 DCU Students Union organized a second protest outside Chenowen Square on Thursday. They decided to sleep over this time. Their motto was, if we can't afford to stay in Chenowen, we will sleep outside instead. They are protesting against the 27% increase in rent for a nine-month lease in Chenowen Square and a 23.5% increase in Chenowen Hall. DCU students staged a sleepout in protest of increases of up to 27% in rent and purpose-built student accommodation in Glasnevin. The students union are calling for the total reversal of the increases and for the creation of legislation to protect students from being exploited. They started a social media campaign under the hashtag Chenowen Shakedown which has attracted mass attention. All other students unions in the country are supporting their campaign. Students fear that these increases will be a barrier to education and could lead to student homelessness. I suppose myself, I'm coming all the way from Cary, so my course is three years long. So every year I have to make the decision of where I'm going to live and knowing from past experience I suppose last year I didn't get on campus which would be an ideal or even Chenowen I didn't get either. So there's so little accommodation offers. So it's just all about making sure that you don't have to drop out like even consider dropping out because you know we're all here for a reason we're all here to get a degree. I want to see new legislation is used by Minister Owen Murphy. There's certainly a private members bill that's been put forward by now at Rock TD. I want to make sure that we get enough public support from politicians to make sure that that bill actually passes and that this is not allowed to happen because right now what these developers are doing is they're picking on the individuals that cannot afford to pay. Councillors and government officials are also showing solidarity for the students. The issue is a housing issue, right? It's another facet of the housing crisis and one of the key things when I was talking with the students and the leadership of the students union in DCU is that the key thing is they've no address to the RGB, they've no rights, they're on licence so the people they have an issue with they have to deal with directly but it's very very difficult to don't have a Tory party to mediate or to get their rents reduced or get issues fixed and sorted out so that's the forced issue. Shawna Bowers, DCU TV News.