Student Accommodation

160. Deputy Donna McGettigan asked the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science to provide details of the student accommodation programme that his Department rolled out in 2024; the progress made; and the beds that have been delivered to date. [72061/26]

Will the Minister provide details of the student accommodation programme that the Department rolled out, the progress made and the beds that have been delivered to date?

I thank the Deputy. It is a good opportunity to revisit Deputy Ó Súilleabháin's question and talk through the details a little more. Addressing student accommodation is a key priority for me, the Government and my Department. I mentioned in response to Deputy Ó Súilleabháin's question that there was a viability and supply issue coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic. Beds were not being supplied at any real scale. There have since been a number of Government interventions to address the issue. The short-term activation programme ran from 2024 until 2026. It was an immediate intervention to see if we could fast-track some projects that had stalled for different reasons. From that, we now have three programmes up and running. The Maynooth programme has been completed, with 116 beds in Teach Uí Bhuachalla. I have been there and visited. It is open, with students now occupying those beds. University College Dublin, UCD, has 493 beds up and running under that short-term activation programme. They are under construction. I was on site approximately two weeks ago. When I visited, the project had reached roof height. It is flying along. It is expected to be ready for next year, which is good. I also approved a project for Trinity Hall in Dartry for Trinity College Dublin, which is its student accommodation residence. I approved an extension of 358 beds. Shovels are expected to go into the ground early in the new year. The project is progressing to tender stage at the moment. Those projects came from the short-term activation programme. More broadly, the student accommodation strategy, which I introduced in March this year, and which I mentioned in response to a previous question, sets out to engage with colleges around the country to identify sites that are suitable. We have done the first phase of that. Four sites are now at the expressions of interest stage. Those sites are at the Atlantic Technological University, ATU, Galway; Grangegorman in north Dublin; the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, IADT, in Dún Laoghaire; and the Munster Technological University, MTU, in Cork. We are taking expressions of interest for those four sites now and until 27 November. I encourage anybody who is following the debate to tune into that and if there is any interest, I ask people to come in and engage with the process. We have also put out a general call for sites that are in the vicinity of colleges in those three cities. We ask people to come forward as part of the expressions of interest.

What I am reading into the student accommodation strategy that the Minister released is that it has potential, it will support potential and the Minister anticipates it will deliver. I do not see any concrete delivery numbers. I see it will support 42,000 beds by 2035. That is, on average, 4,660 beds per year. If you look at the short-term activation programme, which the Minister just mentioned, it has so far delivered 116 beds, with the possibility of a total of 967 beds in seven years. We then have DCU, which was originally mentioned in the short-term activation programme. It spent over €4 million on planning and design, and that seems now to be thrown out. This can be salvaged, but it will require the Minister stepping in to help. Will he commit to doing so? If we look at the current cost of construction, according to a University of Galway submission to the committee, we see that it stands at €230,000 per bed. Over a 25-year lease, that is €9,200 per year. How much would rent cost? The private investors are out there to make money. In order to make profit, it will cost more than €9,200 per student per academic year. That does not even include service charges.

The Deputy mentioned seven years. I do not know where that figure came from. It is two years. It started in 2024 and we are now in 2026. We have 116 beds with students in them. We have 493 beds at roof height in UCD. The Deputy is welcome to go out and visit. I am sure the college would be glad to host her to see that construction site. I have also approved Trinity Hall in Dartry for Trinity College to progress with another 358 beds. I am confident that shovels will be in the ground in January. That is real progress. One site is finished and open and two other sites are under construction or very soon to commence construction. That is real progress. On the wider ambition for 42,000 beds, there was a need to kick-start viability in this process because it had stalled because of various factors and for the reasons I gave a moment ago. That is happening with the strategy. We are now opening to expressions of interest. We will continue. The Deputy mentioned the DCU project. Ultimately, it did not represent value for money. A colleague rightly raised the issue a moment ago. Value for money must be front and centre for every consideration of public moneys. However, the university is welcome to participate, and I fully expect it to participate, in the expressions of interest stage currently running for the student accommodation strategy in Dublin.

How is the Minister persuading investors to build student accommodation that is affordable when they will not even own the land? Will institutions be exposed to liabilities similar in nature to borrowing as they would be leasing lands on their own campuses to private developers, especially when they have no control over the use of the property or the ability to set the rents? What rent would the Minister consider affordable? I referred to seven years. It will probably be 2029 before the project at Trinity College is finished. That means it will have taken from 2022 to 2029, which will be seven years, to deliver 967 beds. That is where that figure comes from. Will Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, have to be expanded to help students pay for rent, meaning more public money going to private investors? Those investors are questioning why they should have to pay millions to build student accommodation on land they will never own. If the Government gets them to build, what state will the buildings be in after the lease runs out? What will it cost the State to bring them back to standard? We know those investors are about profits and are hardly going to pour money into the projects coming up to the end of the lease. It is pie in the sky and there is no concrete delivery.

I am still a little confused. The Deputy is operating in good faith. I very much take her as being sincere on these issues, but I do not know where the seven years come from, because they started in 2024. I would be absolutely horrified if it took seven years to build a project started this year. It should not take seven years. It is at roof height already.

It was outlined in 2022, and it will be 2029 before it is finished.

The project did not start until 2024, however. The short-term activation programme began in 2024. It is now 2026. We have one open already because the one in Maynooth is completed. The one in UCD is at roof height. For Trinity, there will be shovels in the ground in January. The latter might take until the end of 2027. UCD has told me that it expects to have its one open in September of next year. For Trinity, we are probably looking at a year to build. We are talking about two or three years rather than seven. Either way, I want this done as quickly as possible in order to provide beds. The Deputy mentioned a figure of €230,000 per bed. That goes to the heart of it. If we want to build 40,000 beds, the capital injection required to do that, if it were purely public moneys, would be billions. That money simply is not there. If it were to be taken from the Exchequer, we would need to look at the opportunity cost for course delivery for apprentices, higher education, research, innovation and the entire school system. If we can partner with the private sector to attract private capital and work with the public, these sites will ultimately revert to the State at the end of the process. In other words, the State will own them ultimately. That is a good day's work.