy for raising the question on international protection. I am happy to answer it because it is important in this debate that we do not ever allow misinformation, as he alluded to, disinformation or worse to take hold. I am proud to be Minister in a sector that has done a lot to try to improve the humanitarian crisis. Every year outside of college term time, our sector provides thousands of beds, and rightly so. We will continue to do that and we should continue to do that, and if we can do more, we should do more. We have agreed a protocol with the Department of integration whereby student accommodation, where vacant for more than 12 months, can be considered. There could be a case where a private developer built something that had been meant to be a student accommodation block but never became it. If that is available and it has not been used in 12 months, that is fair enough. As the Deputy will know well, the Department of integration has for a long time been looking at any and all options available throughout the country, and it is true it identified a student accommodation block.

My view is it should not be used. That would require a Cabinet decision. I do not believe we should endeavour to fix one problem and cause another. If there are a few hundred students in a facility, we would need to know before there could be any conversation about using it, where they would go and whether they would be guaranteed new accommodation around the same time, for the same rent and so on. In my broader view as a member of the Government, and this is a view shared by all colleagues in the Government, we need to move to a long-term, sustainable policy on accommodation whereby we can say to communities that it is not the policy of the Government to come into a community and take a hotel or student accommodation. Some of that has been an emergency response to an humanitarian crisis, but we have to reduce the reliance on that because it is really important for social cohesion. I would have serious reservations, to put it mildly, about any proposal to purchase student accommodation that is housing students. I do not think that would be a sensible step to take. We can continue to engage with the Department of integration, however, and to be as helpful as we can.