Student accommodation: Stop accommodating the private sector

Our universities are no longer home to the brightest minds changing the world — they’re home to large real estate companies with an increasingly insignificant academic wing, writes the president of Trinity College Dublin Students' Union Jenny Maguire

Trinity College Dublin's Students' Union President Jenny Maguire: 'I will not accept students sleeping in cars. I will not accept vulture funds and neoliberal policies destroying this country.'

This week, for the first time, the students’ unions of the five biggest colleges in Dublin took to the streets to ask homeowners a simple question: room for one more? 

Often referred to as ‘digs’, the student leaders, myself included, were asking people to register any spare rooms with their students’ unions. Armed with thousands of leaflets, we targeted Dart stations, shopping streets, and Luas stops in a last-ditch effort to find our students somewhere to live during their studies.