Third Level Education
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-11
============================================================

Donna McGettigan (SF), Clare

It is no secret that universities are continuing to deal with chronic underfunding for the best part of 30 years and there does not seem to be any let-up on that front. This means many universities have a heavy reliance on international students, who pay costly fees towards the Irish university sector, and potentially this is a factor in this project not going ahead. According to the Irish Examiner, the UCC business school plan was reliant on the expected income to the business school coming from international students. The publication also recorded that during the first post-pandemic year of 2022, 52,000 student visas were authorised in the State. That increased to 60,901 last year. According to statistics provided to the Dáil in May, figures for this year are not in yet but the indications are that there has been a drop-off in the number of students, particularly Chinese students, coming here.
Why do our State-owned universities have to scramble for funding elsewhere? Is there not a need for funding contingency in these types of situations?

---

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/dail/2025-12-11/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-11