Dr. Mary Rose Sweeney:

Yes, you have smells and all of that. Counselling and psychotherapy for stress management is really important and preventing burnout is also a huge issue for these students.

Funding is needed for the neurodivergent societies to allow them to increase both the range of activities that they are doing and also the membership. That is a really lovely space for students to go off and have fun, bonding, to go away for weekends and do all the things that many other societies have enough funding to do.

The summer transition programme is also important. It allows the students to come in during the summer to get a sense of the university before all the bustle and noise and the over-sensory overwhelming environment starts. That would be really nice. We did that before in DCU approximately 15 years ago. It was successful and something that the students loved. Their families contacted us about it afterwards. That just comes down to funding. We can put that in place.

We also really want to do more research on things like helping the students to access physical activity in the campus. Everyone knows that physical activity is really important for your health and to help de-stress but these are things that are currently overwhelming for students. To go into a gym, there are flashing lights, pieces of silver, noise and booming music. We need to find ways to help students to engage with physical activity. There are a lot of things we can do but much of it comes down to having funding to do it. We could really improve their lives on campus if we had.