Trinity News Vol. 62, Issue 3

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Volume 62, Issue 3

trinitynews.ie

NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR 2015 Students look on during speeches at the SU and SOFIA’s candle lit vigil for victims of terrorism andwar.

The emotional cemeromy was held in Front Square / Photo by Matthew Mulligan

Groups mobilise to bring issue of loans to student body again, in wake of Council motion defeat • Ruane: If students asked for a referendum I would completely support it • Until Cassells Report is published, some sections feel that debate is based on speculation Conall Monaghan Senior reporter

F

OLLOWING LAST WEEK’S defeat of a motion calling for Trinity College Dublin’s Students’ Union (TCDSU) to oppose student loans a group of students who are not part of the SU council are considering bringing a second similar motion or referendum on the issue forward, Trinity News has learned.

The motion, brought to SU council by SU president Lynn Ruane, was narrowly defeated at last week’s council.

Paul Molloy, a member of the group who are considering bringing the motion to council again, told Trinity News that they were “extremely disappointed with the result and felt that some in the students union were not representing the best interests of the students.”

“Student loans are a major issue for many from poorer backgrounds, who would be discouraged from entering or continuing college” if loans were introduced, “and we felt

like this fact wasn’t being recognised,” Molloy claimed.

The group have also spoken about the possibility of campaigning for a referendum if the second motion is defeated. Regarding this, Molloy said: “Currently, we’re still only looking into triggering a referendum, however if this issue isn’t addressed we will go ahead with it.”

Ruane also showed dissatisfaction over the last week’s council result and promised in a Facebook comment on a Trinity News article about the motion’s defeat, to bring forward another motion: “It’s too important to shelf. I’ll be back with a better a motion.

Loans are bad end of.”

Ruane told Trinity News that, since last week’s council, she has had “a lot of contact from students not involved in the SU,” who were not present at council, but are upset over the motion’s defeat.

“There’s quite a lot of angry students about how the vote went,” she said.

Breaking down the story behind College’s recent consultancy costs

InDepth p.7

When asked about bringing a second motion forward, she said she would prefer if it came from “the wider student body.” She is aware of Molloy’s group and is waiting to see “how that develops, and whether they bring forward a motion themselves.” However, she added that if their plans do not materialise, she will introduce a second motion.

On the possibility of a referendum, Ruane responded: “If the students ask for a referendum, I would completely support it. I think it’s an important discussion and it should be had by the whole college community and not just within the council setting.” Trinity News has also learned that Ruane will be meeting this week with a number of students to discuss possible routes forward, including members of successful campaign team for president last year.

Peter Cassells was appointed chairman by the government of an expert group “to examine the future funding

policy for higher education.”

There is widespread media speculation that the report, due by the 31st of December at the latest, will propose the introduction of some form of student loans to replace the current system.

Currently higher education is financed through a ‘freefee’s system where the government covers university fees. However, students are still required to pay a ‘Student Contribution Charge’ which has risen over the past four years to 3,000 per annum. The Cassells committee was set up due to the ongoing funding crisis across third level education in Ireland, with John Hennessy of the Higher Education Authority (HEA) repeatedly warning that the current situation is unsustainable.

Alice MacPherson, Deputy Convenor for arts, humanities and social sciences in the SU, who was one of the speakers against Ruane’s motion last week, told Trinity News that “the issue of student fees and loans is one that the SU

must have further discussion on”.

According to MacPherson, one of the reasons that she argued against the motion was because she felt that it was based on media speculation given that the Cassells group has yet to issue its report. She said that “it’s vital we know what the recommendations of the Cassells Working Group report are”.

Agreeing to oppose student loans without knowing what form they will take leaves little room for the SU to negotiate to ensure the “best deal for students,” MacPherson claimed, saying that “outright opposition, at this stage, would leave no room for negotiation in the future”.

She said of the prospect of another motion or a referendum that “Whether it is at next council or not, I foresee and welcome another motion on the subject...I think any issue that divides the student body and has substantial interest justifies a referendum, and if one is called for then I welcome it. ”

Inside

West-coast rapper Vince Staples, Lian Bell and Dr Melissa Sihra on #WakingTheFeminists, exploring the culinary delights of snails, what’s next for Robert Sheehan

Why Archbishop Diarmuid Martin supports divestment in education

College’s real class problem

Trinity Student Scientific Review gears up for its second year

Features p.17

Comment p.17

SciTech p.21

Trinity’s hurlers tell us all about playing the game in a place known more for rugby and cricket

Sport p. 24

>> >> >>

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

News

2

What They Said

“ “ “ “ Lighting a candle makes a difference, because you’re stabbing the darkness

TCD chaplain Reverend Julian Hamilton speaking at last week’s candle lit vigil

All journeys have a start, a beginning and an end. All journeys have a reason, a purpose.

Chancellor of TCD and former president of Ireland Mary Robinson’s remarks at an LSE conference on climate change and migration

For every miserable cup of tea I made and soggy biscuit I ate, [I now have] the best job in the world

Ryan Tubridy speaking to DUDJ and Trinity TV

It’s impossible to conceive of Trinity without your philanthropic support over the centuries.

A Trinity which did not draw on these reserves of goodwill and philanthropy would be a much diminished place.

Provost Patrick Prendergast’s address at a fundraising dinner for College

Trinity professor among those to sign Amnesty letter calling for abortion decriminalisation Dr Veronica O’Keane: has said that the Repeal of the eighth amendment will not be enough Patrick Higgins Online news editor

T

RINITY PROFESSOR IN psychiatry, Dr Veronica O’Keane, and Dr Peter Boylan, consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at the National Maternity Hospital, where the two Irish doctors who, along with 838 other physicians from 44 countries, last week signed an open letter published by Amnesty International calling for governments to decriminalise abortion.

The letter urges governments to stop interfering with health professionals’ ability to provide care and says that criminalizing abortion puts women and girls’ health and lives at risk. It states that criminalising abortion “disregards sound medical judgment and can undermine the

professional duty of care and confidentiality that doctors bear towards their patients.”

Professor O’Keane spoke to Trinity News about the issue. Asked why more Irish medical professionals did not sign the letter or take part more vocally in the campaign for the decriminalisation of abortion, O’Keane commented that, of all the issues facing Irish society, “abortion is the most sensitive.” Abortion in Ireland is a criminal act, she said, and “why would medical professionals come out in favour of a criminal act?”

According to O’Keane, there is a large amount of discontinuity in Irish law regarding abortion. The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act only provides for abortion in cases where there is a risk of suicide, or physical illness of the mother, which would prove fatal if the pregnancy were not aborted. The government is also required

by law to provide information on the availability of abortion services in the UK as a result of the 1995 Abortion Information Act. O’Keane argued that this leads to confusion as regards which “certain situations apply,” as “95% of people would support abortion in the cases of rape and fatal foetal abnormality.”

Regarding the Repeal the Eighth Campaign, which seeks to repeal the amendment to the constitution that equates the life of the mother to that of the unborn child and therefore criminalises abortion, O’Keane argued that this does not go far enough. “Leaving the Protection of Life Act in place will not be moving forward,” she said, claiming that what is needed is both the repeal of the eighth amendment and the introduction of “liberal legislation.” She suggested that abortion should be regulated “within the medical profession” and not left as “a

Postgraduate Erasmus students unhappy over being assigned undergraduate student status

criminal issue.”

Hitting back against the publishing of the open letter, Cora Sherlock of the pro-life campaign is quoted in the Journal stating: “The latest attempt by Amnesty to push for the liberalisation of Ireland’s abortion laws seeks to depict abortion as ‘healthcare’ when in reality it is nothing of the sort. All it does is end the life of an unborn baby.”

Atlantic Philanthropies donates €138.4 million to fund Trinity initiative to tackle dementia Philanthropic donation is the largest in Irish history and the largest ever received by Trinity, will go towards joint programme with UC San Francisco

The students are unable to access normal postgraduate privileges and facilities Lia Flattery News Editor

A

NUMBER OF postgraduate Erasmus students studying in Trinity, who have been allocated undergraduate student status in the college, have been unable to avail of normal postgraduate entitlements and are seeking to be reregistered as postgraduate students.

Roxana Stauber, a postgraduate student studying medieval history in Trinity on Erasmus from her university in Austria, is leading the group seeking postgraduate student status.

Speaking to Trinity News, Stauber said that all of the affected students are postgraduates in their home universities and applied for Erasmus postgraduate placements in Trinity. However, upon arrival at Trinity at the beginning of this academic year, they were allocated undergraduate student cards and told that they would be registered as undergraduate students.

She is aware of at least five other postgraduates on Erasmus in Trinity from a range of disciplines who have been affected by this problem, but suspects that there are more.

When contacted about this issue, the academic registry stated that, although the students are postgraduates in their home universities, be-

cause they are taking undergraduate modules as well as postgraduate ones in Trinity, they are deemed to be undergraduate students.

However, Stauber and the other students insist that they were never informed that they would be treated as undergraduates in Trinity. She commented that, although her Erasmus coordinator at her home university told her that she could take undergraduate modules as well as postgraduate modules if she wanted to, it was understood that she would be treated as a postgraduate student in Trinity either way. The other affected students were given to understand the same thing: “We didn’t even think that we could possibly be downgraded.”

The students are unable to access any of the postgraduate facilities on campus, such as the graduate common room, and they are also restricted to undergraduate borrowing rights in the library.

“We were all confused when we registered on the Trinity portal and it listed us as undergrads… We didn’t apply for bachelor’s placements, we applied for master’s postgrad placements,” she explained.

“It’s a new country, it’s a new language, everything is new, and then we have this problem… and we don’t where to go and what to do,” she said.

She explained that one of the main issues that their undergraduate status is causing the students is a lack of rep-

resentation in college. “We don’t actually know who is responsible for us,” she said.

Stauber was unable to vote in the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) class representative elections earlier this academic year because she did not have a postgraduate student card.

The academic registry is now trying to accommodate the six students and, according to Stauber, will change their status to that of postgraduate once it has received confirmation from the students’ Erasmus coordinators that they are taking postgraduate modules as well as undergraduate ones.

The GSU has become involved in the matter and is seeking to change the system so that “future postgrads who come to Trinity as Erasmus students will not face the same issues” and will be recognised as postgraduates from the outset, she said.

Gillian Healy Staff writer

T

HE ATLANTIC PHILANTHROPIES last week announced the biggest philanthropic donation in Irish history, and the largest ever received by Trinity College Dublin. A total of €138.4 million has been awarded to College and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), to establish the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI), an initiative that aims to advance dementia care worldwide.

The announcement of the donation to GBHI was made last week by Taoiseach Enda Kenny, who commented: “We are delighted that Ireland is a part of this ambitious global initiative.”

Christopher G. Oechsli, president and CEO of The Atlantic Philanthropies, stated: “Our goal is to create a generation of leaders around the world who have the knowledge, skills and drive to change both the practice of dementia care and the public health and societal forces that affect brain health.” He added: “By doing so, we hope to reduce dramatically the number of older people who develop this disease, which affects disproportionally those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, and consumes not just the millions directly afflicted, but their families and caregivers as well.”

Dementia is among the most devastating illnesses worldwide, affecting 48 million people globally, a figure that is expected to double every 20 years. It is feared that if no effective intervention is found, the issue will

worsen.

aging center at UCSF.

Speaking last week, provost Patrick Prendergast outlined how the illness has touched so many, stating: “There is hardly a family anywhere that has not experienced dementia in some shape or form.”

With the GBHI initiative, it is hoped that leaders on the issue of dementia will emerge not just from the medical field, but also from the realm of the social sciences, journalism, law, business and the arts. This is will be achieved through a separate project called the “scholars programme,” which will last one year and inform participants about the preventable causes of cognitive impairment and enable them to share this information with others.

The new initiative will see 600 global leaders from the US, Ireland and across the world trained over 15 years to carry out dementia research, deliver health care, and develop new policies and practices. It will operate in collaboration with other institutions worldwide in Latin America, Vietnam, South Africa, Asia and Australia. GBHI will have shared operations with TCD and the UCSF that will be led by professor of psychology at Trinity, Ian Roberston, and professor Bruce Miller, a behavioural neurologist and director of the memory and

In addition, it is hoped that as a by-product of the GBHI initiative, multiple jobs will be created and Trinity’s expertise in neuroscience and ageing will be deepened.

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

News

3

Biomedical Sciences Institute receives donation to support search for autoimmune disease treatments It is hoped that the funding will help in discovering treatments for “a range of inflammatory diseases”

Conall Monaghan Senior reporter

A

BBVIE, AN INT E R NAT I O NA L biopharmaceutical company, and Science Foundation Ireland have awarded €2.5 million to Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute for four new research topics over the next three years.

The funding has been given to help the Biomedical Sciences Institute conduct research on diseases related to inflammation.

Photo by Matthew Mulligan

Students wishing to return to Trinity “will be dealt with on a case by case basis” One student told that ultimately a student’s health and safety comes before academics Niamh Lynch Staff writer

T

RINITY NEWS HAS spoken to a number of Trinity students taking part in the Erasmus programme in France who have said that College has given them to understand that coming back to Trinity early for students who feel unsafe because of the recent terror attacks in Paris will be very difficult to facilitate. Earlier in the week senior tutor Claire Laudet informed Trinity News that she would be meeting with a number of college officers to review the situation and explore what academic options would be open to Trinity students currently studying in France.

While supports have been put in place, Trinity students have been warned of the problems that could be involved in returning home.

English literature and French student, Orla Howells, who is based in Paris, told Trinity News: “In terms of coming home early, we were told [by College] that it would be very complicated from an academic point of view, as every Erasmus [student] signs a learning agreement for their term. They did say that if you felt really psychologically traumatised by the events then they would insist on you going home, as ultimately a student’s health and safety comes before academics.” However, she was told that for TSM students, in particular, “it wouldn’t be possible to go back to Trinity

in mid-November and that we’d probably have to go off books.” She added that these recommendations might vary dependent on department.

Rachel Fleming, who is studying English literature and history in Nice, said that College informed her that returning home following the terror attacks is “not a viable option.”

When contacted by Trinity News, College press officer Caoimhe Ni Lochlain said that “requests from students wishing to return home will be dealt with on a case by case basis.”

These measures follow the swift action taken by College after the attacks. Senior tutor, Dr Claire Laudet,

College launches new international education project The new Europe-wide undertaking aims to transform second level teaching, with Irish teachers collaborating with German, Swedish and Estonian teachers to ensure the new initiative has both an international and modern dimension Conn de Barra Staff writer

E

ARLIER THIS MONTH, Trinity College Dublin’s secondary school education programme, Bridge21, launched a new project in collaboration with Erasmus + that will see the programme expanded into Europe.

Bridge21 currently aims to enhance “21st Century Learning” (21CL) in Irish secondary schools, where it works with students to build skills in technology, teamwork and cross-curricular projects.

16 Teachers from Bridge21 partner schools across Europe will come together to develop the new project, by building their skills in the area of 21CL and designing new learning experiences for their students. Irish teachers will collaborate with German, Swedish and Estonian teachers to ensure the new initiative has both an international and modern dimension.

Project manager, Aibhín Bray, said that: “This project springs from the shared recognition that we need to integrate the basic and transversal skills associated with 21CL into mainstream secondary school education.”

While studies have shown that secondary school students benefit enormously

from 21CL, it has proven difficult to provide such opportunities for them at a secondary level.

Bray told Trinity News that Bridge21 was originally created to give students from disadvantaged backgrounds a chance to go on to third level education and that the project was conceived with an emphasis on computer science.

She went on to say that for the new Bridge21 project to be successful, teachers will need to “unlearn” the methods they are more familiar with, to stimulate a similar transformation in the way that their students approach their education.

and director of the student counseling service, Dr Deirdre Flynn, flew to Paris on the Monday following the incidents and remained in the city until Friday 20 to provide support to Trinity’s Erasmus students. During their stay, a meeting was held at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris for all Trinity Erasmus students in the city, at which students voiced their reactions to the attacks and were given information on how to deal with any resultant academic pressures. The College representatives also offered to meet individually with students.

Howells, who is studying at Université Paris Diderot, praised College’s reaction. “I was so touched at how quickly Trinity responded to the events,” she said, continuing:

Kingston Mills, professor of experimental immunology at Trinity’s School of Biochemistry and Immunology, will lead the project.

In a statement from College, he said: “Inflammation is a vital process in fighting infection. However, if uncontrolled, it can contribute to the development of autoimmune diseases, such as rheu-

matoid arthritis, psoriasis, Crohn’s disease and multiple sclerosis.”

According to Mills, the project will focus on “identifying and building our understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that cause inflammation,” which will help in discovering treatments for “a range of inflammatory diseases.”

Jim Sullivan, vice president of pharmaceutical discovery at AbbVie, said that the new research that the Biomedical Sciences Institute is planning will “foster continued innovation in the treatment of Crohn’s disease, one of our most important therapeutic areas. We hope to unlock the potential for significant advancements for patients with serious diseases.”

Minister for jobs, Richard Bruton, announced the new funding at the Global Irish Economic Forum in Dublin Castle earlier this month.

“I wouldn’t have expected anyone to fly over to see us and I found Claire and Deirdre really comforting to talk to. Meeting with them definitely reassured me and I’m sure other people felt that way too.”

Paris is a popular destination for Trinity Erasmus students, who are attending a number of universities in the city, including Paris-Sciences Po, Université Paris Diderot and Université Paris-Sorbonne.

The series of coordinated attacks, which took place on November 13 and were carried out by the Islamic State (IS) militant group, left 130 dead and hundreds more injured.

Trinity students among recipients of 2015 Intel Women in Technology scholarships The scholarship programme seeks to encourage women to pursue careers in science and technology Una Harty Staff writer

T

HREE STUDENTS OF Trinity College Dublin were awarded Intel’s Women in Technology scholarship last week.

Lucia Hughes, Eunice OreOluwa Fasan and Maria Cordero, all junior freshman students, were among 17 new scholars announced at a special awards ceremony in Dublin on November 18.

The scholarship programme is in its fourth year and aims to “encourage a new generation of high-achieving women to take up the challenge of a career in science and technology.”

Hughes, who is studying nanoscience, physics and chemistry of advanced materials, told Trinity News that: “I believe the scholarship will open doors for me and offer me an insight into the world of nanotechnology. I hope that I will gain a good experience from the placement during the summer of third year and that it will help me in going forward, whether it be applying for a job or deciding to do a Masters and later, a Ph.D.”

ships like this are so important for women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields.

