Truth to power

• Published date: 28 September 2024
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

Dear Deputy Mary Lou McDonald*

“Mould or homelessness?” questions a Trinity News article from November 2023. This question, of course, seeks to provoke the reader. It is purposefully shocking in order to get people to read it, but I must ask – who is it really shocking to? After working in a students’ union for a number of months now, I am not shocked. For the average student, this question is far from shocking. Instead, it is a question that has become increasingly normalised as each academic year rears its head.

According to the Irish University Association, there stands a €260 million deficit in the higher education sector. This has far-reaching impacts. Universities are no longer places of learning: they are businesses. To make ends meet, colleges across the country have turned from the Government for funding to their students. Through accommodation costs, extracting heavy fees from international students and more, the price of running a university is being pushed on to students. Postgraduate researchers are paid less than minimum wage; they also receive no maternity leave. Would your party change this?

The rent-a-room scheme has created an incentive for landlords to provide accommodation to students. However, doing so without providing protection to those students is to put them at increased harm. Students can be thrown out at a moment’s notice. Students have no right to a lock on their door. Desperate students are settling not just for mould, but a complete lack of dignity in order to find somewhere to rest their head. The digs legislation needs to pass to prevent this: would it remain a priority for your party in government?

These questions are put as if there is just one type of student experience, but as you know, there isn’t. I, myself, as a transgender woman from the north side of Dublin, have seen first hand how college isn’t the same for everyone. I had to take a year out and repeat another: a direct result of the lack of healthcare for transgender young people in this country. Our healthcare for transgender people breaks World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines: The WHO, since 2019, no longer classifies transgender people as suffering from mental illness. Countries have had since January 2022 to recognise this – and yet in Ireland, you must go through hours of psychological evaluations with a mental health nurse and psychologist to get any form of healthcare. On a personal level, this is a humiliating process that has made me feel I couldn’t be myself in the service, but instead, a version of myself that I thought would be acceptable to two doctors in Loughlinstown.

My question is why? Why is this still happening? I, and many others like me, refuse to accept the horror that has become the status quo. In the Republic, there is little or no access to puberty blockers, which would have allowed me to have a normal time as a teenager. They would have given me space to truly be myself, and not the depressed child I was forced to be. I am stubbornly optimistic about my life, and yet it is the failing policies that do not meet the needs of the people that so often make me question my own ability to keep a smile on my face. How would you make things different? Is mise, le meas, Jenny Maguire, Trinity College Dublin

*This letter was sent to a representative for Sinn Féin; however the party did not respond within the time frame. Jenny is happy to meet with the party at any point to discuss her concerns.

‘The air was so thick with mould that breathing through your nose was not feasible’

Dear Tánaiste Micheál Martin,

It is a cliche, that a student – when afforded a public platform – will address the issue of housing. It is a cliche and yet, if we consider that the housing crisis continues, we might realise that the greatest cliche is the fact that no one has fixed it yet. I am 21. I have been a student at UCC for the past three years and I am lucky: I did not need to move out to go to university. Lucky indeed, or I would not have been able to afford to go.

The combined financial pressures of university fees and rent are grinding my peers into the ground. How do you make enough money to pay fees and rent and feed yourself when you are a student? You might argue that the Susi grant supports students. But the Susi grant, for those who receive it, does little against the rising cost of living and rent hikes. Many students work part-time or full-time to subsidise their studies. How are students supposed to find time for education when they must work so much to fund that education?

Two years ago, I made a short documentary with a few of my classmates. It was about students’ experiences of the housing crisis. In it, we interviewed students around Cork, in a variety of situations. Some were living in purpose-built accommodation. Some were in private rentals. Others in unregistered houses. All were exhausted and disenchanted with life. I have filmed in rooms where the air was so thick with mould that breathing through your nose was not feasible. The entire crew fell ill the day after filming. Again, we were lucky. At the end of the day, we got to leave. The students living there did not. That was their home and they were paying €400 per month to keep it. €400, you might say, is on the lower end of the rent price scale. Almost affordable, if you do not turn on the heating during the winter. If you do not take into account the healthcare costs that stem from living there.

There is plenty of building in Cork. Offices, hotels, expansions of the port; you name it, there’s a construction crew on it. There are plenty of buildings in Cork too. Houses with boarded-up windows rot while students, asylum seekers, families and people in need walk past them – homeless. There is no shortage of roofs, only a shortage of good judgment about what to do with them. Newly built housing will never fix this crisis while it is privately contracted and privately owned. Private means extortion. Private means evictions. Private means prioritising profit. Is this what Ireland is; a country that values industry and economics over people?

I studied film and English literature for my undergraduate degree at UCC. An arts degree teaches you how to think for yourself, a skill that has become all the more important as false information emerges in the mainstream. I know I do not need to tell you this, as a student of the arts yourself. Yet I will say it because the rise of the far right typically occurs...