As they attempted to mobilise students for this week’s housing march, students’ union leaders – including Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) President Shane De Rís – triumphantly declared the victory of the student movement in staving off the introduction of income-contingent loans. It’s naive at best, though, to consider this the result of the Union of Students in Ireland’s (USI) work, or to suggest that the battle has actually even been won. As this Editorial Board has pointed out before, this is more to do with the political climate than student lobbying and it verges on delusional to trumpet this as a success when the higher education is still starved of funding.
When things go wrong in House Six, they go really wrong. This week’s plumbing escapades – when a burst pipe left the shared library of University of Dublin Choral Society (Choral Soc) and Trinity Orchestra covered in the unsightly and pungent contents of said pipe – offered a sap to purveyors of cheap gags, but more importantly it highlighted once again the fact that House Six is really not getting any younger. Rich as its history may be, the building’s suitability for purpose is becoming increasingly questionable, and it’s hardly an exaggeration to say the student centre that’s (so far) only hovering on the horizon is badly needed.
To what extent can Fianna Fáil’s eventual decision this week to support the cross-party motion on housing be attributed to the meeting of the party’s leader, Micheál Martin, and the presidents of Trinity’s two students’ unions, Shane De Rís and Oisín Vince Coulter, the night before? The answer to that, presumably, would vary greatly depending on who you asked. However, the very fact that Martin appeared in Trinity on the even of the motion says something about the seriousness with which his party is treating students’ voices on the issue – and given the strength of the student turnout at Wednesday’s rally, it seems a politically prudent move.
