Senior Staff Writer
The working group will consist of the Senior Dean, Professor Moray McGowan, who chairs the committee, and one representative from each of the bodies who receive funding from the committee- Ryan Bartlett, President of TCDSU, Joe O’Gorman, Strategic Development Officer of The CSC, Cyril Smith, Honorary Chair of DUCAC, Mary O’Connor, GSU President and Damien Carr, Treasurer of DU Publications.
The formation of the working group comes amidst pressure from the college’s executive officers and planning group to cut the funding allocated to said committee. Rumours regarding cuts to the Capitation Committee’s funding began to gain ground when such a possibility was mooted by the Senior Dean at a meeting of the committee on November 10th of this year.
Representatives of the capitated bodies who were present at the meeting were said to be panicked when Moray posed the question “how would we feel about a 10% decrease in funding?” However, he quickly clarified that this was merely a hypothetical question meant to assess reaction to possible cuts in funding, a 10% figure not having been proposed by anyone.
As it stands, no exact figure has been proposed by the executive officers seeking a cut in funding and the document the working group hopes to draft is seen as a preventative measure against any cut in funding whatsoever. SU President Ryan Bartlett gave an optimistic statement regarding cuts to funding to The University Times. He said “it’s fairly reasonable to hope that everything will be exactly the same as last year”.
Yet it seems likely that the Capitation Committee will experience continued pressure to accept a funding cut, with the government having laid out plans for decreases in third level funding over the next three years in the most recent budget. Added to this, the committee is one of the few bodies in college which hasn’t been hit with funding cuts in recent months.
This untouched status was defended at another meeting of the committee on the 24th November, in which the history of the funding method of the body was brought up as a point in its favour. It was said that up until 2002, students paid a separate “capitation fee” which was a direct funding mechanism for the organisations which cater to extra curricular activities for students. In 2002 this was streamlined and made part of the registration fee, with the same amount of money going to the Capitation Committee as before.
Thus the argument for decreasing the funding allowance to capitated bodies comes down to an a difference in viewpoint between the executive officers of college, who view the entire budget gleaned from the registration fee to be flexible, and the Capitation Committee, who see the funding they receive as ring fenced and protected by historical precedent. Yet it is still unclear whether there is any protection outside of tradition and previous independence to protect the fund.
There have been no indications regarding what the newly established working group will include in the document which will be brought to the executive officers by the Senior Dean in justification of their budget. Any cut in funding will be expected to affect all aspects of student life in Trinity since every officially sanctioned extra curricular activity receives part of its funding through this hierarchical model. These effects could come in the form of a reduced level of extra curricular activity across the board and also threaten to manifest in tension between the larger collective bodies as they fight to maintain their level of funding from a reduced budget.