While the gap is definitely closing, there’s still a lack of women in a lot of areas of science. I think that initiatives like this really show that companies like Intel are acknowledging this fact and are willing to support and help female students to excel in fields that they mightn’t have been able to in the past.”

Speaking to Trinity News, Cordero, a science student, commented that: “Scholar-

The scholarship programme offers a monetary grant to the value of €2,000

per annum as well as the opportunity to work on the Intel Leixlip campus between the scholar’s third and fourth year of undergraduate study.

They are also assigned an Intel mentor who aids the mentee throughout their academic career. The scholarships are awarded based on the student’s Leaving Certificate results, a personal statement and an interview process on the Leixlip campus.

Intel is currently seeking to expand the Leixlip campus programme. They increased the number of scholars from

7 last year to 17 this year, making a total of 34 scholars nationwide, with an overall investment since 2012 of over €160,000. This follows on from the success of the Intel Shannon Women in Technology programme, which offers similar awards for women in science and technology courses in the South-West of the country.

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

News

News in brief

4

TCDSU prepares to take part in Dublin climate march The march is part of a wider day of campaigning taking place across the Megan Thompson Staff writer

T

RINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN’S Students’ Union (TCDSU) is due to take part in the Dublin climate march on November 29.

The march is part of a Global Climate March taking place that day ahead of the United Nations’ Paris Climate Conference on November 30, at which world leaders will meet to start negotiating the next global climate deal. People in cities around the world will march to push world leaders to commit to tackling climate change.

Speaking to Trinity News, Cheryl Notaro of TCD Environment Society said that the march “is a platform from which TCD students and all can make their presence be known, be part of a global movement and begin adapting their minds to more positive energy renewables.”

She said that it is an opportunity for “current students, who may be our future politicians, councilors, government officials, policy makers and educators, to start the process now of the transition to a better kind of economy.”

According to Lynn Ruane, TCDSU president, the march is significant because it will get people to engage with the issue of climate change.

She told Trinity News that: “It is very hard to get people engaged in climate change causes, mainly because they’re not often observable or emotive.” She explained that: “A greater understanding of the direction the climate is heading in is hugely important and the march can serve as a physical space in which to explore that.” For Ruane, education is central to this cause. “We need to communicate and teach the youth about the damages of

climate change,” she said.

Speaking about attitudes to environmental causes in Trinity more generally, she remarked that there is a need for greater motivation within the college community on the issue of climate change.

“The problem is we seem to be lacking in incentive for people to commit to the green strategies set out by the green committee (Trinity’s Green Campus Committee)” she said, adding that, “a big move for College this year will hopefully be the divestment from fossil fuels and hopefully our newly elected environmental officer can begin to make some headway on the issue.”

The SU are asking students and their family and friends to meet at Front Square on the day of the march so that the SU delegation can make their way as a group to Custom House Quay where the official march will start.

Students graduate from College's first online postgraduate diploma course College aims to have 1,000 online students by 2019 Megan Thompson Staff writer

T

HE 37 STUDENTS of Trinity’s first exclusively online education programme graduated earlier this month at a ceremony held on campus.

The course, which took the form of a postgraduate diploma in applied social studies and was offered by the School of Social Work and Social Policy, was delivered entirely online and moves College a step closer to its target of 1,000 online students by 2019.

The course was delivered using live tutorials once a week in which students and professors could discuss and debate key issues in the module and engage with animated presentations and videos.

Students in Myanmar continue hunger strike for release of political prisoners Aung San Suu Kyi, chairperson of the National League for Democracy in Myanmar, has urged students to stop Megan Thompson Staff writer

T

HE 37 STUDENTS of Trinity’s first exclusively online education programme graduated earlier this month at a ceremony held on campus.

The course, which took the form of a postgraduate diploma in applied social studies and was offered by the School of Social Work and Social Policy, was delivered entirely online and moves College a step closer to its target of 1,000 online students by 2019.

The course was delivered using live tutorials once a week in which students and professors could discuss and debate key issues in the module and engage with animated presentations and videos.

Dr Stephanie Holt, course director for both the online postgraduate diploma and the online one-year masters in applied social studies, told Trinity News about the significance of the course.

“Making education accessible has always been a core aim of the school of social work and social policy and is reflected strongly in the college’s current strategic plan,” she said. She added that the online courses have proven very attractive to people who cannot attend

Dr Stephanie Holt, course director for both the online postgraduate diploma and the online one-year masters in applied social studies, told Trinity News about the significance of the course.

“Making education accessible has always been a core aim of the school of social work and social policy and is reflected strongly in the college’s current strategic plan,” she said.

She added that the online courses have proven very attractive to people who cannot attend full-time studies on campus due to family and work commitments or for geographical reasons.

Speaking to Trinity News, Dr Julie Byrne, assistant professor to online education development, echoed Holt’s sentiments: “I think the online education courses are an excellent way to open up education access to people

who find it difficult to attend college at a fixed time and place each week… The online learning model we use here at Trinity combines asynchronous elements that can be done at a time and in a place that suits the individual student.”

Applied social studies is one of six online courses offered by Trinity, including a postgraduate certificate in dementia, a postgraduate certificate in advanced radiotherapy practice, a postgraduate diploma in managing risk and system change and a postgraduate certificate in clinical exercise. There are no requirements to attend class on campus and so the courses are accessible all over the world.

109% increase in Niteline calls in September 2015 compared to same time last year Niteline coordinator attributes growth to greater awareness and popularity of the service

full-time studies on campus due to family and work commitments or for geographical reasons.

Speaking to Trinity News, Dr Julie Byrne, assistant professor to online education development, echoed Holt’s sentiments: “I think the online education courses are an excellent way to open up education access to people who find it difficult to attend college at a fixed time and place each week… The online learning model we use here at Trinity combines asynchronous elements that can be done at a time and in a place that suits the individual student.”

Applied social studies is one of six online courses offered by Trinity, including a postgraduate certificate in dementia, a postgraduate certificate in advanced radiotherapy practice, a postgraduate diploma in managing risk and system change and a postgraduate certificate in clinical exercise.

There are no requirements to attend class on campus and so the courses are accessible all over the world.

Photo via Reuters

Niamh Moriarty Staff writer

T

HE 37 STUDENTS of Trinity’s first exclusively online education programme graduated earlier this month at a ceremony held on campus.

The course, which took the form of a postgraduate diploma in applied social studies and was offered by the School of Social Work and Social Policy, was delivered entirely online and moves College a step closer to its target of 1,000 online students by 2019.

The course was delivered using live tutorials once a week in which students and professors could discuss and debate key issues in the module and engage with animated presentations and videos.

Dr Stephanie Holt, course director for both the online postgraduate diploma and the online one-year masters in applied social studies, told Trinity News about the significance of the course.

“Making education accessible has always been a core aim of the school of social work and social policy and is reflected strongly in the college’s current strategic plan,”

she said. She added that the online courses have proven very attractive to people who cannot attend full-time studies on campus due to family and work commitments or for geographical reasons.

Speaking to Trinity News, Dr Julie Byrne, assistant professor to online education development, echoed Holt’s sentiments: “I think the online education courses are an excellent way to open up education access to people who find it difficult to attend college at a fixed time and place each week… The online learning model we use here at Trinity combines asynchronous elements that can be done at a time and in a place that suits the individual student.”

Applied social studies is one of six online courses offered by Trinity, including a postgraduate certificate in dementia, a postgraduate certificate in advanced radiotherapy practice, a postgraduate diploma in managing risk and system change and a postgraduate certificate in clinical exercise. There are no requirements to attend class on campus and so the courses are accessible all over the world.

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

UNBEATA BLE OFFERS Reads

www.reads.ie BUY 2 : POSTERS GET 1 FREE !

NOW : FLYERS HALF PRICE !

STATIONERY 1990 - 2015

A2 / A1 / A0 sizes only on 200 gsm satin

A6 / DL / A5 digital 200 gsm satin

FREE Refill Pad - Value €1.50 WITH EVERY €10 PURCHASE

Thesis / Project / Essays Printing & Binding (soft or hard) LOWEST PRICES IN IRELAND you could pay more elsewhere :

BUT WHY SHOULD YOU !

Branches :

Nassau Street / Bray / Sandyford Dun Laoghaire / Setanta Place

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

InDepth Breaking down the record receipt for Trinity's consulting costs College spent €2.8 million on external consultants to “change management”, during critical period of budget cuts for student services

Greta Rosén Fondahn Contributing writer

F

INAL FIGURES ON Trinity College’s external consultancy fees, released earlier this month, show that the university spent ¤2.8 million to “change management”, over ¤2.1 million on financial and information systems, and over ¤91,000 on new graphic profile, during the three year period 2012/13 to 2014/15. The figures were released under the Freedom of Information Act, and first published in The Irish Times. The amount Trinity spent on “change management”, ¤2.8 million, was the largest sum any university in Ireland paid to one specific external consultancy company during this time period, the recent investigation show.

The recipient of the record sum of ¤2.8 million was consultancy company Clarion Consulting, which assisted College with rearranging administrative services. A total of ¤2,139,049 was paid to British consultancy company Deloitte for help with new financial and student information systems. The sums follow Trinity’s recent year trend of increased consultancy emphasis and expenditure.

In correspondence with Trinity News, Pat Millar, Managing Director at Clarion Consulting, commented on the figures: “The figures quoted cover a three year period.

Many organisations engage external consultants on large change programmes. Using consultants gives access to additional resources, experience and expertise and helps ensure success and reduce risk when dealing with complex change.”

During the three year time period, it also became more expensive to study at Trinity and student organisations received less funding. Between the academic years 2012/13 and 2014/15, the student contribution fee was increased by the government by ¤500, from €2,250 to ¤2,750 per year.

Since then it has continued to rise, with the current fee being ¤3,000. In addition to this, repetitive cuts in student services were enforced throughout the period. A 3.75% budget cut in 2013 and a 5% cut in 2014 decreased the funding to the Central Societies Committee (CSC), Dublin University Central Athletic Club (DUCAC), the Graduate Students Union (GSU), Trinity College Students’ Union (TCDSU) and Trinity Publications. Funding is however predicted to increase to some extent again over the next three years, on a per-student basis.

At Trinity, Clarion Consulting has for example been closely associated with the Academic Registry, conducting the Academic Registry Enhancement Programme. This programme is being launched in three phases during 2015, and strive to, to quote the programme website, “develop the Academic Registry and ensure that it can provide the services required to support the student lifecycle” and to enable the university to grow by making sure that the academic registry could cope with a possible increase in number of students. The director of

the programme is Millar himself. Four of the 14 leads the project are consultants from the company. The remaining ten positions are occupied by members of the Academic Registry together with Aideen Long, Dean of Graduate Studies.

“The programmes Clarion has been involved with in Trinity are designed to improve services, systems and processes. The changes made in these programmes have a very positive impact on the university and benefit existing and future students,” Millar said to Trinity News.

Clarion Consulting is an Ireland and United Kingdom based consultancy company, with focus on business and IT. According to their website, the company helps their clients to “manage business transformation, improve organisational agility and build competitive advantage.” The company has previously worked with both public and private enterprises such as AIB, DHL, The Irish Times and PepsiCo. Paul O’Callaghan, PepsiCo Chief Information Officer of Worldwide Technical Operations, has previously commented on the collaboration with Clarion Consulting: “We greatly value the contribution made

by Clarion in helping us to achieve greater transparency and operational control of key organisational projects.”

British Deloitte has a history of working with universities in the United Kingdom and the United States. In their 2015 UK report “Making the grade”, the company identifies the key issues faced by modern higher education institutes as centered around the themes of globalisation, cost, student expectation, technology, estates, talent and research. Julie Mercer, Global Industry Leader for Education at Deloitte writes: “Over the past four years our Education practice has helped Universities and other Higher Education Institutions address the challenges set out in this [“Making the grade”, 2015] report and we, at Deloitte, remain committed to continuing to help providers succeed in an increasingly competitive global market”. The company has also released a “Reimagining higher education” report, focusing on higher education in the United States. The report emphasises the impact of technology on higher education, claiming that it will change the education scene fundamentally “just as iTunes, Netflix, the Kindle, and other innovations have disrupted the music and media industries”.

In 2014, mixed reactions were vowed when the university paid ¤91,786 to consultants at Irish graphic designer bureau Huguenot for redesigning the college crest during the so called “Trinity Identity Initiative”. The need for the rebranding was heavily discussed. Removing the repeated “Dublin” and the bible from the logo was met with criticism at the time, and forced the bureau to redesign the proposed crest to what it looks like today. The controversial sum also generated campus interest, and sparked discussions as well as a page on Facebook where students could submit their very own redesigned crests (some more creative than others).

Photo by Eoin Cambey

“

“The programmes Clarion has been involved with in Trinity are designed to improve services, systems and processes. The changes made in these programmes have a very positive impact on the university and benefit existing and future students,” Millar said to Trinity News.

D

URING THE DISCUSSED period, TCDSU has on occasion spoken out against the university’s high consultancy expenditures.

Back in 2014, Tom Lenihan, SU president at the time, encouraged students to participate in a, later cancelled, library sit-in where the online event description read: “It is time for us to take a stand against a university that has skewed their priorities and locked out students from decision making processes. We do not want ¤3.71m being spent on consultants or 100,000 being thrown at a rebranding exercise. Students want services and supports. It is time to stop the suffocation of student life.”

Trinity News invited TCDSU to comment on the newly released figures. TCDSU has not done so.

In comparison to other universities, Trinity is found in the upper quartile of consultancy expenditures. UCD for example spent ¤185,914 on external consultants during the same time period, but also had a much more limited definition of what consultancy meant in their accounting

methods, leading to the final numbers being possibly pushed down. Over all though, Ireland’s seven universities together claim they spent over €24 million on consultancy fees during the three year period. The Higher Education Authority has not opposed this, and claim that will not do so as long as the expenditures can be defended by the value obtained from the money spent.

Already in 2014, media focused was turned towards Trinity’s consultancy costs.

British newspaper The Sunday Times reported on skyrocketing numbers in the university’s expenditure on consultants, claiming that there had been a 144% increase in the payments from College to consultancy companies between the years 2012 and 2013 under the watch of Provost Patrick Prendergast.

During Prendergast’s first year at Trinity, 2011, the budget for consultants came out to a total of €793,000. In 2013 the final bill landed on €3.71 million.

Regarding the transparency of the economic figures, according to The Irish Times, Trinity has been relatively

open with its consultancy fees and could show figures upon request within weeks. For other universities it took as much as four months to present a final number.

In a statement to Trinity News College press officer Caoimhe Ní Lochlainn said that payments to Deloitte and Touche were "chiefly linked with the provision of professional resources covering project management and accounting relating to the implementation of a new Financial Information System and IT resources relating to the implementation of the Student Information System."

Ní Lochlainn further added that the cost of the new visual identity...was non-exchequer funded."

Deloitte and Huguenot were not available for comment.

€2.8 million

over three years TCD

€55,346 to PwC UCD

€571,640

on student recrutiment over three years UL

€68,898

on HR from September 2014 to June 2015 NUI Galway

Figures via the Irish Times

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

InDepth

7

Enclosed by walls, Trinity still illustrates a class divide

100 National average 80

Trinity is disproportionately attended by the privately educated: 35% of a given year against a national average of 7% were privately educated. This is very much in line with trends across the Anglophone world

Oisin Vince Coulter Deputy news editor

N

EW FIGURES RECENTLY released by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) seem to confirm the widespread perception that Trinity remains an exclusive university that primarily serves the middle and upper class. These figures dealt with the distribution of Student Universal Support Ireland (SUSI) grants across third level education. Analysing the socio-economic makeup of College poses a number of difficulties, from defining class to finding the necessary statistics – which are remarkably difficult to find.

Finding the figures

Bringing together figures from the HEA and College, some trends are clear, although statistics mostly date from 2013/14 at the latest.

The headline statistic from the HEA is that College has the lowest number of students in the country in receipt of a grant, at 24% against a 36% average for universities, and a 56% average for Institutes of Technology.

As grants are means tested on gross family income they are useful as shorthand for class. However, there are issues with gross income as a metric – namely that by ignoring assets like land or investments the result is some high asset but lower income families like wealthy farmers receiving grants.

Fee-paying or private secondary education correlates strongly to being middle or upper class, with average annual fees of 5,000. 2516 students entered Trinity in 2013 from 459 schools. Of this 871 (35%) came from private or grind schools through the Leaving Certificate. On average 7% of the Irish population attend fee-paying secondary schools.

Private education

Like grants, this is an imperfect metric. Many notionally public paying schools have the same demographics as private schools as a result of their catchment areas and high ‘voluntary contributions’. Such schools often ape private schools and have similar numbers continuing on to third level.

With catchment area in mind geography plays a significant role in who attends Trinity. In 2013, 37% of students came from Dublin. This further breaks down into 68% from the more generally more affluent Southside against 32% from the Northside. National statistics support this break down, with 99% of 18-20 year-olds in 2013 from Dublin 6 going on to third level while only 15% of school-leavers of the same age from Dublin 17 doing the same.

Those same national statistics supported the intuitive belief that wealthy areas send far more to third level than poorer ones. The traditional ‘Southside’ that stretches from Ballsbridge, through Rathmines and Dundrum down to Killiney has universally high rates of attendance at third level, all higher than 75%. This is also true of the middle class stretch along the coast of the Northside particularly from Clontarf to Howth.

Alternative entry

The Trinity Access Program (TAP) offers a third way of measuring the number of ‘non-traditional students’ attending Trinity. TAP offers a route for those who otherwise may not have the CAO points necessary, or come from backgrounds that would otherwise prevent attendance. 223 (9%) students entered Trinity through TAP in 2013. Participants are not purely from lower socio-economic backgrounds, as TAP also assists students from ethnic minorities.

Even though TAP entrants still only make up less than one in ten, this number marks is substantial increase over

the past few years. TAP numbers stood at 233 in 2012 and just 184 in 2011.

Although each of these statistics is limited on their own, taken together they illustrate several things. First, that Trinity is disproportionately attended by the privately educated: 35% of a given year against a national average of 7% were privately educated.

