Both teachers and their pupils are being hit by the ongoing housing crisis, the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) conference in Killarney has heard, with the principal of one Dublin inner city school telling delegates half of his students are now homeless.
Mark Candon of the North Wall’s St Laurence O’Toole’s CBS said Zoom classes during Covid had provided a window into the homes of the school’s students, many of whom are members of migrant families living in temporary accommodation. He recalled seeing a room on one occasion where seven people lived.
“I was inspired by Strumpet City to work in the city centre but those things aren’t just 100 years ago,” he said.
Speaking to The Irish Times after a motion urging trade unions to do more campaigning on housing was passed overwhelmingly, Candon referenced a case highlighted by another teacher, Tracie Tobin from Limerick, of a five year-old pupil who had lived for three years in a hotel room.
“We have kids like that, they go back to the hotel where they are [living], close the door and mightn’t come out until it’s time to go to school again. Unless their parents are really good about getting them out to the park, they don’t have the room to develop.
“Kids are resilient and they’ll adapt but one of the things that we do is try to make sure our kids are in clubs after school and stuff like that.”
He says the activities are good for the children’s physical health but also allow them to make connections with classmates from the area.
Some are moved on, particularly the international protection applicants. Others, the conference heard, can end up with long commutes to get to school after a family relocates for whatever reason, either because their parents can’t find them school places elsewhere or because their work remains close by.
Its city centre location, Candon says, has at least helped the school attract teachers down the years as “all roads lead to where we are”. Yet while the public transport options are a definite plus, Candon marvels at the growing distances being covered by his staff of 12 to and from work each day.
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“We have a full staff now thankfully, it’s quite settled, but they are living further away … Rush, Lusk, Clonsilla, Celbridge. Places where they can afford to buy, that’s the deal, but at least they are able to do that and come to work on the train.
“More widely, I’d say there is still pressure on staffing because newly qualified teachers used to stay in Dublin for a few years. When you’re young and have a bit of money to spend, where else would you want to be? But that’s changed because they can’t afford the rents.”
Eilis Flannelly, who works in St Fiachra’s, Beaumont, says she and her husband can only afford to live in Marino because they bought a home 10 years ago and he has a better paying job. Traditionally, the school’s 40 or so teachers lived in the local suburbs, but younger colleagues reside in Dublin’s satellite towns which, she suggests, will also soon be out of financial reach.
Eilis Flannelly, a teacher at St Fiachra’s in Beaumont, at the INTO conference in Killarney. Photograph: Emmet Malone
Flannelly and her husband paid €330,000 for their three bedroom terraced home but, she says, “if we were to buy it now as we bought it, it would be somewhere around half a million euro. That’s why it’s becoming totally unsustainable for teachers on a teacher’s wage like mine is, at the moment, to even consider living in an urban centre like Dublin”.
Flannelly earns about €70,000, a wage she readily acknowledges might be considered a good income, but suggests that by the time they pay for diesel, groceries, their mortgage and childcare, they don’t feel well off.
“If my husband didn’t do the job he does, we wouldn’t have a hope of living where we live,” she says. “And we would most likely have gone to Mayo, where his parents live, or to Laois, where my parents live, before our children were born, to buy a house.”