Overnight, students in Galway braved the rain in a sleep out to highlight the lack of accommodation facing students ahead of the start of the academic year.
“We’re fed up,” read one sign which summarises the mood of students and young people across the country, a great deal of whom are getting up at all hours to spend hours commuting for failure to secure a place to stay. This also applies to many young workers, who have been priced out of living in Dublin but still have jobs to go to.
Some students have said they will have to defer hard-earned places at either of Galway’s two universities directly because of housing difficulties.
There are only a handful of rooms available on the Daft website, starting at €750 per month. At the same time, the implication seems to be, in the media coverage of the story, that students should turn to Airbnb as the last viable option for finding a bed – where around 100 short-term houses and apartments are available.
A report from estate agent Sherry FitzGerald at the beginning of the year claimed that a lack of development of purpose built student accommodation in the main university cities, Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway had created a shortage of around 38,900 student beds.
At the end of last year, the number of purpose-built student accommodation bed spaces was 47,600 – yet the number of full-time students in HEA-registered third level institutions for 2024/2025 was more than four times that number, at 215,585.
There are only around 2,600 student beds under construction across the State, per figures from the end of the year. Planning permission has been granted for around 13,800 beds – but more than a third of those are in developments that have been put on hold.
Even for those students who secure purpose built accommodation, often for the first year of studies, the scramble for accommodation continues year on year until they are finished their studies. It’s become increasingly hard to find digs or a room in an owner-occupied home, and there is very little ordinary rental housing.
Fewer than 200 houses were available to rent in the whole of Galway in May 2025, a fall of 35% year-on-year. The situation leaves many trapped in their cars or on public transport for hours. Surely there is no better way to drain the joy and excitement out of being a student – the years which should be counted among the best of your life.
If you’re fortunate enough to secure new student accommodation, that isn’t necessarily affordable. There’s a new 345-bed development set to open in Galway’s docklands, but the Students’ Union has rightly pointed out that the price is too high.
Students, who are notoriously known for having no money, are faced with rents of around €800 t0 €1000 per month in Galway. The University’s new Dunlin Village, opened in 2023, charges up to €962 for a month’s rent.
If you compare that to ten years ago, in 2026 students would have paid as little as €225 a month, with NUIG’s own 2016 postgraduate budget estimating €340 per month for accommodation. This allowed young people to have a student experience that has been robbed from many of them a decade on. All I can say is that I’m glad I was a student in 2016 and not today.
I found it interesting, when a video report popped up from RTE on the Eyre Square sleep out, that the national broadcaster had chosen to interview two international students before any of the Irish students who were pitching their tents for the night.
It brings up what I would call the uncomfortable elephant in the room with regards to Galway and the crippling lack of accommodation for students. The University of Galway has about 19,700 students – and around 18% of these are international students from more than 122 countries. That’s roughly one in every five full-time students. A rate of almost 20 per cent is much higher than the EU average – Eurostat’s EU-wide figures from 2024 show that only 8.4 per cent of tertiary students across the EU were students from abroad.
We can talk about more housing, but where on earth is the housing going to come from?
Students have hopelessly witnessed the problems with accommodation getting worse – but rather than reduce the number of international students, who, because they are coming from abroad, cannot live at home, the University has been deliberately increasing the numbers coming from outside Ireland. Its own figures show the proportion rising from 17.6 per cent in 2022/23 to 18.5 per cent in 2024/25, with a target of reaching 20 per cent by 2027/28.
The objectively crazy thing is that while Irish students are despairing, spending hours in the car every day, or turning down places as there’s nowhere to stay, the University openly says its strategy is to increase international student numbers.
It wants more internationalisation – all while the city’s tiny private rental market is floundering and Galway resolutely, year on year, fails to provide enough accommodation for growing numbers of both domestic and international students.
If a University deliberately recruits thousands of students from outside Ireland, shouldn’t it be required to provide enough accommodation for everyone?
The university has roughly 1,900 student beds – a tiny amount against a university population of 19,000. So that leaves us with the private rental market in Galway City, where already, 18% of residents are non-Irish citizens. This is the second-highest proportion outside Dublin City where the proportion is 21%.
The CSO says 53,006 people living in Galway in 2022 were born outside of Ireland, meaning that around one in five people in Galway are foreign-born, and around one in five residents of Galway City are non-Irish.
The impact of this on the rental market is clear – the CSO itself specifically states that recent non-Irish immigrants are overwhelmingly renters. Renters have a higher foreign-born proportion than the population as a whole, given they are much more likely to rent.
Nationally, 80 per cent of households headed by non-Irish citizens who had recently immigrated were renting privately – compared with 42 per cent of recently arrived Irish citizens. The fact that our media is still shy to talk about the very clear and acute pressure this places on a small housing market does a disservice to us all, and particularly to the students who should be able to study in their own country.
To put those figures into context, the population of Galway rose from 66,163 in 2002 to 83,456 in 2022 – an increase of 17,293 people, or around 26%.
Galway’s population growth has outpaced the delivery of new homes, further pushing up property prices and rental costs. It is undeniable that rising demand has been fuelled by demographic shifts and inward migration – yet establishment media is intent on speaking only of constrained supply and missed Government building targets, both of which have been detrimental, but do not explain things on their own.
The Government has the political will to deliver when it wants to – I am convinced that it just doesn’t really care very much about delivering for Irish students. How can this be the case? After all, it can and does deliver for the rest of the world.
It is excellent at delivering for Ukrainians, of which there are 1,939 beneficiaries of temporary protection from Ukraine living in Galway in private accommodation supported through the Accommodation Recognition Scheme. There are many more living in accommodation provided by ARP hosts and in State-contracted accommodation.
They are great at providing for those in IPAS – there are more than 33,000 people living in IPAS accommodation – and Galway has around 25 IPAS centres. The city has a Nigerian Mayor who has called out people as racist. Many have simply raised questions about her own claim that she came to Ireland after her husband’s assassination.
It’s a hard pill to swallow that many of the same Irish students who have been neglected by this Government will vote them in again at the next election – convinced that the progressivism of establishment TDs makes them good people.
Politicians have for too long been allowed for too long to use every trendy buzzword and distraction tactic under the sun – from anti-racism to LGBT pride – to distract from the problems facing its own people. Unless the penny finally drops, well-meaning student sleep outs will achieve very little change.