Paul Glynn | Senior Staff Writer
The academic year of 2013/14 saw a particularly strong campaign season for the election of the coming year’s sabbatical officers. Two additional referendums, two candidates dropping out, one campaign conducted entirely online as well as a re-branding of the two-week long campaign period to “The Leadership Race” made this the year of a considerably strong and almost exhausting presence from all candidates. Nonetheless, those who have been elected are looking forward to their year in office.
Domhnall McGlacken-Byrne won the race for SU President by a wide margin with 2940 votes, a 74% share of the votes against rival Jasper Pickersgill’s 879. Speaking to The University Times, McGlacken-Byrne said: “The campaign weeks were probably the most intense, surreal and rewarding of my life. I’ve never done anything like it! If I had known how taxing the whole experience would be, I probably would have hesitated a lot more than I did before submitting my nomination form.” Nonetheless, he praised the strong commitment of each candidate’s campaign teams, stating that they “kept each candidate going”, and added that: “The commitment to the campaign from some of my friends was humbling and absolutely inspiring and will give me a much stronger mandate next year than any Constitution ever could.”
Domhnall also commended the work of the candidates, considering two out of all of them had dropped out. “To risk such public failure in exchange for a chance to do some good is very brave,” he said, adding: “As I said to Neil when he informed me of his decision to step back: when you think about it, getting through the selection process from 17000 students down to 3 candidates is more impressive than that of 3 candidates down to 1 victor.”
McGlacken-Byrne added that his campaigning experience did not lead him to plan on changing any of his election promises, but he has used the opportunity to observe the plans of his fellow campaigners, stating that: “There are some ideas I would be willing to explore which I either couldn’t fit on my manifesto or decided to omit because I wasn’t sure of their feasibility.” He noted Welfare candidate Dan McFadden’s plan for a landlord database, which he stated was “a very exciting idea which I had entertained briefly before the campaign kicked off, and it’s something I’m sure he’d be happy to see take shape next year, even though he lost.”
Although Katie Byrne fought for and won the role of Education Officer in an uncontested race, a strong campaign was still needed to discourage students from voting to re-open nominations. Fortunately for Byrne, only 688 out of 3872 valid votes chose to do so, with an 82% win securing her position as Education Officer-elect. Byrne was the first sabbatical officer to be elected on the night of the count, after ballots from the Tobacco-Free Trinity and long-term Abortion policy referendums were counted.
Over the weeks of campaigning, Byrne took on board many issues that students had been bringing up while talking to her on the campaign trail and addressing questions to her at Hustings. Issues such as Erasmus options for students of Irish, as well as accommodating the needs of students with visual impairments during lectures, came to form a bigger part of her manifesto of closer engagement with the student body, more efficient class rep training and improving access to class materials.
Ents candidate Finn Murphy emerged victorious from his race, with a comfortable margin of 53% of the 3867 valid votes, having secured a 52% approval rating in the University Times pre-election poll. To help hone and display the necessary skills of an Entertainments Officer, as well as to supplement a strong amount of campus and online canvassing, Murphy organised two promotional nights out in The Village.
A popular and unique feature of Murphy’s manifesto compared to his predecessors was the planning of a “Trinity Film Festival”, which would take place during his role as officer and in following years depending on its success. The idea for a film festival was fortified during discussions with Ents candidates about broadening the role of the officer to include the hosting of non-club night and daytime events. In his manifesto, Murphy outlined how this would offer filmmaking workshops to students and allow them to submit films, as well as provide a strong opportunity for further sponsorship deals with the college – according to him, “large events like these are attractive to sponsors and would ideally be fully sponsor-funded.” Apart from this development, he plans to further strengthen the officer role by simplifying involvement with the office’s “Ents crew”, running a College-wide trip abroad and acquiring more student discounts for club nights.
The race for Welfare Officer brought the most excitement to the table towards the end of the election season, with strong online and campus presences from both candidates. The University Times’ pre-election opinion poll put approval ratings for both Dan McFadden and Ian Mooney at almost 50:50, with Mooney having a slight advantage. Count-night ended in Mooney’s favour, but only barely, as a mere 94 votes (including reassigned votes to re-open nominations) separated himself and McFadden.
Communications Officer-elect Samuel Riggs won his race, defeating rival candidate PJ Moloney with a tally of 66% of the vote against Moloney’s 28%. Riggs told The University Times that the experience of campaigning was very positive. “Campaigning was in many ways exactly what I expected, and nothing like I expected,” he said. “I expected the constant talking and walking, the manifesto-bombardment, the nerves that never truly go away before a lecture address, no matter how many you do. I didn’t expect the instant camaraderie between campaign teams, the willingness of students to stop and talk and discuss ideas, and just how engaged people got with the elections.”
Riggs stated that many improvements and additions were made to his manifesto mainly through Hustings and engagement with students in general. On this he said: “A big point on my manifesto was a Health Sciences Correspondent, but as the week went on, it became clear that correspondents for other under-represented groups in the media could prove useful too – an LGBT* correspondent would be important in making sure all trans* language is correct in related articles for UT, a post-grad correspondent could make sure that any news affecting post-grads gets into the paper.” Riggs also praised some of rival candidate Moloney’s ideas, stating that: “as much as my opponent and I disagreed on certain points, he did have some good ideas in the form of utilizing multimedia to get the message of students out there – we’ve seen this in the success of the TCDTalks video in the past week, so I believe more video content would be a really good way of capitalizing on how to spread positive messages within the student body.”
