Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Government funding for student accommodation is welcome but the devil is in the detail. Will it be genuinely affordable? How much of this new accommodation will there be? It is only the accommodation built with the money the State will put in that will be supposedly affordable. The rest will be unaffordable. Is the Minister aware, for example, that, every year, UCD imposes the maximum legally allowed increase of 2%? Every year, it increases the rent on students despite the fact there is an affordability crisis. Does he know the new accommodation built at UCD will be €1,300? It is outrageous. That is the same as market rates. We cannot have a situation where national universities and publicly funded universities are charging these extortionate rates. According to the Minister, there will be a little bit of affordable, but we are not even clear on the detail. Will it genuinely be affordable? Even if the maximum rent is €6,000, as the Minister stated, that would eat up almost all of a student's grant. There is not a single piece of accommodation at UCD currently, for example, that would be fully covered by the maximum SUSI grant.

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