This is very much in line with trends across the Anglophone world, where English ‘Public schools’ and American preparatory schools dominate their respective top tier third level institutions.

"Free fees"

It’s interesting to note that this is the situation after twenty years of nominally "free-fees". The connection between free-fees and private secondary education has been widely discussed, with a common theory that once freed from the cost of university middle class families used that money to finance private secondary schooling.

Although technically there are no university fees in Ireland, Trinity has a ‘student contribution’ of 3,000 per annum. The real cost of a year in full time third level education was estimated by Bank of Ireland as high as 13,000 – and this cost has likely risen since that calculation. Such high costs are the result of Dublin’s housing crisis, as well as the capital being the most expensive place to live in the country.

This is a clear barrier to those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and goes some way to explaining the class makeup of Trinity.

These issues are compounded by supposedly meritocratic CAO points system. The system is lauded for being ‘blind’ and not allowing for discrimination based on background, as each student is anonymous within the system. However this hasn’t prevented league tables being dominated by private schools, Gaelscoileanna and schools located in affluent areas. Trinity has recognised this issue with its ‘feasibility study’ that assess

students using supplementary material beyond just CAO points.

Future

Far greater than the difficulties in analysing Trinity’s class makeup is considering possible solutions to the current imbalance. Rather than reduced, it seems likely that the financial burdens faced by students will increase over the next number of years as rents continue to rise and the government contemplates a return to fees or the introduction of student loans.

With various alternatives to the CAO system being explored - though none will be implemented on a large scale soon, if at all – at the core of Trinity’s current demography is the very nature of private secondary schooling in Ireland, a controversial topic that would require considerable political will to reform.

Although Trinity’s internal efforts to extend access, from TAP to the feasibility study, are laudable their effect is limited by the realities of our society and education system.

Trinity

60

40

“

The headline statistic from the HEA is that College has the lowest number of students in the country in receipt of a grant, at 24% against a 36% average for universities, and a 56% average for Institutes of Technology.

TAP numbers stood at 233 in 2012 and just 184 in 2011

20

24% 0

36%

Proportion of students on grants (2015)

100 National average 80

Trinity

60

40

20

0

35%

7%

Percentage of students privately educated (2013 intake)

TAP 9%

Non TAP 81% Non-tradtional students in Trinity (2013 intake)

Significant funding gap between men’s and women’s sports clubs An investigation by Trinity News' Clare McCarthy into the potential funding imbalance in Trinity sport has given voice to the silent frustrations borne by women’s sports clubs

Clare McCarthy Sport editor

T

RINITY COLLEGE HAS 49 sports clubs, all of which are funded

by DUCAC, the governing body for sports in Trinity. DUCAC’s aim is to further the interests of all sports clubs in Trinity College to the best of its ability and works closely with the clubs to achieve this goal. Trinity sports clubs are supported and funded on an annual basis by DUCAC in accordance to their needs. DUCAC said that they have a duty to enable all 49 sports clubs to compete at their highest level.

According to DUCAC, funding varies greatly among clubs and depends on the sport, competition, equipment, travel and accommodation needs.

DUCAC itself receives the majority of its funding from the capitation committee and supplements its income with profits from the Pav. The majority of these sports clubs are gender amalgamated. However, certain sports have two separate clubs for males and females. It is by looking at the funding attributed to these two gender-separate entities that an imbalance would seem to be apparent.

The funding gap

There is a significant funding gap between the men’s and women’s clubs in many of the sports. Katie Moore, this year’s ladies soccer captain, expressed her concern on the issue. “I am not sure what the men's team received this year but last year we applied for a quarter of what they applied for, and we didn't receive the full amount,” said Moore.

The difference in the apportionment of last year’s funding which Moore speaks of is significant. The men’s soccer team received 80% of the soccer club’s funding for the year 2014/15, the women receiving only 20% of the total funding, or ¤13,825 less than the men’s

club. This year, 2015/16, saw an improvement from last year’s percentage with the women’s soccer club receiving 27% of the total funding, still a margin of ¤10,280 less than the men.

Ladies soccer received a huge increase in sign ups on freshers week and would love to expand to two teams but cannot facilitate the demand due to lack of funding. “We signed up 80 players this year, we usually get 30 sign ups but this isn't reflected in the budget as budget presentations and applications are done before we sign up players for the year so we didn't foresee the huge increase,” said Moore. A need for better training facilities in winter is another issue faced by ladies soccer. “We usually use Botany Bay, the 5 a side pitch, which is bad when we have 30 training. We have now been given Santry to use but we're only able to use the small training area as the rest is being used up by other teams,” said Moore.

According to Moore, the funding gap is a huge issue for a lot of clubs and the figures would support her case. In relation to their female counterparts, the men’s rugby, cricket and golf clubs each received over 75% of the funding allocated per sport in Trinity this year.

DUCAC have increased the funding allocated to ladies rugby this year by almost ¤1000, bringing their total funding to ¤6,658 for the year 2015/16. Men’s rugby received a decrease of ¤200 in funding this year, bringing their total funding to ¤22,450 for the year 2015/16. Though the gap has been closed marginally there is still a difference of ¤15,765.

As of now, the Trinity ladies rugby club consists of only one team. DUCAC Chairman, Cyril Smith, said “women's rugby at TCD is now developing that way in line with IRFU policy.

Thus, while the women presently get a separate allocation, the ladies rugby now comes under the direction of DUFC

and benefits overall from this.”

DUCAC administrator Aidan Kavanagh added: “They [ladies rugby] have been formally entered into the SSI league which gives them more competitive games and so at DUCAC we are supporting this increase in competition by increasing their funding.

They have also begun the first stage of a development plan with DUFC men’s team and we would like to see them develop steadily to be regarded as one of the well-known and successful ladies rugby teams”.

Though the funding gap can be accounted for by the multitude of men’s teams and higher performance level that the men compete at, the vast difference in funding in the same sport gives sporting women less incentive to progress into higher divisions and discourages future female participation in the sport. Funding is an essential component of equality in Trinity sports as through funding, sports clubs can access more coaching, better facilities, maintain the numbers playing sports and reach a wider number of participants.

Sponsorship

The traditional undervaluing of women's sport makes it much more difficult to attract sponsorship. Trinity ladies Gaelic football, winners of the division II All Ireland, are well supported by DUCAC this year and yet struggle to acquire sponsors. Ailbhe Finnerty of ladies Gaelic football spoke to Trinity News on this issue, “Our main problem is trying to find sponsorship, money for anything extras i.e. gear, new jerseys.” Despite their achievements, ladies Gaelic football find it much harder than their male counterpart to find sponsorship and must fundraise themselves in order to compensate. “We're still struggling to find sponsorship for the current year and have had meetings discussing ways of fundraising including bake sales, bag packing etc. to try

and raise money. The men's teams find it much easier to get sponsorship and have gotten over ¤4000 this year which we are still struggling to find even a quarter of that,” said Finnerty.

DUCAC’s website states that it works closely with sports clubs to help increase their fundraising opportunities through sponsorship and alumni engagement. The ladies soccer team benefited from this collaboration with DUCAC as they usually struggle to attract sponsors while the men’s soccer team usually have a number of sponsors at hand. “We got a new home and away kit this year thanks to a new sponsorship deal with the Pav that DUCAC helped us get which was a huge win for us.

We just have to have nights out in the Pav as part of the deal. Maybe if we maintain this sponsorship next season we can get training gear and stuff. If we could pick up a second sponsor that'd be great. I know the lads have a couple sponsors so they get a lot of gear,” said Moore, the ladies soccer captain.

Lack of engagement by alumni

Another difficulty faced by women’s sports in Trinity is the lack of engagement with alumni when it comes to donations. The ladies hockey captain, Clare Stead, expressed the need to rebuild relationships with their alumni. “What I've seen in recent years through the hockey club is that the largest differences in funding have been from the alumni contributions. The men's club has a stronger connection with its alumni than we do with ours, so when it comes to asking people to donate back two their old club the men have much more success,” she said.

Although struggling to gain support from its alumni, Trinity hockey is one of the clubs which defies the usual trend of underfunding women’s sports. There is an approxi-

mate 50/50 balance of funding for the men’s and women’s clubs. It is followed closely by Gaelic football and hurling/ camogie who have only a 10% and 2% difference in funding, respectively. Stead attributes this equilibrium to the high numbers of females that take part in the sport. “As one of the largest female sports clubs in Trinity, I think ladies hockey have built up a strong reputation that stands to us when looking for funding - and in fact our most recent source of funding gave exactly the same amount to us as to men's hockey, which is really great to see,” she said.

Need for greater funding equality

According to the Trinity College Dublin website, over half of the student population is female (58%) and yet male sports clubs still receive a significantly larger portion of the allocated funding. Kavanagh, DUCAC’s administrator, argues that the committee aims to support all clubs equally: “At DUCAC we strive to support all clubs as fairly as possible regardless of gender.

DUCAC considers that clubs compete under a particular sport rather than defining this sport by gender,” he said.

“This year overall funding for the sports that have separate female clubs has increased by 6,348 so I would hope that that shows DUCAC’s commitment to these clubs in helping them to develop.” This anticipation of potential for growth in the allocation of funding, even before major success has taken place, is crucial to the development of women’s sport. The logical way to fund sports clubs would seem to be size and performance based.

Yet if the lesser teams receive such minimal funding there is no possibility for their improvement.

In the interest of a fair society, women's sport deserves an equity of treatment in all areas including funding. In Trinity, this is not the case and the un-

derfunding of women's sports teams is current and ongoing.

Allowing money to become too much of a hindrance in allowing women’s participation in sport is nothing but a betrayal of the essence of sport itself.

The underfunding of women’s sports stunts the development of women’s clubs leaving little opportunity for expansion.

The protestation that women simply aren’t interested in sport is the exact attitude that discourages women from taking part in sport to begin with.

It is important to note that this is not an issue exclusive to Trinity sports. But as Ireland’s self-proclaimed “leading university” should we not also be leading the way in gender equality in sport? Perhaps the most important thing that needs to occur in order to ensure gender equality in Trinity sport is an acceptance of its legitimacy as a concept in the first place.

Percentage of DUCAC funding by sport received by womens teams 2014/2015 Source: DUCAC

20%

51%

Rugby Hockey

39% Boat

26% Cricket

14% Golf

43% Hurling

45% Gaelic football

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Features Reviewing the government response to the housing crisis Homelessness, emergency housing, increasing rents, flatlining wages and lengthening waiting lists characterise a housing market in crisis.

William Foley dissects the most recent statistics to examine the current government’s record and proposals for tackling it

done, given their current skyhigh levels. With a two year review landlords will simply implement a double increase every second year, as highlighted by a recent news story in the Examiner about a single mother with two sons who had her rent increased from 900 to 1,400.

William Foley Deputy editor

here are now 730 families living in emergency accommodation in Ireland. Focus Ireland estimates that that figure will approach 1000 by next year as the rate at which families are being made homeless increases drastically.

83 lost their homes in Dublin in August alone, compared to a monthly rate of 8 in 2012. As of September, the total number of people estimated to be homeless is 5,100, according to the Peter McVerry trust.

The number of people on the social housing waiting list has increased substantially as well.

While the government claims that there are only about 90,000 on the list, data collated by Fianna Fáil from the 31 local authorities indicate that this figure is closer to 130,000.

Many of those on the list are joint applicants and families so the total number of people waiting for affordable accommodation is likely much higher - possibly around 300,000, according to Fianna Fáil’s environment spokesperson Barry Cowen.

T

This crisis is ultimately driven by a lack of supply, and a consequent skyrocketing of rents and house prices.

According to a daft.ie’s latest quarterly report, authored

by TCD lecturer Ronan Lyons, the availability of rental homes, at just over 4,000, is at the lowest level since their data series began in 2006.

Rents have risen by 30% nationally since 2012 and are increasing at a sharply accelerating rate, according to the report. Since last year the cost of renting in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick, and Waterford has increased at a rate of between 8% and 10% per city.

On the other hand, average weekly income has only risen by 0.5% between the first quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of 2015.

Rising rents are regarded

by Focus Ireland as the main cause of homelessness in the last year. Even those who have managed to hold on to their homes will find that housing costs are considerably diminishing their weekly income.

Lack of response

government

This, by any standard, constitutes a housing emergency.

It’s over a year since the housing activist Fr Peter McVerry warned of a “tsunami of homelessness,” and conditions have taken a sharp turn for the worse. Despite this crisis, the government has reacted with a shrug. There was no commitment in Budget 2016 to introduce rent controls - though they already exist in many European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, and cities such as Paris.

Belatedly the government has brought in a plan whereby private rents can only be raised every two years. This scheme will last for four years, after which the present system of annual rent reviews will be restored. This scheme is totally inadequate as it places no actual limit on the amount rents can be increased by. Indexing rents to inflation is the absolute minimum that should be

There was no increase in rent supplement either, a shocking lack of response given that the Simon Community’s Locked Out report, released this August, estimated that “92% of properties on the market are outside of the reach of people on state rent support.”

Most paltry of all however has been the level of social housing construction. The current dire situation would have been somewhat attenuated if the present government had at the very least kept up the previous government’s level of social housing supply. Building social housing not only directly provides affordable homes for people in an inaffordable market, but also serves to make the market more affordable for private renters by having a disinflationary price effect (as an increase in supply will, all things being equal, reduce price, ie rents).

Under the Fine Gael-Labour government there has been a catastrophic fall in the number of social housing units that have been constructed and acquired by local authorities. The Fianna Fáil-Green coalition built or acquired over 17,000 houses over the course of their government.

By contrast the present government’s figure is only 1,650.

The number of social houses built in 2008 numbered nearly 5,000. The number built last year: 158. That’s 0.03%.

That proportion is even more miniscule when compared to 6,200 dwellings completed on average annually between 1970 and 1985, a period during which GDP per capita was roughly a third of present levels.

Failing promises

The rhetoric of the government, and in particular the housing minister Alan Kelly, has been highly disingenuous and inconsistent. Last November he and his junior minister, Paudie Coffey, set out a plan to accommodate every household on the social housing waiting list in the Social Housing Strategy 2020. This list is based on the old 2013 figures which, as pointed out above, underestimate the true figures by 40,000. So in five years time, if all goes according to plan, less than 70% of current applicants will be housed.

That’s assuming that the crisis doesn’t get any worse. And that’s also assuming that we can take Kelly by his word.

As Pat Rabbitte cheerfully admitted, making promises that they don’t intend to keep is what Labour “tend to do during elections.”

The new housing strategy promises to deliver 18,000 new dwellings by the end of 2017 (and an additional 17,000 by 2020). So how many have been built so far? According to the latest figures from the Department of the Environment and Local Government there have been 20 new social units completed in the first half of 2015. Kelly now claims that the number of dwellings completed by the end of the year will be “up to ten times higher.” In other words, based on the most optimistic predictions of the housing minister, there will be an additional 200 units built in the second half of 2015. According to the journal.ie, a spokesperson for the department later said that when local authority acquisi-

tions are included that figure will be over 1,000. Even if this proves to be the case, that leaves 17,000 more to be built or delivered through other means in the next 24 months.

Building and acquiring 8,500 units per year would represent a 13 fold increase over the highest annual total delivered yet by the present administration (and that total is from 2011 when most if not all of the houses would have been completions of constructions begun under the previous government). This is certainly possible given the right level of investment and planning, but there is no reason to believe that these elements are in place.

Dublin City Council, where Labour and Sinn Féin are the main parties in a ruling coalition and where there are 42,000 people on the waiting list, made provisions in its latest budget for only 310 dwellings between 2016 and 2018. This both insufficient, and at odds with what Kelly and other Labour figures have been claiming. For example, in a recent constituency leaflet produced by Eric Byrne - a Labour TD for Dublin South Central whose response to the Paris terror attacks was to read out the lyrics from John Lennon’s Imagine in the Dáil - he claims (implying that he is talking about Dublin City): “9,500 social housing units will be built by 2018, funded through direct investment and PPPs - 3,100 of these will be provided in 2016." Kelly himself has been inconsistent and unclear. In a May article in The Irish Times, Olivia Kelly pointed out that the minister has repeatedly made announcements of funds secured to build new homes, but these are not additional to but, in fact, already contained in the Social Housing 2020 plan.

Social Housing 2020

If the current administration’s targets already seem fantastic and unreliable, they appear even more so when you investigate the proposed financing of the plans. Under the current social housing strategy, 35,000 new social housing units will be provided by 2020. As pointed out above, this target is well off course.

This leaves open the question of how the other households

on the official 90,000 figure are to be accommodated (nevermind the remainder of the actual 130,000 figure). The current strategy envisions that an additional 75,000 will be accommodated in the private rental sector through rents subsidised either by the Housing Assistance Payment or the Rent Allowance scheme. Thus the scheme, if it works fully, will only house 110,000 people by 2020 - an already inadequate provision.

EVERAL SOURCES OF “off-balance sheet” housing are identified. The first is the expansion of the NAMA special purpose vehicle established to sell or lease residential units for social housing purposes. As of October of this year, NAMA has delivered 1,241 completed properties for social housing and has earmarked a further 359 that are currently under construction. The Social Housing 2020 strategy document envisions that the special purpose vehicle can fund 450 new units and has “the potential for 2,250 Part V units should NAMA’s Dublin residential delivery reach its upper limit of 22,500 units over the next 5 years” (Part V units are properties set aside on private housing developments for social purposes). In other words 2,250 units could be delivered but there is no guarantee that they will.

Another source of funding shall be public private partnerships (PPS). The only concrete plan for PPS laid out in the strategy document is for 1,500 homes to be built with 300m from Budget 2015.

Finally, a “financial vehicle” will be set up to fund developments by Approved Housing Bodies (voluntary and nonprofit organisations which provide social housing). This vehicle will be capitalised with 400m from the sale of Bord Gáis, and this will provide for “at least 2,000 housing units.”

S

The plan for how this vehicle will fund further units is so vague that it deserves to be quoted in full: “This investment can then leverage private sector finance which will be raised from a variety of sources which could include the EIB, ISIF, Pension Funds,

Credit Unions and other financial institutions, both domestic and international. This funding will then be lent on to qualifying AHBs, giving them access to long term finance.

