Irish Examiner view: The modern student is trapped between larger forces not of their making

Wed, 25 Oct, 2023 - 00:55

At first glance the protest planned by students at Munster Technological University (MTU) yesterday smacked of privilege — a walkout motivated by the lack of car parking spaces for students at MTU’s Cork campus?

Surely nothing could scream ‘spoiled students’ more than this kind of petulant reaction to having no spaces on offer for cars being driven to lectures. To the casual viewer, it underlines the lazy slur that many of our college-age youngsters are lacking resilience. Where are the hardy college-goers of yesteryear, happy to get the bus? Or walk? Where is the environmental responsibility?

Closer inspection, however, shows how the modern student is trapped between larger forces not of their making. Many of the students attending MTU are unable to find accommodation next to or near the campus because of the ongoing housing crisis. This is just one more manifestation of a problem that emerges, hydra-headed, in almost every aspect of Irish life.

Because of the lack of accommodation, many students are still living at home who would otherwise be residing near the MTU campus. And because those students are, by definition, some distance from the campus, they must commute every day.

And here those students come up against another problem in contemporary Ireland — the inadequacy of public transport services, particularly in rural areas.

The MTU Student Union president has pointed out that students are “facing unbelievable levels of stress just to get to all of our campuses and to get to classes. Day in and day out, students are waiting for buses to arrive in the mornings and sometimes, when they do arrive, they are already full.”

Those buses, and other forms of public transport, are of course under increased pressure because of the unprecedented numbers of students who must use them — as a result of the lack of accommodation — which in turn has an impact on their efficiency. It is no surprise, then, that students must rely on cars to get to college, and those cars need parking spaces. Students are quite correct to protest.

The housing-accommodation issue continues to lurk behind apparently unrelated problems. This is another stratum of society suffering as a consequence.

Passwords: Regular change non-negotiable

With so much of life’s administration being conducted online, from finance to relationships to entertainment, many of us rely on multiple internet passwords every day to conduct our business.

Many of us will also feel an uncomfortable shiver of recognition when it comes to the latest findings from the organisation CyberSkills, which specialises in cybersecurity education. Its research shows that popular sports teams, renowned radio personalities, and beloved TV programmes are among the most commonly used passwords online — thus making them prime targets for cybercriminals.

Consulting a database of 613m hacked passwords, CyberSkills found that a reliance on popular culture in the broad sense means that many people use passwords such as ‘roykeane’ and ‘glenroe’ to protect their accounts and information. Some are lazier, opting for combinations such as ‘123456’, ‘qwerty”, and even ‘password’ itself, terms which appear millions of times in that database.

This runs completely contrary to the advice given by experts in the field such as the National Cyber Security Centre, which recommends long, diverse passwords. “The longer the password, the more difficult it is to break. If you go to 10 characters or more it gets very very difficult to break it,” said a spokesperson.

In the real world, however, the sheer amount of business we transact online means using several lengthy passwords presents a problem. Changing our passwords on a regular basis is inconvenient and time-consuming.

However, we clearly can’t afford to rely on ‘123456’ to keep the cybercriminals at bay. Changing your password of random letters and digits on a regular basis is non-negotiable.

Murder victims: Honouring lives

This week, Yousef Palani was jailed for life at the Central Criminal Court by Ms Justice Mary Ellen Ring for the murders of Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee.

She also sentenced Palani to a concurrent sentence of 20 years for causing serious harm to a third man, Anthony Burke, by stabbing him in the eye.

The court had heard Lorcan Staines, prosecuting, say Palani’s motivation to carry out the murders was as a result of his “hostility and prejudice” towards homosexual men. The court also heard that Palani told detectives he would have continued to kill if gardaí had not stopped him.

It would be easy for the horrifying details of this case to overshadow all other considerations, but Ms Justice Ring spoke well in the court this week when focusing on those who had suffered at Palani’s hands.

“These men should be remembered as good family members and friends, not as victims,” she said.

“The details of their lives should be more important and not the details of their death.” All too often, lurid descriptions and a killer’s hateful attempts at rationalisation can take precedence in the public imagination in such cases.

It was good to hear those who suffered being remembered instead — and not being reduced to the status of victims, but as individuals with friends and family members who loved them.

MTU students walk out and blockade parts of campus during protest