Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputies Ó Broin and Funchion for coming in and for doing the work they have done on this.

Deputy Ó Broin spoke about the submissions and I was disappointed with the submissions that I read. The USI was the best submission of all of them, followed by the RTB but there was no great sense of understanding of the whole thing and what was really interesting was USI's point about overseas students. I have no difficulty with overseas students and I see the benefits of it for our economy and everything but I am familiar with a particular international language school that has many hundreds of students here in Dublin and they are at a higher level because they are postgraduates, they are sponsored by professional companies and they speak better English than most people who speak English but they are here with a lot of money and staying for a year and they are occupying a lot of student accommodation. There are great benefits from that too and I am all for the free movement of people across the European Union and everywhere else but there is no great sense from all of these reports how urgent the situation is. The other side of it is that we have students sleeping in cars, sharing beds and popping up for two or three days and we have students who are literally trying to sleep on the edges of campuses and that is the reality of it. That does not help someone to get on with their academic achievements. There is a major crisis.

USI had a really good and informative submission which touched on some of those key issues around the vulnerability of students who simply do not have the money to provide accommodation and yet have a yearning for learning and want to pursue their academic careers. There is a crisis here but I do not get any sense of that from the two other presentations that we had.

Well done on the work. It is great and it is worthy of support.