Sir, - As a representative of Trinity Students' Union, I wish to highlight the anger of our members at the suggestion from the Irish Property Owners Association that "the only factor that might be reducing the stock available to students was the number of EU nationals and asylum-seekers looking for similar accommodation" (The Irish Times, August 25th).
The crisis has been caused by the failed housing policies of successive governments, excessive profit-taking by landlords and developers, and the lack of on-campus student accommodation, not the arrival of a few thousand asylum-seekers. Irish housing policy has relied on the market to provide low-cost housing. It is policies such as the privatisation of local authority housing, a reduction in the construction of social housing and the abolition of rent and price controls that have left us with today's crisis. Countries such as Germany and Holland have received much greater numbers of asylum-seekers yet do not have our disgraceful lack of student accommodation and local authority housing.
Housing provision in those countries is not left simply to the market. Government policies ensure that most people have a decent standard of housing. These include: the compulsory purchase of development land at existing use value in order to construct low-cost social housing and high levels of construction of local authority housing. According to USI, landlords have raised rents by 96 per cent in some cases over the past three years. The Government should implement rent controls with security of tenure to stop greedy landlords preying on tenants. And as only 6 per cent of students are housed on-campus in Ireland, compared with 28 per cent in the UK and 17 per cent in Europe, we call on for immediate State investment in purpose-built student accommodation. - Yours, etc.,
Rory Hearne, President, Students' Union, Trinity College, Dublin 2.