James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy McGettigan. I have not passed a budget yet. I am working with the budget from my predecessor and the Department as I found it when I came in. This is my first provision of Estimates that I am bringing before the committee. I will do my own budget in October where I will put my stamp on things in terms of the issues we are talking about today and our shared interests. I look forward to our engagement at that point on the priorities because choices are hard, have consequences and have opportunity costs because if we choose to do one thing, it may mean that we cannot do something else. I look forward to the committee's involvement in that. If the committee wishes to make pre-budget submissions, they would be welcome being guided by the choices we have to make. This is something we can have a conversation about as we get closer to the budget.

I note that Deputy McGettigan met a group from TUS this morning. I would have liked to attend but I was visiting one of the Dublin colleges so was unable to attend. I have visited TUS. I was in Athlone and opened its new building, which is a fantastic new campus. I met Vincent Cunnane and the team there, including Josephine Feehily, its chairperson. We had a really good engagement. They shared some of their ambitions with me, which I share. I also signed off on a TUS Limerick campus getting capital funding last week. It is part of a really significant bundle 2 announcement. We spent €380 million across the higher education sector in terms of new buildings for TUS in Limerick, ATU in Galway, ATU in Letterkenny and SETU in Carlow and Waterford, so there is continued investment in the campus and real estate that are there. TUS is one of the beneficiaries of that in Athlone and will be a beneficiary in Limerick soon. I will work to see that all those projects are delivered on time and on budget. This is very much the focus we bring to the next round of them as well.

I have engaged with TUS and other technological universities on the borrowing framework. There is a commitment in the programme for Government to do that and put a borrowing framework in place in order that technological universities can enter into negotiations themselves with international funds, the European Investment Bank or whosoever they wish to engage with. They will enjoy autonomy. There is a difficulty in terms of on-balance sheet and off-balance sheet. If they are considered to be on-balance sheet, the State is effectively exposed and state aid rules and European regulations come into play so it is not a trivial problem to solve but it is one I am engaging with the technological universities on to try to progress and I will continue to do that. I have a few ideas about it but I will not share them publicly at this stage because some of them may have a degree of sensitivity in terms of some alternative proposals but I agree that technological universities having autonomy to borrow and pursue their own projects is the ultimate goal.

As I said last night and every day since February, and I have done multiple interviews and answered multiple parliamentary questions on it, I inherited a situation regarding students fees where cost-of-living measures were temporary and they are not available to me this year as it stands. However, I will certainly look for permanent measures in the budget that will very likely include the student fee element but also other measures across the board because the fee is one very important aspect of student costs and student budgeting but there are many others as we have heard today such as accommodation, travel, materials and the cost of living. I will be looking for a package in the budget that includes the student fee but also those other measures as well. The situation we are in is the one that prevailed last year, the year before and the year before that, since cost-of-living supports were introduced. It has drawn attention to the issue in terms of them being temporary, expiring each year and then being renewed each year. If, as appears, they are not being renewed this year, I have to do something else, which is to seek that funding from a different source, which is what I intend to do. I cannot, however, predict the budget negotiations until October so that is where we are on that.