Church should spur older parishioners to take in students

It’s crisis-time for students, and it’s especially crisis-time for students seeking accommodation. The situation, particularly in Dublin, is dire. We know it’s dire for homeless families as well, although the needs of students, and of families, are different. The solution for families is for more family homes to be built, pronto. The solution – or one solution – for students is for a wider promotion and social acceptance of a return to the practice of ‘digs’.

Student union leaders say there are 20,000 families, mainly in the Dublin area, who are ‘empty nesters’ – whose own offspring have grown and flown – and who could open their doors, and their bedrooms, to students who are coming to college next month.

This would be a reversion to a practice which worked well in times past: taking in a lodger.

In the 1911 census a high proportion of Irish households had a lodger, being a solution to accommodation for young workers needing a berth and extra revenue for a householder.

Lodger

Not everyone wants a lodger nowadays because we’ve become more accustomed to privacy. And students, in general, do not enjoy a blemish-free reputation when it comes to respecting the accommodation they inhabit.

There are health, safety and insurance issues today which wouldn’t have applied last century. Supposing a lodger trips on your stairs and sues you for a creaky step? In our compo-driven culture, that’s another consideration.

But still, with proper protocols these obstacles can be overcome, for it would surely be a good thing to encourage a reversion to the lodger habit. The Government can help with tax breaks for householders. The Church could help by underlining the social advantages for the common good.

Many older people feel lonely, while many younger people need space to study. Older people can benefit from the tech-savvy ways of the young, while younger people going to university often do need more emotional mentoring than they might admit – Oxford University’s most persistent anxiety is the number of students who become suicidal because they can’t cope with the new demands of uni life.

There needs to be respect for privacy (on both sides) and ground rules too. We’re terrified, these days, of seeming ‘authoritarian’, but when people are sharing, there must be boundaries.

The Church has shown leadership in its concern about housing; it can also be an enabler in the area of supporting students.

‘Empty nest’ parishioners could be encouraged to take in student lodgers – which, by the way, can also be fun. And didn’t St Paul say that in giving hospitality we may well encounter angels?

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Australian states are being urged, by the recommendations of a Royal Commission, to make it mandatory for priests to break the seal of confession, if the issue of child abuse arises in the Confessional.

This is a terrible idea, and the Australian Church is right to resist it. Even leaving aside the sacramental point, even within the secular context, it would be a terrible idea. It would mean that no one could ever talk to a professional counsellor or psychiatrist in confidence ever again. By any measure, bad therapy.

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‘Burden of childcare’ is the wrong term

The Taoiseach Leo Varadkar spoke, while in Canada, of his promise “to ease the burden of childcare” on families. Yes, we should all support families in their responsibilities towards their children, but the ‘burden of childcare’ is such a negative phrase. As though a child were merely a burden.

I am called upon to carry out some childcare, as a grandma, and I regard it not as a burden, but as an exceptional privilege and a blessing. I only wish that geography facilitated more of it – my grandchildren live 95 miles away.  I know many grandparents who rejoice in the opportunity to do childcare, and several who feel it as an acute sorrow if grandchildren are in another country and they can’t share in childcare time.

Childcare surely is a responsibility. You get desperately worried about dangerous traffic, accidental mishaps and the child victims of appalling terrorist attacks. But please, Taoiseach, don’t make childcare seem like a very negative burden to carry. The care of a child is a hugely rewarding experience which deserves support. Put it that way.