Senior Tutor Aidan Seery has said that, as a result of the COVID response fund set up by the College in April, all students should be able to pay the first instalment of their registration fee this year.
In an interview with The University Times, Seery said: “It’s my hope that there will be no continuing student in the College who is unable to register because of financial hardship.”
To date, the COVID response fund has drawn in €265,000 in donations, since it was launched four months ago.
Seery said that while the student hardship fund, which oversees the COVID response fund, could not cover registration fees directly for students, it could “pay somebody’s first two months of rent in order for them to be able to pay their registration fee”.
Students, he said, “shouldn’t fall into difficulties with that on financial grounds alone. We will want to help as best we can to ensure that all continuing students can register”.
The fund has already spent €60,000 over the summer helping students.
“We have students who were due to finish in June and return to Italy or India, and they found themselves trapped here”, Seery said. “They cannot get back and ran out of money. So we are supporting a number of students before they can get home.”
The student hardship fund, which is operated by the undergraduate student support officer, provides financial support to students in financial difficulty, and is partly funded by the government and the European Social Fund.
The COVID response fund raised over €200,000 in its first week, after Trinity Development and Alumni launched it in April.
Earlier this year, the hardship fund drew headlines when an anonymous donor, who had previously used the fund while in Trinity, made a nearly €400,000 donation to the fund.
This week, The University Times reported that an anonymous donor had set aside €260,000 to pay the monthly stipends for PhD students whose lab-based projects were interrupted by the coronavirus lockdown.
