Feeding the vultures The questionable solution to student housing

Mia Allen

The prospect of moving away from home for college is not a freeing one for most, but one riddled with guilt and stress. This sentiment when related to finding accommodation in Dublin does not seem to be alleviating. The broader context of a nationwide housing crisis due to a property bubble that has not been popped adds more pessimism. The more you look the worse it seems, and absence of supply combined with unaffordability makes this gruelling search a typicality for students in Dublin. Nonetheless, the situation seems dismal in terms of public policy, and the implications are damning. In a broader sense, land ownership is at an all-time low amongst young people, and the tradition of immigration is one that readily perseveres through this absence of housing, with 7 out of 10 aged between 18-24 considering it according to Red C. Government and higher education institutions understand the importance of housing for students. Their reports show the affordability and availability of student housing is absolutely integral not only to students’ social development, but to their retention in education and to their academic performance. The options for students in Dublin seem limited at best. Government and HEI remedy to the shortfall in supply has not been to implement affordable housing or increase construction, but to allow for international investment funds to swoop in to swiftly meet the urgent demands for housing. The growing role of these international actors is symbolic of a growing pattern that’s visible in nearly every aspect of Irish land and real estate, and it’s looking less and less defensible.

Between the vultures and the cuckoos it seems a whole host of animalistic private investors have taken a hold of the Irish property market. This is apparent in the realm of student accommodation with the continued growth of privately owned purpose built student accommodation. The dilemma remains that there is a lack of infrastructure or policy to create accommodation without these investors. Assistant Professor of Economics Ronan Lyons notes the immense shortage of supply in Dublin’s rental market. In his report for Daft.ie, private investors essentially provide an immediate supply to an area that has experienced decreased construction since the recession. This has created a lucrative market for international investors, and a country that needs them. Since 2016, our Government has been keen on developing more and more student accommodation. However when it comes to city-centre universities specifically, international investors are a focal part of this scheme of producing supply. The Government continues to incentivise these firms with continued tax relief. Looking closer this results in near impossible rents for the typical student, with the average sitting at €250 a week. Their general defence of this pricing is an intention to provide quality, modern and “luxury” accommodation for students. A sentiment which seems near deluded to what most students want, a simple roof over their heads for a manageable price.

Trinity has even partnered with these capital funds (namely Yugo) to provide further accommodation, with residences like Kavanagh Court priced at over €10,000 per academic year.

Furthermore, looking at university owned accommodation this trend is far more apparent, with more and more colleges offering an abundance of more luxury geared accommodation. The government has indeed created more supply, but this supply is extraordinarily expensive. Similarly, it’s important to note the continuing profiteering universities enjoy from student accommodation. Trinity’s new Printing House accommodation costs €13,000 a year, with all pre-existing Trinity owned accommodation rising in prices. The inability of universities to provide affordability, and the lack of availability in the private rental sector has only fuelled the growth of “cuckoo fund” backed purpose-built student accommodation. This leaves students to consider looking to other areas of the private rental market, which itself is facing issues of supply. For a typical student budget this results in living on the outskirts of Dublin, paying cash in hand, with a complete absence of tenancy rights. A quick search online vanquishes any hope of finding something affordable, safe, and relatively accessible. That once assumed goal of a rough around the edges, but affordable student house is now inaccessible to the majority. The abundance of Instagram story posts searching for anything, for students the only solution seems to be pure luck. Ironically the aim of the government’s efforts of pushing more purposebuilt student accommodation was to remove students from the rest of the private rental sector.. However it has only forced those unable to afford PBSA into more unstable and insecure housing arrangements. Whilst tax relief schemes for rent payments have been employed they seem entirely disproportionate to the high rents, which continue to increase. Government’s current sympathies on the matter seem conflicted, with Leo Varadkar consistently referring to the “mess” that is the housing market as a whole, whilst dismissing the worry of increasing immigration as “the grass is always greener” syndrome. Students in Ireland on average pay more in housing costs than any other student in the EU or UK, a fact Leo loves to forget. Despite this, current full time students cannot test Leo’s hypothesis, as we are bound to the Irish property market for the course of our degrees. This vulnerability of students in this housing market has been neglected, by both our colleges and by our government. Debt, long commutes and even homelessness are the very real concerns and realities of those trying to pursue third level education in Ireland, and are going to particularly affect the most vulnerable of students.

