The student movement can take credit for a lot of things. It was the student vote that helped push marriage equality through in 2015. Last October, it was students who marched to Leinster House calling for publicly funded education – united in their thousands by one clear aim, bussed across the country by their respective students’ unions. Only a few weeks ago, it was students who made up the majority of the crowd in the Strike 4 Repeal, once again channelling their energy to call for a repeal of the eighth amendment.
The student movement doesn’t arise organically. It’s made up of various students’ unions of various sizes and strengths and motivations. Some rural, some urban, some with more money than others. The sheer variety of their services, however, require one thing: freedom. From being able to spend money on buses to marches to being able to print petitions and leaflets, every aspect of a students’ union’s role depends on autonomy. Weekly meetings with management, audits and college scrutiny might sound innocuous, but they are a looming threat to our students’ unions. To anyone who wants to know what a future of defunded and weakened students’ unions might look like, just consider the marches of the last 12 months – whether for publicly funded education or for abortion rights – and think what they’d look like without Dublin Institute of Technology Students’ Unions (DITSU), Institute of Art, Design and Technology Students’ Union (IADTSU) or Carlow College Students’ Union.
But the boring stuff also requires autonomy. For the majority of students, it wasn’t a “movement” they signed up for when they came to college, it was the microwaves, the condoms and the last-minute, late-night advice that makes students’ unions so vital and which will be under threat if autonomy is lost.
As USI begin to campaign on the issue, they must make clear what will be lost if students’ unions independence becomes infringed. Year after year, decade after decade, students have proved a bastion of support for groups and campaigns that have often been marginalised and ignored. From marriage equality to repeal to banging on about gender neutral bathrooms, students have always been able to stick two fingers up to the establishment. Nothing should be allowed to threaten that.
