With Mitzy An Jiménez no longer running for the position, it is now a two-horse race for the freshly minted Graduate Sabbatical Officership. We sat down with Féith Ní Chléirigh, a graduate student studying a Postgraduate Certificate in Innovation & Enterprise Development, to discuss their and their campaign in the upcoming SU elections.
Ní Chléirigh describes theirself: “38, I’m a mum”. “I want to impart my wisdom to people as an elder,” they say, and adds “I’m very much into Native American spirituality; I’m very spiritual”. Ní Chléirigh previously attended the Gorey School of Art and University College Dublin, before entering the working world and now coming to Trinity for their Postgraduate Certificate.
With this being the first year of Sabbatical Graduate Officer, Ní Chléirigh sees it as a, “blank canvas”. “I’d like to embrace that and see where someone in that role is really needed the most and try and prioritise that,” they said.
Ní Chléirigh called attention in particular to the historic underrepresentation of graduate students in the Students’ Union, saying that “postgrads don’t seem to get very involved in the Students Union, which doesn’t really make sense, because you want to have people with more experience in there, to help intertwine everything together with the undergrads who are typically taking on these roles”.
In regards to what makes Ní Chléirigh a good candidate, they stated, “I have a lot of experience working with students of all ages, so I like to think I can broadly help the students here”. Ní Chléirigh added, “my lived experience, and also my creativity; I’m a musician and an artist, I get a lot out of being a muse to others”.
Ní Chléirigh’s CV boasts a great deal of charity and community-based work, including the running of children’s art workshops with HeART of Gaza, at Fleadh Cheoil 2025, and being a participant of the Ada Lovelace Initiative, an initiative promoting women in STEM.
Ní Chléirigh also helps raise money and support various charities like Doctors Without Borders, the Irish Cancer Society, Amnesty International, CoderDojo and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. Ní Chléirigh is also currently a librarian for the Free Legal Advice Clinic (FLAC). Before joining FLAC, Ní Chléirigh worked as a paralegal in a Philadelphia-based law office, as well as in IT and software engineering.
When asked about working with the rest of the Sabbatical team, Ní Chléirigh said they was “sure that [they] would be working a lot with the Welfare Officer. They added that “graduate students tend to miss out on events as they seem to be more geared to undergrads”, and that they wants to “work with the Ents crew to change this due to my experience in Entertainment, and help the postgrads have a better work/life balance which would be conducive to higher-quality studies”.
An area Ní Chléirigh wishes to work on is the involvement of staff and students’ children in the college community, suggesting “open days” or “weekend classes” for neurotypical and neurodivergent children, allowing them to “create something that can connect them and encourage them to learn from each other”. “You could have students and staff come in with their own kids or lend their skills on weekends to actually give special classes or special programmes,” Ní Chléirigh added. “That’s one of my biggest ideas I’ve had. Utilising spaces on campus for the community.”
Another key area that Ní Chléirigh wishes to tackle is graduate support services. They relate that despite the postgraduate advisory service having helped their in the past, “they seem to be understaffed, so there seems to be a lot of gaps there with that”.
A further issue they note is College’s “new peer-to-peer graduate service”. According to Ní Chléirigh, “they didn’t have enough postgrads signed for that. I wanted [a peer-to-peer mentor] but they didn’t have one available… there’s definitely a gap there”. “Improving those services and getting people interested in using them by saying ‘I’ve done it, it’s brilliant, please try it out, please sign up’, would benefit graduate students by adequately staffing and resourcing graduate support services.”
Ní Chléirigh’s manifesto is concise. It reads: “I do everything I can with purpose – Watch out for the seagulls and listen to the good little birds’ messages – Welcome to the Umbrella Academy 3.0”. The Umbrella Academy reference, they say, highlights their campaign’s messaging on disability and access, in addition to joking about the amount of rain Dublin has received in recent weeks.
In closing remarks, Ní Chléirigh stated, “I’m trustworthy, I have a very long track record. I am committed to doing the very best for the future of education”. They also add, “I well represent the working class which many postgrads would be, so I can empathise very easily with that faction of the student body”.
