Dr. Patrick Prendergast:

When it comes to student accommodation, an important element of the TUs is that we are making university education more local and bringing it into the regions. We hope people will not have to go into student accommodation and will be able to commute. A student living in Wexford will, we hope, be able to get a university education in Wexford. The same is true of a student living in Waterford because university education will be available nearby. That is a good thing. We will also do more online education so people do not have to travel. Perhaps they will be able to do more of their course work at home.

Student accommodation is a complicated thing. Much of student accommodation is built to double up as rental properties over the summer. It is high quality, with en suite bathrooms in every room and all of that. In many other countries, student accommodation has shared bathrooms at the end of a corridor. Those are much cheaper to build. Perhaps we should think in those terms about building purpose-built student accommodation rather than building student accommodation that doubles up as a hotel over the summer. The latter is obviously more expensive to build because a building need to be constructed to a higher quality, with better fittings and all of that, if it is to be rented out as accommodation over the summer. There is probably scope for a task force to look into how to better provide student accommodation not just in the TUs, as Mr. Deenihan said, but throughout the higher education sector overall. Those are my thoughts.