Jack Leahy | News editor
Political divisions over the future of the student movement have threatened to undermine the Union of Students in Ireland for the last number of years. After a year in which discontent and satisfaction were rendered through a series of affiliation referendums and the student contribution charge continued to rise relentlessly in spite of a bold new campaign effort, the students of Ireland ought to be asking one pressing question: what comes next?
Outgoing USI President John Logue has enjoyed far greater approval ratings among the Trinity student body than his predecessors of recent years. Photo: Andrew Murphy
The question as to USI’s future organisation has its roots in this year’s discourse on student politics. A year dominated at grassroots level by referendums on membership has brought to the fore a number of questions about USI’s internal organisation, its engagement with the students it represents, and its political agency. The completion of the formal process of balloting and the affirmation of membership delivered by students in Trinity and Maynooth may offer a false sense of resolution, but in reality members will continue to agitate if the potential for reform advocated by pro-USI campaigners is not achieved. It seems appropriate, therefore, to render a review of the USI’s last twelve months against the context of imperatives for progress.
When John Logue took office as the president of the USI in July, he did so with the member-led conviction that the annual protest march had lost whatever potency it may once have had. As has quickly become his hallmark, he thought anew about the challenges facing his organisation and USI announced a series of local events and protests aimed at harnessing resources locally, within each member organisation’s electoral constituency, targeting the perceived vulnerability of particular political representatives.
The directive from students across the country has been that simply opposing cuts with no constructive alternative is pointless, and that such an approach has hindered the progress of fees campaigns in the last few years. That alternative is being composed by a taskforce, whose remit is to conceive of a five-year strategy that outlines how fully exchequer-funded third-level education might be achieved. The strategy is unseen to most so judgment ought to be reserved, though the likelihood of reversing Ruairí Quinn’s stubborn plans for rises in the student contribution level is slim, regardless of the level of professionalism or economic insight the strategy may demonstrate.
Kate Acheson served this academic year as Deputy President with responsibility for campaigns and is widely and justifiably regarded as one of the best organisational brains ever to represent students in Ireland. Under her direction, regional campaigns involved lobbying of local TDs and ‘town hall’-style meetings during which students were rallied by their representatives while, idealistically if improbably, the local TD watched on in dread of the electoral force prepared to unleash itself upon the ballot in 2016.
In a word, the effectiveness of the campaign was varied; in a sentence, contingent upon the effectiveness of the local unions. At the top end of things, 3,000 students from NUI Galway and the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology attended a public meeting with Colm Keaveney TD, chairperson of the Parliamentary Labour Party. That Keaveney was the only sitting government TD to vote against the budget must not be written off as a coincidence as he would later justify his decision by reference to the human impact of the budget. At the bottom end of the scale, this own college’s students’ union managed to mobilise fewer than ten students, including its sabbatical officers, to attend a demonstration outside of the Department of Education with the students’ unions of DIT and National College of Ireland.
The campaign won praise for its organisation and professional, lobby-driven approach, but drew criticism in equal measure for the ease with which particular TDs could refute students’ assessment of their standing among their electorate. When The University Times met Kevin Humprheys, the Labour Party TD for Dublin South-East elected on the final count in 2011, he appeared neither troubled by the claim that he was ‘politically vulnerable’ nor to engage on a deep intellectual level on matters relating to third-level education when his party only looks to him on matters of finance and the environment. He was enjoying his time in the limelight, no doubt, but his empty platitudes and party-fed quips spoke of a man unperturbed by the lobbyist approach.
That Humphreys did not attend the ‘town hall’ meeting hosted by TCDSU, DITSU and NCISU is often forgotten against the backdrop of the larger dramatic action of John Logue’s arrest later that evening. Turning his back on members of the Dáil as they voted against a Fianna Fáil motion to protect the maintenance grant and freeze the student contribution charge, Logue refused to sit at the request of Gardaí and was removed to Pearse Street Garda station. A University Times poll run on the next morning indicated comprehensive student support and a marked shift in perceptions of legitimate protest following a much-condemned sit-in staged in numerous government buildings following the announcement of Budget 2011.
