Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael)
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In the first instance, we got a sum of money to activate the student accommodation system for 2025. This is in addition to the student accommodation allocation the former Minister, and now Taoiseach, got previously through the national development plan and the windfall. It is up to the universities to subscribe to and ascribe the thresholds in those instances. They will know what a 30% threshold will mean. I stated in the Dáil that our clear policy objective is to increase the amount of purpose-built accommodation. Before the establishment of my Department, there was no student accommodation budget of any description. I am sure Senator Mullen will agree that further and higher education, particularly further education, was the poor relation in the Department of Education. There is now a ring-fenced budget of €4.5 billion for next year. We have moneys for student accommodation. We hope most of that will be activated through rental agreements, leasing options or activation measures.

Even if I had €1 billion today for student accommodation, which I do not, we would still have to secure planning permission and go through procurement and detailed design, which will take a period of time, before we would even have a machine on the ground. The Higher Education Authority, the universities and the Department have a bit of work to do on how we spend the initial tranche. This money will ramp up incrementally going forward. It is certainly a huge improvement on where we were.