Mairéad Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I would be the first person to say I think something is going well but I genuinely believe that in terms of student accommodation, we are dramatically failing students. If we look at last year's budget, not a red cent was given to capital for student accommodation. If we look at the announcements by the Minister's predecessor, there were continuous re-announcements of the same beds. In my view, that is very unfair to students and parents who are trying to plan for the year ahead. Where are we at with regard to the technological universities? The TUs thought they would be able to borrow and we discovered only a number of months back from Eurostat that there was no further progress in regard to the TUs being able to do that. We also see that there was nothing to the student accommodation strategy that the Minister announced in January and the only new thing was that he said he was going to start using vacant properties. When I contacted the universities, none of them had vacant properties available for that. September is coming in only a few short weeks and we need to see affordable student accommodation coming on stream.

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