Foreign students have had to sleep in a former Dublin nightclub as the housing crisis deepens.
And one international student revealed how she's suffering from stress rashes on her body over fears of becoming homeless.
Amanda Nogueira is one of the many Brazilians who came to Ireland to study English.
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The qualified engineer, who previously worked for Toyota, currently works as a cleaner in Dublin.
Amanda has been forced to relocate a number of times since arriving in the capital several months ago, and now fears she may be left homeless.
Amanda broke down in tears as she described the traumatic few months she's had since coming to Dublin.
She told RTE: "I’m learning English but I don’t have time or my brain is so tired to think about this. I can’t study.
"My parents don't know how I'm living here. If they knew they would say, 'Please come back home'. We're here, we spent a lot of money, we left our parents, our family, boyfriends, girlfriends. We’re living here trying to follow our dreams and it’s just a nightmare."
After Amanda arrived in the capital, she was brought to the former Buck Whaley's nightclub building on Leeson Street by Sweet Home Accommodation, where she paid €450 a month for a bunk bed space.
The students slept on a number of beds that were placed on the main floor of the disused bar which still had beer taps, mirrors, and bar decor. There were also some more regular rooms at the top of the building.
Unfortunately for the international students, the building was due to be sold and they had to move a few months into their stay to a crowded and substandard flat across the city.
A total of ten students were crammed into a tiny two-bedroom flat which had six bunks in a single room, RTE reports.
After four weeks, they were once again forced to move as the building was sold to new owners.
Amanda said she had stress rashes across her hands, face, back, and neck due to the anxiety.
Sweet Home Accommodation owner Renato Passos said he was subletting the buildings from their original owners.
When asked about why students slept in the former nightclub he told RTE: "We found that out after. One of my staff did that without my consent."
He also said that students were sleeping in the bar area "temporarily" until the beds in a flat on the upper floors of the building were vacated.
He added that he was not aware that six people were sleeping in a tiny bedroom in a two-bedroom flat and blamed one of his staff.
He said: "I knew people were moving there from Leeson St but I didn’t know exactly how many people. He was doing these things without my permission. I will have to check the situation."
He told the national broadcaster that he had "maybe made a mistake" when it emerged that neither of the properties had been registered with the Residential Tenancies Board.
He said: "We are in the process of registering. I think it is registered. I don’t know. I will have to check."
Dublin Live has contacted Sweet Home Accommodation for a comment.
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