For a 9am lecture at Trinity College Dublin, Mark Kerr needs to be up at 6.50am. The third-year history student commutes from his family home in Navan, Co Meath, catching the 7.20am bus.
“The way I view it, renting in Dublin is pretty much impossible,” he says. “Even student accommodation I find is very expensive. It’s supposed to be designed for students, but a lot of students can’t afford it.”
If Kerr’s last lecture is at 6pm, he has to contend with rush hour traffic on the route back to Navan. That is if he can manage to get a spot on the bus – with evening demand, buses fill up quickly and commuters are often left waiting another half hour for the next arrival. Getting home can take two hours in traffic.
Starting his course, Kerr had hoped to find accommodation closer to the university, but quickly realised the expense that plan would incur. Instead, using a student Leap card, it costs about €5 to travel between Navan and Trinity each day.
“I’d probably go into college more often,” he says of hypothetically living nearer to the college. “I miss class sometimes when it’s not worth the journey – just the time. It’s four hours out of my day sometimes going up and back. That’s a lot and that’s just on a bus. It’s wasted time.”
Though he works one or two days a week in a Navan butcher’s, Kerr believes he would need a full-time job in Dublin to afford to live in the city. With ambitions of completing a postgraduate degree down the line, it is not something he or his family can afford to consider right now.
Navan is one of several towns around Ireland that is home to a high volume of commuting third-level students. Another, Naas in Co Kildare, is where Caoimhe Ní Mhaitiú lives while attending Technological University Dublin in Grangegorman.
For a 9am lecture, she has to get up at 6am to make it in time for her bus. Usually, she heads home from college at 5pm and arrives two hours later.
“Within the people I know living around [Naas], nearly all of them are commuting in,” she says. “Then within my course, I’d say a good chunk of the course are living in Dublin and half are definitely commuting.”
Ní Mhaitiú is in her second year of film and broadcasting, and still holds out hope of moving closer to the college for her fourth and final year. Like Kerr, she relies on public transport for her commute.
“I either get the train in and then the Luas and I walk up, or I get a bus in,” she says. “The train takes me about an hour because I have to drive out to the train station first. The bus is 1½ hours. It’s not awful but it’s not brilliant.”
The 20-year-old says most people her age, and even several years older, in Naas are still living at home. As it stands, no change is imminent. Looking beyond her degree, Ní Mhaitiú is not sure how viable it will be to move out of her family home while remaining in Ireland.
“That’s the hope that it’ll eventually go down a bit,” she says of rental costs. “There is the temptation to try to find somewhere else. In the state it is now, I’ll be living at home for a while. There’s a temptation to see where else is on offer. Right now, I want to stay in Ireland, but we’ll have to see how it goes.”
Early lectures and evening activities are naturally the parts of a college schedule worst affected by long commutes. It is also difficult to attend social gatherings with friends, as well as events with clubs and societies.
“Socially, people could text after I’d already got the train back home. There was no point in me going back in to meet up with people after I’d already left the city. I had to have everything planned or else I couldn’t take part in it all,” Ní Mhaitiú says.
Emily Stanford is on a cancellation list for student accommodation at the University of Galway. She has just started her first year of a bachelor of commerce degree, facing into a commute from Gort.
“We’re looking ... for houses as well but there’s nothing really around that’s suitable,” she says. “It’s about an hour [in the morning] but it depends on traffic. Yesterday, we came in for orientation and it was about 1½ hours.”
[ Student accommodation crisis: Three applications for every bed on campusOpens in new window ]
Her friends from Gort are in the same position. Martina Fahey has just begun a bachelor of arts and is already noticing the impact her journey home will have on her access to college facilities.
“Most people from Gort went to UL because it’s easier to get to,” she says. “Everything for societies in the evening is seven to nine. The last bus [home] is eight or nine.”
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