A pint of Guinness in Chaplin’s has reached an all-time high of six quid. A coffee in town can set you back €4.50, a fiver if you have the audacity to indulge in a plant-based milk. And God forbid you want to have a nice meal with a pal anywhere in Dublin 2 without being willing to sell a kidney. Ladies, gentlemen and those who subscribe to neither binary, students in Dublin have been facing a dearth of spaces for socialisation for quite some time now. The clubs of the boom have died off, community spaces are nowhere to be seen and when the weather is bad (it always is) going for a walk in the park is an invitation for a month-long cold. Which leaves us with one question – where are we supposed to gather?

“The Hamilton Library,” my friend Siofra tells me, her eyes drained of anything resembling joy or hope. Siofra is a fourth-year Theoretical Physics student. “That’s where I’ll be spending my year. Probably the Pav sometimes, so that I can feel like I have a reason to live.” Siofra refers to the basement of Centra on Westland Row, affectionately known by her year group as ‘TP Centra’, as her “home away from home.” There’s a student deal for chicken fillet rolls, and the building is sufficiently close to the Hamilton so as not to lose precious time studying. Her friend Chloe once said that TP Centra was like a ‘third place.’ “As in, a place separate from the home or workplace that you can go to at certain times where you’re basically guaranteed to be able to socialise with people you know.” Siofra pauses and returns to meditate on this year’s study schedule. “How sad is it that the Hamilton library might actually constitute a third place? I’m guaranteed to see someone I’m friends with there at any given moment.”

The concept of the third place was first defined by Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. The first place is the home, where we go to sleep at night and wake in the morning, where we rest and spend most of our time. The second place is the workplace, where our means of living are provided and our hours are structured. Oldenburg mentions that the first and second places were once a singular place, in a pre-industrial era, prior to “removing productive work from the home and making it remote in distance, morality, and spirit from family life.” He goes on to clarify that the phenomenon he phrases as “the third place” existed long before the Industrial Revolution divided the lives of people into public and private spheres. “The third place is a generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work,” he writes. It is the pub, the coffee shop, the community centre. It is, at its most essential, a social environment distinct from both the home and the workplace, a social environment without a formal structure.

The concept intersects interestingly with the role of the university. Some see college purely as an institution of learning, separate from the home, the workplace and socialisation. They may attend classes and avail of useful facilities which their student status make accessible, but choose to keep their educational environment separate to the functions particular to Oldenburg’s three places. Some full-time students see their course as occupying the role of the workplace – an environment where there are requirements, responsibilities, commitments and little respite. For courses which require placements and internships, a separate workplace is introduced into the equation. Other students work part-time off campus and might see the act of attending lectures and going to the library as a form of socialisation as well as partaking in education. For a few, the college environment is simultaneously a first, second and third place. They live on campus, work on campus and socialise on and around campus. 

Tara is a fourth-year Nursing student who lives on campus. She was elected a Scholar in April 2023 and since then Trinity have provided her with free accommodation for nine months of the year, as well as free fees. Her course requires hospital placement, so her workplace is separate to where she lives. She says one of the problems in her workplace is that there isn’t a third place for student nurses. They’ve asked for a student nurse hub or room in the hospital, but it hasn’t been addressed. Tara tries not to spend money on campus, so when she wants to spend time with friends, she usually invites them to her flat or sits down outdoors with them. She doesn’t think there are many third places indoors on or around campus. “You’ve got to buy a coffee or book or something to gain access to a seat.”

I’ve done this – bought a coffee in order to sit down for half an hour, then felt guilty when I’ve finished it and am taking up space without a purchase to show for it.  Sometimes the coffee costs a reasonable amount. Sometimes the price makes you question your own sanity. Am I to blame, you wonder, for being willing to spend this much just for the chance to sit down somewhere and read? Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. Students are constantly faced with an onslaught of advice when they dare to discuss the cost-of-living crisis, advice which somehow always contains an undertone of blame. Your groceries are extortionate? Well, why aren’t you shopping around? You are? Well, young people have never had it as good as you have it now, so stop with your complaints. Just go to the pub less, make lunch at home, spend less on coffee. “I never would have gone to Electric Picnic,” my mother remarked when my sister recently spent the weekend in Stradbally. “There wouldn’t have been the money.” She told me about a video she’d seen, young people at EP talking about being unable to afford their rent. “Yet they can afford to go to EP? And they expect us to take them seriously?”

The self-martyrdom of middle-aged women aside, let’s say we do as they say. We stop going for pints with friends, we stop meeting people for coffee and for lunch. We accept that indulging in third places will, rather than fulfil a human desire for an informal social setting, bring us to financial ruin. I would make do. I would reconcile myself to socialisation in the home and only the home. I would cook dinner for my friends in the evening, maybe share a bottle of wine, each ingredient purchased from Aldi’s own-brand range. Of course, that would stipulate my having a home in which to socialise. Were I living with my parents, they would need to be happy to accommodate this. Visiting friends would need access to public transport to get home, or even to stay the night depending on how far they‘re coming from. But much cheaper than a night out on the town in Dublin, am I right? Or perhaps, ‘lucky’ girl that I am, my parents live so far from any major city in Ireland that it’s necessary that I live independently in Dublin in order to access third-level education. This gives me the choice of

1.) attempting to rent in a city where a studio in a Rathmines shared-living complex can be €2,850 a month (and let’s not even start on the housing crisis),

2.) extortionately-priced student accommodation that comes with policies described as ‘paternalistic and dangerous,’

3.) digs, which, as TCDSU/AMLCT President Jenny Maguire recently pointed out on Ireland AM, offer little to no protections for students, or

4.) trying my luck with couch-surfing for eight months.

