Student Accommodation and Supports: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-26 ============================================================ Gareth Scahill (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach The Minister is once again welcome back into this Chamber and I welcome the opportunity to speak on student accommodation and supports. With two minutes, I am going to have run through a lot of the other things and not go through things that have been said already. I welcome the student accommodation strategy. The Minister put it very well when he spoke about viability, allowing to build, and affordability, enabling and empowering the students to be able to afford the accommodation. The 42,000 beds by 2035 is a good, ambitious target. The current demand is 15,000 so it is great to see a Department looking to well exceed the current demand because that is very important. It is achievable because with the rent-a-room scheme, you are going to hit about 10,000 of those beds through digs and renting out accommodation in private homes. We welcome the VAT reductions and rent reforms and the flexible design elements the Minister spoke about as well. They are all very welcome. I refer to something Senator Boyhan mentioned about third level food and trying to create that scheme. That scheme was there in the past when the Council for Education, Recruitment and Training, CERT, were in all of our technical institutes. The equipment and facilities are there, or most of it, and there is huge demand. We had the Restaurants Association of Ireland in last week talking to us about the lack of skills there. It is potentially not a huge budget; it is actually just expanding your apprenticeship model to include that and I would love to see that looked at again. The Minister has €176 million committed for student supports, including bursaries and grants. That is very welcome and we want to see him delivering that. I would like to mention the Athlone green city plan. We have Mr. Sean Mulryan committing to 5,000 student beds, and if any man in this country can deliver that, it is definitely him. I would love to see the Minister's engagement with that particular project. There is also the access to skills for people with disabilities. There is a €36 million budget under the workability programme there - I know I have gone over time, I am sorry - but there are still barriers there. The barriers are leading to issues with our delivery on housing, student accommodation and infrastructure and we could do with having a conversation or a further debate on that. --- 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