No Italians Allowed: One Student’s Flawed Account, Among Many, of the Struggle for Housing In Dublin

The other day I found myself scrolling through Facebook at 5am, looking for better accommodation — ideally one with a big enough window to let some light in — and responding to as many room adverts as I could. I stumbled upon one: 

“Looking for LGBT friendly housemate to join us, must be respectful, clean, […]”

I inquired, went to bed, and woke up a few hours later to one of the most absurd texts I have ever received:

“Hi, thank you for your message I appreciate the time you put into it. My flatmates and I are not looking for Italians. We had problems with the last 2 flatmates who were from Italy and we believe that would be triggering for us”. 

 At first, I found this really funny, and had to share it on social media. But when I saw the sheer number of people responding, astonished at the discrimination and showing support, while being equally entertained by the absurdity of being rejected from a room for being Italian, I realised that it was actually quite sad

 Even more so because, surprisingly, this was not the first time that I had encountered discrimination while looking for housing in Dublin as a student. I had previously put up a Facebook post advertising myself as a potential housemate, only to receive, as the first response, “We don’t want you here, go back to your country”. This prompted the development of a full-on squabble in the comments, with people going so far as to claim I was not a real person, that I had AI-generated my photo from a Brazilian woman who looked nothing like me. Facebook really is where all the dissatisfied amateur xenophobes work overtime. 

So, I deleted the post

Many friends and acquaintances recount similar experiences while house-searching (see accompanying message). For me, these encounters can mostly be filed under absurdity:stories to tell friends, material for an article.Mainly because I have the privilege of rarely being the target of such discrimination, of rarely having to worry about things like these and have them always occupy, even if maybe quietly, the corners of my mind.

Racist comments left on Dublin housing forum

Xenophobia and racism have become a conversational topic in Europe, something people complain over the dinner table, a dog-whistle used as a shortcut to explain why everything feels worse than it used to. And I say this coming from Meloni’s Italy. I remember language tutoring in Trinity when an essay question about immigration came up. I suggested that the tutee consider exploring both the “positive” and “negative” aspects. They said to me: “I can’t really see anything positive”. And I thought: Am I not your tutor right now, helping you pass your exam? Are you not learning this because you want to visit or move to my country one day? Am I one of the good immigrants because I happen to be sitting on the other side of this table?

Finding housing in Dublin is already hard enough. This is not only a sleep-deprived student’s flawed account: In 2024, Ireland had the highest housing costs compared to the EU average, at 87 per cent above the EU average — up from 17 per cent above the average in 2010, and the second-highest share of under-occupied homes (67 per cent)

The world of accommodation as a student in Dublin is wide and Kafkaesque: rooms with four bunk beds in the city centre going for 600 € each; mouldy basements without light, designed for the perfect Dublin winter depression; a largely insufficient supply of university housing; rowdy alcoholic housemates in their forties; the occasional LGBT-friendly housemates blissfully practicing casual discrimination; Chinese black-market housing with the potential for exponential subletting; rooms at remotely reasonable prices in the city reserved for an increasingly incestuous web of creatives;and private student accommodation owned by (potentially) corrupt giants charging extortionate rates that mainly Americans can afford. The list goes on.

And what about the Irish?

I understand the resentment that some hold. Many of us international students stay in this country for only a few years and treat Ireland as a brief landing strip: touch, benefit, and go. We are temporary residents in a country whose housing shortage is anything but temporary

But the history of the Irish housing crisis is complicated and tragic, and it certainly does not begin with immigrants or international students. The government’s ceasing to provide of large-scale public housing during the economic boom, the arrival of “vulture funds” preying off distressed property and debt after the crash, “cuckoo funds” buying housing in bulk to rent rather than sell, etc. And the result is a crisis with disproportionate consequences, as always, to those occupying the more fragile parts of the social wheel: we know that the number of single adults in emergency accommodation was 63.3 per cent higher in 2026 than five years earlier, in 2021.

But it is easy to make this about blame. To construct intricate justifications for who belongs in this country and who doesn’t, who is a desirable tenant and who is not. Gays, but not Italians? What about Italian gays? Some combinations are welcome; others,triggering. This is not, or should not (only) be, about blame. We all want it, and need it, to be about solutions

Source: universitytimes.ie