The year is young, and the tone is set. Throughout its existence, the University of Galway Students’ Union, or CMLONG, has been synonymous with distinctive protests, campaigns and publicity. And Tuesday was no different, as members of the union embarked on one of their most ambitious protests to date.
Inspired by the distinct sleep-out campaign of 2023, the officers of the union led an accommodation protest on Tuesday evening, September 1. To raise awareness regarding the lack of affordable student accommodation in Galway and the wider country, students and officers erected tents in the middle of Galway’s famous Eyre Square. The crowds assembled at the University Quadrangle at 4pm, before an animated march to the Square and the pitching of tents in which to spend the night.
I was lucky enough to be present for a portion of the evening, and witness the sheer commitment among my fellow students’ union members to spreading awareness around the accommodation crisis. Vigilance was building with posts on CMLONG’s Instagram for a number of days prior to the protest, and several of the officers were featured on local radio the morning of the camp.
At 4 in the Quad, the megaphone was cranked into life and short speeches to the gathering crowd were heard, courtesy of CMLONG president Seán de Burca, and the president of the national students’ union, Aontas na Mac Léinn in Éirinn (AMLÉ), Daniel Walsh. The troops rolled out along the walk to Eyre Square, led by Daniel Walsh and the megaphone and shouldering their camping paraphernalia. Bringing up the rear was CMLONG’s VP for Welfare and Equality, Molly Hickey, piloting the shopping trolley with excess camping gear.
Led by Walsh, the cries from the crowd were simple:
Students’ rights are under attack… stand up, fight back!
What do want want? Housing!.. when do we want it? Now!
Students’ rights are renters’ rights!.. one struggle, one fight!
Upon reaching the Square many spectators had assembled, as well as press from RTÉ, Galway Bay FM and Raideo na Gaeltachta. The CMLONG and AMLÉ officers delivered speeches to the onlookers, started by Seán de Burca.
“What we’re calling for first of all is legislation for digs. Currently your landlord can take a notion one day if you’re in digs and have you out that evening. There’s no security of tenure, something that people have been fighting for since the 1800s. We’re fighting for a full rewrite of the National Student Accommodation Strategy, which is totally unambitious when we’re already at breaking point.
Rents keep going up – higher and higher – and every single year the government fails to take any action. We have students commuting from further and further afield. We know that the pressure being caused by extortionate rents is a pressure that’s going to go up. We’re here to demand some action because we have been asking for the same things for decades, and the government has been failing for a decade.”
Seán’s speech was met with a round of applause from the gathered crowd, before Daniel Walsh from AMLÉ proceeded to expand even further:
“AMLÉ are here today in solidarity with CMLONG. We are here in solidarity with the thousands of students across the country for whom this is a daily reality, whether it’s sleeping in cars, crashing on couches or getting up at the crack of dawn to commute hours into their college. This is the reality for students in Ireland today and it’s locking people out of higher education. This is a reality of successive government failures over years to take the higher education sector seriously, invest into student accommodation and to recognise that we are facing a student accommodation crisis!
We’re here to ensure young people are supported and let to flourish, not kicked in the teeth budget after budget, year after year. We’re calling for investment and regulation of student digs where students have been thrown to the wolves by the private market for decades. We’re calling for a government student accommodation strategy that recognises the only long-term sustainable solution to the crisis is state investment in purpose-built student accommodation.”
Daniel’s concluding line sent out a clear and exciting statement of intent:
“This is the first protest that we’ve seen this year, but it isn’t going to be the last!”
The campers continued the assembling of their tents. Jumping on the present media bandwagon, I caught hold of Seán for an exclusive word for SIN.
“We’re protesting because the situation is desperate and it’s only getting worse,” he told me.
“There’s been a total lack of government action for decades. Recently we had the government National Student Accommodation Strategy and to say it’s unambitious would be a compliment – it is predicting that by 2035 there will be an increase in the number of full-time students in Ireland to forty-one thousand, so by 2035 they want to provide forty-two thousand more student beds.
They are claiming currently there is a deficit of beds of fifteen thousand, a figure that is disputed by AMLÉ, which puts it around thirty to fifty thousand. They’re aiming to solve the problem, but only one-fifteenth of it.
But there’s twenty or thirty tents here in protest, and that’s without students back. This is to set the tone that this is what’s going to be happening this year.”
The evening drew in on the square, and while I couldn’t be present for the entire time, morale was high in the camp. Many passers by were intrigued by the Eyre favela, stopping for a look and an enquiry as to what the protest was for or hoped to achieve. Some even attempted to offer money, despite the protest being purely about awareness. With the exception of the occasional heckler, public engagement was decisively positive.
As night fell, the first campers battened down the hatches for bed. A roster system was in place for the night, with an officer of CMLONG or AMLÉ awake at all times as first port of call in an emergency. 3am came and, with a smidgen of rain breaching my friend’s permeable tent cover and looming Wednesday morning commitments to attend to, I had to call it a night.
I returned home to my 5x10ft box room to sleep, still one of the lucky ones with a roof over my head.
Of course, the accommodation situation gets worse still as the new academic term begins. Protests such as the one on Eyre Square hold more depth than a simple sleep out. Rather, they represent students crying pleas to a government that fails to listen to them. Ironically, while camped in what might soon became the going standard for student living.
Campus accommodation at the University of Galway leaves a lot to be desired. Of the over 20 thousand students enrolled in the university, only 1,900 beds are provided for on campus in the university’s three student villages. Data obtained from the University’s FOI Publication Scheme shows that in Corrib Village, a basic single room – no en-suite – starts at €509.89 per month, with refundable booking and rental deposits and a utility pre-payment of €600.
This climbs to €661.33 for an en-suite double room, and the story is further grim upon looking at the other villages. €746.80 monthly for a single room in Goldcrest village, multiplied by 9 payments for the academic year and adding in the €450 utilities fee will set students and their families back €7,171.20 for a year. Simply for having a place to put the head down at night.
Our evening on Eyre Square was no doubt a worthwhile endeavour, as students are hit among the hardest by the worsening accommodation crisis. When morning came and the sun set on the first protest of the year, the lucky ones joined my way of thinking and returned to their accommodations for some well-deserved sleep. The sabbatical officers of the SU legged it to Áras na Mac Léinn to clock in for the day. I got in the car and went home to Roscommon. Over the next couple of weeks, thousands will arrive in Galway for the academic year and be faced with the problem the protest sought to highlight.
The first of the year, but not the last. The tone is set. Time will tell if the powers that be will listen.
Sonny McGreevy is SIN’s Deputy Editor and co-Sports Editor for 2026/2027. He is a final year student of English, Creative Writing and History. He has written for SIN for 3 years, mainly around sports and occasional politics. When he’s not presenting his Gaelic football show on Flirt FM or peering over a fence at a local GAA pitch, he's slicing a golf ball into the nearest pond or propping up a Sult table letting everyone know he's from Roscommon.