The Government believes that this new source of funding will enable AHBs to better leverage their existing stock with the ultimate aim of delivering more housing from scarce exchequer resources. This funding solution will be part of an incentivised programme where AHBs will commit to deliver specific housing targets and AHBs that are the most active and capable of delivering new housing supply will receive a greater proportion of this funding.”

So, taking the most optimistic projections for the hard figures actually given in the article, off balance sheet funding will provide 5,750 social housing units. Whether or not this figure will be achieved, any plans for further provision of dwellings through this method are entirely uncertain, unclear, and indefinite.

Overreliance private sector

on

the

With inadequate provisions for the construction of new social housing, local authorities will have to make up the shortfall by leasing. To what extent exactly is unclear. The Department for the Environment and Local Government issued detailed targets to all 31 local authorities earlier on in the year. The Irish Times, which was given access to the targets for the four Dublin authorities and the Limerick, Galway, and Waterford councils, saw that on average threequarters of new units supplied up until the end of 2017 will be sourced through leasing from

6000

the private sector.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, as Kitty Holland points out in an Irish Times article, for leased social dwellings the tenancy will not be secure or regulated as the owner can opt out at relatively short notice. Secondly, this does not directly address the supply issue which is pushing up rents. And thirdly, it is doubtful whether the private sector can produce enough units to even meet private and social demand.

As Ronan Lyons points out in the daft.ie report, the number of houses being built only meets about a quarter of private demand, while substantial vacancies only exist outside of the urban centres where the demand is greatest.

Even in, say, the three year period between 1999 and 2001, before the housing bubble took off, the private sector was completing around 45,000 houses per annum. Between 2012 and 2014 inclusive it only managed a yearly average of 8,500.

When you factor in that most of the waiting list is supposed to be cleared through the expansion of the HAP and RAS system, it is clear that there is a heavy overreliance on the private sector.

Values

Even if the private sector were up to the task, there are plenty of more fundamental reasons to spurn it. Historically, the private housing sector has functioned to the benefit of a powerful and corrupt nexus of developers, speculators, bankers, and politicians.

The indigenous Irish capitalist class is weak, and unable to compete on the world market in the high value-added sector.

Total social housing units completed and acquired

Social housing acquisitions

4800

Social housing completions

3600

2400

Instead a large sector of it has focused on leveraging political and financial networks to extract high economic rents from unsustainable housing markets. Production has been based on profit, not social need, with developments such as Priory Hall and Longboat Quay showing that developers had little regard for safety and other standards of quality. Its unplanned and grab-all nature has created the absurd situation where depopulating rural areas such as Longford and Leitrim still contain high rates of property vacancy while the growing urban centres are chronically undersupplied.

The industry’s role in precipitating the general economic crisis need not be rehashed here.

It’s clear that the only method of meeting the social need is a properly funded and costed programme of social housing construction that is an order of magnitude greater than the current strategy.

This is fundamentally against the pro-market values of the present government. As Fintan O’Toole pointed out in a recent article, the fact that Ireland in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, when it was still a “poor, primitive, backward economy,” could build social housing on a large scale whereas the modern, developed Irish economy of the 2010s cannot, is a result of the free market ideology that this government is beholden to. This social sclerosis is the product of faulty values rather than insufficient resources.

There are simply things which the Fine Gael and Labour coalition values more highly than it does social housing: paying down debt instalments ahead of schedule; allowing multinationals to pay negligible rates of corporation tax; cutting the top rate of the USC to the greatest benefit of the top two deciles.

Commenting on the pathetic rent freeze proposals, Michael Noonan, who fought tooth and nail against indexing rent increases to inflation, said, “I hope it works.” It’s hard to imagine Noonan adopting this indifferent and callous approach to, say, tax incentives for multinational investment, in which case gushing sycophancy is the rhetorical plat du jour. The most recent statutory Assessment of Housing Need, from which the government takes its 90,000 waiting list figure, estimated that nearly three quarters of applicants were entirely dependent on social welfare as a source of income and only 11% had income from employment only.

Providing adequate housing is a basic human right, and one that is not being fulfilled for a large section of the population. The government’s response has been inadequate, inconsistent, disingenuous, and characterised overall by grasping and cynical careerism and a total ideological submission to free market principles.

1200

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Illustration by Danial Tatlow Devally

2012 2013 2014 2015 Graph by Matthew Mulligan

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Features

9

Theft in the city

With the constant threat of theft hanging overhead, Caoimhe Gordon investigates further measures students can take to protect themselves

Photo by Eoin Cambey

Caoimhe Gordon Online features editor PICTURE THE SCENE: you are out with friends and then you reach into your pocket or your bag, grasping hopelessly for a phone or wallet. The moment of panic hits - where is it? You are 100% certain that it has disappeared forever without a clue left behind. Your heart is thumping in your chest and your friends try to console you that it is within the depths of your bag. Suddenly, you reach into a corner that you could have sworn you had already searched and your hand closes around the exact object you firmly believed would never be seen again.

Or you log onto Facebook and see a status appear on your newsfeed, declaring solemnly, “Hey everyone, phone’s gone.

If you need me, contact me on this.” Whether the phone was lost on a night out or stolen on the streets, there seems to be no chance of retrieval. You wince and offer a sympathetic comment while thanking your

lucky stars it wasn’t you.

What about the situation where you return to your bike that you locked up only hours before and it’s nowhere to be found? You can almost see someone cycling around the city on your mode of transportation but before you explode with fury, you look again and it’s four spots down from where you left it in a haze as you rushed to meet your 9am.

Incident in Insomnia

If any of these situations sound freakishly familiar, it’s because they occur daily. It is widely accepted that students are being targeted. Just last week, I found myself in Insomnia sipping hot chocolate with two pals. We noticed a suspicious small figure enter the café. This man did not purchase anything, instead lurking around the café undetected by staff members. As I stood up to leave, my handbag tucked into the crook of my elbow, he followed close behind.

As we turned right to return to the Arts Block, a gust of panic blew through me. I could not detect the presence

of my wallet. I told my friends of my concern but they told me to search in the bright lights of the Arts Block. However, before I could do this, a fellow patron from Insomnia chased behind us and informed me that my suspicions were confirmed - the short man had nonchalantly reached into my bag and swiped my wallet from under my nose.

We chased up Nassau Street.

My eagle eyed friend spotted the thief attempting to enter McGuires and much to my surprise (and to that of my friends), I confronted this man as he was being escorted out of the shop. This is not advised or recommended but there I was, exclaiming, “excuse me, did you just steal my wallet?” Now, the outcome of this encounter was obvious.

He did not admit it nor hand me back my wallet (which contained all of two euro) and apologise for the confusion. I had no choice but to let him go forth, watching as he clutched a handful of change (presumably mine) but not before he raised his middle finger. However, this is not where the saga ended.

The situation that I found myself in reveals that we are never truly safe from theft.

We could be sitting in a café, catching up with friends or wandering the streets, admiring the Christmas lights, not aware that we are being watched. Once a friend of mine left a pair of boots she had purchased down as she perused another display.

When she reached down to pick up her bag mere seconds later, it was gone. Because we are aware of this fact, we must take measures to protect ourselves from being targets.

According to a report from the Central Statistics Office, theft rose by 1.3% in the period from March 2014 to 2015.

Over 77,700 different cases of theft were recorded last year in Ireland.

Precautions

Most of us fear the theft of our smartphones. Our parents may chide us for our constant absentminded screen tapping but the angst is not unfounded - a mobile phone is stolen every 20 minutes in Ireland with street robberies becoming ever more common. A survey

by ESET Ireland in February revealed 9.7% of those surveyed users had their phone lost or stolen in the last 12 months.

A leaflet published by the Gardai reveals some tips for smartphone users that offer some assistance in dealing with the tirade of theft in Dublin city. They recommend keeping your phone out of public view. The amount of people that regularly walk into others because they can’t miss the group chat banter while roaming the streets proves that this often isn’t possible.

However, if it is necessary to text or call, the Gardai recommend remaining vigilant.

Attacks of the phone being grabbed from the hands of its owners are becoming more and more common. Another measure that many of us don’t think of is the IMEI code.

It can be accessed by typing *#06# on the phone keypad.

By providing this detail, as well as your SIM card information to your mobile provider, your mobile provider will disable usage of the phone hence protecting private information.

Programs like Find My iPhone

also aid the process. Backing up photographs and contacts will also lessen the blow of the loss of a beloved companion, the humble smartphone.

Bicycle theft

Bicycle theft is also a problem that many students today have to face. 4,950 bikes were reported stolen in Dublin in 2014. That is more than 13 per day. It shows a jump of 162% since 2008, when 1,873 bikes were reported stolen in the capital. A survey of 1,500 people from dublincycling. ie indicates that one in six of us have given up our city cycling dreams due to fear of a stolen bicycle, while an article in Trinity News last year revealed a student’s own experience with the devastating loss. A further survey by the Dublin Cycling Campaign revealed that our very own campus is the worst place to park a bicycle outdoors in the city.

Cyclists are advised to double lock their bikes. These locks should always be U Locks with a Sold Secure marking. Taking a photograph of the bicycle’s serial number is also recommended.

My brush with petty theft did not end after I trudged away from my nemesis or after I cancelled my debit card.

Instead, I received an email from the Accommodation Office of where I reside. My wallet (including my apartment key card) had been found! In a Burger King bin! This resulted in an unsightly dampness. However, all my cards were there, including my debit card, and thank goodness, my many assorted society cards with all their helpful discounts. My tale had a happy ending. However, it would have been much better if it hadn’t developed into a tale at all. Constant vigilance is necessary no matter where you happen to find yourself.

It is also worth adopting more safety measures in our daily lives to protect our most valued of possessions and guarantee that you too won’t have to chase someone down the streets of Dublin in a valiant quest to regain your honour.

The future of contraception In 2015, our population growth rate is at a steady 1.096%, but how will the future of contraceptives influence this figure?

Una Harty Staff writer

T

HE WORLD’S POPULATION growth rate peaked in 1962 and 1963 at 2.2% per annum. Since then it hasn’t returned to its former glory. It’s all boils down to a single factor: the introduction of the infamous contraceptive pill three years prior to the birth of the sexual revolution. In 2015, our population growth rate is at a steady 1.096%, but how will the future of contraceptives influence this figure?

History of contraception

The contraceptive cosmos is a complex one. The concept of hindering reproduction first emerged in Mesopotamia in 1550BC where records show evidence of honey, acacia leaves and lint being placed in the female’s vagina to intercept the male’s sperm.

The Egyptians applied acacia leaves via medicinal methods by creating a gum from it. The acacia leaf gum is still used today in contraceptive jellies for its spermicidal qualities.

Lactation was also used by the inhabitants of the Nile valley as a birth control by breastfeeding for three years in order to reduce fertility.

The Ancient Greeks (circa seventh century BC) were notorious for their contraceptive methods. The study of gynaecology was invented by the Greek civilisation. Academics in this area included Hippocrates, one of the greatest physicians of all time. He prescribed silphium, a plant known for its contraceptive and abortifacient qualities to the people of Cyrene, a coastal

city and the only area where silphium grew.

The future of contraceptives seems equally as cosmopolitan as the past. They are developing parallel to our world’s needs – where women are tending towards more equal rights and hopefully, to juxtapose that; better, more effective birth control that’s affordable and accessible for the developing parts of this world.

Contraception today

The problems with our existing array of contraceptives is that they oftentimes have negative side effects and aren’t 100% reliable. A report from the Guttmacher Institute in 2012 found that around 222 million women in developing countries want to use birth control but aren’t currently able to access modern contraceptives. Thus, the ideal future of contraceptives is one that is accessible to all who require them.

By far the most prevalent of contraceptive types are hormonal methods – the pill being the most commonly used method of birth control today with over 200 million women having taken the drug over the past forty years. The pill was first introduced on May 9th, 1960 when the FDA approved Enovid, the shelf name for the first oral contraceptive pill. Rather than seeking to improve upon the most popular contraceptive model to date, researchers are now looking for new ways to deliver hormones for birth control. Instead, researchers are currently looking at new ways to deliver hormones for birth control. Implants and hormone-releasing intrauterine devices are currently leading the vanguard. An intrauterine

device sits inside the uterus and dispenses progestogens, and lower doses of estrogen than would normally be produced by the pill. Studies have shown that better balances of hormones could be highly beneficial to contraceptive developments.

Contraceptives of the future

There is one future contraceptive seizing the attention of the pharmaceutical industry and is set to define the direction of contraceptive methods for the next while – remote control fertility. Currently, there exists an implant, commonly referred to as the bar, which is inserted in the woman’s upper arm and typically has a lifespan of about three years.

A company called MicroCHIPS inc. is presently cultivating a wireless device only 20 millimetres in length matched with a lifespan of 16 years. Instead of the upper arm, the chip would be inserted into the buttocks or the abdomen. Its job would be to deliver levonorgestrel, a manufactured hormone used in emergency contraceptives methods frequently nicknamed, Plan B. The revolutionary aspect of this is that the women using this birth control would have the power to deactivate the device whenever they needed to.

They would not require a visit to the doctor to re-prescribe them with a different form of hormones. Instead it would be as simple as pressing an offswitch. This radical concept would provide a long-lasting contraceptive with minimal doctor-patient contact. This is ideal for women of developing countries who may not have easy access to GPs and other

healthcare professionals. It is important to note that as of today, no contraceptive method lasts longer than five years so this 16-year span would be truly avant-garde. The device is currently under testing and is due to hit the market in the US in 2018.

In these days of advancing birth control technology, it imperative that the industry analyse the various ways to apply and manage fertility. The future of contraceptives lies in the various means of obstruction of pregnancy.

These include meiotic arrest (this would be a male contraceptive method involving an activation of a mechanism to

inhibit spermatogenesis), the blockage of follicle-stimulating hormone (would account for the arresting of the final maturation of the oocyte before ovulation or follicle rupture), preventing implantation and immunisation.

Contraceptives for men

If you think that only women ingest medicinal forms of contraception, think again.

Recently there have been calls for advancement in male hormonal contraceptive methods.

In the past it has been hard for researchers to receive funding for research into male contraceptive as the pharmaceutical industry show little

or no interest in this negligible market. A Kaiser Family Foundation study found 66% of men were willing to take an oral contraceptive, while 44% would get a birth control shot and 36% would try an implant.

Vasalgel is an injection that inhibits sperm from escaping for a temporary amount of time. This pioneering medical technology was developed by Dr. Guha 15 years ago and has since been under clinical trials with very promising results. Essentially it is a reversible vasectomy. A polymer injected into the man’s genitals traps the sperm as it tries to make its way to meet a female egg. A second injection

would remove the polymer when a contraceptive is no longer required and his sperm would not be affected.

Remote controlled birth control and sperm “nets” are weaving their way into the future of our contraceptives. But it isn’t all under our control. A study carried out by the European Union recently shows that our water is polluted with the chemicals typically found in our oral contraceptives. So whether we like it or not, the future it seems, is swimming with contraceptives.

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Features

10

Author Belinda McKeon on her novel Tender, College, and women in Irish theatre

A brief history of The Lad Bible

Staff writer Dearbháil Clarke speaks to the Trinity graduate in the wake of her second novel Tender making the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards shortlist

It's more popular than the BBC, The Irish Times and Instagram.

Tadgh Healy explores the reasons behind the Lad Bible's rise and examines the problems associated with its widening scope

Tadgh Healy Features editor

M

ARK ZUCKERBERG RECENTLY renounced Facebook’s famous motto “move fast and break things” which it is said once plastered their office walls. Facebook’s early philosophy was a fearless willingness to make mistakes. It needed to be brave, innovative, and above all else, ruthless, to surpass its competition. We forget it was not the first social network, but it very quickly became the best.

The interface was sleek, uniform and minimal, yet allowed users to make their pages highly personalised. It was about you. Facebook elevated the user, created an interactive community, whilst at the same time ensuring its own brand remained restrained and dependable: a facilitator, rather than the centre of attention.

Now, arguably, it is all about Facebook. Earlier and once larger competitors such as Friendster and MySpace are now forgotten. Facebook reigns and there is no one left to surpass. Today it boasts 1.5 billion active monthly users and 1 billion daily users on its mobile site. Instagram, probably its largest competitor, is owned by Facebook. Hence, the company motto is now the more conservative, and less memorable, “move fast with stable infrastructure.”

more popular than Instagram, The Daily Mail, Buzzfeed, and The Guardian, and the only news website above it (if you can call The Lad Bible a news website) is the BBC. In Ireland, it is the 14th most popular, ahead of all the above (including the BBC) as well as the Independent and The Irish Times. More astonishing still is the popularity the website has had through Facebook, and particularly through video. The Wall Street Journal reported that in April of this year The Lad Bible was the largest producer worldwide of video content on Facebook in terms of raw views. In a single month, it received 1.6 billion views, aided greatly by Facebook’s auto-play function.

“ The Lad Bible would scoff at Brian Friel’s insistence that “confusion is not an ignoble condition.”

Growing pains

The Lad Bible owes much of its success to this infrastructure. It is only four years old and like a younger Facebook has adopted the move-fastand break-things philosophy: Lads magazines FHM and Zoo this month announced their closures, joining the equally unprofitable Loaded and Nuts. All cited their audiences moving to online sites such as The Lad Bible.

The website was founded

by Alex Partridge in 2011, who soon sold it, going on to found the nearly as popular Unilad.

Now run by Arian Kalantari and Alexander Solomou, in a short time the website has grown to become the 12th most visited in the UK. It is

Despite this reach, and an advertising revenue of over £100,000 per month, The Lad Bible has not attracted investors in the same way as other young online-only publications such as Buzzfeed and Mashable. The brand is damaged from a history of misogyny, and to many these tendencies are still present, if slightly more latent. A recent picture-heavy story was titled, “Former drug cartel leader and detective have posed naked to promote peace in Colombia.” Another pictured a women relegated to the back seat of a car with a takeaway occupying the passenger seat.

Laura Bates of the site Everyday Sexism called The Lad

Bible representative of “a culture of misogyny sickeningly disguised as banter.”

Redefining the lad

The Lad Bible is attempting to become a more respectable venture, so it is these associations it says it wants to distance itself from. As a case in point, the controversial #CleavageThursday has been scrapped. Moreover, Mimi Turner, the marketing director for The Lad Bible’s publisher, 65twenty, says that in the last six months the proportion of female readers has increased from 20% to 27%.

