Of course, what I say is true in that I can direct only agencies under my remit, but the Deputy is entirely correct that, generally, other parts of government follow suit as well. The main funders of PhD researchers, from a State point of view, include individual institutions, SFI, the IRC, Teagasc and the HRB. The HRB has moved, the IRC and SFI are now moving and Teagasc will consider the matter. Moreover, I know from conversations with individual university presidents that they, too, are looking at this issue. In…

I do know what the issues are and I have engaged with many of our PhD researchers. As the Deputy knows and as I said earlier, a second report that was due from the co-chairs has been received by my Department and will be considered and published in the coming weeks. That report was charged with looking at a variety of other issues above and beyond the issue of stipends, and I know those issues are very important to PhD researchers, as they are to higher education in general and to Ireland Inc. I look forward to hav…

As the Deputy well knows, student accommodation is addressed through capital. The Government made clear on budget day, in advance of budget day and in a previous Government decision that in the national development plan, NDP, the uplift and extra funding in capital would be dealt with through the NDP review process, which is due to conclude around the end of the year. That will be an opportunity to try to progress a number of important student accommodation projects and I am actively working with colleagues across …

While I agree with the Deputy about affordability, you come at affordability from a range of ways. Affordability is about making sure a family or student can afford to pay the price of college and of renting for college. Reducing fees, increasing grants, extending the renter's tax credit and specifically putting €440,000 into the student assistance fund for students having difficulty with the cost of accommodation means we have help in the here and now and from the get-go. I agree fully with the Deputy about standa…

The short answer is that for the digs you do not. We had this issue last year too. I plan to publish a new student accommodation strategy by the end of the year. I prioritised trying to move on the legacy projects that had planning permission but that had stalled for economic reasons. I think on balance that was the right call. Those were priorities one, two and three. We will have a new strategy towards the end of the year. We need to get to a situation where we have more college-owned affordable accommodation, bu…

I thank the Deputy for raising this important issue. I am committed to making progress in enhancing access, participation and success for learners across further education, apprenticeships and higher education. Recent data for 2021-22 indicate that the current number of new Traveller entrants to higher education is 52. The national access plan targets 150 new entrants to higher education from the Traveller community by 2028, so there is a lot of work we need to do collectively to get to that target. I also had a go…

I agree with all of that, and join the Deputy in commending the University of Galway on all of the good work it is doing. I have had the opportunity to meet them on a few occasions specifically on the subject of Traveller participation. What I like about what they do is that it is not just about getting somebody in the door. It is about getting somebody out the other side, through the education process and into the world of work. I think we are doing a reasonable amount, quite a lot in many ways, at third level wit…

The Deputy shows admirable ability in terms of how he got from here to there. I was pleased to visit Mountbellew in recent days and honoured to open the Aleen Cust library, named after the first female veterinary surgeon in Ireland and the UK, who was an incredible woman. I have been reading up on her in recent days. I was delighted to meet the team there and to see the good work going on in Mountbellew. The factual position is the Government wants to expand the number of veterinary medicine places. The Minister fo…

There are two main factors driving my approach to addressing issues with medical education: ensuring we produce enough doctors to meet the requirements of our healthcare system and our society and providing more places for students in a context where the level of demand has consistently exceeded the number of places available. It was encouraging this year that, for the first time in a long number of years, when the CAO offers came out for undergraduate medicine, we saw a fall in the points required. Last year, the …

On that, we have to be honest. The graduate medical entry programme was introduced to try to diversify the medical profession. We also have to be truthful that in recent years we have seen points for undergraduate medicine places skyrocket to the point that accessing those courses became prohibitive for many. People could achieve the best points possible in the leaving certificate and still only go into a random selection lottery for a place. We have tried to break that cycle via a very significant increase in unde…

I hope he is happy with my answers. I agree with the Deputy's point that we do not want people who want to access the medical profession to reach barriers and blocks that mean we cannot diversify the profession. I know, as a former Minister for Health, how important diversification in medicine is. When we talk those most in need, as recently as last year we extended the 1916 bursary to general entry medicine students. For the first time, the most financially disadvantaged students can use the 1916 bursary for gradu…

Dropout rates often do not factor in those who may have moved from one course to another within an institution. That is important to say because many of us will know somebody who might have started one degree or area of study and moved to another. The Deputy is right to highlight this issue. Ensuring that students succeed and thrive in their higher educational journey is an important issue for me and my Department. The HEA publishes data on the proportion of students who do not progress from the first to the second…

To use the Deputy's phrase, I am not in any way buying into the thesis that "jacking up" rents needs to happen in any university. The Deputy will have to agree with me on this point because it is a fact. Universities have seen an increase in their budgets this coming year compared to last year and last year compared to the year before. There is no excuse and that should not be used as a fig leaf. In fact, a number of universities are reducing the cost of student accommodation. The University of Galway is one exampl…

I also know which one the Deputy would choose.

There is no list as such but we are doing a more in-depth dive into the data now. I think it can be for a variety of reasons, be they personal, health or cost. As a Government, we need to better understand the reasons but also recognise that sometimes people will choose to change and move to different courses. It is also important to bear this in mind when trying to improve a tertiary education system. To address Deputy Boyd Barrett's point, rents were also often kept down in universities because we extended the re…

Budget 2024 introduced what is, by any fair and objective measure, a significant package of supports for third level students and their families. I will take each measure in turn. It is estimated that 94,000 students will benefit from the €1,000 reduction in the student contribution fee. Almost 52,000 students will benefit from the student grant increases. A total of 1,790 postgraduate students will benefit from the reintroduction in postgraduate supports. Some 24,000 students are expected to benefit from the remov…

I could not agree more. That is exactly what we are trying to do. Yes, we need to increase the size of the tertiary education system and we are doing so year-on-year. However, we also need to increase it specifically in areas where we know there is one of two things - a need for more people to work in that area from a public services point of view or a demand for more students to study in the area that is not being currently met. Throughout 2023 we have done a number of exercises in respect of healthcare and veteri…

I am glad the Deputy raised that because that is what the review has done. People often ask me to create another college place in X area. For some courses that is relatively easy to do. However, in a course with a clinical or work placement element, there is no ability to create the place without the matching work place. We have worked jointly with the Department of Health. We have identified what we can do from a university point of view and asked the Department of Health to identify the work placements. We have m…

I thank the Deputy for raising this important question. I have been consistent in my position that we need to develop an education system that is more flexible and agile than the one we inherited. We need to recognise that learners come to education at different stages of their life and career and need access in a way that works for them. For many that will be part-time learning, some in person and some online. Increasingly we will have students in work as opposed to people straight out of school. One of the overri…

I thank the Deputy for his support for the scheme. This scheme will help people who can now access degree programmes outside the CAO process. I was recently in the Atlantic Technological University in the Deputy's part of the country. I met nursing students doing the new tertiary nursing degree. These students had been assessed for eligibility for the programme not based on their leaving certificate points but based on an interview and other assessments of their aptitude. That means students who might have had to g…