Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

What I might do is send the committee a note on this but the short answer is "Yes". The €5 million will sustain existing provision but we hope it will do a bit more than that because what we are also trying to do is put funding that had been temporary funding into the core. One of the things the universities regularly say is that all funding is welcome and makes a positive impact but if they can have certainty that this funding is recurrent and is gone in as core funding, it enables them to hire staff. It is much harder to hire someone if the funding is year to year and, therefore, we expect it to make a positive impact. The institutions are autonomous. We are not overly prescriptive of what they do and that is quite important. It does not mean we are not interested but we want to give them the flexibility locally to decide what their need is and I encourage them, as I do again today, to engage with their student union representative bodies about what the students see as a need. There is no doubt that in society generally we are seeing real challenges when it comes to mental health and there is a bit of a Covid impact as well. I meet a lot of college students now who somehow never even got to sit a leaving certificate, say goodbye in school or have a debs. There has been a whole cohort of people who found themselves plucked from the second level education system almost overnight to learn at home and then into college and we are conscious of that in our provision.