UCD Student Union President Michael Roche: "It’s not uncommon to run into this mindset of NIMBY-ism with student housing projects"

School isn’t even in session just yet, but UCDSU president Michael Roche already has his work cut out. Just a day before Roche took office, Minister for Higher Education James Lawless announced that student fees will increase €1000 from this year.

The demand for UCD in the CAO 2025 first round has skyrocketed, with each course requiring over 400 entry points. On top of that, the housing crisis remains a brutal reality for students looking to live both on and off campus. As they are constantly priced out of accommodation, students are forced to live at home or pay eye-watering amounts of money to simply live. Students are not on campus as much, and the community suffers as a result.

The prospect of a “normal” college experience –  to which socialising and residing within reasonable distance of campus are fundamental – went out the door with the constant undermining of students’ basic needs.

Roche never showed much of an interest in joining student politics, but the constant governmental gridlock on housing, and the cost of living crisis, impelled him to run for president of the UCD Students’ Union.

“I was a bit of a rarity,” Roche laughs. “I had never been involved in the Students’ Union in my life, and I suppose I was always very engaged and aware of what was going on. I was particularly concerned about decisions that were being made without our input in the room. There’s that saying, ‘If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu’. I really wanted to be at those decision-making tables and effect some kind of change for students like me.

“The decisions being made with accommodation were a major issue for me. The type of housing that was being built in UCD, and the very nature of it, was more on the luxury end, as opposed to the practical one. Accommodations like these are less accessible to students from more unfortunate economic backgrounds, so many were locked out of student life. I wanted my campaign to try and open that door again to students who have been iced out.”

Roche comes from a farming background in Wexford and arrived at UCD in 2022 to study economics. Having lived on campus his first year, he found himself at a remove from the rest of the students who struggled to find and afford housing. Outside of his bubble, thousands of unanswered letting applications, and the bureaucratic indifference towards struggling students, became an ever-mounting reality.

Michael Roche at UCD on August 25th, 2025. Copyright Abigail Ring/ hotpress.com

Owing to this, Roche says his “lived experience” as a student “informed the tack I’m taking during my presidency by trying to open those doors.”

“I was very lucky to find accommodation on campus, and I ended up living with five people who became my best friends,” Roche recalls. “I couldn’t help but feel guilty, because I saw how difficult it was for other students to find housing. They’re constantly being priced out of accommodation due to their socioeconomic conditions or personal circumstances.”

The proof is in the pudding. To lease a room at UCD Village, one of the college’s newer accommodations, which was funded by a private equity firm, students must shell out a whopping €11,888.72 upfront for the year.

Those renting for a single semester face even greater costs, with the total coming to €6,202.46 for the same room. Such prices are seen as the norm, rather than the exception. For Roche, the situation demands a bit of context and says “there’s no beating around the bush”.

“Students in UCD pay the highest student rents in the entire country, and on a square-foot level, they’re paying some of the highest rents in the country,” Roche says. “So it’s a very difficult situation in UCD, which oftentimes felt to me like a sort of ‘pay to play’ lifestyle, where you must be able to afford the life of a college student.

“We already have the structural issue of UCD’s location being in the heart of Dublin 4, which is very residential and suburban. Realistically, if you were to build a university now, you wouldn’t choose to build it in this location. A student accommodation recently went up nearby and the sheer level of planning complaints against it were astronomical. So much so that I decided to submit an observation in support of the project because, at the end of the day, it’s going to serve students.

“It’s not uncommon to run into this mindset of NIMBY-ism with student housing projects, and the whole planning system in Ireland is frankly a joke. At this very minute, projects are being delayed that would have a real benefit to students in the long run. So there needs to be a complete reform of the planning system in the first place, and then student housing needs to be recontextualised, so that accommodation is seen as necessity rather than luxury.”

UCD Students hand out flyers across Dublin

The cost of living crisis has brought the student experience to a whole new level. While community once ran the gamut of college life, recent years have shown an uptick in what Roche calls a “corporate campus”, where commuting students are only present from 9am to 5pm and then make the long journey home. It’s an issue he is making a point of addressing.

“A person I often think of, whom I met on the campaign, was in university for the last three years, but had never been on a night out in Dublin,” Roche offers. “It’s somewhat of a minor issue, but student life is so much more than what you do in the classroom. It’s the experience and the life skills you learn from it.

“As bizarre as it is to say, people fall in love for the first time, people have their first relationships and make new friends. These are all valuable experiences, but students who can’t afford to live on campus are being frozen out of this life. We’ve heard cases of students who commute to UCD from Donegal every day. So something where we can provide, albeit temporary, housing, would go an awful long way. Even people who just commute two hours each day would benefit. What we find is that as people face longer commutes, academic performance can begin to suffer.

“And then you can be hit with repeat fees, let alone the potential of repeating the year, and then the bills rack up quickly. In this way, not having ample on-campus accommodation makes education a lot more expensive and inaccessible unless you, or your parents, are able to afford luxury UCD accommodation.”

Roche sums up his thoughts.

“As I said, many people feel frozen out of student life,” he says. “So at the Students’ Union this year, we will be putting on more commuter-accessible events, scheduled within that 4-6pm window. This way, students with a bit of free time on campus can attend these community-building events. I feel students really lost that sense of community that did exist in bygone years, and it’s something we want to  return.

“Even the amount of people who identify as students is decreasing. I think it’s a real loss, because we are such a distinct group and it’s sad to see us losing that distinction. So the big emphasis this year is community.”