Mr Brian MacSharry's friends have been buying his drinks for the past four years. To the rest of us, this might seem like a good complaint but, for Mr MacSharry, it's a symbol of his pitiful financial state.

If his friends do not step in, it is a choice between "nursing one coke all night" and spending every night in. The latter is often the only option.

At this moment, he is "maxed out" by about €1,150 on his credit card, has an overdraft of €317, and is in the process of repaying a bank loan of €1,900 - the third such loan of his academic career. He receives €45 per week through a local authority maintenance grant, which does not even cover his €47.50 weekly rent, never mind other living expenses.

"My financial situation is very poor," he says.

Mr MacSharry has now been a student for almost a decade, having spent his undergraduate career in his native Cork before moving to Dublin to pursue postgraduate studies in 1996. He is completing a PhD in the Geology Department of Trinity College, a degree that he says would have been completed long ago if his finances had not been in such a mess.

Life in Dublin began well; Mr MacSharry won a £2,500 scholarship which, when added to his maintenance grant, meant that his income was relatively high in student terms. He had lived at home as a student in Cork and had managed to carry no debts forward from his undergraduate days.

"I had £3,500 in my first year," he says. "Five years ago, that went somewhere in Dublin. That was before the summer of 1997 when rents skyrocketed. Money suddenly didn't go anywhere."

Part-time work fast became Mr MacSharry's only route to student survival.

He began to supervise college examinations and took on laboratory work in his department.

He also picked up work from friends who worked in geology-related industries.

"I didn't want to work in a pub," he says. "The big thing with a PhD is self-discipline, and I didn't want to have a job where I'd be working three nights a week in a bar and be exhausted during the day."

At the end of that year, rents again rose, and Mr MacSharry's position became more precarious.

"That really hit me because my funding went down at the same time. Then, the following year, my scholarship stopped and I only had my local authority grant.

"I paid my fees and had £1,700 left. That only just paid my rent. To eat and pay my bills, I had to work constantly. In that one year, I had seven different jobs over a period of three weeks.

"I was demonstrating in the department, supervising exams, teaching and doing jobs for friends. My work totally suffered. Losing the funding is one reason why I still haven't finished my PhD."

During that period, Mr MacSharry says that he was in college "in name alone".

He felt that he had no option but to take out a bank loan for £2,000, which he undertook to repay in seven months.

"I paid that one off but then I got another one. Next time, it was £1,000," he says.

A year as a student officer within the Trinity Students' Union provided Mr MacSharry with a low, but valuable, wage. This brought him up to zero with his bank but the experience was short-lived. The current academic year has seen him revert to local authority funding once more, a payment that no longer comes close to covering accommodation costs.

"One of the big problems with local authority grants is that the system is not designed for postgrads," says Mr MacSharry. "I had to argue for my grant because I didn't fit into any of the qualifying categories."

The most significant issue, says Mr MacSharry, is that local authority funding is designed for a nine-month academic year. A PhD student studies for 12 months, putting in hours similar to the average worker, but the stipend does not increase accordingly.

He hopes to finish his PhD this summer and finally join the waged population.

Looking back, he admits that he was financially naïve when he started his postgraduate career because he had lived at home as an undergraduate.

"I hadn't really thought it through thoroughly."

Mr MacSharry knows, however, that he could be worse off. One fellow student is, he says, "walking around in a daze" because she is juggling a full-time research PhD with three jobs: one in the library, one in the laboratory and one in a bar.

"It'll take her a good few years to pay off her debts."