Ringsend native Amy Doyle (26) realised quite early on that getting into college would not be as easy for her as it might be for those in more affluent neighbourhoods.
Nobody in her family had entered third level before her, and the people around her often did apprenticeships or worked in retail rather than pursuing academic degrees.
Applying for university was “unfamiliar territory”, Doyle says, and the first barrier she encountered was that her school offered only one science subject at Leaving Certificate level. The course she wanted to do, human health and disease at Trinity College Dublin, required a minimum of two science subjects.
“I think this is a classic example of how your class and the type of school you attend can bottleneck your potential before you can even apply,” she says.
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Doyle worked summer jobs while in school to pay for grinds in chemistry at the Institute of Education, which allowed her to sit the exam without studying the subject at school.
She secured a place in Trinity and has since gone on to complete a masters in neuroscience at the University of Cambridge in the UK and is now doing a PhD at Imperial College London.
She had to work part-time throughout most of her studies in order to afford it, something she says was “stressful” and impacted her overall college experience.
Receiving a Dublin Port scholarship, part of a programme that has been running for 25 years, went some way to alleviating the pressure. It has awarded more than €1.5 million to about 1,500 students from the port area.
The scheme aims to help people from around the docklands, some of Dublin’s most disadvantaged areas, to overcome the financial barriers to entering third level. Among the areas included are East Wall, North Strand, Ringsend, Irishtown, Sheriff Street, Pearse Street and City Quay. Successful applicants receive a €1,000 annual bursary for each year of their course (up to four years).
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While the money helped Doyle to reduce her working hours and be a student “in the fuller sense”, it also represented a “vote of confidence” from her community.
“It was my own community saying, ‘We see you, we believe in you, and we want to invest in what you can become.’ After years of feeling that those doors weren’t meant for me, that meant more than I can say.”
Dublin Port conducted a survey of past recipients to mark the 25th year of the scheme, speaking to 145 scholars across the Dublin 1, 2, 3 and 4 areas. Almost half of them were the first in their family to attend university, it found, while 80 per cent were among the first.
The biggest barrier for respondents when considering third level education was finances, with 90 per cent citing this as the main block.
Edel Currie, community engagement manager at Dublin Port and an East Wall local, has worked for the company for 25 years and is the third generation of her family to do so.
She says a “two-tier system” has developed in the docklands where a significant amount of wealth has come into the area, with new apartment blocks and general gentrification, leaving behind a local population still struggling to get by.
“You do have a lot of people living on maybe social welfare payments, maybe working minimum wage jobs, and for a family on two minimum wage jobs, paying fees to go to third level education is a big ask,” she says.
Dublin Port started this scholarship 25 years ago because local communities told them that financial difficulties were the biggest barrier to entering third-level education, “and 25 years down the road it’s still mostly the same reason”, Currie says.
“These are bright young students that really deserve that chance in life – but no one had walked that path before them.”