“When people say ‘what’s a lad?’, a quarter of lads are actually women.” However, Turner does not concede that the editorial decision to discontinue #CleavageThursday was taken out of any obligation to the growing number of female lads, but rather because “those things are just not funny and clever enough to meet the content standards for what we need.”

Above all else The Lad Bible sees itself as fundamental in the evolution of the lad: “Magazines were of their time but this is just much bigger and I think it absolutely redefines what lads are,” says Turner.

Yet, it’s not immediately clear what that redefinition is. A visit to the Facebook page today will tell you that this community - and they are very keen to emphasise this is a community - hold an unapologetic reverence for many subjects: Jennifer Aniston, British exceptionalism, military and security forces, computer game nostalgia, large sandwiches and Jeremy Clarkson.

None of this seems particularly radical, and yet The Lad Bible continues to grow at an incredible rate.

Nor has the process of generating content changed very much in the lifetime of the site. A sense of community is so important because the content is entirely user generated.

The Lad Bible’s office receives over 1,000 submission a day, and a team of editors will sift through to find the most appropriate. It is almost a cross between social media and traditional journalism in relying on the public to capture images and video, combined with a selective editorial team. The model began as, and still is, a kind of online You’ve Been Framed.

I

F THERE IS any selection criteria, it is that successful submissions must be instrumental: they are intended to make you snigger, swell with pride or revulsion, shake your head in disbelief, empathise, and, ultimately, want to share it with friends.

But something connects all of these reactions: each must happen immediately. If there

is a point to a caption or a video, it has to be made quickly. The Lad Bible gets to the point quickly, and finishes the point quickly.

An example might be a recent video: “Crow Takes a Ride on A Window Wiper.” Not only is it short, unexpected and funny, it is also immediately understandable. The Lad Bible would scoff at Brian Friel’s insistence that “confusion is not an ignoble condition.”

Wherever there is a revelation, or surprise, or message to a post, it is not difficult to grasp, and when it is grasped, it generally does not prompt further thought. There is no appreciation for context, complexity or nuance. The content offers a path of least resistance; there is almost an encouragement for the brain to move on rather than ponder.

“

Where the Lad Bible is radical, where it is perhaps redefining the lad as it claims to do, is by expanding this short and perishable interest into more serious territory.

Refuge from nuance

Still, once more, none of this unique. This disposability of short and satisfyingly concluded narratives is not unique to The Lad Bible, although it is very good at it. It is a technique used by many websites with a revenue reliant on advertising per page view. You see, understand, react, and you move on. An objection is that attention spans are shortening, and sustained

communication is disappearing with such a bite-sized online discourse. However, such exclamations tend to overstate the point. If there is a desire to convey a message succinctly, new and expanding forms such a memes, vines, and GIFs will only facilitate that. The Lad Bible may be moving quickly, but it is not breaking everything.

At its root, the site’s huge popularity relies on that burst of satisfaction from understanding something quickly and easily. Indeed, satisfaction is the theme of a number of recent pictures posted to the Facebook page: A vacuum cleaner fits snugly between two skirting boards, and logs of timber fit together neatly like a jigsaw on the back of a truck. The Lad Bible has become a refuge from a messy and difficult world. Only here does everything fit together satisfyingly like a jigsaw. The Lad Bible community member is not asked to think or engage, but wallow in their own understanding.

We remember this is The Lad Bible. And yet, the objects of devotion here are the followers of The Lad Bible themselves. Much like Facebook, it is a model based on elevating the user, or as CEO Arian Kalantari puts it: “an uplifting approach. We like to glorify anyone from our community.”

If a short clip of a crow on a windscreen wiper fails to provide sustained critical engagement, but instead a short and perishable interest, the effect is relatively harmless. More accurately, it’s appropriate.

Where The Lad Bible is radical, where it is perhaps redefining the lad, as it claims to do, is by expanding this short and perishable interest into more serious territory.

The site recently posted footage of Russian forces firing cruise missiles at ISIS targets. It provided breaking news during the mass shootings in Paris on 13 November.

A high percentage of anyone under 30 will be aware of this.

Here a model built on elevating the reader’s sense of their own understanding at the expense of nuance and complexity, on providing quick, easy, and fragmented narratives, reveals its limitations. More balanced and less instrumental reporting is by contrast remarkable because it is so often unsatisfying. Brief moments of discovery amongst an unhappy confusion is the pervading condition. Above all, when a partial understanding is won, it is much harder to dispose of.

TENDER IS A novel centred in Trinity College in the late 1990s, which explores the complex and fumbling relationship between two characters, Catherine and James. The difficulties of homosexuality in 1990s Ireland are examined, although it is unfair to say that Tender is about homosexuality. It is more about the crazed tableau of sensations and emotions that engulfs every naive 18 year old flung into the big city. It is about insecurity, posing, obsession, sexuality: it is drenched in longing and uncertainty. It is an uncomfortably familiar insight placed on a comfortably familiar background.

Each character McKeon introduces is someone we have definitely met before; the accents are the same and the dialogue is laden with the typical banter and sarcasm which dances around real meaning.

McKeon conceded that elements of autobiography are inevitable: “Every character is a marriage of the remembered and the imagined, or the inhabited. Catherine has plenty of my younger self and my present self in her, but during the writing of the novel, she and all the other characters became their own selves.”

We see an honest Dublin through Catherine’s eyes.

Full of opportunity and danger, full of pompous age and zealous youth. Trinity is only the background to Catherine’s story, but there’s a clear walked-in fondness to the descriptions. “I have very good memories of my time at Trinity,” McKeon agreed. “Those were four great years for me; though they weren’t always easy… I spent a lot of my time in the library, reading as much as I could, and using it as a base from which to wander out onto the ramp at intervals to chat and stare at boys. They were good times.”

McKeon’s debut novel, Solace, won best Irish newcomer at the 2011 Bord Gáis awards, but she is non-committal on how she will fare in this year’s ceremony on 25 November.

“The competition in my category is tough, to say the least,” she admitted, referring to the shortlisting of seasoned novelists such as Anne Enright and Edna O’Brien. “I haven’t yet read Edna’s and Kevin’s novels, but I have read all the others and admire them a lot.”

Waking the Feminists

Moving on, we turn to the recent controversy inspired by the release of the Abbey Theatre’s 1916 centenary programme, Waking the Nation.

Only one of the ten plays announced was written by a woman, and her commission was to write a children’s version of one of the male-written plays. As a playwright under commission to the Abbey Theatre and a long-standing critic of the gender bias apparent in the Abbey’s programming, McKeon was incensed.

“It bugged me in 2004, when the Abbey’s centenary programme was almost entirely male, but when I saw that the Abbey - and a director I consider intelligent and open-minded - were still up to this shit in 2015, with a pro-

For now, to stand still and listen may be a better motto for The Lad Bible.

Photo by Rich Gilligan

gramme which was effectively 100% male in terms of playwrights: I was furious.”

She voiced this anger on Twitter alongside a fellow TCD graduate, the set designer Lian Bell. This gave birth to the #wakingthefeminists, which gained support not only from a strong body of Irish playwrights, but from popular icons such as Meryl Streep and Saoirse Ronan. A resultant public meeting was held in the Abbey Theatre, where an incredible turnout of female Irish playwrights and actors gave testimonies to the injustices they felt and the changes they’d like to bring about in Irish theatre.

“

The novel is about insecurity, posing, obsession, sexuality: it is drenched in longing and uncertainty. It is an uncomfortably familiar insight placed on a comfortably familiar background.

“It’s far from just an Abbey problem,” McKeon stressed.

“Gender bias has long been internalised and operative all across the arts. In theatre, the Gate and the Druid are just as bad, if not worse. Everyone involved in programming needs to cop themselves on and become aware of the unexamined biases with which they work.”

McKeon denied that her voice has been central to the development of the movement, saying: “I’m glad to be on board, but the Dublinbased theatre artists are the ones doing all the hard work.

And there’s a lot of work to do.”

When asked if she had any parting advice for Trinity’s young writers, she mentioned Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird. “Marina Carr recommended it to me when I took her playwriting class at Trinity in 1998,” she explained.

“I’m a very big believer in what Anne Lamott calls the shitty first draft. Just try to make a habit of writing, even if you’re not happy with what you’re producing at first.”

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Features

11

Symphysiotomy and the media

Sarah Taaffe-Maguire outlines why sustained media reporting of this cruel medical procedure and its legacy is more necessary

Sarah Taaffe McGuire Deputy features editor

S

YMPHYSIOTOMY IS A PROCEDURE that cuts the symphysis pubis, the joint that holds the pelvis together. It was performed on hundreds of women in Ireland from the 1940s to 1980s. A few cases of symphysiotomy have been recorded in more recent years.

Ireland is the lone country in the West to have the practice continue after it was rejected for its dangers in the 18th century. Irish doctors reemployed the procedure to make their mark on the medical world, to export to the missions and to prevent women from having caesarean sections which could only be performed an estimated four times. That would have provided a restriction on the number of children a woman could have.

Survivors experience a myriad of side effects including incontinence, severe orthopaedic issues, acute pain and psychological trauma.

Inadequate compensation

The women mostly did not know what was done to them, let alone why. In Ireland talking about your body, particularly a female body, was rare.

Complaining was not done.

Doctors were experts and trusted accordingly. It is only in the last decade that survivors have come together and began to make sense of what happened to them. The state has had to catch up.

After years of advocacy and dozens of impending cases against the state for allowing the procedures to happen in its hospitals, the Irish government responded. A payment scheme was devised to stem the flow of litigants. It was rejected by the group representing 99% of survivors,

Survivors of Symphysiotomy.

The absence of an investigation, apology and individualised awards for the survivors as well as the indemnifying of religious orders and perpetrators received condemnation from the Irish Council of Civil Liberties, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and Amnesty International Ireland. In July of 2014, the United Nations Human Rights Committee held that the payment scheme was in contravention of international law. The scheme proceeded as planned.

Once the scheme had been implemented the number of news stories declined. A decisive government action appeared to have extinguished the media curiosity; the problem had been solved, the issue concluded. It is at this point that the media is particularly needed. There remains a general ignorance of symphysiotomy despite the government response. It’s tricky to pronounce and defies belief.

This adds to the need to have it in the spotlight. Every time there is press coverage at least one new survivors sees it, realises what happened to her and comes forward. Without broad public knowledge of symphysiotomy there is a limit to the opposition that survivors’ advocacy group, Survivors of Symphysiotomy, can rally.

When awareness is low, so too is political will to take action. Without intense media pressure there is no impetus for the government to provide an effective remedy.

Symphysiotomy remains a political non-issue. TDs will not have to answer questions on its handling, it will not be mentioned on the doorsteps or referred to in manifestos.

As survivors are elderly women and the problem is gynaecological there is a limit to the political capital they can garner without media reporting.

Media reporting is essential to get justice for survivors.

Media attention

Survivors of Symphysiotomy attempt to keep the plight of survivors and the payment scheme failures in the public arena. This is only possible through generating news stories themselves. Where Irish media outlets have been minimal and non-investigative, Al Jazeera has stepped in. In the last year they have compiled four reports. Each one has interviewed survivors, given an overview of the struggle and been critical of government action.

BBC Radio 4, CNN and The Guardian have featured similar reports. The few Irish media reports have been when the Scheme Assessor, Judge Maureen Harding Clark, has passed comment on the large number of refusals or on the couple of occasions when a TD has questioned the Minister for Health. It is plausible that without the legal challenge against symphysiotomy the issue may have entirely gone off the radar of the Irish media.

What does that say of Irish media and of legacy abuse? If there is not unrelenting agitation by a survivor group, an issue will be forgotten about.

If it were not for Survivors of Symphysiotomy making an issue of all of the scheme’s failures and publishing press releases the issue could never have been taken up. Certainly without the agitation there would be no assessor’s response or TD questions and the few media reports would not have occurred. It leads you to believe that our media reporting system may not be fit for purpose; it requires sensationalisation.

The tragedy of the Magdalen Laundries seems to be more widely heard of. While a greater number of women were impacted, it is questionable whether the story would have reached as large an audience were it not for the film, The Magdalene Sisters. Does institutional abuse depend on

Photo by Nevit Dilmer

dramatisation to garner media coverage?

There are plenty of stories to be written. Stories that Ireland needs to hear and needs to address: Retired judge, Yvonne Murphy, is doing the report into Mother and Baby Homes, yet her report into symphysiotomy has been heavily criticised by the United Nations Human Rights Committee;.

Mary Daly, independent historian for the Mother and Baby Homes report, was called as an expert witness for the state in defending symphysiotomy litigation.

Dr Peter Boylan of the National Maternity Hospital has featured in the Sunday Independent saying “patients need to be embraced as partners,” yet will defend the use of symphysiotomy in court.

Injustice

Serious flaws with the payment scheme have not been addressed. The scheme was not advertised in any local

media nor in countries such as the UK, Australia and America where survivors live. This was at least done in the (albeit flawed) Magdalen Laundry McAleese scheme. Survivors are still coming forward having realised what was done to them was a symphysiotomy and that it was wrong. Those women are left out by the scheme.

GP records from up to 50 years ago are requested by the assessor. Non-treating doctors or specialist evidence of injuries is not admissible.

The awards are paltry. In most cases they will not cover the decades of expense a symphysiotomy has resulted in. If you want to accept the award you must sign a form indemnifying not only the state but also, bizarrely, religious orders. There has been no investigation into the practice nor an attempt to prosecute anyone who is still alive and performed the operations. It seems to fit in with the broad-

er Irish trend of allowing religious institutions to evade accountability that was seen with the Church's’ child abuse.

The role of religion in symphysiotomy has been ignored.

The state’s response is the only one. Yet there is no apology or admission of wrongdoing from the state. The lie that the operations were necessary is promulgated. Leo Varadkar’s defence of the procedure has gone unchallenged in the media.

Without media reporting we can never come to terms and take account of what happened, get justice and make sure it never happens again.

Specifically, without Irish media reporting, survivors do not feel like their own story has been listened to and heard by the society that was complicit in the atrocity.

This government has done nothing to improve the lives of survivors. They want you to think the issue is solved and they did a good job. Noth-

ing could be further from the truth but the average Irish citizen could be forgiven for their ignorance.

“

The awards are paltry. In most cases they will not cover the decades of expense a symphysiotomy has resulted in.

What will the new leaving cert politics and society subject actually achieve?

While CSPE is intended to encourage citizenship, it is commonly seen as a fluffy subject, an easy grade requiring little study. Will this new subject be more of the same?

Bláithín Sheil Staff writer

I

T WAS ANNOUNCED this month that a subject named Politics and Society will be added to the Leaving Certificate Curriculum from 2016, with the first formal exams taking place in 2018. The course will cover topics such as power and decision, rights and responsibilities, globalisation and identity, and sustainable development.

Students will be exposed to the ideas of the main political thinkers historically and at present, ranging from the revolutionary socialist Karl Marx, to US economist Milton Friedman, a major advocate of the free market.

Described by Minister for Education and Skills Jan O’Sullivan as an opportunity for students to “explore how politics affects communities on a national and international level,” it will “provide them with an understanding of how power works in a democratic society and how they can play an active and engaged role in public debate.”

It is in theory a positive step in stimulating political engagement. Irish politics has been re-energised by public involvement - particularly in the wake of the economic crash, there are protests left, right and centre. The appearance of new political parties such as Renua, Stop the Water Tax Socialist Party, and the Anti-Austerity Alliance People Before Profit Party, has added a new dimension to the Irish political scene.

CSPE and Curriculum

This development is long overdue. Democracy is founded on the principle of the decision of the majority, but for the majority to decide, they must first be informed. It is often cited that CSPE has failed as a subject to inform students on the basic operation of poli-

tics, and the absence until now of a follow-on subject at Leaving Certificate only deepens the crevice this has created.

While CSPE is intended to encourage citizenship, it is commonly seen as a fluffy subject, an easy grade requiring little study. According to Dr Ann Devitt, Assistant Professor in Modern Languages at Trinity, the issue lies “on how it is assessed.” The fact that the education system is so heavily based on the examdriven culture currently thriving in schools, in Dr Devitt’s opinion, has a negative impact on teaching and learning in schools. One would hope that Politics and Society would encourage active learning, but this may ultimately be quashed by the race for students to achieve as many points as possible.

The reality of the situation is that some students leave school unable to distinguish between the role of Taoiseach and that of Uachtarán na hÉireann, and unaware of the left-right divide in politics.

Although this is not the case for a lot of students, there is certainly scope for politics to be better administered in schools, and for the lacuna to be filled. Ivana Bacik, Associate Professor in the School of Law and Independent Senator for the Dublin University constituency, agrees that this course will ensure the provision of “a basic foundation in civic awareness” for all second level students, regardless of the career path they follow upon leaving school.

This brings to light the current question of lowering the voting age to 16. Bacik would favour this change as it would help to “increase levels of engagement with the political process among young people.” But in order for this to be worthwhile, the youth must be informed, ensuring young people have the necessary tools to make informed decisions.

The curriculum includes in its objectives an “understand-

ing of concepts which underpin contemporary systems of government and of the diverse models for making these concepts operational,” and a focus in another section on debating and discussing ideas on being an effective and active citizen.

The word “debate” surfaces multiple times as a core aim and method of the course.

This is an opportunity to correct the shortcomings of our political education. However, it is possible that the subject will turn out to be similar to its older sibling, and become another fluff subject. Bacik hopes the course will focus on various aspects of governance in Ireland including the legislative process and the content of the constitution.

If structured correctly, it holds potential to be extremely engaging and challenging. Ideally, students will be equipped with a better working knowledge of the way the world functions. In covering a range of social and political theories, and studying how they relate to current issues, the course, according to Jan O’Sullivan, will endeavour to develop critical thinking skills among students and to encourage active citizenship.

Though the extreme examfocus highlighted by Dr Devitt, may pose some issues in terms of the efficacy of the programme. Perhaps this is an opportunity for the education system to be reviewed in its entirety, to determine if such exam-based learning is really the best means of education?

Life skills

Dr Niamh Connolly of the School of Law, has highlighted the benefit of having a diverse range of knowledge upon leaving school. Her view is that it does not benefit students to specialise too narrowly before university: “It's good for all of us to know something about different fields before we choose to specialise.” Therefore, this course will not only benefit future students of politics and law; it will also equally

“

The fact that the education system is so heavily based on the exam-driven culture currently thriving in schools, in Dr Devitt’s opinion, has a negative impact on teaching and learning in schools

benefit students entering into other disciplines.

