“There’s nowhere to live in Cork, and the rents are out of this world,” says Alejandro Cervantes, a third-year music student at University College Cork.
The 23-year-old student has been left with no choice but to spend his final year commuting from his family home in Limerick for three hours a day due to the severe shortage of affordable accommodation in Cork city.
“There’s also the social aspect that I’m missing out on because I’m wasting so much time travelling, and it’s just exhausting,” says Cervantes.
His story typifies the experience of so many students in Ireland today whose college life is now vastly different from their predecessors due to the chronic shortage of student accommodation in Ireland.
RM Block
A study published by the National Youth Council of Ireland this week took the views of more than 1,000 people and found that just over 90 per cent of those aged 18-24 said rent and the cost of housing was the biggest issue they faced.
Two-thirds believed they would be better off in other countries; 31 per cent said they were “strongly” considering a move away.
Looking at the figures, it is clear that demand for student housing is rising at a rate that cannot be matched by the supply of new beds coming on stream.
Alongside this, rising construction costs have stalled many on-campus accommodation projects that have planning permission but universities cannot afford to build.
A long-promised Government plan to address the crisis, the Student Accommodation Strategy, has been delayed yet again and will now not be published until later this year.
The latest available data from the Higher Education Authority shows there were 265,905 students enrolled in higher education in the 2023-2024 academic year, an increase of 3.6 per cent on the previous year.
Over the past five years student numbers have grown by more than 28,000 since the 2018-2019 academic year.
The number of beds available for student accommodation falls far short of what is needed.
The latest data from the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) shows there were 36,521 student tenancies registered at the end of 2024 – an increase of 8.4 per cent on the previous year.
These figures echo the findings of a report by commercial property firm Cushman & Wakefield published at the start of this year, which looked at the supply and demand of student beds in 2024.
It found that there was a rapidly growing demand for student accommodation and a largely static supply of new beds coming on to the market.
That report forecasts that full-time student numbers are likely to rise by more than 30,000 over the next decade, translating into an increase in student demand of almost 17,000 beds.
However, the report found that overall supply of student accommodation changed little during 2024, growing by just 1,300 beds. Looking ahead, it found that just 1,300 new beds were under construction.
Summing it up, the report’s authors estimated that the total national demand for student accommodation could reach more than 115,000 beds in the next 10 years, compared with the current supply of only about 47,000.
This would have a damaging knock-on effect: many students are now being forced into the private rental market, which is already overheated.
Cervantes, the music student at UCC who is originally from Mexico but moved to Limerick with his family more than a decade ago, describes his frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful search for a place off campus.
“There are student accommodation [providers] that charge €1,200 per month, which for college students is outrageous,” he says.
“And then you have digs, which are more sustainable, around €600-€700 per month, but they’re often in the middle of nowhere.
“When you finally find something in the city centre, there’s other stipulations, like they only want girls. Other people I know have been scammed.
“I found a house last month, but then the landlord gave it to someone else without giving me notice, so now I am commuting,” he says.
Cervantes failed to secure on-campus accommodation this year, an increasingly difficult task for students.
That problem does not appear to be going away, either. The Irish Times reported last week that almost 3,000 on-campus student beds across Dublin remain unbuilt, despite planning permission being granted several years ago. The accommodation remains unbuilt due to high construction costs and a gap in Government funding cited by universities.
Even when students manage to secure on-campus rooms, the prices they must pay are often far from affordable.
Prices at University College Dublin start at €5,722 per academic year, up to a maximum of €11,888, the most expensive across the country.
The highest-priced on-campus accommodation outside Dublin is at University College Cork, with prices of €3,816-€8,585.
The cheapest on-campus accommodation across the State is at University of Galway, which charges €3,258-€7,925.
In the private rental market, the latest rent index published by the RTB and ESRI this week shows average national rents in new tenancies now stand at €1,696 per month, with Dublin standing at €2,186, Galway city at €1,767, Limerick city at €1,587 and Cork city at €1,629.
How did we get here?
Lorcan Sirr, a senior lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin, says one reason for the student accommodation crisis in Ireland is down to a tradition of people going to their local university rather than moving away from home.
“There hasn’t been any building of student accommodation by universities on any sort of scale because we didn’t have to,” says Sirr.
“That means when the student cohort expanded, when universities here sought to increase their income from international students and you end up with all these students coming from abroad to Ireland, that there’s nowhere for them to live.
“The government then incentivised the private sector to respond to that demand, but they’re only providing accommodation at a price point that suits them, which is expensive,” says Sirr.
“So then the Irish students are left in what is already a pretty precarious and expensive private rental market.”
Guilia Caftellana, a 22-year-old Italian, has just finished her degree in archaeology at University College Cork, but has chosen to leave Ireland for her postgraduate studies in the Netherlands because she can no longer afford the rising costs here.
While she would not have paid the same high fees as international students because she is from the EU, she was still forced to take out a student loan to cover her accommodation and college fees while living here.
She stayed on campus at UCC for just over €600 per month, and paid a student contribution fee of €2,000 a year.
She says almost €25,000 of her €30,000 loan was used to pay for her rent and college fees, even though she worked in a bar in her hours off college.
When it came to deciding whether she would stay in Cork or go elsewhere for her master’s degree, the unpredictability of the rental market was a deciding factor.
“My expenses were going to be very high with the rent, and considering the expenses that I would have spent there [in Cork], I decided to take my chances somewhere else,” she says. “But leaving Cork was very hard for me.”
Emma Monahan, vice-president for welfare at Amlé (Aontas na Mac Léinn in Éirinn, formerly the Union of Students in Ireland), says the student accommodation crisis is “a problem that’s going to continue to get worse”.
“We are seeing a lot of people that very quickly can end up in crisis situations,” she says. “You’re seeing a lot of people that might end up sleeping on friends’ couches, or staying in a hostel, because sometimes that’s the only option.”
Representatives from Amlé are having “frequent” meetings with Minister for Higher Education James Lawless on the issue, says Monahan.
The union is also running drives for digs and keeping rolling spreadsheets of people who come forward with a room to rent.
Various student unions across the country are now also setting up food banks, or handing out food vouchers, she says, in response to the difficult situation many students find themselves in paying such high rents.
“There’s so many cohorts of students around the country who are feeling like they’re not being supported at all,” she says.
While a new Government strategy is awaited, the figures paint a clear picture of demand outstripping supply with no quick fix on the horizon.
Behind all of that is a generation of students commuting hours to class, sleeping on couches, being financially crippled by rents and ultimately choosing to move abroad.
