Campaigns for Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU/AMLCT) Sabbatical positions are officially underway: candidates have been posting, flyer-ing and waving down unsuspecting Arts Block denizens since last week. Eight new Sabbatical Officers will soon enter office to represent and drive forward student concerns, fighting your corner in education, welfare, events and more. They will each be paid a salary of about €33,000 — money that comes from student tuition — to do this. These are demanding responsibilities with substantial remuneration to match. Choosing who will run the SU next year is serious business: there are over 20,000 students and a quarter of a million euro at stake. Yet campaign rules and guidance for candidates set by the union’s Electoral Commission (EC), which organises and runs SU elections, seem to be less focused on giving voters the best possible picture of their options than making sure this year’s 20 candidates have a pleasant and frictionless campaign period. The EC needs to remember what is at stake, and not only allow but welcome challenges that help clarify candidates’ positions and capabilities to the voting student body.
Hustings is a prime example of this. Questions to candidates are asked by SU officers and vetted ahead of time, with little to no follow-ups and even less fact-checking; regular students—the vast majority of the voting body—have no organised public venue to press difficult issues they want answers to with all candidates present. In general, the EC seems to encourage candidates to avoid what could be challenging public attention; in campaign briefings, candidates are dissuaded from taking media interviews and responses to them too seriously, and recommended to “know [their] limits” and “avoid papers/social media” in general if they “think it would be best” for their welfare.
Yet students need to know who candidates are and what they stand for before they vote; moreover, if a candidate is elected into a major representative role, they need to be able to face students’ questions and interrogations, and this is hardly possible if they are too stressed by the prospect of putting themselves out there. The ability to withstand public attention—and yes, cross-examination—is an important and often unavoidable part of the job, particularly for the SU President. Rather than suggesting that anyone can and should run for these roles no matter their boundaries, the EC must see the campaign period as a time where candidates and voters gauge suitability for the role, and part of this means giving candidates a realistic view of what lies ahead.
Other campaign regulations follow this general approach. Candidates, for instance, are not allowed to cross-endorse, run on a slate or be endorsed by societies and bodies like the Phil, the Hist or the University Times. This is ostensibly aimed at giving all candidates a level playing field and making sure people don’t feel marginalised during the campaign period. This doesn’t stop alliances from forming, however, but just conceals them from students, making internal Union and society politics and affiliations less clear to the average voter—politics that will certainly influence things once an officer is instituted in their role. Candidates are also limited to campaigning in certain hours, and EC campaign schedules generally avoid placing candidates who are running for the same role in the same place at the same time. All of these reduce the pressure and possibility of difficult interactions for candidates, but also limit the access students have to real engagement with and information about prospective Sabbatical Officers.
These are student politics, after all, and the hopeful candidates are also students whose well-being is important. However, the prospect of a stressful two weeks for 20 candidates and their campaign teams cannot overshadow the concerns of the 22,000 students they will serve for the next year, not least because in our Students’ Union (unlike many others), Sabbatical Officership is a full-time job with a full salary. The EC must stop focusing on making the campaign process an “amazing experience” for candidates (as they so cheerfully state in their “Words of Wisdom” to candidates) and instead turn their attention to the rest of the student body, who are entitled to gauge just how capable, responsive and effective their union officers are before casting their vote.
