Student life is about self-discovery, not scrambling for a home
ON Tuesday night, the eve of his first day at the University of Limerick, one first-year student slept in a tent. His mother emailed RTÉ’s Today With Claire Byrne show yesterday to highlight the lack of student accommodation, which has now reached crisis point. Many other students are paying €20 a night to sleep in hostels, while others, probably with help from parents, have had to book into hotels.
The Mary Immaculate teacher training college in Limerick has struck deals with three local hotels to accommodate students for €390 – a week. The crisis has arisen in part because of the pandemic. Remote learning last year saw many houses traditionally rented by students turned over to the long-term market instead. There has also been a severe drop-off in the numbers of digs available (where students rent a room in a family home and are fed too), because families don’t want young people who are out studying and socialising possibly bringing Covid home with them.
While this situation has illustrated the lack of accommodation, it has also shone a spotlight on the price when it actually is available. My American cousin, a mature student, decided to do a masters in Trinity and arrived here two years ago. He stayed with me for a fortnight until he found his bearings, and eventually decided to live in a dedicated student accommodation block in the north inner city. He paid €12,000 up front for the nine months he would be studying.
Unfriendly
Soon, though, he realised he was required to attend the campus only two days a week, and he found Dublin too big, too alien, and too unfriendly. While he was with me, I had taken him for a day out in Wexford town, and he loved it – the compact centre with its medieval street plan, the pubs, the friendliness.
So he ducked out of Dublin, got his money back, and found a two-bed apartment in Wexford for €500 a month. He could buy five return journeys to Dublin for €95, and he saved a fortune. When the pandemic hit and everything moved to distance learning, he took the word literally and moved again – to Ukraine.
That wouldn’t work for those who have to attend every day, but staying a little bit further away might be an option if a student looked creatively at his or her schedule. They shouldn’t really have to do that, though.
Student life is about the totality of the experience, not just what happens in a lecture hall.
I went to Rathmines College of Commerce for two years, and I was lucky I had to worry only about two bus journeys from my home in Ballybrack. The certificate course in journalism was the only one in the country, and my class included people from
Louth, Kilkenny, Waterford, Clare, Galway, and more, all of whom needed accommodation.
Some had attended the same schools in secondary and hooked up for house shares, with others in the class or friends attending different colleges, while more still went the old route and found bedsits in Rathmines, Ranelagh and Portobello. We’re talking 1980 here, so the bedsits weren’t exactly salubrious. They were mostly cold and damp. The bathrooms were shared. There were payphones in the hall, for which there was often a queue.
When we stayed out late, I often begged a patch on the floor and slept under a mountain of coats and took days to thaw, but it still was part of the student experience. We would sit up until four or five in the morning (sometimes with very good poitín thanks to those from the west), setting everything to rights with that naive zeal common to students. Where once I wanted to change the world, I have in middle age settled for being able to change my socks without having to sit on the bed.
Bedsits were at least plentiful, but then came the bubble years, and many of those houses were sold and restored as single dwellings. Fuelled by cheap cash and the desire to gentrify, the new owners stripped out all the avocado baths and the miserable, tiny bedside sinks. The cookers, connected by wires held together by little more than insulating tape and a prayer to the Virgin Mary, were removed, and replaced by televisions and PlayStations for little Lorcan and Saoirse, who also had their own en-suite bathrooms. A room in which two students shivered themselves to sleep was now someone’s walk-in wardrobe.
Expensive
And then, in an act of quite astonishing short-sightedness, instead of demanding upgrades to bedsits, the government banned them outright in 2008. As always, the law of unintended consequences kicked in very rapidly, and once-plentiful accommodation became scarce.
Now, we are left with expensive dedicated student accommodation blocks, and co-living apartments (in reality little more than pods). In some cases, they don’t even have that dangerous cooker, just kitchens shared by multiple tenants and, no doubt, the return of those old signs in the fridges saying ‘Do Not Touch – this is Barry’s shelf’, even though almost everything on Barry’s shelf was covered in a lurid green fuzz.
Of course, there are thousands with more pressing needs. A few months in a hotel, if you can afford it, might even be fun, though as someone who has had to do that for work, I can attest to the fact the novelty wears off very quickly. If you’re in a hotel room with a partner and children, though, it must be very grim indeed.
The student accommodation crisis is just part of the overall housing crisis. Too many people are fighting for too little, and what little there is now is beyond the reach of all except those working in tech and other highly paid sectors.
Your college days are supposed to be the best of your life. Not many, I will wager, will look back and think that if they spent part of those years in a tent.