Halfway through our interview, Michael Kerrigan, the sole candidate to be the next president of the Union of Students in Ireland (USI), tells me he fears that students are going to have a fight on their hands over the next few months and years.
Being uncontested means that Kerrigan will almost certainly take up the national “champion of free fees” mantle next year, and he has a tough act to follow. It was only a few months ago, standing on a stage in front of thousands of students lined up opposite the Dáil, that current President, Annie Hoey, roared with anger at the government sitting serenely in Leinster House.
He seems convinced that he’s up for it – his strategy for USI seems to fuse the focus on lobbying pioneered in recent years by the union under presidents Kevin Donoghue and Hoey with a renewed focus on attracting support from a wide grassroots base of people from across the country.
With 2018 set as the target for when a new funding model could be implemented, it will be Kerrigan who will be charged with fighting for the students’ movement if a loan scheme is introduced. So what would USI’s response be if, in 18 months time, a loan scheme is the leading proposal from the Minister for Education, Richard Bruton?
“I think we’d need to have a lot more than 12,000 students on the street”, he says, suggesting everything from a national protest to smaller demonstrations in towns and cities across the country.
“We’d have to do everything we can to stop it. It would be a complete disaster for higher education and for accessible higher education in Ireland if this was to come in”, he says. He predicts that students will once again be demonstrating later this year, following the success of the March for Education in October, with decisions that could shape higher education for a generation expected soon.
We’d have to do everything we can to stop it. It would be a complete disaster for higher education and for accessible higher education in Ireland if this was to come in
While he’s not critical of the union’s decision not to hold a march two years ago – “there was no Cassells report, there was nothing massive to protest to or about, we were kind of waiting for the Cassells report to come out and make our stance then” – he does seem cautious about the march becoming “the annual student protest”. It’s a theme he returned to in his three-minute speech to Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union’s (TCDSU) council in early March, warning that some TDs see the march as nothing more than a students’ day out.
Instead, it seems, he wants to ensure that the march has the intended effect, coupling it with a newly-improved communication strategy, something that has been the union’s “downfall” in recent years. “I want to engage with, I suppose, officers that are elected now in the coming months from other colleges, get it done early in the summer, so that from the start of the year we can get onto campuses, get contact information from students and be giving them regular updates on the work that USI is doing.”
This will involve everything from emailing newsletters to every one of the union’s members to targeting local media with press releases. “People see it at a national level, and then they see it in their local paper that it will directly affect them, they’ll start getting in contact with their TDs and that’s ultimately where the decision on future funding of higher education is going to be made anyway. I think if we aim at a local level, we’ll get TDs on side.”
Press releases and weekly emails aren’t glamorous or exciting, but if Kerrigan’s approach works, it’ll be a remarkable success for a student movement that has been buffered by a funding crisis that has endured during the last two governments, and which looks set to continue into the future.
The Oireachtas Education and Skills Committee are, at last, discussing the report of the government’s higher education funding group, and have heard presentations from everyone from university leaders to USI to the Irish Farmers’ Association.
The latter group, in particular, who advocated for a loan scheme when they appeared at the committee, have been targeted by USI. Kerrigan met with the group himself, trying to convince them to switch their position to one of publicly-funded education.
The committee, however, has caused some confusion, and for a while it wasn’t immediately clear if it would be designing a new funding model or a simply recommending a model before a decision is reached by Bruton. Kerrigan is still adamant in his belief in the value of lobbying the committee: “I know there have been some people who have presented in front of the committee, who thought that they were making the decision, which obviously isn’t true, but they will have a good part to play in it, and I think we should keep them away from student loans.”
The only ones who haven’t come out and directly said they’re against student loan schemes has been Fine Gael, but they haven’t come out and said they’re in favour of it either
Kerrigan notes that they’ve seen some success so far: “I know there was over 80 TDs met this year on the subject, and we have a lot of support. I don’t have the exact numbers how many have come out and directly supported us, but I think Fianna Fáil seem to be against it. The only ones who haven’t come out and directly said they’re against student loan schemes has been Fine Gael, but they haven’t come out and said they’re in favour of it either.”
The last time The University Times spoke to Fianna Fáil, their spokesperson for education, Thomas Byrne, was quick to emphasise his party was only “cautious” about loan schemes, and that that they no formal opposition. “Just meeting with Fianna Fáil TDs, they have been pretty much saying they’re against it, it’s something they don’t want to see come in”, Kerrigan says.
The rest of his manifesto will be familiar to anyone with experience in student politicking: accommodation, the Irish language, training union officers and higher education funding.
Yet one of the main planks of his manifesto, ensuring the autonomy of students’ unions, is trying to highlight an issue that has come to prominence recently, and is yet probably little understood by most students. The issue, of course, is a significant one – last summer, a dispute arose between Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) and their union over an audit, leading to Dublin Institute of Technology Students’ Union (DITSU) being temporarily left without funding. “We’ve had cases across the country this year of colleges holding back funding from student unions, there are student unions around the country that are not challenging management on internal issues due to a fear of having their budget cut”, Kerrigan says.
His solution is the introduction of legislation to guarantee students’ unions’ autonomy. This is something, he says, that isn’t a common feature of UK and European universities, but he suggests Canada as an example of a country that has legislation in the area. Either way, he hopes to re-establish USI’s legislation working group in order to draft a bill on autonomy and accountability.
I finish by asking Kerrigan to comment on the recent trend sweeping Irish colleges of referenda and preferenda calling for Irish unity. “Personally, I’m not sure it’s something that students’ unions should have a stance on”, he says. Students, however, appear to disagree, with students seemingly happy to vote for their union to campaign to remove the border.
“I think there’d have to be a lot of discussion, exactly what they would want us to do, they want us to push for Irish unity, what sort of campaigning, what actions would we be taking. I don’t think we should just have a stance, and not follow up on something, just to have a stance for no reason. I think there has to be clear action and aims behind it, and I’m not sure that has been done.” He notes, however, that if it came to USI Congress and passed, it would be something “we will work on”.
The constitutional qualms of Irish unification are probably the least of Kerrigan’s worries. Next year, which could go down as one of the most important in the history of higher education, will require the energy and focus of not just a single president, but of an entire student movement. He might be uncontested for this election, but he’ll need to be prepared for plenty of opposition as the fight for free education continues.
