TRADITIONALLY, RENTING A room in a house share has been an affordable option to students and people starting out in their careers.
It has also been the first best option for people coming into Ireland to work or study.
However, with the most recent Daft Rental Report showing rents have climbed by an average of 9.7% (11.5% in Dublin) over the course of last year, such accommodation is quickly becoming financially out of reach.
This had led to the rise of room sharing. At time of writing a search for shared rooms on Daft.ie brings up 44 results.
While some of these provide a cheaper alternative, many people would feel them to be an unwelcome compromise on their privacy.
One vacancy in Santry is offering a bunk bed in a room with three others for €60 a week (€240 a month).
Another vacancy in Dublin 8 is for a “Spanish girl or EU girl to share a room with another 1 guy (man) on the same room” for €300 a month.
Coming to Ireland
Speaking to TheJournal.ie, Giovanna Delgado, a student from Venezuela, explained her difficulty in finding accommodation.
“We went there and we shared with two people in each room. There were two girls in one bedroom, two girls in another bedroom and the boy in the main (living) room. We lived there for about three months. Then we moved out of this apartment and then all of us moved together to another apartment in Dublin 1,” she said.
In the beginning we paid around €480 each for sharing a room. In the second one we paid less – although it was still around €350 each.
Delgado has been living in Ireland for almost a year and a half and in this time has been working as an au pair and learning English. Despite the big amounts her and her friends were paying for places, she explained how along with her friends, they were still required to be dishonest with the landlord.
You have to lie to the landlord if you want to get the apartment. Most of the landlords, they don’t want to have two or three people sleeping in the same place. And in our case we are Venezuelans.
When Delgado and her friends arrived in Ireland, the steep prices came as a big shock.
“We didn’t know. It was a surprise for all of us. Most people say that, ‘oh, you can get an apartment that won’t be too expensive.’ When you get here and you see that the prices are really, really high. And you have to share a room because there isn’t any other way,” she said.
Students
The issue of shared rooms is also an issue for students around Ireland. Speaking about this, Greg O’Donoghue, vice president of welfare with the Union of Students in Ireland, said, “people are being forced into a share rental accommodation”.
I don’t think it is ideal, people are entitled for their own privacy. It is a landlords market now with people desperately looking for accommodation. They aren’t fixed to a certain pricing bracket.
“We would be calling for the government to offer better long term solutions.”
O’Donoghue went on to mention that the USI had some success last September in dealing with the student demand for accommodation with the ‘Homes for Study’ scheme, which encouraged people to think about letting a room in their house to a student.
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