With Option 1, I could probably give a couple of dinner parties. But if I can afford to rent in Dublin I can probably afford the odd pint. The same goes for the second option, where socialisation in the home is given a fun twist by the fact that your landlord has control over who does and doesn’t enter your home. Options 3 and 4, as you can imagine, give little to no opportunities for dinner parties. 

Back to the drawing board, I guess. 

I ask Hannah, a Chemistry student, where she goes around campus to socialise. “For the prospective year?” she asks. “Because it’s entirely dependent on if I have somewhere to live.” Hannah has been couch-surfing this summer as she is doing an internship in Dublin and couldn’t find an affordable place to live. She thinks that eight months on a couch could drive her crazy. If she finds somewhere to live in Dublin during the year, she plans on going to the Forum with friends for a cheap coffee, or to just sit down and chat. In the evenings, she hopes to take advantage of the Lighthouse Cinema’s €5 student tickets. If she doesn’t find a place in Dublin to live, it’s “just the library and then fucking go home to Louth, I guess.”

Proposed blending of first and third places as a means of saving money both assumes that people have access to a home suitable for socialisation (which many don’t) and ignores the vital importance of accessible third spaces in and of themselves. The value of the third place goes beyond its capacity to enable meetings between friends. The third place also facilitates social interactions between acquaintances who happen to run into one another. It reinforces community ties. In The Great Good Place, Oldenburg assigns certain characteristics to third places. They’re neutral, so occupants are not legally, financially, politically or otherwise obligated to spend time there. They’re accessible to and accommodate the needs of occupants. They act as social levellers and there is no prerequisite for socioeconomic status (in theory, at least). They have regulars, which help to give the space its particular tone. And conversation is the primary activity – third places allow for discussion and banter between occupants, usually witty or lighthearted in tone. They’re spaces which, through the socialisation of occupants, manage to capture and encourage a sense of community.

Many students who get involved in societies on campus are passionate about the community they feel their particular society has fostered, especially through the use of society spaces for socialisation. Niamh, an Irish and Sociology student, says she could speak for a thousand years about Seomra na Gaeilge. “It’s been my automatic place to go to between lectures since first year,” she tells me. “It’s quiet enough and the chairs are so comfy, but also so lovely for running into people because all the Gaeilgeoirs know each other. And free tea and biscuits and a microwave, which is so amazing.” Signing up to a society, which usually costs about €2, often offers members access to a range of facilities and events throughout the academic year. But, much like college itself, college societies are technically a formal social setting. You are operating under rules and regulations. You are subject to a hierarchy, whether or not that hierarchy is acknowledged in society settings. Events are planned and organised with a purpose in mind. The people you meet are often there for reasons beyond the purely social – they agree with the society’s goals and commitments and actively work towards them. While groups like this are essential and offer a means of accessing spaces for social gatherings at a reduced cost, they are not third places. The third place is a strictly informal setting. Getting drinks after a society event with pals in your local pub is visiting a third place. The many hours I have spent in the EnviroSoc room, drinking coffee and bemoaning College’s ties to Ryanair to friends, is not. The latter activity is free. The former is very much not.

I think certain third places exist in and around Trinity where you don’t need to spend money in order to partake in informal public life. The space between the entrances to the Ussher and Lecky libraries, particularly during exam season. The benches outside the Arts Block, populated by bleary-eyed students rolling tobacco and slouching against walls. The grass by the cricket pitch in the summer, when the sun is shining and you should be worrying about the essay you have due but instead you’re reading or discussing life with your friends. The common room in the Hamilton at lunch where the queue for the microwave will have you waiting forty minutes, during which time you will meet everyone you have ever met in your life. The many museums dotted around Dublin city centre, most free of charge. The National Gallery is a particular favourite of mine. It’s a two minute walk from campus.

But, then again, we pay the highest student contribution fees in the EU to be here, with a year of college costing upwards of €3,000 for EU citizens. There seems, to me, to exist insufficient third places on and around campus where occupancy doesn’t hinge on either student status (and hence the money we spend just to be here) or buying coffees and pints and sandwiches – which are steadily increasing in price. Socialisation in the home as an alternative rests on having a suitable home in the first place. Where are we, as students, supposed to gather? 

Dublin is remarkably hostile to an informal public life. People have been forcibly estranged from third places, estranged by money wants and money needs, estranged by the failures of a succession of governments whose policies have exacerbated the cost of living crisis. The near impossibility of taking part in a social life in Dublin without spending money is reflected in the profit-driven model of TCD itself. Let’s not forget that until September of last year, seating policy in the Buttery forbade people from sitting there with a lunch they’d brought from home. We should be able to access third places without having to spend an arm and a leg. We should not have to worry about being unable to pay rent in order to engage in social relations, in order to hang out with friends, in order to participate in informal public life. Third places are a necessary component of communities and it’s time their crucial role is recognised — with recognition entailing increased financial support for them at a policy level. In the meantime, people will drink at home instead of going to the pub while the price of a pint continues to rise. And I’ll be getting my coffee in the SU Cafe, where I can be guaranteed to run into casual acquaintances, can sit without worrying about purchasing a product in order to participate in a social setting and get one of Dublin’s cheapest coffees. I’m sure some of those who dispense financial advice to students would probably still disapprove. Back in their day, they would say, there wouldn’t have been that kind of money to spend on socialisation at all. Back in their day, in an Ireland yet to experience the Celtic Tiger and when the price of a pint was equivalent to €3.50 in today’s money, I’m sure that was true.