Logue’s survival of an incident that could easily have been the political death of his predecessors is, in part, a credit to the carefully-architectured presidential image that he maintains. He is a statesman – condemning those forces which undermine the welfare of students but maintaining diplomacy where possible. The thread that runs through his core values is the innate belief in the potential, worth, and expertise of the people that he represents. He is universally respected by the students and officials who have worked with him, but understands that political favour is a fickle mistress and should be neither abused nor taken for granted.
Logue’s natural propensity to leadership, then, has acted as the foil for the work of a dedicated media and communications executive hired on a permanent basis in July of last year to help USI compete in the pageantry aspect of the political game. USI’s media presence has increased by some 500% this year and been an undoubted success for the organisation, with high-profile opportunities to appear in some of the country’s most-watched studios and most-read newspapers appearing regularly and ensuring a wider public sympathy for students and their hardships than the organisation has enjoyed for quite some time.
The USI has been about more than fees and grants on the campaigns stage during this academic year; under Vice-President for Equality & Citizenship Laura Harmon, students have been represented at high-profile marches calling for X-case legislation, the March for Marriage, and the constitutional conventions debates on equali marriage rights. USI’s impressive organisation worked to their credit in three of the four affiliation referendums held on campuses in Ireland this year. TCDSU and Maynooth SU members voted to remain affiliated by significant majorities, but it is the results of the plebiscites held in DCU and UCD that will cause the most concern. A tidal wave of negative assessment engulfed students in UCD and the collective decision to vote in favour of disaffiliation was never in doubt from quite an early stage, despite the efforts of UCDSU president Rachel Breslin to intervene at a late stage.
The annulment of DCU students’ decision to re-affiliate was controversial; DCUSU president Paul Doherty cited a lack of information made available to students before they were asked to vote, though the provision of information is part of Doherty’s brief. The battle continues as USI promises to fight for the enactment of the expressed democratic desire of DCU students.
The fractious relationship between the UCDSU and USI was subsequently acted out at USI’s annual congress, where UCD delegates walked out in protest on the final day having been denied the chance to debate on a motion by the need to end the debate session according to the event’s timetable. It had been revealed earlier in the week that UCDSU’s debt problems has left it unable to pay its USI affiliation fees and its debt to USI currently stands at €95,000.
The above analysis is but a microcosmic reflection of the political climate in which the student movement is situated: besieged by discord, unsettled by uncertainty and unsure what tomorrow will bring. Despite the obvious challenges that threaten the quality of our day-to-day lives, our progression in life and our prospects for employment, students seem increasingly less interested in the political actions of their representatives or in taking part in their election. Students’ unions and the USI need more numbers than ever when the number of grassroot activists seems to be in freefall; their challenges are part of the larger set of problems facing this generation, making a solution all the more intangible.
In this deep slump the numbers of sufferers among even just the student population are so huge that they may pass us by. It’s hard to make the scale of suffering feel real. Opponents of this government said it would happen – and it’s all too easy to smirk with we-told-you-so glee. But those students still – yes, still – waiting on their grants have wretched tales to tell, so familiar by now that they risk becoming humdrum. We appear now to have a situation in which the necessary representation of student hardship is so commonplace that emotive stories of suffering seem to have lost their agency. Public empathy is self-defensive; ‘so what about the student with no heating, I lost my house!’. Competing imperatives for public spending are contributing to an naturally-occurring divide and conquer that makes momentum and solidarity a precious commodity.
In some very depressing way, perhaps this is why grassroots engagement with campaigns against fee increases and grant cuts has been so poor in Trinity and many other locations across the country this year; the prevailing economic orthodoxy of ‘sensible austerity’ looms too large to appear conquerable, and there will always be a cohort who will try and silence those whose speak against the arithmetic sense that fee increases represent. This happens regardless of whether the origin of the opposition is ideology or just dire need. Perhaps it’s just because the students’ union isn’t good at motivating students to care. It’s probably a bit of both.
Today, feelings of helplessness dominate much of the national landscape; a modern anomie. Yet, as students, we ought to consider a desire to conserve settled ways of thinking as hindering our own, or indeed humanity’s progress. The USI’s challenge going forward is to mobilise a generation who recognise their political agency and potential to enact change in insufficient numbers. In a sense the problem is age-old, but there couldn’t be a worse time to need to overhaul it.
