Madam, - I write to appeal to any of your readers who may have rooms in their homes, or who may have vacant property elsewhere, to make such space available to third-level students in desperate need of somewhere to stay for the coming year.
Here in UCD our main difficulty in trying to find appropriate student accommodation is our postcode; places with an appropriate price for student pockets are few and far between anywhere in Dublin but it's nigh impossible to find such places in areas where students are forced to compete with young professionals and new graduates who can simply afford to pay more rent in areas like Dublin 4 and 14.
Such a shortage is compounded even more by the rising interest rates and stalling property market, meaning that nobody wishes to buy property and everyone wishes to rent instead.
Thus, an already overcrowded populace is swamped with people who can afford to pay more than a typical unemployed undergraduate, and those in accommodation with more student-orientated rent prices simply stay in the places where they lived as students themselves.
The overall effect is that new students simply have nowhere to live. We have lobbied continually for years to have the provisions of Section 50 of the Finance Act 1999 renewed for longer than their original run.
Such provisions, which allowed property owners to write off the cost of renovating property against their tax bill, will soon lapse, causing an even further shortage of student-friendly accommodation.
We therefore appeal to anybody who might have space to house a student, to get in touch with us at (01) 7163117 or via email at suaccommodation@ucd.ie.
The welfare of the 22,000 students in UCD, the viability of the 250,000 students in third-level education in Ireland, and the hard-earned wellbeing of our knowledge-driven economy are all at stake. - Yours, etc,
GAVAN REILLY, Accommodation Officer, CIARA BRENNAN, Deputy President, UCD Students' Union, Belfield, Dublin 4.