Trinity student and former Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) Mature Students Officer Carly Bailey was elected Vice-Chair of the Social Democrats last night at the party’s national conference.
Three hundred people attended the party’s annual conference in Dun Laoghaire last night. Bailey, who is a local area representative for the Social Democrats in Ballycullen and Firhouse, is a third-year law and political science student in Trinity.
In an email statement to The University Times, she said that she was “delighted and honoured” to have been elected.
“Together we will continue working towards providing solutions and evidence based policy that will seek to provide, amongst many things, equal access to education, housing and healthcare, including campaigning to remove the eighth amendment from within our Constitution”, she said.
Bailey defeated National Executive Committee members Noel Dempsey and Mark Khan to win the vote. Dempsey pulled out of the race ahead of the conference, leaving Bailey to defeat Khan with 70 per cent of the vote.
Bailey also expressed her excitement at working with newly appointed Chairperson Joe O’Connor. O’Connor is a former President of the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) and Chair of the Coalition for Publicly Funded Education. He defeated Caitríona O’Driscoll, the National Student Engagement Coordinator in the National Student Engagement Programme and a former Vice-President for Academic Affairs in the Union of Students in Ireland. O’Driscoll worked alongside O’Connor in USI. Dempsey also ran against O’Connor.
The first in her family to go to college, Bailey entered Trinity through the Trinity Access Programme. Since entering the College, she has had a strong presence on campus. She previously held the role of Student Parent Officer in TCDSU while also speaking in front of thousands of people at the 2016 March for Education, organised by USI.
Addressing a crowd in Trinity before this years march, Bailey said: “I’ll never stop fighting. I owe it to my children and our future generations.”
After her family lost their home during the recession, she decided to apply to Trinity. Speaking to The University Times previously, she explained that “everybody that we saw that had managed to somehow keep going in the midst of the recession was because they had a degree, they had a qualification”.
“You understand the value of getting an education…it expands your capacity as a critical thinker, and I think that’s something I didn’t value before because I didn’t know about it, because I didn’t have that education level”, she said.
Access to education and championing mature students and student parents aren’t the only causes that Bailey supports. She is also a member of the Parents for Choice Working group and Dublin South-West Pro-Choice.
