Integration, clarity, Generative AI and Irish language initiatives are topics that frequently came up when The University Times spoke to Education Officer candidate Conchúr Ó Cathasaigh. Getting his start as the Tech Officer for the Science Society in 2022 and a regular Electoral Commission (EC) member, Ó Cathasaigh has been actively involved in campus life for the greater part of his time at Trinity. A fourth-year Math and Statistics student from Kerry, Ó Cathasaigh has served as Chair of the Electoral Commission last year, while serving as the Undergraduate Studies Rep in his final year. Calling his position as EC Chair “ a controversial job”, Ó Cathasaigh has had experience with running the Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) elections and interpreting its constitution. While moving away from strictly TCDSU-related positions this year, Ó Cathasaigh has worked closely with the current Education Officer Eoghan Gilroy as the Undergraduate Studies Rep, holding one of the “highest academic offices on campus.”
Speaking about his start in the SU, Ó Cathasaigh feels that a position on the EC overlapped with a lot of his interests and was “a very specific niche thing”. Enjoying interpreting the constitution and getting into the “nitty-gritty details and running elections” felt like fun for Ó Cathasaigh and motivated his later interest in the EC Chair position. Ó Cathasaigh thinks that it was this position in particular that introduced him to the work of the Education Officer since they function as EC Secretary. Seeing the work of the Education Officer in the sphere of exam appeals, supporting of Class Reps and ensuring adequate representation motivated Ó Cathasaigh to consider running for the position himself as there was “a lot of overlap between what I was already doing.”
“I’ve never thought about running for anything else,” said Ó Cathasaigh when asked about why he chose to run for the position of Education Officer specifically. As he has always been interested in academic policy and advocacy, the position of Education Officer as well as Deputy President of the SU fits well within his goals to integrate postgraduate students more into the Union as well as ensuring a better representation system within the Union overall. One of his aims in particular is to “start structuralising things a bit more” in terms of postgraduate representation. Citing a lack of representation since the collapse of the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) in 2022, Ó Cathasaigh feels that while the current Education Officer has furthered the cause, there remains much more to be done.
His manifesto touches on postgraduate integration, promising a reform of the Constitution to formalise their integration. Speaking about this, Ó Cathasaigh praised the creation of the Postgraduate Research Council, while highlighting the need for further prioritisation of postgraduate taught students. Ó Cathasaigh said that he wants to work “with them to find a way that sort of, they feel a bit more represented in each structure” as well that he wants to make faculty assemblies less undergraduate heavy while envisioning a “ sort of integrating, some of those ideas, more formally, into the Constitution,” in the long term. Through spotlighting various academic weeks, he hopes to make students who “feel like they haven’t typically been represented very well in the union feel like the SU was there for them, and that there’s someone that they can talk to or the SU does care”.
Another big part of Ó Cathasaigh is further streamlining and clarification. Stating that there is a “limited space for automation” in terms of the Education Officer’s email responses, Ó Cathasaigh hopes to implement a system that would send automated responses to students’ emails to let them know that their concerns/requests are being looked at. Citing the amount of emails the current Education Officer receives stating that “I think maybe he slightly underestimated how many emails he got”, he hopes to fix the issue of long response times. Furthermore, he hopes to bring more clarification into the role of Class Reps as well as help students find out who their Class Rep is more easily. By doing this he hopes to lighten the workload of the Class Reps as well as the Education Officer himself as the casework can get “challenging.”
Outlining a clear generative AI policy while maintaining varied forms of assessments for students is another goal for Ó Cathasaigh. When asked about his plan for achieving this Ó Cathasaigh said that he feels that “STEM students don’t necessarily do well on end-of-year exams” and that “exams are not a great way of testing all the skills.” By pushing for forms of assessments other than end-of-year exams, Ó Cathasaigh hopes to ease students’ anxiety. While recognising that the move to in-person exams has come as a result of increased generative AI use, Ó Cathasaigh wants to work with various Schools to “adapt our assessment policies around that, and sort of trying to move, sort of change […] how we assess people to have critical thinking” as AI is “definitely here to stay, whether we like it or not”.
In his words, the most ambitious points of Ó Cathasaigh’s manifesto are his Irish language initiatives. By conducting a survey he hopes to identify levels of Irish in different schools, with the Schools with the highest levels of Irish then being chosen for his pilot scheme of making the submission of assessments available in Irish. One of these Schools could be the School of Law where there already exists a high level of Irish-speaking staff due to “Irish [being] an important part of interpreting the Constitution.” Basing his scheme around the Welsh Standards Act, Ó Cathasaigh wants to deal with the potential problem of teaching staff not having enough Irish proficiency to correct assessments submitted in Irish by making it “the responsibility of the university to translate those” or to “find maybe a similar alternative member of staff who might have enough Irish to be able to correct it”. Ó Cathasaigh thinks that the inability to communicate in Irish in the academic sphere is “almost an accessibility issue in many ways, because, if you’re doing maths as Gaelige, you’ll have built up a lot of terminology of like, what it is in Irish, but you might not necessarily know what any of those terms mean in English”. “It’s just like a language barrier”, he added. Another way he hopes to integrate Irish more into academic life is to introduce an option for Irish-speaking students to indicate their language preference when registering in first year as well as make a list of Irish-speaking staff available to these students. Additionally, an Irish-speaking tutor could be assigned to Irish-speaking students “if practical and feasible.”
Finally, he added that “it is a decision of this college that the Irish language is sort of sidelined” and that “you can’t just put Irish in the box”. Ó Cathasaigh thinks that every officer has a responsibility to “make sure that Irish is revitalized and, you know, becomes part of, you know, having a bilingual University.”
