Irish Examiner view: Campus food banks

Disheartening news

UCC has been forced to reopen its food bank for struggling students.

While the nation’s leading politicians were extolling the expansionist virtues of the National Development Plan in the verdant groves of academe that is University College Cork a more plaintive message emerged from a section of society which has suffered as badly as most during the pandemic and the lockdown.

UCC has been forced to reopen its foodbank for struggling students says its welfare office in a move it describes as “disheartening.” It is certainly that. Few things are more dispiriting than the knowledge that you cannot pay your way in the world however hard you try and this is a horrible start for a group of people upon whom we will rely in the future to create the wealth for all those grand spending plans which were laid out on Monday and Tuesday.