Aisling Deegan is a Speech and Language Therapy undergraduate and sits as the Student Parent representative for the Student Union. She knows all too well the routine of a day designed around putting someone else’s needs first, and how completely a day fills up when coupled with the expectations of being a student at Trinity. Every second counts.
She gets her son up, dressed, and fed. While he eats, she gets herself ready. She drops him at school at eight, arrives at Trinity straight after, and uses every available hour she can find. She cannot study at home, she says. Home, in the hours after the after-school club, belongs to dinner, clean-up, and shopping, when there’s time. “I use all of the day I can to study”, she says.
“You have the same wants and needs as other students,” Deegan says. Last weekend, she took her son to the National Botanical Gardens and to The Ark Children’s Theatre for Bees. “It’s not the same weekend other students are doing”, she says, “but it makes me happy.”
In 2023 and 2024, Welfare and Equality Officer Aoife Bennett and Student Parent Officer Sheila Keegan surveyed forty-one student parents and carers for the TCDSU Report on Supports for Student Parents and Carers. 39 of them (95.1 per cent) wanted a formal register, so they could be seen the way mature students are seen: a named, counted cohort with specific requirements. Thirty-six (85.4 per cent) needed financial support during school mid-term breaks, which rarely align with Trinity’s reading weeks.
Senator Lynn Ruane was studying at Trinity while raising two children, and in 2015 she became the first student parent officer in TCDSU/AMLCT history. That year, she told the Union that they could only financially support five of Trinity’s hundreds of student parents. Ruane’s survey published the same year found childcare costs ranging from €27 to €500 a week, with crèches closing at five or six, making evening lectures functionally inaccessible. Ruane is now a Senator for the Dublin University constituency in Seanad Éireann, re-elected in January 2025.
In correspondence via email with Senator Ruane’s office, she writes how there was no such thing as a “typical week”, recalling how “sometimes, when you’re in the grind of parenting, studying, and working, you just push through, hoping to get to the other side.”
“When I look back or reflect at the end of each year, I often have no idea how I juggled it all. No week was predictable: a sick child who couldn’t go to school, a health appointment your children couldn’t miss, or lecture clashes when attendance was mandatory. So while some weeks ran smoothly with family support, no week was ever the same. I once had to leave my daughter straight after her confirmation mass so I could sit a sociology exam. I sometimes feel a little guilty about how much I missed at home to get my degree, but I know it was worth it.”
As the SU’s first Student Parent officer, Senator Ruane says that “a big focus for [her] was the lack of access to recordings of evening lectures, which can be difficult for some parents to attend […] no one solution will meet all parents’ needs, so an assessment of needs and support for parents would help identify the gaps.”
When asked about the costs and benefits of student life as a parent, she responded that she “didn’t really have a student social life, and I often couldn’t stay back for evening events or talks. This also meant I always studied alone and learned alone, as I wasn’t around other students to discuss the topics we were learning. In some classes, however, there were other mature students, and sometimes we worked together, especially on modules I was struggling with. I would have liked more of that experience, but I also wouldn’t change what I had.”
“In addition to parenting, I also had a parent nearing the end of life, so care in the home expanded beyond children alone. This comes up a lot for student parents who are mature students or carers. While I was SU president, my kids really integrated into college life, attending events with me or having movie nights on campus with other student reps. I have always been very grateful for that.”
Shedding light on the invisible work of being a student parent, Viviane Passos Soares, a Physiotherapy student parent, was asked via email correspondence to describe a day or instance wherein she felt most seen or unseen as a student parent. She replied that she “feels unseen every day, to be honest. Everyone has their own things going on, but raising little people while trying to study in every spare moment you have is so hard, especially when you’re in a healthcare course that requires a lot of study.”
“I knew it would be harder for me because I have children. I don’t want to sound naive, because I knew what I was signing up for, but once you’re actually living the situation, reality hits! It’s difficult to fully understand unless you’re going through the same thing.”
When asked about the other costs unbeknownst to non-student parents/carers, Soares confesses that “it can be very expensive! To study full-time, your children often need to be in full-time childcare. If you’re based in Dublin, finding childcare can be difficult and/or extremely expensive.”
Soares lives outside of Dublin, and though that may seem more affordable, commute costs pile up, and she mentions how, even when not in lectures, she still spends time and money getting to university.
Soares says that “Weekends are another challenge. I always have material to go through, but I also want to spend time with my children and my husband. Sometimes I choose family time over studying, and then the guilt kicks in again, this time because I feel I’m not keeping up with my course obligations. It feels like there’s always something you should be doing, and whichever thing you choose, you feel guilty about the other.”
Deegan’s course added a 10-minute window this term, and if you arrive after it closes, the absence is recorded. Trinity’s own policy on student parents and carers, last updated in June 2023, commits the College to “reasonable efforts” toward family-friendly timetabling, permits self-certification for the first three days a child falls ill, and asks that timetables reach students one to three months before term so caring arrangements can be made in advance.
The Trinity Day Nursery has operated on campus since 1969, making it the oldest on-site workplace nursery in Ireland, and currently provides early years care for up to 50 children between three months and five years old. In a statement through email, the nursery described its role as helping parents balance academic, professional and family commitments so they can participate fully in university life, and noted that by offering reliable care on campus, it reduces some of the practical and financial challenges of securing childcare. The weekly student rate for a full place is €129.74 at 42.5 hours, which comes down to €38.79 after the National Childcare Scheme subsidy. The nursery is one of the concrete supports named in the June 2023 policy.
“All of the student parents I know are women”, Deegan says. In detailing why, she links the pause that motherhood asks of academic and professional life to the women who later return to finish their studies, since it is usually mothers who initially step back due to societal norms, welfare, or health. Fathers, for the most part, are not expected to choose between being a parent and continuing their existing paths in education or careers.
The gender disparity is consistent even through Senator Ruane’s earlier Trinity Student Parent survey in 2025, where 94 of the respondents consisted of women out of 103, with seven men and two respondents not stating any gender.
Nationally, women make up 61 per cent of Ireland’s unpaid carers according to the 2022 Census, and an ESRI report published earlier this month found that women remain the people most likely to provide family care, as the need for that care is projected to grow by up to 58 per cent by 2040.
There is no official count of student parents in Ireland. Higher education institutions do not register them the way they register mature students or students with disabilities, which means that no one knows how many people are navigating a degree alongside the full-time work of raising another human being.
Trinity’s policy on Support for Student Parents, Student Carers and Students Experiencing Pregnancy was due for review in June 2025, and as this piece goes to print, no revised version has been published. In the meantime, Aisling Deegan has started building a community for student carers herself. This month she is planning a Halloween party for student parents, where children are invited along with the adults. A decade has passed since Senator Ruane became the SU’s first Student Parent Officer, yet the concerns mentioned more than 10 years ago still surface among current student parents. Love is labour, after all, though at Trinity, much of this labour still falls to the ones whose hands are already full.
