Mr. Alex Angland:

There are definitely dangers in taking in greater numbers of international students. We have seen what happened with the University of Aberdeen in Scotland recently. What is happening with the colleges is that they are being incentivised to take in more and more students to be used as, essentially, cash cows. We saw from the Cassells report that there is a €300 million deficit in core funding across the university sector. International students have been used as a method to try to make up this deficit. As the Deputy said, Government policy is incentivising universities and colleges to take these actions.