Rose Conway-Walsh on Student Accommodation Crisis and Official's Remarks

Goer maith agat laas carheerlech. Firstly, Minister, I want to warmly congratulate you and your wife, Kiva, on the birth of your son, Cillian, as a mother of two boys. I know the great joy that that can bring, and I wish you all well. Minister, on student accommodation, the student accommodation emergency is now at crisis point, and I'm being contacted by students and families with real life stories of travelling up to seven hours a day to attend college, because they cannot afford accommodation to study the place, to live near the place that they study. Students are couchsurfing, staying in hotels and overcrowded accommodation. That is the reality, Minister. But it's not normal. It's not normal in 2021. So my question is, what specific measures have you and your government taken to address this crisis? Thank you very much to the Deputy for her kind wishes. I sincerely appreciate it. And thank you also for raising this extremely important issue. I suppose at the outset, I think it is a statement of the obvious, but it is important to say that a lot of the issues affecting students are part of the broader housing challenges that we do face as a society. And these are challenges that the government is really committed to resolving. And my colleague, Minister O'Brien, is leading on our behalf with our new housing for all strategy. But it's a strategy that involves all government departments stepping up to the plate and and doing everything we possibly can to increase housing supply. I would make the point we have taken a number of actions and working with students and indeed working with you and working with this house in terms of proposals that have come forward in terms of trying to improve the situation. So for example, indeed, you would have supported legislation, and I think you would have introduced legislation to ask us to change the rules around deposits for students where students were being asked to pay, in my view, ridiculous levels of upfront deposits. We changed the law on that together as an Oireachtas and those changes have come in. The second thing we were asked to do was change the notice periods. So students would only have to give 28 days notice if they had to give up accommodation for whatever reason, and we did that together as well. The third thing we were asked to do was change the borrowing frameworks to make sure that institutes of technology and indeed technological universities, colleges in your own region, like GMIT and others, could actually start to access finance for the first time to borrow, and we have made that change in housing for all, and perhaps we can get into that in more detail shortly. We have also increased the Student Assistance Fund, which can be used for students to meet bills that they cannot otherwise afford, including rent, and we put a record amount of funding into that Student Assistance Fund. We introduced a circular in relation to making sure that student accommodation is used for just that purpose. I am sure you and I can both agree that the snide, flippant and sarcastic comments of a senior official in recent days really showed a lack of understanding of the seriousness of that situation. Our circular is very clear in what we want to do and expect to do in relation to that. Changes we made in the budget in relation to the non-adjacent grant yesterday will also help students. Many students see perhaps an increase of their grant to up to €2,000 as a result of the distance rules. But there is more that we want to do, more that we are doing, and I will get back into that in the supplementary. Thank you, Minister. I think Owen Keegan's comments was more than a lack of understanding. I think it was absolute contempt for the students and for the situation that they are in, and I hope that you will join with me in asking for his resignation. And I am going to join the students today when they are demonstrating at one o'clock outside DCC to make their feelings known in this. I was absolutely shocked. In all honesty, when John in my office contacted me about it, I said, oh, you can't retweet that or you can't relay that. That has to be wrong. Nobody in that position could say such a thing, could think such a thing. It is absolutely disgusting. Now, I have a copy of a letter from the Department on Housing to all local authorities and county councils, and it really just says there is a critical need for student accommodation, which obviously is true, and that local authorities and onboard Planola must be satisfied that there are good reasons for the transfer of student accommodation to tourists. This is an extremely weak response, particularly as it is a circular. This was sent around 2016. We are now in 2021, and this is what is happening in terms of the conversion of student accommodation. It has to stop. Well, firstly, I don't wish you to in any way think my language isn't strong enough in relation to Mr Keegan's comments, because I find them absolutely reprehensible. I really do, because it does show a real failure to understand the serious challenge that people are facing. It also shows that it is a complete and utter disrespect to students. You and I might not agree on everything, but what we do agree on is working with students on a number of issues. We have made progress on some matters. If we are to find solutions to these things, it is not going to involve collaborating, working with students' unions, working with colleges and listening to them. The idea that one of our most senior officials in our capital city will dismiss their views with flippant and sarcastic language is contemptuous. I do want to say this, though. Last week we had a meeting with the Department of Housing and all the college rep bodies. We said, under the Housing for All principles, there is an opportunity for people to start borrowing to build student accommodation, college-owned student accommodation, not just being reliant on the market. We are inviting them to bring forward proposals. I am very excited by the pipeline of proposals that our colleges have. I am due to meet Minister Darrow O'Brien next week to further this, and also myself and the Minister are due to visit DCU. The President of DCU made some very interesting and constructive comments about the cost of building and the implications for some of our universities in our larger cities. So I expect to be in a position to work with this sector to bring forward, in what is a very significant policy shift, a very large building programme of college-owned student accommodation, as opposed to the policies of the past where it had been reliant too much on the private sector. Minister, we are in the middle of an emergency and a crisis, and I appreciate all those things that you say would be done. But we had a chance to stop the conversion of student accommodation in 2016, and the Government did not do that. I think they need to have a bit of humility and hold up their hands and say, we did not act. We could have seen this coming. We knew we were going to be in this situation this year. So for the students who are travelling for hours now, couch-surfing and in overcrowded accommodation and paying for hotels, all of these measures aren't going to solve their problem in the coming weeks and the coming months. And I think we need to sit down and send out a very strong message there to those that are converting the student accommodation to make more student accommodation available and to use it for the purpose that it was meant for, and to do everything we possibly can to ensure that these students are safely accommodated, because without the accommodation they cannot access third level education. Thank you. As I have already outlined to the Deputy, some of the immediate measures we are taking to try and help in the here and now around financial assistance, student assistance fund, around the circular, which I do think is very strong, the Minister O'Brien issued making it very clear that student accommodation during the College years should be just for student accommodation. I do also think we need to look at how we can get back to promoting the initiative where people can avail of renting a room and income tax-free people can benefit from that. There probably was an impact from Covid in relation to that that did not help the situation this year as well. I have a whole folder here and I can give you a load of statistics about how the supply has increased, about how there is more purpose-built student accommodation now than ever before. I am not going to waste the House's time in reading that out because it misses the point. It suggests that I think everything is OK and I certainly do not. It is my position and the position of government that we need a significant policy shift when it comes to student accommodation and that is what I am going to deliver. That is what I am going to deliver with Minister Daryl O'Brien and with the Technological Universities, the Institutes of Technology and the Universities in the coming weeks and months. I accept it takes the lead-in times to all of these things but it is still the right thing to do. I cannot just engage in the short-termism. I need to look at how we can get college-owned student accommodation built, not just in our capital cities but also in the regions and with a particular focus on the new Technological Universities. Thank you very much. Thank you.