Government’s warm welcome to these international investors has had grave and far reaching implications on the Irish property market. There is a “chronic over reliance” on the private sector to afford social housing notes Sinn Féin housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin. We see HAP payments as increasingly the norm for Irish renters, in effect creating a private sector which is subsidised by government as people cannot possibly afford these rents. Their defence to the situation is a retelling of the historic implications of the recession, and the lengthy time it will take to see stability once again, emphasising the need for these investors to meet the staggering demands. However, government affinity for these “cuckoos” extends much further than housing, and begins to look much less defensible. EU and government-backed afforestation efforts, which were designed to provide an income for farmers in rural communities for otherwise unusable land, have been invaded by cuckoos, disrupting communities without any discipline.

Earlier this year, Coillte and Gresham House, an internationally active investment fund, launched their joint venture into afforestation efforts. This went uninterrupted, despite the shocking decrease in local farmer engagement that ensued. No considerations were made by the government to the potential socio-economic or environmental consequences of the deal. With farmers and other local developers unable to compete, perfectly good and usable land is being bought by these huge cuckoo owned forests shunting development and growth of local businesses and farms. Nonetheless the afforestation scheme has been criticised by environmental scientists for being overly accelerated and antithetical to native biodiversity. However with the introduction of these actors in the market, this questionable afforestation has only accelerated. The reality of the midlands land becoming dominated by these multinationals is heavily concerning, for both the environment and the locals. When we look at contexts like this, a broader trend of government indifference to the conduct of these firms is visible. The uncaring attitude to its people is the same in relation to the market of student accommodation.

The government has allowed private funds like Yugo and Gresham House to swoop in and manage land, housing, afforestation, and even road infrastructure. The common catchphrase embodied by the government as always is an intent “to keep bad investors out”, whilst they incentivise their arrival, and seldom inhibit this free market. Land is a huge factor in wealth accumulation, and it’s a struggle to merely rent it, which is telling.. Protecting the free market is one thing, but the government seems to be relying on these private investors to somehow distribute housing fairly, particularly student accommodation. The road to “rebuilding” Ireland cannot be equitably paved by international investment funds – but all signs indicate that they will nevertheless be the ones paving it.

My Erasmus experience in Jerusalem – an alternative view

Kerry O’Sullivan

The March issue of the University Times contained an article in which the writer described their experience of Erasmus in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It claimed that “politics and religion don’t define the lives of ordinary people” in Jerusalem, and that issues relating to conflict in the region “are not as black and white as they seem”. This is a response to that article.

The Erasmus experience may be a rite of passage for many students of cultural studies; what is not a rite of passage is unwillingly participating in the oppression of Palestinian people. I believe that an erasmus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is, by definition, just this. I spent a semester living in Jerusalem as part of my Middle Eastern studies programme and came to realise that one cannot exist in this city or indeed this apartheid state without rightly harbouring the guilt of benign support for Israel. Everything, from the bus you get to where you buy your weekly groceries, directly impacts the victims and perpetrators of the regime. It’s time we questioned whether a partnership between Trinity and such an environment is useful or constructive for our education; something we are getting for the sake of the betterment of society.