When asked about the necessary preparation for a student entering university, she responded that students do not necessarily “have to come to university knowing lots about their chosen course already. I think that a student could study Physics or Spanish or Politics as an optional Leaving Certificate subject and be equally well-equipped in each case - perhaps with slightly different approaches, methods and perspectives - to study Law at university.”

W

HILE THIS DOES not particularly support the argument that Law and Politics students are under-equipped on entering university, it does support the contention that students entering into other domains will have benefitted from studying Politics in the same way that a Political Science student will benefit from having studied Chemistry. Accordingly, it is fair to conclude that not only will the new subject naturally benefit prospective Law and Political Science students, it will benefit everyone, no matter what domain they are continuing onto.

In the United Kingdom, Law schools frequently prefer Law students not to have taken Law as an A-level as it may teach students to think in the incorrect way. This further supports the need for a wellrounded political education at secondary school level for the benefit of all the students who will never study Politics, Law or Society again. It gives them the basics in order to stimulate them to keep actively engaged in politics outside the domain of work or study. It seems to be more beneficial to students in general, rather than being beneficial to a particular class of students.

Student interest?

Are young students interested in politics? If not, perhaps

it is due to a lack of exposure, which should be rectified by the course. Leinster House is well accustomed to protests, and perhaps the most significant indicator of public engagement was the debate and activity surrounding the Marriage Equality Referendum. In the months leading up to the referendum many third-level institutions launched extensive voting registration drives on campus to ensure maximum participation of young people, whereas up until that point, student participation in elections and referendums had been quiet.

Many school-goers are not of voting age, but nevertheless, this did not stop secondary school students from engaging in the debate. It was an issue that affected many of them directly, so although unable to vote, they took to social media, and to the streets, to campaign for their rights, urging people to vote where they could not.

Mount Temple School Students drew the gay pride flag in the shape of a rainbow outside the school gates in support of the Yes Campaign, and in a school referendum 89% of the students voted Yes. This is a good example of the commitment and resolution of school students to become politically active, showing that if given the necessary tools, they will have their voices heard.

When asked about the challenge of engaging young people in politics, Dr Devitt responded that the issue is “to engage students and people of any age in issues of importance to civil society, in global and local terms.” The new course has “more power” to achieve this as it would have “value” in the current points system, meaning that students would be eager to take it.

This raises the question of why students study in the first place. Surely it is paradoxical that students would be encouraged to study Politics and Society because of the points

value it can offer, when the core idea of studying politics is not the emphasis on rotelearning, but in fact the development of critical thinking skills?

Dr Devitt points out that if the subject is aimed at developing critical thinking skills, “one would hope that students would come to question this value system as part of the course.”

Bias

Naturally, the idea of teaching politics at school level comes with it the fear of a biased curriculum. Who is to say that the curriculum will not teach students to believe in a certain set of values? Luckily, the government itself will not be designing the curriculum.

This operation is managed through the NCAA and generally engages any interested parties in consultation. Moreover, the NCAA has consulted the student body quite widely in recent years through designing and developing courses, so this will likely occur for the creation of the new course.

But although the NCAA is independent to a certain extent, it is fundamentally an instrument of the state. Dr Devitt would be amazed if it were to promote anarchy. But she would also be surprised if the course did not promote critical thinking. So, if the course was to be inherently biased, if successfully taught, the students should be able to pick up on this as a result. If they did, then the course would have achieved its goal.

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Features

12

Archbishop Martin - support for divestment in Irish education comes from unlikely quarters Archbishop Diarmuid Martin explains why he supports the divestment movement, and where he thinks the resistance to it is coming from.

Eva O'Brien Staff writer

D

I V E S T M E N T. PATRONAGE. ETHOS. Faith formation. These are some of the words at the centre of what has become an increasingly heated debate in recent months about the divestment of religion from Irish schools – but start trying to explain what they mean, and you might quickly find yourself in a state of considerable bewilderment. And you won’t be alone.

Abstract role

These are words that Archbishop Diarmuid Martin struggled to define when I spoke to him last week about divestment and the role of faith in Irish society. Divestment is the process of removing Irish national schools from the patronage of the Catholic Church, but what does the patron of a school do? “It’s somewhat vague,” the Archbishop admits, adding wryly, “if you wanted to put it down in real terms, if something goes wrong in the school you’ll be sued. There is legal responsibility, and therefore some authority.” The more contentious part of patronage, however, is the responsibility of the patron for maintaining what Martin calls “This very strange word: ‘ethos.’ I find ethos a very hard word to grasp because it’s ethereal.

What is a ‘Catholic ethos,’ for instance? In many cases, these words aren’t defined.”

Colm Keher, principal of the Loreto secondary school in Kilkenny, spoke to me about how this Catholic ethos translates to tangible school policy.

“The ethos is very important to us,” he said. “Most lessons will begin with a prayer, Christian symbols are evident in the school and there are three school Masses in the year. We have a school oratory and promote the development of faith and the practice of the same.

We also have a strong emphasis on social justice, promoting a care for those in need and for the environment.”

In this school, then, at least, the phrase Catholic ethos is translated into a wide range of activities and programmes, at least by aspiration. Yet, as the Archbishop pointed out, in some cases it might end up being nothing more than “a nice mission statement over the door of the school.”

It’s more than a curious quibble with jargon. The way these terms are interpreted has real implications for attempts to change the system, such as divestment.

Perhaps more importantly, the fact that we don’t instinctively know any more, what a Catholic ethos means, points, Archbishop Martin says, to significant changes in our society.

“A lot of this was formulated when Ireland was different.

The vast majority of the population was regularly Massgoing and clearly religious.

Nobody attempted to say what Catholic ethos was or wasn’t, it was presumed.”

It is obvious that something in this model needs to change, the Archbishop stressed to me. Mass attendance among Catholics now stands at around 45% according to the most favourable statistics, and as low as 14% in Dublin. And yet 95 out of 100 schools in Ireland are still run according to a “Catholic ethos,” whatever the particular school may take that to mean.

Reflecting society

In this context, transferring Catholic schools to other patrons certainly seems at a basic level, a sensible idea, in the face of growing demand for non-Catholic school places, recorded particularly by organisations such as Educate Together. And yet when it comes to the practicalities of changing a school, few people seem willing to actually undertake the task.

Certainly the process is not happening as quickly as Archbishop Martin would wish.

“The big problem that I find,” he says resignedly, “is that if you talk about divestment everybody would agree, but if you talk about divesting your school, nobody will agree!” He believes that the problem is “fundamentally a resistance to change.”

However, it may be more complicated than this, as Keher testifies. In some cases where a school is at the heart of a community, its identity as Catholic defines a kind of spirit of the school, and this can have more importance than people who urge the practical advantages of divestment will admit.

Confronted with the idea of the Loreto becoming nondenominational, Keher shifts from using the word “ethos” to the stronger “identity”: “If this school were to lose its Catholic identity it would no longer be ‘Loreto’. I have no sense from our parent or student body that there is a demand to change the ethos of the school.

I cannot see it happening for at least 30 years, if ever.”

The Archbishop, however, argues that clinging so strongly to institutions of faith may, paradoxically, weaken the religion they represent. He draws parallels between Irish society at the moment and the community of Quebec, which at one time was “extremely Catholic. Perhaps even more so than Ireland. What began to happen there,” he explained to me, “is that the structures no longer represented the reality, and people drifted away from faith. Yet people still continued to think and act as though the world that built these structures existed, until something happened, and they collapsed.”

Are we are at the stage where the Catholic-run structures underpinning our lives are no longer representing our reality? Indeed, Catholic teaching, the Archbishop suggested to me, is becoming

in many ways a kind of ceremony without substance. “In primary school every child in the class makes their communion and their confirmation, with very few exceptions.

Confirmation is becoming like a school party, where everyone participates and feels left out if they don’t. I had a letter from the HSE asking me why a Muslim child wasn’t allowed to do her confirmation.”

Reclaiming and reinforcing

For him, divestment is about reclaiming the Catholic spirit and reinforcing it, where it still exists. “I’m not interested in being patron of an alleged Catholic school, just to be patron. I am interested, if there are parents who want to send their children to a school with a clear Catholic ethos, that they should get that.”

Colm Keher believes there is still plenty of room for such schools: “I do think there is currently a strong demand for Catholic education and would like the State to reflect this demand.” Based on his experience as principal, he believes that there is a “significant minority” of parents who send their children to his schools because they are “practicing Catholics who actively want a Catholic school for their daughters,” and a further category (“possibly a majority of our cohort”) who are “non practicing or occasionally practising Catholics and are happy that their daughters are receiving some knowledge of the Catholic faith.”

F

OR SUCH PEOPLE it seems a favourable outcome that Catholic schools might become more intensely Catholic as a result of divestment. It has been pointed out, however, that this idea presents problems of its own. Labour TD Joanna Tuffy, quoted in The Irish Times last February, expressed concerns that the divestment process would lead only to more segregation, with only more welloff Irish parents exercising the greater parental choice that divestment would provide, and schools becoming less inclusive than they currently are.

Archbishop Martin admits that this is a difficulty: “There is a challenge there. You would have to find ways of having inter-school connectivity – a different model.”

He worries too about the tendency, when Catholic schools are in a minority, for them to become regarded as “elite schools,” in his words.

“One of the big difficulties in Britain and in the United States is that the Catholic schools do develop a reputation for being ‘good schools’ and so there’s a huge pressure for people to go to them.”

This concern is born out by Colm Keher, who emphasised that “Loreto is a very good school with a very good reputation. It is probably safe to say that none of the parents would choose Loreto if it were not a ‘good’ school.”

Secular model?

Tuffy is one person advocating a “move to a state multidenominational model bringing all stakeholders on board,” as a more long-term alternative to divestment. Both Archbishop Archbishop Martin and Colm Keher disagree with this view, warning against approaches to teaching becoming too secular.

“Are we maintaining a vision of a Catholic Ireland which no longer exists?” queries the Archbishop. “I think we are.

But is Ireland becoming radically secularised – I don’t think so. We’ve got a mixed society.

What’s the opposite of faith education in schools? Is it that faith becomes totally marginalised, perhaps for people for whom faith is very important?

There’s no such thing as neutrality in this debate. You can’t impose faith on anybody, but that doesn’t mean that faith isn’t present in public life.”

Keher was keen to stress the importance of taking into account faith and spirituality as a fundamental part of education; inherent, he said, in its very meaning. “I don’t believe that education is merely about creating engines for industry or economic units, but has a much deeper goal which is to enable people to live fulfilled and meaningful lives. For many, faith and spiritual development are an important part of this and fundamental to the concept of education.”

While maintaining the need for the continued role of faith in society, both men are insistent that an inclusive approach is best, where, in Martin’s words, “believers and nonbelievers can live together

in a civic space and respect the contribution that each brings.” This kind of space can flourish, Keher believes, even within a school with a strong Catholic ethos such as Loreto.

“Our RE programme is designed to be inclusive and promotes an understanding of all faiths and none,” he claims. He adds: “it is important to differentiate between Religious Education and indoctrination - which I don’t think has existed in schools for at least two generations.”

Broader questions

One question that people seem unwilling to address is the difficulty of having a society where faith is very important, yet where at the same time every approach to faith is genuinely welcomed. If we say that we are fine with everyone around us believing different things, we can no longer claim that our faith is our way into heaven. No more can we say that in a community defined by its pluralism and no longer by the faith it collectively professes, our religion is about being part of a collective religious body, whether Christian or otherwise. What, then, is faith for?

This question will become increasingly hard to ignore, as the movement towards divesting schools gathers momentum, with Minister Jan O’Sullivan last week announcing that 13 new primary and secondary schools would open in 2017 and 2018 as part of the programme, and communities in 19 areas being earmarked for Educate Together schools.

At the same time, there are plans to change the religious

curriculum, with less emphasis on what is called “faith formation” and more on the ability to “think critically about religion,” as one recent report led by sociologists from Trinity College recommended.

These developments do appear to acknowledge that children now are “asking questions which we only began to think about when we were 21,” as the Archbishop comments.

Yet one cohort of people who have been remarkably underrepresented in the commentary around religion in schools and the issue of divestment are the students who will be arguably affected most by any changes. Asked whether he believes students care about how their school approaches religion, Mr Keher acknowledged that while he had a good idea about how parents felt about the school and its religious ethos, when it came to students, “I am not so sure.

We tend to generalisee so it is very important that we do not make assumptions. I do know that many young people do want to develop their faith which is important to them.”

It has been clear from the nature of the debate around this issue that this is about more than who gets sued when things go wrong in schools. As changes in education are continually rolled out, politicians and communities will be forced to address the wider implications of these changes, the unheard voices of those whose needs they are attempting to meet, and whether these structures truly reflect who we are as a society.

Illustration by Louise Weitbrecht

“

It is important to differentiate between

Religious Education and indoctrination – which I don’t think has existed in schools for at least two generations.

- Archbishop of Dublin Dr. Diarmuid Martin

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Comment Without a proper class narrative, Trinity’s liberal culture is oppressive If we really care about social issues, surely we want these ideas to permeate through all echelons of society and not just those which we are a part of.

This is where Trinity falls down, writes senior reporter Conall Monagahan HAT’S WHAT HAPPENS when a knacker…” she said in a group of people, liberal-minded people, people like herself. Up until that point, conversation had drifted between topics such as LGBTQ+ rights and feminism. Topics filled with words such as “oppression”, “elitism”, and “inequality”. However, when it came to class inequality, none of these words were mentioned.

Not one member of the group called her out on using a slur associated with the common caricature of the working class. No-one even flinched at its sincere utterance. Wealth inequality was not their concern. A few minutes later, they were back to discussing the oppression of women in society. The irony didn’t seem to strike anyone.

This is not an isolated incident. If you listen carefully, you can spot examples during any given week at Trinity. I’ll give one more.

“T

The word on campus

Two days later, I was walking to a pub with a friend. We needed to get past two men who were standing in the way of a narrow alley, at the end of which was our destination.

They spoke with strong Dublin accents and the way they were swaying suggested that they had been enjoying some drinks. We waited patiently for them to notice us. When they did, they apologised and step to one side so we could pass. After they were a few metres behind us, my friend leaned in into me and whispered sardonically: “The local wildlife”.

I don’t mean to shame either of these people, so the events are purposely vague.

They’re included because their comments help elucidate a worrying trend within certain circles of Trinity PC liberals – the trend being how little some of these fighters for equality seem to care for those less financially well-off.

Political correctness is centred on arguing for the rights of the vulnerable and oppressed within our society, which is an admirable intention. Many who follow the ideology have been at the forefront of great campaigns such as getting a marriage referendum, leading prochoice activism, and attempting to stop direct provision.

They’ve also been some of the strongest opponents of racism and sexism.

However, while still using much of the vernacular of traditional leftism, many have forgotten about one of the groups that equality rhetoric was originally intended to serve: the working class.

Erasing of class

I was recently at an event arranged by some Trinity students associated with a personal-politics movement.

The group asked attendants to take part in a privilege test. The idea was simple. We would be asked ten questions about our gender, race, and sexuality. If we felt, for example, that we weren’t discriminated based on our gender, then we would give ourselves one privilege point.

According to the test, the people with ten privilege points were at the top of society while the people with zero privilege points were at the bottom. It was the people at the top who exercised oppression to keep the others down.

It might sound like an admirable idea to some. However, the way it was conducted should leave any reasonable person with a little unease.

There was not a single question about financial, geographical or family circumstance in that test. As long as you were white, male, and straight, your existence was apparently clear sailing.

Obviously, being white, male, and straight brings unfair advantages in western culture. However, to reduce privilege down to just these things is to simplify the incredibly complex and multifaceted concept that is oppression, to the point of it becoming hearsay or subject to trend.

The proof is in the pudding.

We sat as a group of Trinity students, which is one of the most elite institutions in the

country, on a Saturday when others less well off would have had to work, discussing how some of us were the most oppressed individuals in society. I can’t be the only one who feels there’s something eerie about that.

When I brought this up, everyone admitted that a privilege test should include a broader set of questions.

For an ephemeral moment we were in total agreement about how bad wealth inequality was, but then it was over. We returned to our privilege test, which was left unaltered. Our rhetoric went unchanged. Wealth inequality as a form of oppression was not mentioned again.

Hollow activism

I was reminded of all those conversations I’ve had since entering Trinity where people are passively willing to admit that wealth disparity is a bad thing but show nowhere near the same conviction about it as they do for other social issues.

Obviously, I’m not speaking about everyone in Trinity.

Some great work is done for those less fortunate than the average student. VTP, SVP, and TAP are all testament to that, and that’s just to name a few. However, that does not change the fact that the current debate about injustice seems entirely preoccupied with certain issues at the expense of others.

There has been a surge in debate over free speech in the last couple months, with some suggesting we need to protect oppressed and marginalised groups from hate speech. I feel the argument has been documented enough in the college media that there’s no need for another summary of the sides.

Aside from the topic itself, though, what’s interesting about the debate is the ques-

tion of who counts as an oppressed or marginalised.

Scanning through the last three articles published by Trinity News around the topic, the marginalised groups mentioned are Muslims, the travelling community, those who have been sexually assaulted, LGBTQ+, and racial groups. I’ve yet to see any free speech arguments mention the working class.

The working class are as relevant to this debate as any other group. Consider The Catherine Tate Show, where the character Lauren embodies the “chav” caricature.

Hannah Frankel writes in the Times Education Supplement that Lauren “can leave working-class people feeling patronised and laughed at” – yet there was no uproar last year when Tate’s name appeared on the list of potential Phil speakers.

C

HRIS MCGEAL, IN a recent Guardian piece, spoke to Dee Davis, a local of Bettyville Kentucky, which is described as “America’s poorest white town”. Davis and others successfully prevented CBS from remaking Beverly Hillbillies. According to the piece, “the planned programme reflected a sense that white people living in poorer communities were blamed for their condition”.

Davis stated, “There’s this feeling here like people are looking down on you. Feeling like it’s OK to laugh at you, to pity you. You’re not on the same common ground for comparison as someone who’s better off or living in a better place.”

