Ms Emma Monahan:

Last year, I was the community and citizenship officer in DCU. A lot of my time was taken up with accommodation queries but another aspect of my role was transport. Within that, students were coming to me looking for help to find accommodation that was not even close to the college but brought them perhaps as far as County Meath in order to have a slightly shorter commute. One of the scariest things we are seeing is that people are now paying for accommodation just to make their commutes shorter. On a daily basis, students are travelling one, two or three hours back and forth. As we were discussing earlier, the student experience completely changes when students are working and travelling and then being told that outside of lecture hours they have to do an amount of solo study. There are genuinely not enough hours in the day.

The transport is not even there for many of those students. When they come out of class they might have to run straight for a bus and they cannot take part in any extracurricular activities or any opportunities that would further their career prospects. The experience has completely changed due to these issues.