Call For New Student Accommodation Strategy

The government has come under pressure to establish a new strategy to help tackle the student accommodation crisis across the country.

Sinn Féin representative Rose Conway-Walsh TD has called for a new strategy to prioritise delivering publicly owned, affordable student accommodation.

This call comes after students in Maynooth were reported to still be scrambling to find accommodation despite the new term being upon them.

Calling for a new strategy to end the over-reliance on the private sector, Teachta Conway-Walsh said: "In 2017, Fine Gael brought forward its National Student Accommodation Strategy. Now, four years on from its publication, it is clear it has been an abject failure.

"The government will claim they met the 7,000 additional student beds set as the minimum target in the strategy. In reality, this target was never capable of meeting the real student housing need.


"Even within the strategy itself it recognised there were 24,000 students relying on the general private rental market that could not access student specific accommodation.

"Not only did the government set completely inadequate targets for overall numbers of bed to be added to the system, the plan set no targets for publicly built student accommodation or criteria for affordability.

"Under eight percent of new student accommodation built since 2017 has been publicly owned, on-campus accommodation. This amounts to only 679 beds.

"On top of this, colleges increasingly give priority to fee-paying international students for on-campus accommodation in line with government policy. This has led to a situation where up to half of all on-campus student accommodation goes to the more lucrative international students.

"We need a new strategy for student accommodation that has affordability and public ownership at its heart. We need to increase recurrent and capital funding for institutes higher education to allow them to build on-campus accommodation and offer affordable rents. 

"End the conversion of purpose-built student accommodation to tourist accommodation, and encourage colleges to strike a fair balance between attracting international students and meeting the needs of Irish students."