In Ireland’s case, shows like “Damo & Ivor” and “Hardy Bucks” portray the working class as dumb, dirty and naturally deserving of less. As far as I know, there’s been no col-

lege debate around the ethics of such shows, and there’s been no petition or online campaign trying to improve the media’s portrayal of such groups.

And we’re not just ignoring those who are poor within the parameters of our own state. Because of the effects of globalisation, most of us are contributing to the plight of the economically deprived all around the world. You would think this would be a focal point around college, but the recent visit of Tim Cook suggests otherwise.

In a University Times article published last week summarising Tim Cook’s talk with the Phil, the phrase “human rights” is used five times.

Tim Cook is quoted as saying, “It takes courage to overcome oppression.” He was speaking about the need for racial, gender, and sexual diversity.

However, his stance against oppression doesn’t extend to the workers of Foxconn, the leading manufacturing partner of Apple. Foxconn have been at the centre of controversy over how they treats their workers for years now.

There have been explosions in their factories leading to several deaths and allegations of using underage workers.

They have had to put nets up to prevent the increasing amount of suicides taking place inside.

In a New York Times piece released in 2012, a year after Tim Cook became CEO, a former executive of Apple said: “We’ve known about labour abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on. Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

It’s disturbing that no one thought this was an issue worth addressing in relation

“

I was walking to a pub with a friend.

We needed to get past two men with strong Dublin accents and the way they were swaying suggested that they had been enjoying some drinks. They apologised and step to one side so we could pass. My friend leaned in into me and whispered sardonically: “The local wildlife”

to human rights. Regardless of what Cook has done to diversify his staff, if he’s in any way contributed to the deaths and injuries of several innocent people then he is not a human rights activist.

I’m not trying to demean the personal being political.

The way women and minorities are treated in society is an important issue, one that should be given full support.

My fear is that those in Trinity who are ignoring the class element of equality are themselves belittling the issues that they stand by.

Expanding outreach

PC culture, in my experience, has created almost a second language around campuses, and one that seems entirely confined to its students.

Going to a school that sociologists would define as “lower middle class”, I had never heard of political correctness before entering college. I knew a lot of people from minority backgrounds, in fact more than I do now, and yes, jokes would have been made at their expense.

There was never any spite involved, though. We had our own boundaries about what was too far and no longer considered a joke. The way we spoke to each other was a product of solidarity, a mutual attempt to make friends, of “having a laugh”.

When I came here, I quickly realised the way I had learned to talk to people was offensive to some and proceeded to change it. I was perfectly fine with that, as I, like most, don’t want to offend people.

However, not all the people I know went to universities and had the chance of learning this second language, and usually it was those less well off than myself who didn’t.

If PC views are only reaching people in certain cohorts,

then they can easily be manipulated into a way of fostering a sense of moral superiority amongst a certain group over another. Suddenly, political correctness seems less liberal and more like a return to conservatism of early 20th century Britain.

If we really care for these social issues, surely we want these ideas to permeate through all echelons of society and not just those which we are a part of.

We need to stop pretending that this attitude about social issues is self-evident.

People have been around a long time and these views are relatively new. Unless we share the resources to be financially comfortable, as well as to learn, it’s unfair to vilify those who don’t immediately come around to a new way of thinking.

If we really care about equality, we will be out on the streets campaigning for better education funding at all levels, so that people from all backgrounds can become aware of everyone’s equal opportunities and stake in society. We will campaign for better conditions for low paid workers to prevent the alienation of the working class, which has, according to social scientists like Robert Ford and commentators such as Owen Jones, been partly responsible for the increasing support for far right groups across Europe.

We will fight for these things and more – not only because they will help us achieve our goal of a socially liberal democracy, but also because a state that gives everyone, without exception, the opportunity of living comfortably is a state worth fighting for.

Photo by Eoin Cambey

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Comment

15

Is no-platforming the correct response to messages we don’t like?

Quashing free speech has frightening connotations. While no-platforming a transphobe may seem tempting depending on your beliefs, would this be preferable to opening a dialogue on the prejudice the trans community faces?

Greta Warren Contributing writer

L

AST MONTH, A petition created by Rachael Melhuish, women’s officer of Cardiff university students’ union, called on the university board to cancel an appearance by second-wave feminist Germaine Greer on the topic of Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century due to her unapologetically transphobic beliefs. This sparked a somewhat lessthan-friendly conversation over whether or not one has the right to prevent someone from expressing their opinions, even when they are potentially harmful and triggering to those they pertain to.

This is not the first time Greer’s personal brand of feminism has come under fire. The author is best known for The Female Eunuch, a part scholarly, part polemical analysis of female sexuality, widely regarded as a key text of the second wave of feminism.

Its sequel, The Whole Woman generated controversy for several reasons, among them a comparison of female genital mutilation to male circumcision. She also asserts her belief that trans women who were assigned male at birth are not “real women”, claiming that “the insistence that man-made women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males”.

Just two years earlier, Greer had attempted to oppose the appointment of physicist Rachael Padman as a fellow of the women-only Newnham College, on the grounds that Padman had been assigned the male gender at birth.

More recently, in The Beautiful BoyGreer used the image of a 15-year-old boy for the cover of an art history book aimed to “advance women’s reclamation of their capacity for, and right to, visual pleasure”, without his permission.

Melhuish’s petition gained traction on social media, prompting Greer to give an interview on BBC Newsnight where she defended her views, branding Glamour magazine’s awarding of woman of the year to Caitlyn Jenner “misogynist”, and insinuating that Jenner’s decision to undergo sex-reassignment surgery was an attempt to steal “the limelight that the other female members of the [Kardashian-Jenner] family were enjoying”. Greer mis-

gendered Jenner throughout her answer, before going on to state that “it is simply not true that intersexual people suffer in a way that other people don’t suffer”.

For the sake of argument, disregard the irony of a “feminist” (to use the term loosely) icon, who has fought to deconstruct our socialised ideas of femininity, insisting that transgender women “don’t look like, sound like, or behave like women”. By the standards of anyone who has any awareness whatsoever of trans issues or intersexuality, it’s hard to construe these comments as anything less than ignorant and grossly offensive or to be anything other than embarrassed on her behalf. Nevertheless, this controversy raises two questions; who should benefit from feminism, and should an unabashedly transphobic person be permitted to express these opinions?

Intersectionality

Since its inception, the feminist movement has never quite reached a consensus on who exactly it is designed to empower.

The women’s suffrage movement of the early 20th century secured the vote for women, but in many countries this right was reserved for those who owned land, while in a number of Southern US States, African-American women could not access this right up until the 1960s.

Meanwhile, the women of Saudi Arabia and the Vatican City have yet to be granted it.

This insensitivity towards women of underprivileged and minority groups was ironically reflected in the marketing campaign for the film Suffragette, in which its stars, Carey Mulligan, Meryl Streep, Romola Garai, and Anne-Marie Duff, posed in t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave”.

For every female celebrity who cheerfully announces that she’s “not a feminist” because she believes “men and women should be equal” (shout-out to Shailene Woodley , Madonna, Katy Perry etc., but that’s another issue entirely), there seems to be another who readily takes up the mantle but fails to educate themselves on, or even acknowledge, how their peers – disabled women, queer women, women of colour, trans women – are marginalised by more than their gender (T-Swizzle, J-Law,

Miley - what’s good?).

The medium is the message

Sexism isn’t a flat oppression; it interacts with every other form of institutionalised prejudice, which unfortunately often leaves it to the most privileged (white, straight, wealthy, cisgender, able-bodied) women to dictate the boundaries of feminism while those on the fringes suffer. This year alone, an unprecedented 25 transgender females have been murdered. Black women make up 8% of the US population, yet 22% of all domestic homicide victims.

While the cancellation of Greer’s scheduled speech is being reported as a no-platforming – a violation of her right to free speech and expression – it is worth noting that it was Greer herself who dropped out, with Cardiff University refusing to cancel the appearance under much pressure to do so, maintaining that their events “include speakers with a range of views, all of which are rigorously challenged and debated”.

The question of whether political correctness inhibits freedom of speech is one that consumes our popular culture, with both the Phil and the Hist debating it during this term alone. The rise of social media platforms like Twitter and Tumblr has given a voice to ethnic, sexual and gender minorities who quickly created their own niches and communities within these mediums, allowing them to raise awareness of issues and injustices they have experienced and create safe spaces for each other in a way that wasn’t before possible.

T

HE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL phenomenon known as “the risky shift” (I know) describes how groups can partake in more extreme behaviour collectively than any individual member would normally. In a practical implication, an analysis of interactions between prolife and pro-choice groups on Twitter illustrated them becoming increasingly polarised the more they interacted. In a similar vein, the gulf between the so-called “social justice warriors” and anti-political-correctness brigade widens with every scroll through the comments on

an online article published on gender-neutral children’s toys or Donald Trump’s latest self-promoting tirade.

Open dialogue

Despite this, political correctness need not be the antithesis to free speech. Censorship is certainly not the antidote to bigoted ideation.

In the same way that prohibition increased alcohol consumption, in the same way that outlawing abortion only leads to women venturing abroad, preventing people from expressing and sharing their opinions can only lead to them going about it via an alternative route, which can often lead to the spreading of misinformation and even radicalisation.

Quashing free speech has frightening connotations – and while no-platforming a transphobe may or may not seem tempting depending on your beliefs, would this really be preferable to opening a dialogue on how this is exactly the type of prejudice the trans community faces on a daily basis?

Europe is filled with relics and museums dedicated to the atrocities committed by humankind. Mein Kampf is still in publication. 12 Years a Slave received an Academy Award for Best Picture. This is not in celebration or admiration for the events and ideas they depict, but out of respect for those who suffered extreme discrimination under various reigns of terror, and as a horrifying reminder to future generations that these violations of human rights must not recur.

The past few decades have been momentous for the advancement of women’s, queer and trans rights and these issues are now a focal point of media coverage. In the pursuit of equality, becoming bogged down in the minority of dissenting opinions is a waste of time. How we attain social justice should reflect its inclusive and all-encompassing end-goal, and this does not license the suppression of opinion.

Photo by Hans Peters

Solidarity needed in the face of division ISIS want people to fear and hate Muslims. By giving into that, you are letting them win.

Imaan Bari Statt writer DEAR GOD. We are in amidst yet another terrorist attack in Europe. Those are the worst kind. For one thing, they attract global attention. That’s not generally a bad thing, apart from the fact that it alters western perceptions of other cultures, most often slandering and perpetuating harmful assumptions about already disgraced minorities.

It creates general upheaval and horror – that is, more than your average mass civilian slaughterings in countries that are not the west, ahem, #prayforbeirut. Finally, it leads to never-ending emotionally charged Facebook posts that can sometimes get incredibly ignorant and pedantic, which is never fun.

What is happening right now in Paris is a genuine horrific tragedy that will remain a crucial part of European history in years to come. In a couple of decades, history books will be produced in France on the topic of Islamic terrorism in the 21st Century, going on to talk about events like the Charlie Hebdo attack, this attack, and most likely more to come.

That absolutely sucks, and it is really worrying to think about. How many more years will this blood-shed, fanaticism and inhumanity go on?

Will it never end? No really, think about it. This will never

end. Not at the rate we are going anyway.

What is happening at this point in time is nothing like what we have seen in history before – well, it’s never happened before to this extent.

Traditionally, when countries or ideologies had major clashes, there was a series of battles, which sometimes culminated into a full-fledged war where eventually there was a victor. Following that, conferences would be held, treaties would be signed, agreements would be made about reparations and territory lines, etc.

At least back then, there was some sort of general consensus about warfare and what it entailed. Yes, it could get messy, and yes, bad things still happened, but there was often a solution or some sort of final settlement after all the bloodshed and fighting.

Ideological warfare

How I see it now, is that we are indirectly fighting a massive war, with western Christian/secular culture on one side and Islamic extremism on the other. Islam is in a very vulnerable position right now, with misconceptions and radical sects left, right and centre. Many current Islamic countries are being torn apart through war and terrorism. Islam has become incredibly tied in with politics and power and that is extremely dangerous.

The ideological war that is happening is being conducted with a serious lack of com-

munication and bad judgement and decisions on both parts. As Islamic militant groups are rising and taking power in the Middle East and Africa. Western nations are reacting by initiating drone attacks and encouraging antiIslamic propaganda.

This is all bad. It is provoking and fuelling hatred on both sides. As more drones are dropped, it is creating more material for terrorists to use to justify attacking western culture. They have enough backward reasons as it is. Why would anyone in their right mind give them any inclination towards legitimate reasons to attack? We cannot allow that.

Then on the flip side, as more and more attacks happen, our reactions are fuelling a very blatant anti-Muslim rhetoric across western media. Media channels are getting more and more material to show the world how evil and barbaric Muslims are and that they need to be destroyed. It is the epitome of a vicious cycle.

We have seen guerrilla warfare before, but never at a global level. It’s madness. The world is gradually getting more unstable with terrorism rising and we can’t seem to do anything right to stop it.

The kind of attacks that are happening right now are ranging from suicide bombings to hostage crises to shootings in public places.

They are happening across the world, across various countries, every day.

Our responses to it aren’t helping anything. Is anything really going to help this situation? It seems like it is just going to get worse and worse; as years go on, the attacks seem to be getting more and more frequent. What end will this reach?

One thing I do know is that drone strikes need to stop.

If anyone still believes that bombing countries in hopes of wiping out terrorists is actually going to work, you are deeply mistaken and deluded.

For one, Islamic militant groups are extremely technologically equipped and are probably the first to evacuate a situation where they may be droned.

That leaves innocent civilians to perish, not to mention destroying the buildings and infrastructure of a country. I know that seems so irrelevant, but really, how are we ever going to help these countries if they are completely obliterated in the process?

Often these countries – I’m thinking of Syria particularly – were well-developed, civilised places. Their towns were pretty similar to most developed cities on our side of the world. It is tragic to think that it will be decades before any progress can be made.

Maybe if we started spreading serious awareness about terrorist attacks that also happen in Muslim countries, it might bring people together and unite them against the real problem.

Islamophobia

These attacks are going to further increase the Islamophobic atmosphere that already exists, and that is exactly what ISIS wants. It is their ultimate goal to divide the world into two factions: the “Believers” and “Non-Believers”. By allowing Islamophobia to grow, we are allowing the world to polarise itself further, which is not helping anyone but them.

But by reacting with love and peace and standing together, we are making it very difficult for them to achieve their goals. We give them less material and propaganda to use to further rally themselves. If they see that the world is united, they will find it incredibly hard to grow and strengthen themselves, and ultimately they will fall. ISIS want people to fear and hate Muslims. By giving into that, you are letting them win.

The Paris attacks have shown yet again that there exists a very worrying attitude towards Muslims.

The use of the word ‘terrorist’ has become associated with Islamic extremism and Muslims in the media, and it seems that recent events won’t be exempted from that association.

As the prime minister announced that the French borders would be closed, it became clear that it had certain implications. After 9/11, the U.S government acted on the same policy out of fear that certain unwanted outsiders may enter the country.

“

How many more years will this blood-shed, fanaticism and inhumanity go on? Will it never end? No really, think about it.

This will never end. Not at the rate we are going anyway.

France are underhandedly implying that they do not want any foreigners entering the country, specifically Muslims. At this point no one has been informed who the terrorists are, yet there seems to be clear assumptions already made.

However likely it is that they are Islamic terrorists, I believe it is harmful to imply any sort of prejudice towards Muslims in general. The border policy is also very unfortunate for any refugees who were hoping to get to France, as their chances of getting anywhere near that country are going to be made significantly harder, but whatever, I mean, refugees shouldn’t really have a choice where they get to stay anyway, they should just tough it out, right?

I am becoming increasingly concerned for the future of our world. I realise how vague and larger-than-life that sounds, but I think we are in for a pretty tough ride.

The Paris attack today was another chilling reminder of how close to home this situation is becoming. It is unnerving to think that young people our age, who were out for dinner in a restaurant, or at a rock concert tonight, suffered at the hands of disillusioned violent bullies.

This injustice is ongoing and will not reach an end unless something changes. I don’t know what. I am only a kid. But something has to be done. Let’s focus on that.

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Comment

16

Head to Head: Has Tinder reinvigorated the world of dating?

Courtney Byrne Staff writer

T

INDER – RENOWNED FOR its superficiality, misrepresentation, and one-night hook-ups, yet it is dominating the modern world of dating and is a companion to even the most eligible bachelors/bachelorettes.

These days it’s not a scandal who is on Tinder, but who isn’t. The premise is simple: swipe left for no, right for yes.

If you both swipe right– bingo, it’s a match, and you can message them in this cute basic messaging window.

In other words, it’s the world’s most interesting game of “would you”, because you get to see if the feeling is mutual.

And, let’s face it, we all love that game nearly as much as we love knowing someone has the hots for us.

The main argument the radical minority usually have against Tinder is that it’s based purely on looks, with little or no insight into someone’s personality. But let’s look at this realistically.

When you pass someone on the street, the first thing you notice is their appearance, not whether they take two sugars in their tea or want a litter of kids in a year’s time.

It’s the natural progression; interest grows from attraction. Why should we overcomplicate it by attempting to be completely oblivious to the fact that you need to be

sexually attracted to someone in order to have sex with them?

Tinder acknowledges the fact that no algorithm can determine if you will or won’t get along with someone, or whether you are compatible in any way whatsoever. Instead, it lets you work that out between the two of you, provided there is some shred of attraction between you two.

And hey, it even takes away the sexist aspect of approaching someone you are into, which many will feel is the man’s role. It takes a mutually felt spark to ignite the fires that is sexting, as opposed to unsolicited dick pics or a man trying to convince a woman that she actually wants him in her pants.

More than that, you can even choose how far you are willing to commute to see them, and what age range you feel would suit your needs best (golddiggers deserve love too).

Inclusiveness

Tinder doesn’t claim to help you find your soulmate, although the hopeless romantics can dream, but it does expand the pool of potential partners for singles and that is never a negative. You can put yourself out there without even putting pants on.

For those who don’t club, the world of hookups and even dating can seem miles from them.

With Tinder, we can all have one-night stands (or fulfilling, lasting relationships based on love and trust, whatever you’re into). It also

gives the shy folk a chance to say hello: it’s infinitely easier to hide behind a s c r e e n without the possibility of confrontation and rejection, than to approach a stranger. Not to mention you can pretend to be something you’re not for way longer than you could in person.

