Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am lucky to have an office.

I thank the Deputy and welcome him back after his surgery. I will check that issue out. My honest answer is that I do not know. I have a dim view of any sort of vacant property in the middle of housing crisis, to make that point more generally. I have no knowledge of that but I will endeavour to find out for the Deputy.

I thank him for paying tribute to Jim Meade and Irish Rail. I consider him and the company champions of the apprenticeship programme. The Deputy is correct that it is such a case. I had a different case where the CEO of the Irish branch of the Zurich Insurance Group was in a DEIS school in my constituency in Bray. I witnessed the power he spoke with to the students there about his apprenticeship pathway, and now he is the boss of the organisation. The more we can show people how the apprenticeship is not a lesser route but just a different way of learning, the better. In many ways, it can present a more rounded employee or leader within an organisation. I am pleased that both the CEO of Irish Rail and Irish Rail are very involved in Generation Apprenticeship, which is our programme that promotes apprenticeships, and I will continue to ensure that they are. I also thank them because they are an organisation that has provided 18 places to assist us with capacity as we deal with the Covid backlog in respect of apprenticeships. They do not just talk the talk. They have really stepped up and I acknowledge and thank them for that.

I am glad the Deputy brought up the students commuting issue. I had an excellent meeting with the Minister for Transport on this last week. When we were bringing our student accommodation policy to Government, certain issues became clear when we talked to students. Through a survey, we talked to 22,801 of them, which is a lot of people. We were hoping approximately 10,000 would do the survey. It was interesting the number of times public transport and transport links came up when we were asking people about accommodation. Then you stop and think and realise that it is not actually that interesting at all; rather, it is logical. We know from the survey that 50% of students live at home. Many commute, including in my constituency. We have reasonably good public transport links. Approximately 50% of students commute to college from wherever. However, even among the 50% who do not and even when they live near college or in college accommodation, transport becomes a big part of their life for all the reasons the Deputy said, for example, to get to a part-time job, have a social life, move safely in and around a city or get from accommodation that might be a bit of a distance from the campus. Public transport links affect every student. What we agreed with the Minister for Transport and his officials as recently as last week is that we will work on an action plan specifically on how we develop these links in regional areas. The National Transport Authority agreed that it will collaborate regionally with universities. This should be done regionally. There needs to be contact points in the regions for the universities to make their views known and to be fed into the plans. We kind of knew this but now we have the weight of the evidence. Students view this as key to helping ease their accommodation challenge but also to improve their student experience. I am happy to keep in touch with the Deputy on this as we roll it out. He gave up a couple of regional and local examples in the mid-west that I will feed back as well.

Regarding the QQI, I will follow that up directly and I take on board the seriousness with which he raised it.

On the language schools, I am due to meet with their representative body shortly and I am happy to discuss this with them. We are going through a period of reform in respect of language schools and international education in general. We intend to introduce the international education mark shortly, which will basically accredit for the first time our language schools and our international education offering. However, there is, as the Deputy knows, sometimes an issue with visas, what a visa does and does not allow people to do and the length of time they can stay. I am supportive instinctively of what the Deputy said but I will need to engage with my colleague, the Minister for Justice, on that.