Student Accommodation and Supports: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-26 ============================================================ Nessa Cosgrove (LAB), Labour Panel I thank the Minister for giving us the opportunity to discuss this issue. A few weeks ago, ATU and the students' union delivered a presentation in the audiovisual room. It was a student-based survey carried out among local ATU students and property owners on the availability of student accommodation. It found that the situation has deteriorated, rather than getting better. I am sure the Minister is aware of difficulties with accommodation in Sligo that was supposed to be purpose-built student accommodation but ended up not being so. The regulations on borrowing for technological universities frustrated it. The Minister referred to this issue in his opening statement. We were talking about a partnership approach. Sligo County Council and ATU have a good working partnership. A 16-acre site in the ownership of Sligo County Council has been identified as a good site for developing purpose-built student accommodation to facilitate ATU. Agreement has been reached with ATU that it could be purchased. Unfortunately, while ATU has enough money to buy the site, it does not have the resources to fund the construction. This is where the borrowing framework comes in. It does not include enough details on how the TUs are able to borrow. We are looking at the prioritisation of certain colleges. That prioritisation comes from central government and then some of the technological universities feel they are stuck. For example, Atlantic Technological University, ATU, Sligo feels like it is stuck but it is a really growing university because we have this really good relationship, if we are looking at a partnership, between Sligo County Council and ATU Sligo. Because ATU has not been identified as one of the priority projects, we feel like we are in limbo and are stuck. There are 2,700 staff and 30,000 students and it is growing all the time because Sligo is an area of growth. It is in an area within the north west that is recognised as an area of significant growth. There are new courses coming in such as the five-year masters in pharmacy. It is a huge deal for a TU to have the big high-point careers that were in the traditional universities. We need to back the technological universities a bit more and we need to get clarity on the borrowing framework. The prioritisation should not be just from central government, especially when we have needs identified locally and where they have the ability to buy the site but they do not have the ability to borrow to build on it. I also want to talk about having joined-up co-operation with the Department of Transport for delivering an early morning commuter train from Longford. Everything is there for it and it just needs the green light. That would alleviate a huge amount of the student accommodation problem in Sligo. There is a train ready to come into Sligo for 8.15 a.m., and it would make a huge difference to alleviate the problem at the moment. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-26/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:59+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-26