To say that politics do not define the lives of the ordinary people in Jerusalem is to say that Palestinians are not people of the city. The classes in the university and the state of the art student accommodation only exist because it was built on stolen Palestinian land in East Jerusalem. The university itself is a settlement on stolen land. Sitting in class at the top floor of the International Rothberg School, one has a perfect view of the apartheid wall in East Jerusalem. A perfect view of the torn up footpaths and ramshackle homes people are forced to live in within the small pockets of East Jerusalem they are ‘permitted’ to. In other words, a perfect view of the result of your presence in that particular class on that particular day, whether you like it or not.

Whilst on the surface level it may seem that everything is safe and secure in the Hebrew University, it is one of the starkest examples of the power of Israeli propaganda I saw whilst over there. There are armed guards at every door; searching the bags and shouting at the few hijabi students and Arabs who brave the campus of the Hebrew university. If they believe their presence is warranted on this land, if they believe they have a right and a claim to East Jerusalem, the fear and hostility they have of Palestinians and anyone critiquing their regime directly contradicts this widely spread claim. Students perpetuate this oppression and hostility too.

During my time there, students performed a citizen’s arrest on a group of students who happened to be singing in Arabic on the university campus, the future and current soldiers of this regime already using their upper hand. Far gone were the insincere claims of equality and changes in Israeli society beginning with the students of the Hebrew University. They are being taught to fear and attack these communities. The classes, too, must be acknowledged for their bias. Many of the teachers were European or North American immigrants to Israel. I had a class on “counterterrorism”, which was essentially an hour a week class in propaganda surrounding the justification of the actions of the IDF using regular brutal force against Palestinians. I came to find it extremely ironic as I see the level of violence and terror that the Israeli government allows and encourages to happen as simply terrorism itself.

It is a privilege to believe that your community is not politicised, especially in Jerusalem. Claiming the privilege of being apolitical is in itself dismissive and ignorant of the plight of Palestinians in the city. For Palestinians, buses, water supply, electricity supply, how they get to work every day past checkpoints, how safe their children are whilst playing on the street by their own homes, whether they are going to be safe from evictions and house demolitions are part of everyday life. These are political actions that this state is taking to ethnically cleanse the indigenous people of this land. Every interaction is steeped in the politics of hatred that the Israeli government has cleverly and quietly woven into every facet of society. People celebrate religious holidays, of course, but often they are used as opportunities to attack attendees at Al-Aqsa mosque, as happened just last week, or wreak havoc on the Muslim quarter of the old city, which is already suffering from an influx of Jewish settlements literally on top of ancient Palestinian homes and businesses. Existence in the city is political, whether this is because your life is easy and you can ignore these injustices or difficult to the point where all you can hope for everyday is to survive.

The question we must pose is whether this exchange partnership should even exist in the first place. I have learnt from participating in it that we should not have to see or experience the oppression of others to believe it or do something tangible about it. The purpose of education, and particularly exchanges such as this is to increase our cultural awareness and be able to put this into practice to improve society and the world we live in.

Trinity maintaining links with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is not representative of the beliefs and views of the student body and certainly does not pertain to the betterment of society. Maintaining links with this university is sinister enough, but now Israel is the only country in the Middle East that Trinity offers funding to study abroad in. This means that it is the only opportunity for students of Middle Eastern studies to travel and study in the Middle East, an incentive to increase the number of people attending the exchange.

I felt like every penny that I spent in Israel was helping to strengthen an apartheid regime I didn’t believe in and didn’t want to support. Every class I attended was teaching me something that wasn’t true or was so based in bias that I didn’t want to know it, but was afraid other students were listening and believing every word coming out of a lecturer’s mouth. Every time I felt safe on a bus or walking down a street I was reminded of the fear that has become as ordinary to Palestinian communities as getting to school and work is. This exchange has no place in our education, the ideas and sentiments of the Israeli regime have no place infiltrating Irish universities. As we at Trinity try to peel back our own layers of colonial legacies, we should be more than mindful of the Palestinian cause; more than aware of how it feels to have your land stolen and culture suppressed.

Kerry O’Sullivan is the PRO of the TCDSU Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Implementation Group