This year’s Ents officer election has proven to be one of the most hotly contested sabbatical roles in Trinity with four different candidates vying for the position. The close competition is in sharp contrast to last year’s election, where current Ents officer Peadar Walsh successfully ran an uncontested campaign. I sat down with third year film student John O’Hara, who is in the running, to discuss how his campaign, based on reforming the college’s biggest event, Trinity ball, while attending to the day-to-day responsibilities of running trinity’s weekly events, sets him apart.
In our interview, O’Hara proposed that his wide range of experience in Trinity events makes him best suited for the position. As club captain for DU men’s hockey, O’Hara has spent much of his third year at Trinity liaising with students, coaches, external staff and insurance to organise events for his team while being on the executive committee for Ents as public relations officer (PRO), having had a hand in some of campus’ biggest events. As club captain, O’Hara has taken a strong stance in favour of events run by students, for students, stating he has been “pushing back against a movement to reduce the amount of student led events” who are often replaced by external bodies. O’Hara has fought for student led mixed varsity events alongside the DU hockey Ladies club captain to ensure that all Trinity sports club can hold on to their student organised events. He believes that this experience, along with his time as Public relations officer, will translate well into his role as Ents officer, if elected.
At the forefront of O’Hara’s campaign are his plans for Trinity ball. As part of his manifesto, O’Hara is dedicated to maintaining the events €100 ticket cap, in spite of rising insurance costs. He plans to look for alternative funding to combat these costs, such as creating sponsorship opportunities on the events many stages, which have remained plain of any advertisement. O’Hara sees Trinity ball’s blank stages as an untapped market that could not only maintain current price caps, but could also be a “huge opportunity” that could “boost the funding thats going towards musical acts”.
In consistency with his previous advocacy for student led events, O’Hara is dedicated to increasing the Ents committee’s influence on the organisation of the event. As it stands, Trinity ball is run in collaboration with an external production company. This collaboration is mediated solely by the current Ents officer, meaning that contact between the student body and production company is often slow and limited. O’Hara understands this proxy system as responsible for the lack of student input in the ball’s main musical artists. O’Hara hopes that through increasing the responsibility held by the ents committee over the event, seeking more contact with the production company and leveraging sponsorships to increase funding, he can increase the quality of headlining musical acts, as well as the event overall.
A large part of the Ents officer responsibilities is overseeing weekly events held in the pavilion bar, particularly the popular Pavfest, a large scale version of pav Friday with a special musical guest, introduced in 2023. This event has been evidently successful, although concerns over the events safety have been raised after a pavfest in 2024 was shutdown an hour early over crowd control issues. The ents committee has responded to these issues by increasing the venue size and providing a foundation on which future committee’s can base the event off. O’Hara plans to use this foundation created by former officers and promises a total of 4 pavfest’s a year, two for each term. He also plans to address any safety concerns or ideas for future events by opening an anonymous student forum, where students can submit “their ideas for events, but more importantly, the facilities which they see as essential in order for events to be accessible for them”. He plans to use information gathered from these forums in collaboration with the incoming welfare and equality officer to “push external venues to have these facilities in place” or to encourage use of accessible on-campus space which are underutilized. This outreach for student feedback on Trinity events will be in tandem with O’Hara’s plans for a quarterly town hall where students can address any of their concerns in person.
O’Hara also plans to improve the safety of all Trinity events by facilitating bystander and first responder training for all Ents committee members through the student conselling service on campus. He hopes to achieve this through submitting a motion in the student union. O’Hara believes it is important that this is passed as a motion in student council and not just a feature of his tenure “so that it is not just an idea for Ents officers but it is an obligation”.
Finally, O’Hara plans to improve the inclusivity of Fresher’s events by integrating students from different student accommodations..As O’Hara understands it, there are “certain demographics within college, which aren’t getting as many events as others”. This can be seen in the difference in events held in Trinity Halls who have their own JCR committee and Kavanagh court who do not. In our interview, O’Hara proposed the idea of running “Ents X JCR” events on campus that could include students from both buildings, as residents-only events in Halls are potentially shutting out many students eager to get to know each other.
However, beyond the technicalities and issues addressed by O’Hara in our interview and his manifesto, it seems that continuing quality events, accessible to all, is at the heart of his campaign. The core of this campaign was adequately summarized in O’Hara’s recent Hustings appearance last Monday where he proclaimed “For incredibly high-craic levels, vote John”.
