It’s time to build a student town

Education is an uncontestable good. It empowers and liberates and helps us all to realise potential. It is the energy behind social, commercial, and personal development.

It can also, unfortunately, be the energy behind a sometimes unwelcome suburban colonisation. Many cities have seen mature, balanced neighbourhoods change utterly when the priority moves from providing family homes to student accommodation.

This process can negatively change the character of an area and isolate communities and individuals.

These issues are in play again in Cork City as developers have opened talks with An Bord Pleanála to try to secure permission to extend a proposed project from 57 apartments to 81 at the Lough.

The first, smaller project was not universally welcomed, so the revised proposal hardly will be either.

Though typical of how conflict arises when these projects are proposed, this development is not in any way unique.

There have been and there will be many more like it in suburbs close to University College Cork, Cork Institute of Technology, and Cork University Hospital.

If unchecked, the process will turn the area into a dormitory, degrading host communities. It seems time for those institutions to co-operate with planners and public transport services to build a student town on a greenfield site on the fringes of Cork to satisfy this relentless demand.

Such an ambitious project could be, like education, an empowering catalyst for the region.