Dáil debates

Wednesday, 28 April 2021

Residential Tenancies (Student Rents and Other Protections) (Covid-19) Bill 2021: Second Stage [Private Members]

 

10:35 am

Photo of Maurice QuinlivanMaurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Students have suffered significantly during the pandemic. Many of their families are now dependent on the pandemic unemployment payment and wage subsidy payments. Many are struggling not just financially but also due to the Covid-19 restrictions. For the current student body, most of the traditional third level experience has been absent. The experience of the current cohort of students is in videoconferencing and online lectures attended from their kitchen tables. For the most legitimate of reasons relating to protecting public health, students have been asked to stay away from their college campuses. They adhered to this advice and remained in their local communities, yet for many, the semester's accommodation is still expected to be paid for in full. We have introduced this Bill because we believe that student renters deserve greater protections and so that students will receive refunds where accommodation is unusable due to health restrictions. The aims of the Bill are simple and fair. The ambition is to ensure that student renters are treated the same as other renters by ensuring that landlords cannot charge student renters more than one month's rent in advance.

The University of Limerick is a superb institution that contributes greatly to the life and energy of Limerick city. In normal times, it is wonderful for the city to be injected with an array of ethnicities and a collection of students from all 32 counties, with the accompanying GAA jerseys in the colours of those counties. I look forward to the day when public health allows for the return of these students. They have been sorely missed.

When we look at the on-site accommodation fees that families are expected to pay, it is difficult to imagine how any family could send one child, let alone two, to a third level institution. The cheapest accommodation that I found was for a single room with no en suite in an eight-bed house. The total rent for an academic year came to over €4,000. Aside from application fees, the rent has to be paid in three instalments over the academic year. Accompanying this price is an ominous warning which reads, "Should you make an application for a full year place with us and cancel mid-way through your stay, you will lose your full deposit, be liable for the full year rent and will be unable to apply for accommodation with us in the future." While the university issued refunds, it was extremely disappointing that they were sometimes firmly resisted before relenting.

I also looked at some of the off-campus accommodation options where the fees are higher and which still require a full year's payment, with a four-instalment plan available. This locks students in and gives them no opportunity of choice. This is a tremendous amount for many middle-income plans, especially for those with more than one child in education. For many of those families, a series of thresholds make them ineligible. The Bill is supported by 56 Deputies. I encourage all Deputies to support it and the USI too.

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