Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I assure the Deputy that I have been willing but in fairness to them, I also wish to acknowledge they are up for it too. In fairness to our universities and our technological universities, a lot of them are chomping at the bit to make progress on this. They are all at different stages, which is just a statement of fact and not a value judgment. The six traditional universities have planning permissions and they want to get on with it and we want them to get on with it. We are trying to free them up to move on, including universities in the Deputy's county, which is now a university county. The Deputy now has university campuses in his county for the first time. We want people locally from Tipperary to be able to go to university in Tipperary and in due course we also want people to come to Tipperary who want to learn there because they like that course or because that university works for them. To do that we need to be able to develop student accommodation whether it is there or in Ennis, which is in Deputy Carey's constituency. We have the €1 million that we received in November, which we want to use as seed funding. We want the technological universities to get their plans in order, bring in their expertise, tell us what they can do in Tipperary, Ennis or Castlebar, and then get on with it.

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