Professor Vincent Cunnane:

Just to go back to that need and what we can do immediately. We await with bated breath the national student accommodation strategy, which should come out before the end of October. This has been a long time in gestation. As Professor Cusack has just said, we have been working over many years to try to advance the case for student accommodation. In March 2024, we put in, as a sector, 53 different projects across a variety of activities. These include working with the private sector, purpose-built student accommodation, refurbishment, digs - everything that we could possibly imagine. We also worked with our local councils to identify land and space they could utilise for student accommodation. Those 53 projects are real but we await the outcome of the analysis of that since March 2024. There is frustration within the sector. We did a lot of work then but we have not really heard anything since. The national student accommodation strategy should be core to what is going on. We hope it will provide opportunities for us to move forward at pace, as opposed to us being asked to do another set of analysis, which may have been Professor Cusack's point. We are beyond the analysis phase. We want to get into action but it needs decisions from the State and that is why the national student accommodation strategy, as we await it, is so central to that.