There was a time when finding out you had secured a college place in Galway came with another, equally important rite of passage: finding somewhere to live.
For almost three decades, in the weeks after students discovered they were coming to Galway, there was one ritual that told the city the students were on their way.
In those days, accommodation was considerably more plentiful than it is now, and much of it was advertised in the Galway Advertiser. On the day before publication, we would print the accommodation pages and sell them for £1, with the proceeds donated to local charities.
Up to 1,000 students could queue outside the Advertiser offices from dawn, desperate to be among the first to get their hands on the listings. This was long before mobile phones, of course. Once they had their precious pages, they would dash to one of the phone kiosks around the Square and start making calls, trying to secure a viewing before somebody else got there first.
It was a wonderfully chaotic ritual, but it was also a reminder of something important: the students were coming back.
The accommodation pages eventually disappeared, made redundant by the internet and online classified advertising. They belonged to their time, but for roughly 30 years they were part of the fabric of Galway.
One year, an enterprising young lad at the front of the queue took his copy to a photocopier, produced a few hundred duplicates, returned to the back of the queue and started selling them for a fiver.
I often wonder what happened to him. He is probably a millionaire today — or in jail.
Those accommodation pages did more than raise money for local charities. They announced the annual arrival of thousands of young people who would bring colour, energy, noise, ideas and money into the city.
Galway is fortunate to have a student population approaching 30,000. That is an enormous part of the city’s demographic and identity. Many students will eventually leave, but almost everyone leaves something of themselves behind.
That is why it is heartbreaking to see the traditional student experience becoming increasingly difficult to access.
Student representatives are now calling for urgent action as the new academic year begins. A sleep-out was this week held in the city to highlight the shortage, while student unions warn that some students face hours-long commutes or may even have to defer their college places because they cannot find somewhere affordable to live.
There are new purpose-built student accommodation developments, but student representatives argue that much of this is simply too expensive for ordinary students and has done little to solve the wider crisis.
At the same time, short-term rental accommodation continues to remove homes from the long-term market. Around 100 houses and apartments are currently listed on Airbnb around Galway city, while rooms advertised on Daft start at about €750 a month.
That is not merely an accommodation problem. It is an education problem, a social problem and, ultimately, a problem for Galway itself.
Forty-one years ago this week, I arrived in Galway as a student. It changed my life and formed the basis of a book (Kittyland ) which detailed the reality of living away from home for the first and perhaps most formative time.
Living here, rather than simply travelling here for lectures, was a huge part of that experience. The friendships, the independence, the baked beans, the late nights, the accidental encounters, the music, the pubs, the streets and the sheer sense of being somewhere new all shaped the person I became.
Going to college is supposed to offer young people an opportunity to reinvent themselves. At 18, you arrive somewhere where nobody knows who you were at school. You can make new friends, discover new interests and become a slightly different version of yourself.
But that becomes much harder when your college experience consists of getting up at dawn, travelling for hours to attend lectures and then heading straight home again.
Students were always destined to leave Galway eventually. The tragedy would be if we start making it impossible for them to properly arrive in the first place.
The accommodation pages may be gone. The phone kiosks have disappeared. The £1 listings are a memory.
But the rite of passage they represented should not disappear with them.
Galway needs its students. More importantly, its students need Galway.
