POLITICS Out with the Old and in with the… Old?

ADAM BEHAN POLITICS WRITER

Anew year dawns on Ireland. Leo Varadkar has re-entered the Taoiseach’s office and must again tackle issues which have plagued the state for the past 15 years: housing, inadequate healthcare provision, education reform and so on. With only minor cabinet members reshuffling keeping ministers of the previous government in power, there are some doubts whether or not the Taoiseach’s government can adequately address and remedy these issues before the next general election.

Housing is, from a student perspective at least, the most important crisis the state currently faces. In September of 2021, the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage published a strategic outline for tackling the worsening crisis.

health. According to Ageaction, in 2022, approximately 1.04 million Irish residents were aged 65 and older, constituting of the current population. With this number set to increase in the coming decades, the HSE faces mounting challenges linked to an ageing population. Current issues include staff shortages, hospital trolley availability and overcrowding which led to an exponential growth in hospital wait times, much to the ire of the tax-paying public.

In the Netherlands, another nation infamous for its high cost-of-living, the accommodation crisis was so disastrous that the Dutch government was forced to set up emergency housing for those students who had not yet secured a place to live at the start of term. Recently the government announced that they were planning to provide an extra 60,000 dedicated student housing units between 2022-2030. While obviously welcome, the measures are unlikely to reap dividends for quite some time.

Sweden is a similar story. In September of 2022, the Swedish National Union of Students announced that student accommodation prices had returned to pre-COVID peak levels. In Germany more than 35,000 students across towns and cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich were still waiting for a place in on-campus accommodation in mid-September.

It’s clear that spending is the avenue most EU governments are taking to dig themselves out of the crisis. Most know, however, that they will not reach adequate housing capacity levels for some time, not without unattainable increases in spending