Last week, the students’ union council of UCC passed a motion to abolish all policy and mandates from the last five years because of “discrepancies in recording of past minutes and mandates”. It would perhaps be unfathomable to suggest that there were ulterior motives for such a move, so on the face of it, it really does seem that the record keeping over the last five years has been so poor that the current officers of the union were unable to interpret definitively what policies or mandates the union even had. Records of some motions and mandates, the union said, were “lost entirely”.
The only problem is that this scenario is equally as unfathomable. Yet to many people, and presumably the majority of students in UCC, this is business as usual. These are the kind of things students’ unions are known for. These are the kind of reasons why people write off unions as bureaucratic institutions that get little substantive work done. And they may be right. But that doesn’t make this scenario more fathomable, because no matter how easy we find it to ignore whatever it is that the officers of a union do day to day or whatever it is that the councils do when they meet each month, students’ unions across the country are in control of significant sums of money. TCDSU’s yearly budget surpasses €300,000. Presumably, so does UCCSU’s. And when you bring money into the equation, things start to get real. Actions start to get real. Simple, fundamentally basic things like keeping records of the work you do every day need to become real.
While certainly not all of the work that a union does is concentrated on developing policy and setting mandates, it’s not unfair to say that by not having simple protocols in place – like having someone at their council designated to take complete records – easily hundreds of thousands of euro over five years has been wasted.
Perhaps the motion made last week wasn’t done in the correct way, as several groups have stated. For instance, there certainly should have been discussion about it at council level long before an officer of the union proposed something with such far-reaching impact. Yet, this kind of dire action, it looks like, was only proposed because it needed to be proposed. And that should be the focus of this controversy: the very basic fundamentals that a union, or any organisation, should have in place.
Also in Editorial this week: In Light of the Funding Situation, a More Nuanced View of Non-EU Fee Increases
Written by the Editorial Board of The University Times
