Dr. Patrick Prendergast:

First, I have asked about mental health services, although the president of SETU will be able to say much more about it than me. It seems, as things stand, that we are able to meet our capacity needs with counsellors and so on in student mental health, so we are managing it at the moment, it seems, but we have not had a direct briefing on the governing body, so I cannot say much more than that.

North-South student mobility is a really interesting topic. Deputy Conway-Walsh is right. Half the students coming south from Northern Ireland come to Trinity, it turns out. There are traditional, historical reasons for that. It is still very few. I think only something like 2% of Trinity students are from Northern Ireland, so the percentage must be much smaller in many other institutions. Why are there so few northern students coming south? For many years we ran a programme in Trinity, when I was provost there, called the Northern Ireland engagement programme, going into secondary schools and high schools in Northern Ireland and telling them about Trinity. Many of them do not know how to apply to the CAO. It is kind of complicated because the points change every year. We understand it but they do not. Some schools welcomed us with open arms and some did not want to see us at all. It is not straighforward. Then students who would want to come south needed specific careers guidance as to how to apply to the CAO and they might not have been able to get it. Every year until Brexit, the number of students coming from Northern Ireland increased. In the year of Brexit it dropped, and that was because of fee uncertainty. The students did not know whether they would be subject to the non-EU fee. Thankfully, the Minister provided clarity on that, but every year since the number of students coming to Trinity from Northern Ireland has dropped. I guess if we look at the whole system we will see what is happening. I have not looked into SETU's data and I must do that sometime, but I imagine there are handfuls of northern students, probably dropping every year. If we want to improve student mobility on the island of Ireland, we probably need a specific policy on it. We need fee certainty such that, no matter what happens, students in Northern Ireland coming south will pay only the EU fee and, likewise, students from the Republic of Ireland going north will pay only the EU fee. There should be a programme giving information to students in high schools and secondary schools in Northern Ireland about how to apply through the CAO.