NUI Maynooth student, Jenny Gray, found herself living in unsafe, overcrowded and dirty conditions while attending college last year, because there was "no hope" of getting anywhere else.
The third year arts student lived with eight other students in a three-bedroom house a half-hour walk from the campus. “There were two of us in what was the dining room, and two girls in the garage,” said Jenny. “He [THE LANDLORD] had carpet put down in the garage, but the room was absolutely tiny. I was staying in the dining room, and me and my roommate could literally hold hands in the beds - that’s how small it was.”
The lack of space wasn’t the only issue. At the start of the year, they found an infestation of wasps in the house. “We rang the landlord and his solution was to tell us to get wasp spray,” Jenny says. “We just had to spray all the wasps, and there were hundreds of them, in this nest by the back door.”
They soon found that their bins were only being collected every two weeks, and they had several problems with the electricity throughout the year. Again, the landlord was of little help. “One evening all our plugs stopped working. The landlord was a fix-it-himself man who wanted to do everything himself. We literally had to beg him to get someone to look at the electricity. Then when he did, the electrician said our fuse box was wired to suit a family of five and that it wasn’t safe for all of us to stay there using the electricity at the same time.”
The landlord was charging the nine tenants €930 per week – eight students paid €100 per week to share and another paid €130 for a single room.
Jenny is currently looking for new accommodation for this year, but finding it difficult. "I don't have the best of luck. Maynooth is a nightmare; it's so hard to find anything."
NUI Maynooth Welfare Officer Karen Kane agrees that housing in Maynooth can be scarce, but it is no excuse for landlords to offer sub-standard accommodation. “Like everywhere, there can be low standard accommodation but we would always advise students to view the property before putting down a deposit. It really is about doing your research and looking around.
“Honestly, the students have to stand up for themselves. If they feel the property they are viewing is below standard they should not accept it. Maynooth SU and the accommodation office strive to ensure every student is in proper accommodation. The lack of houses is not that severe that students should be living in low-standard accommodation.”
