There is a curious generosity reserved for alcohol in this city, a cultural indulgence that survives austerity, rent crises, even ministerial handwringing, while food, ordinary sustaining food, is treated as a decadence. Hunger is permissible but thirst, at least the liquid variety poured in pints, is subsidised.
The identity of the student has long been tethered to the struggle for what comes next, but this struggle is romanticised only insofar as it is temporary and amusing to those who no longer have to endure it. What is less acknowledged is how deliberately the city has organised itself around this assumption: menu prices that continue to climb while maintaining the illusion of accessibility offered through the occasional discounted coffee. This conditionality is most apparent in cafes and casual restaurants, where you overstay your welcome when you do not order enough and dwell in the subtle withdrawal of hospitality as you quickly become an imposition. Meanwhile, the pub remains remarkably tolerant of students nursing a single pint on a night out.
Dublin’s prices are often justified through comparison to other cities, but this comparison does not hold up well under scrutiny. According to LovinDublin, one now pays an average around eighty euros for a modest three-course meal for two, a figure that exceeds comparable costs in Paris, London and Rome. The cost of eating out in Dublin has risen in a manner that is unaccountable and detached from improvements in quality or wages, while student grants lag behind with bureaucratic indifference. Recent figures from The Irish Times show that food prices in Ireland are increasing at a rate far exceeding general inflation, with costs rising by nearly four per cent over the past year even as overall prices across the economy grew by closer to half the pace
There is also a gendered and class dimension that remains largely unspoken. The expectation that students will endure hunger rests on the assumption that they live without major care-giving responsibilities and are cushioned by the support of family. For those who lack such advantages, the price of being fed is not abstract, it is in the ordinary choices made at the grocery store. Lidl and Marks & Spencers operate less as competitors than as markers of social expectations, delineating who can afford what within an implicit hierarchy of spending.
A city that prides itself on affability while simultaneously inviting students to walk past shelves of pre-prepared meals priced at what might constitute a day’s food budget elsewhere, has misunderstood the conditions of such. If prices in Dublin continue to rise and wages do not, it should abandon the pretence that it is inconsequential, and reckon honestly with what it has chosen to subsidise, and whom it has decided can afford to go without.
