By Sean McInerney
On 3 April, RTE reported on the case of 22-year-old student Conor Davidson, who is forced to live in a van due to a lack of affordable student accommodation. Davidson, who is studying chemical engineering at the University of Limerick (UL), stays upbeat while describing his situation (“No landlords for one!”), while still fully admitting to the challenges that come from living in a small van, including the cold months and “people banging on the van”.
UL students and the housing crisis
Such situations for UL students are unfortunately nothing new – in the context of the housing crisis caused by Government inaction and market profiteering. A Student Life (UL Student Union) survey in 2022 found that over a third of the 1,233 students surveyed had not secured suitable accommodation. Of this group, 19.4% percent were staying with friends, 16% in Airbnbs and 26.3% homeless, accessing emergency accommodation.
This is in the context of a massive growth of students attending the college. In 2011, it was less than 12,000, now it is over 19,000, putting further strain on accommodation and services.
Government and administration failure
Meanwhile, the UL administration and the Fianna Fail and Fine Gael Government that funds it have failed to offer any adequate solution to this crisis. Promises were made in 2020 of a new campus apartment complex that six years later has yet to materialise. The campus accommodation management company, Plassey Campus Centre, has further acquired 50 rooms from a nearby private hotel, 46 of which are planned to be converted into ‘twin rooms’ to house a total 96 students, and even this inadequate half-measure has yet to materialise.
The campus administration controversially decided to convert rooms originally designed to house just one student into ‘twin rooms’, which as the then USI President Lorna Fitzpatrick described: “The phrase ‘you couldn’t swing a cat in the room’ doesn’t even cover it. There is a tiny gap in between two single beds and one small work station at the foot of the bed, so it’s impossible to see how you could live comfortably or study in these conditions”.
Time to rebuild a fighting student movement
This crisis is a result of the Irish state’s complete ideological subservience to private landlords and the wider private market, whose aims are to maximise profit by monetising the fundamental human right of housing, not provide universal access to it. To combat this, and force the Government to invest in affordable housing, free and widely available education, decent public transport and beyond, the student movement needs to rebuild and effectively utilise its collective power in militant struggle. A social partnership style approach of pure negotiation and strongly-worded letters hasn’t worked at all.
The USI in Ireland has so far taken small steps in organising students into struggle, and student unions around the country are hollow shells of the fighting organisations they used to be. All progressive reforms that the capitalist system has been forced to grant have been won through mass collective struggle from below, and if the fighting traditions of past student unions can be learned from and improved upon, perhaps this can bring new fighters into the unions, transforming them as vehicles for genuine struggle.
