By Oonagh Cassidy
The housing crisis in Galway is at a critical stage, with high rents and poor living conditions continuing to push people out of the city. Students are being forced to commute long distances, or return to their family homes, due to the lack of affordable and safe housing options.
Across Galway, students report facing difficult decisions with the choice of paying extortionate prices for low quality homes or leaving the city entirely. Damp and mouldy rooms have become alarmingly common in student rentals.
Laura Flanagan, a part-time student in Galway’s Technical Institute (GTI), is currently commuting from Westmeath due to the lack of acceptable housing. She described the conditions of her previous accommodation as unacceptable, explaining that her room was “extremely damp, and it had a lot of black mould.”
Unable to afford a room with proper living conditions, and unwilling to risk her health, Laura travels an hour and a half each way to attend classes twice a week. “It’s expensive and kind of exhausting, but I have no other option really,” she explains.
Another former student, Emily Fallon, who graduated this year, says she had to leave Galway and return home after struggling to find a place to live. “I viewed a couple of houses [in Galway], but they were just so expensive and unliveable” she says.
However, not all students have been as severely affected by Galway’s housing crisis. One final year student, Soren Tumasonyte, said they currently pay €400 a month for a room in a shared house in the city.
They describe their situation as “actually quite good” but acknowledges that finding this accommodation was more luck than anything else. “My parents found the place through a shopkeeper on Headford Road, who mentioned a woman was looking for tenants to split rent,” they say.
Before living in the city, they had accommodation in rural Cloonboo. The long commute and unreliable bus services made attending lectures nearly impossible. “Sometimes the buses didn’t show up at all. I missed classes constantly and really struggled to stay motivated,” they said.
Immediate action must be taken to improve the conditions of rented houses and allow vacant ones to be more accessible and affordable. Galway will not remain a sustainable student city if students cannot afford to live here.
Students are particularly vulnerable to substandard living conditions, often renting on limited budgets. Many landlords are renting older properties that have not been properly maintained, banking on the high demand to fill rooms regardless of the conditions.
Galway’s legacy as a student city is being challenged, and without affordable and safe housing, it may soon become a place where students simply will not be able to reside.