Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

On 18 June, the recently established Cost of Living Coalition will hold a national demonstration demanding a compressive package of measures to address the cost of living crisis. That coalition involves workers, pensioners, lone parents and people on low and middle incomes but perhaps the most surprising element of the groups that have affiliated to this coalition, and which is very enthusiastic about being mobilised for that protest, is students. The Union of Students in Ireland, USI, is affiliated as is University College Dublin, UCD. In talking to some of the students this morning, they said themselves that the response of young people and of students to the idea that there are going to be protests over the cost of living is quite phenomenal. This is not something one would have expected, to be honest.

When we had the big water protest a number of years ago, it was mostly older people and that was in effect about the cost of living also. There were not many young people on those protests but I suspect that, judging from the response we are getting from students, many young people will in fact be participating.

Why is that happening? Why are young people and students joining workers and pensioners to protest about the unbearable and worsening cost-of-living crisis? It is because they too are being very significantly impacted, in the first instance by the cost of accommodation, which is completely shocking.

Beth O’Reilly, the incoming USI president, has made the point that student accommodation is now as expensive or more expensive than accommodation generally in the private rental sector. That is something else, when one thinks about it. The whole point about student accommodation, surely, is that it should be cheaper to enable people to do their further and higher education and complete that education, because they do not have the sort of income and resources that workers might have, and because it is in society’s interest that they are educated to the highest possible level. Nowhere is that more true and obvious than at the current point in time.

Our society has serious problems facing it because we have a lack of people who are educated and trained in a whole number of areas. This is the case in construction, health, education, mental health, ICT, and science. We need more people right across the board. Those shortages are called bottlenecks, in euphemistic economic terms, but that means we have not invested enough in training and educating our most important resource, our young people, to do those things which our society needs to function and grow.

It is not just a moral imperative, as it most certainly and immediately is, to address student poverty, the stress, impact on mental health and the pressure that students face because they cannot find affordable accommodation or because they are paying extortionate amounts because they are lashed with fees and so on. But it is also an imperative on the whole of society to remove the obstacles to further and higher education. Accommodation is critical in that. It is entirely unacceptable that UCD, for example, is building student accommodation that will cost €1,400 a month. That is an outrage. This is a publicly-funded university. That is only one example. Look at all the purpose-built student accommodation where investors have moved in and are exploiting the housing and accommodation crisis and charging students extortionate money. They are making profits from the hardship and financial difficulty experienced by students and they are allowed to get away with it. That has to stop. We need more subsidised and directly provided student accommodation at prices that are genuinely affordable for students. We need to remove all barriers to access to further and higher education, whether exam barriers such as the leaving certificate or financial. They are a throwback to an elitist and unequal society where there was a notion that only rich people should access education. That is what it is a legacy of. It makes no sense in today's world to limit in anyway or obstruct access to higher and further education. It is totally counter-productive.

On many occasions I raised funding for educational and counselling psychologists. It is ridiculous. There are huge waiting lists for assessments and the provision of services for children with special needs and there are young people who want to qualify in these areas but are being obstructed in doing so because they have to pay €11,000 or €15,000 in fees to do postgraduate studies in educational and counselling psychology. It is madness. Graduate medicine entry students, who want to be doctors, have to pay €15,000. We have a shortage of doctors. It is crazy to obstruct them. It is crazy to have fees and to have exam barriers which make it more difficult for people to enter further and higher education. It imposes incredible stress and pressure on our young people. The leaving certificate is putting many young people off education. It is actually inhibiting them from achieving their full creative potential. We need free education in the interest of students and of society. We need to solve the student accommodation crisis.

I do not have time to say anything about apprentices except that fees should go for them too. Apprentices should be given college places near where they live because the cost of them travelling is unbearable for many. We need to do that if we are to get the tradespeople we need to solve so many of the problems we are well aware of in our society.

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