Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 15 July 2025

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science

Student Accommodation: Discussion

2:00 am

Mr. Paul Lemass:

Working through the business cases, getting an understanding of what it costs and the impact of the standardised design model we have developed will all play a part. I would not want to mislead the committee. There is a big viability challenge in any construction at the moment and costs have only gone one way in the past four or five years. While we are seeing a moderation in inflation, we are not seeing deflation, so costs are still very high. We will look at all options to try to reduce costs. That is all I can say because there is still a significant viability challenge. Somebody referred earlier to the 10,000 units in the pipeline that are not being activated. The reason they are not being activated is because people cannot make the business case stack up. There is a real viability challenge.