Let’s take a little look at how Tinder affects minorities. For instance, the LGBTQ+ community. Tinder doesn’t ask for your sexual orientation, merely your gender, which it usually takes from Facebook if you use that to make your profile.

It then asks you whether you would like boys, girls or both to come up, and from there your selections appear.

So unless that specific person has detailed their sexual orientation on their Tinder profile (uncommon), or you match with them, you have no way of knowing who they are attracted to.

In other words, Tinder doesn’t shove anyone out of the closet, nor does it exclude anyone still in there. The only way to know for sure if a girl is into girls is if you are too. It gives those who are not ready to come out to the world yet a chance to date. And generally speaking, the LGBTQ+ community know better than to out their own without prior

consent. Inclusion at its finest.

Tinder’s newest function, the “Superlike”, brings something new and exciting to the table.

This level of liking actually notifies the Superlikee who has Superliked them.

It’s an attempt to allow you to feel a little bit more assertive in your life, while still hiding behind an iPhone of course. While some may worry about the Superlike sending waves of desperation, I would argue that I would quite like to have the option to be blatantly open about wanting someone in my bed.

And it works.

Tinder has calculated that the likelihood of you matching with that super-hot guy or gal is much higher if you Superlike them. If the signal is desperation, then desperation triumphs.

On the flip-side of the Superlike, there’s the ever so feared circumstance of accidentally swiping “nope”.

There’s no going back from a “nope” (well, you could pay for premium Tinder but then again, we don’t pay for Spotify premium either).

Tears have been shed, I assure you, over that slip of the finger. But alas, it makes us remember that we are all human and make mistakes every day, and that that hottie who we never matched with

probably accidentally swiped “nope” too and is crying into their pillow right now.

and every-other-importantbloody-thing you should be on the hunt for in a potential partner.

Tinder could easily fix this with an additional section as part of the profile where users must fill out certain answers to questions. This could involve rating the importance of relationship aspects on a scale of one to ten.

For example, when users are setting up their profile, the app could impose a short questionnaire upon them with questions such as “How important is loyalty in a relationship?” or “Looks or Personality?” This would filter out those looking for something a little more serious as opposed to the others on the search for a “good time, not a long time”. Also, it wouldn’t impede Tinder’s slick and easy set-up process as it would simply take an extra couple of seconds to complete.

enough”’ – just think, is this really how we should choose who we want to date?

Parallel it with ordering food online. The process is facilitated by a wants/needs mind-set.

We want that pizza on our doorstep as quick as possible with minimal effort. The swiping process is not too dissimilar in that we know what we want/need and we will avoid effort wherever possible, hence rash decisions follow based upon these desires – but meanwhile, we forget we are dealing with real people and not a Domino’s Double Deal for €20.99.

Ever since its initial release on the 12 September 2012, Tinder was inevitably to become a hook-up app. This is another reason why I dislike it so: there are people who use Tinder to look for relationships and end up getting caught up in another person’s sexual fantasies. Okay, I understand that some people disclose the information regarding “sex-only” early on in the conversation, some even in their bios, but despite this, people still get caught up chatting to people who are using the app for totally different purposes. Tinder needs to address this problem or it will lose the small bit of credibility it has left as a serious dating app. Again,

the simple questionnaire during the initial set-up could really benefit this predicament.

Do you know those Yo u T u b e videos that take online concepts and turn them into real life situations?

Normally they’re quite irritating, but the ‘Tinder in Real Life” videos really prove the point I’m trying to make.

College Humour have one named “Tinderella: A Modern Fairy-tale”: it tells the story of a man and woman meeting up on a Tinder date.

The point about Tinder being primarily used as a quick hook-up device is the mantra of this video. The final rhyming couplet of the fairy-tale goes, “She snuck out that morning at half past four a.m., and they lived happily ever after because they never spoke again”. I think that sums it all up.

Yes

Ego boost

One of the main perks of being a Tinder user is that ego boost when you get a match.

The confidence that follows when you know that by the end of the day you’re going to have at least one match, so you can’t be that ugly.

They do add up, the matches, even if you are picky and vaguely average appearancewise. And it’s always nice to know that there are people out there that find you attractive, and that you don’t always have to rely on your intellect or sense of humour to make people like you.

It’s to be expected, of course, that an app that makes judging on appearances seem socially acceptable would become immensely popular. We’re shallow people at first glance, but past that you need to up your game with some light (or, in some cases, heavy) flirting and some witty banter in order to charm that lad or lass into craving your company and trusting that you’re not a catfish or 90-year-old creep.

Another thing Tinder has done for us is make this passing of judgement an addictive pastime that you nearly start to mimic on the street.

It’s entertainment, plain and simple, with a possibility of more — and it’s perfectly adequate at getting you through those boring, tough lectures and futile library visits.

And let’s face it, Tindering has now become a group activity where women can dis-

cuss whether or not that selfie he uploaded was indicative of him being vain, have full-out debates about whether a certain fellow is tall or not (guys, please specify), and give out about how Tinder becomes a testosterone-fuelled frenzy past 8pm. Judgemental? Yes. But finally we can be honest about it. Judgement would not be a concept if it weren’t human. We all judge appearances, whether it’s in person or virtually; let’s just accept and enjoy it, please.

In the end, Tinder is merely a carefully crafted tool wielded by the masses, and only reflects and mirrors real-life to its best ability. It is not some evil distortion of the world we live in. All varieties of people use it: both that cute girl who served you in the shop the other day who you were too nervous to do more than smile at, and that creep who wouldn’t stop staring at your boobs.

There’s room for the hopeless romantic as well as those who just want a bit of fun in the sheets, and for everything else along the spectrum.

From the most basic binary decision of “to shag or not to shag?”, comes the question: where could a coffee lead to?

With an infinite supply of possibilities, Tinder is your wingman – he’ll introduce you, and then let you do the rest.

Tinder doesn’t claim to help you find your soulmate, although the hopeless romantics can dream, but it does expand the pool of potential partners for singles, and that is never a negative. You can put yourself out there without even putting pants on.

Illustration by Mubashir Sultan

Una Harty Staff writer

To quote the viral video If Tinder were eHarmony, it’s “not about finding the one; it’s about finding anyone who’s willing”. Is that all you deserve?

Anyone who’s willing? In the words of the great Tom Haverford of “Parks and Recreation”, “Treat Yoself!” and don’t use Tinder.

B

EFORE I BEGIN, I would like to establish that I am not against dating sites or dating apps. They are a perfectly valid way to meet a potential partner. Tinder, on the other hand, is littered with flaws regarding its logistics and fundamental concept.

Where do I begin?

Tinder promotes everything that’s currently wrong with the dating culture in Ireland: poor conversation, relationships that rarely go past “getting the shift” and unimaginative dates. Our culture is built upon white cis males lurking in groups in the dark corners of dingy nightclubs where they rate the girls in the club 1-10 purely based on physical looks. Tinder is the online version of this culture, except it’s even more antisocial than our already socially stagnated club scene.

Tinder is a platform that allows materialist ways to fester and flourish in the form of cheap chat-up lines, sensationalistic profile pictures and cold rejection mechanisms. The concept is circled around how a person looks as opposed to who they are. Tinder provides little encouragement to its users in exploring one another’s personalities.

It neglects real conversation on social and political topics, how a person might treat and engage with other people,

Swipe system

The swipe system is my least favourite feature of the dating app. The concept of “sorting” possible matches is detached and removed. It promotes shallow based on a few dodgy images pulled from Facebook profiles with an equally as cringy biography served on the side.

I think the action of swiping someone to the “dislike” side on Tinder is morally displeasing. Am I alone in this? Next time your thumb is at that critical angle – the point before suitor number 487 is about to be cast into a bottomless pit of “not good

No

Social networking

It is imperative to mention that our society is plummeting itself further and further into an over-dependence on online social networking.

The rates of social media use are increasing at exponential rates. Since 2005, social networking usage has increased ten-fold among 18-29 year olds.

Asking someone on a date is no longer a face-to-face affair – it’s all about the gawky

opening line when you begin to converse with your new Tinder match. The internet is awash with resources full of thousands of potential Tinder lines ranging from “Do you sell carpeting, because I’m looking for a deep shag” to “Are you my appendix, because this feeling in my stomach makes me wanna take you out”. Last time I checked, I did not want to be compared with a dispensable internal organ.

Due to its ridiculous popularity, Tinder tends to attract some questionable people looking for dates. These include people under the age of 18, who are clearly posing as older than their real age.

There are also people who fall into the unsavoury category. These demographics throw Tinder off-kilter and annoy even the most loyal of users.

In addition to that, plenty of improvements could be made on the logistics of the app. Preferences often aren’t followed, and this is particularly frustrating when you are of a certain sexual orientation. Furthermore, the existence of a juvenile Tinder is frankly quite worrying. People between the ages of 1317 who access Tinder will be filtered into an “underage” Tinder. What is particularly alarming about this is that people who pose as under 18 on Tinder can access the “teen” Tinder and therefore all the teenagers on it.

Without a doubt there are many other ways in which we can go about online dating without having to be so pri-

mal about it.

A new app, “Happn”, has been recently launched in the UK after its preliminary round in France in September 2014. It works very similarly to Tinder in that it connects with your Facebook profile for your personal details and then uses your GPS to search people in your area. “Happn’” then searches for people also using the app who you’ve crossed paths with several times. Maybe you’ve both been to the same concert, attending the same club night last week or are in the same lectures.

The fundamental difference between “Happn” and Tinder is that “Happn” encourages users to engage with their matches face-to-face. It works over a 250m radius as opposed to Tinder’s many hundreds of miles, which means the dates are more likely to happen and, along with that, they’re more likely to be genuine.

So there certainly are alternative ways to rendezvous with new people in ways that embrace social contact and real conversation starters. To quote the viral video “If Tinder were eHarmony”, it’s “not about finding the one; it’s about finding anyone who’s willing”.

Is that all you deserve?

Anyone who’s willing? In the words of the great Tom Haverford of “Parks and Recreation”, “Treat Yoself!” and don’t use Tinder.

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Comment

17

STEM sexism needs to stop The kind of subtle, insidious sexism that is so widespread in STEM is hard to pin down – not because of any subtlety in how it manifests itself, but rather in the way we approach sexism in everyday life.

Sarah Jennings Staff writer

WHEN I WAS 15, the boys in my TY class created a ranking out of 10 for every girl in the year. My ranking was a 7 initially. It was reduced to a 5 because I was “too smart”.

I’ve never been average in my life.

I’ve regularly heard that maths isn’t for girls, that the “science says so”, that women are emotional and men are logical – and the lack of peerreviewed reputable research to back up those claims seems not to weigh on people’s minds. I have two female lecturers this year. I know the name of every girl in my physics class; it’s not that big an achievement.

I’ve learnt to avoid statements that acknowledge my own ability, instead putting my success down to a passion for chemistry – because when you’re a woman, being self-confident is an open invitation to be attacked.

I’ve been told that I got my scholarship because I’m a woman; that I was there to fill a quota and tick the equality box. I’ve defended “Women in STEM” scholarships to too many people to count who believe in reverse sexism.

FYI, sexism is gender-based prejudice with the power to enforce it and I am powerless in this world.

The kind of subtle, insidious sexism that is so widespread in STEM is hard to pin down – not because of any subtlety in how it manifests itself, but rather in the way we approach sexism in everyday life.

The blinkers are well and truly on when it comes to gender representation: men consider a room containing 17% women to be gender-balanced, and one with 34% to have majority women. Men are blind to sexism, find writing off misogyny scarily easy, and to cap it all off, they have essentially all the power. It’s

just empirically the case that many men won’t notice that a gender disparity is appearing as a result of their own actions – but when you’re a young woman in STEM, you notice.

Everyday signals

You notice that only 22% of academics in the Faculty of Engineering, Maths and Science are women. You notice that there are only 9% female lecturers in that same faculty.

You notice that despite Trinity’s Athena Bronze Award and supposed dedication to gender equality, the website for Women in Science & Engineering Research (WiSER) hasn’t been updated in any meaningful manner for two years and the scheme most certainly isn’t promoted.

You know how hard it is to cry sexism when the onus is on the victim to prove meaningful intent to discriminate, and sadly not all scientists are kind enough to be as blatant in their sexism as Tim Hunt.

Because when you’re the only woman in your physics tutorial you notice that asking a question leads to a change to a patronising tone of voice from your professor.

But in so far as “patronising” isn’t something that can be quantified in any meaningful way, and crying sexism leads to the inevitable backlash of “touchy feminist”, it’s often just not worth it.

You know how to make value judgments on what subtle attacks against your person are worth speaking up over, and what ones will shift from implicit to explicit attack if you try to respond. You know to write S. Jennings at the top of your CV so they might assume it’s Steve, not Sarah – because even when everything else is equal, female researchers will be offered less money for their work. In the STEM world, and all worlds, gender equates with value and significance.

You know that the stereotype of not dressing well in the Hamilton sends the message that you choose to be pretty or you choose to be smart. Mascara doesn’t glue your eyes shut so you can’t do differential equations, and heeled boots don’t make a sound so loud you can’t read a book on thermodynamics.

But when you’re 14 and you value yourself in terms of what your peers think, the choice to embrace your love of maths and chemistry is genuinely an act of defiance and one you’ll receive little thanks for.

It should seem unbelievably self-evident that STEM positions should be equally distributed; women and men are equally good at science (this is just empirically true).

If you believe that an equal faculty would require mediocre women to fill up spots, then you have to believe that the current male majority has an awful lot of mediocrity amongst its ranks.

Tackling the gender gap involves dismantling the patriarchal structure of decision-making that dominates at high levels of academia. It involves opposing attempts to introduce a tenure system that both forces women to make a choice between family and work, and uses vague criteria to decide who gets tenure – providing easy outs for sexist dismissals of proposals.

Real change

At undergraduate level, events like Women in Science Week, female mentor programmes and scholarships for women need to be encouraged at all costs and we need to see more of all of them.

But there’s only so much efficacy in encouraging women at undergraduate level. Those of us who have made it this far have faced at least 17 years of consistent and underhand-

Photo by Eoin Cambey

attempts to limit us from joining the world of science and technology.

Boxes of blocks and construction tools that breed love for engineering in the hearts of young children are hidden down dark aisles in toy shops with shelves groaning with Action Men and Hot Wheels. Later on, guidance counsellors in schools push unsure students towards subjects perceived as being “high points” and away from the classically difficult applied maths and physics.

People question the motives of female students choosing STEM (no, I’m not going into pharmaceuticals) but seem not to do the same for men. “I’m doing technology and engineering” elicits two responses that have a

degree of an eyebrow raise wholly determined by your gender. It’s often even the case that male-dominated subjects like engineering and applied maths aren’t offered at all girls’ schools or small mixed schools. I know quite a bit about odds, and these are some seriously stacked ones.

Change wouldn’t just be “nice” to correct the statistics of sexism in STEM; it is vital on a micro level. I can’t speak for all women in STEM – we’re not a homogenous group – but I know the internal conflict I feel so intensely.

I define myself quite considerably by my gender and enjoy being a woman and all that that entails. But my identity is something that has placed the restrictive and painful glass ceiling over

“

If you believe that an equal faculty would require mediocre women to fill up spots, then you have to believe that the current male majority has an awful lot of mediocrity amongst its ranks

my head. It has left me with the joyous future prospect of earning less money than equally capable men. My gender has defined who I am, limited who I can become, and forced me to feel belittled and lesser for doing what I love more than anything else.

I didn’t ask for an apparent 30% reduction in desirability to men and a guaranteed 30% reduction in pay. I didn’t ask for this, that’s simple biology, but fact doesn’t make fair.

Reconciling male privilege as a female to male feminist There are a lot of intersectional feminists who will give trans men free passes when it comes to acceptable feminist behaviour, passes that they would never give to cis men. And while I understand that some obvious differences apply, especially when it comes to experiences of oppression and “what it’s like to be a woman”, I don’t accept these free passes.

Felix O’Connor

Contributing writer

I

GLANCE AT my phone and see a red number – fifteen – in the corner of my Twitter app. I don’t even have to open it to know what I’m getting notifications about.

About a month ago I made the arguably grave error of feeding the trolls. That is to say, I decided to rebuke some guy who was arguing that the term “mansplaining” was sexist. (Before you rush to the comments, this article is not about whether or not “mansplaining” as a term is sexist – though it would likely behoove you to stop reading now if you think it is, as you don’t understand what sexism is).

With regard to this Twitter feud, for about a month I was solidly getting notifications both from people who agreed with the dude in question, and (overwhelmingly) from people who agreed with me.

Primarily women, retweeting what I’d said, quoting me, seconding my points with their own. “Look at this guy!

Being a good male feminist.

This guy gets it.”

And I’m torn. Firstly, I don’t deserve praise for telling this dude that male privilege exists. I shouldn’t be taken more seriously because I’m being perceived as unbiased. And secondly, because I’m passing off my points as second hand experience when they’re not.

They’re first hand. But I don’t want to derail the discussion with, “Hey, I’m Felix, I’m a trans man. Male privilege definitely exists. I experience it in my everyday life now that I’m not being seen as a woman all the time”.

(For the record, I have done that in past online arguments. It goes one of two ways: either the cis male parties stop taking me seriously because my objectivity has been compromised, or the conversation starts to look

like this: “Are trans men real men? How can you have experienced female oppression if you say you were never a woman? Isn’t gender a social construct? How can gendered oppression be real if gender isn’t real?”, and every shade of missing the point in between.)

This weird inner conflict, second guessing myself, thinking myself into knots until I feel inexplicably guilty – it happens a lot with me. I think it has a lot to do with my “feminist origin story” (which involves much less spandex than the average origin story).

Feminist origins

Context time: feminism was the first ideology that stuck for me. Yeah, I was an aggressive atheist for a while, but I outgrew that particular brand of bile when I was 14 or so. Aged 17, feminism, specifically in relation to pop culture criticism because that’s what I like, was a big part of my identity. This is important because at that point I had not yet uncovered the two other things that now greatly inform who I am and how I see the world: my queerness and my transness.

When I realised that I wasn’t one hundred percent straight, I looked at it through a feminist lens. “What does it mean to be a queer woman?

How does queerness shape how I see the world and how the world sees me? How does this affect my feminism?”

And that was fine. Long gone are the days of the lavender menace, meaning that being a queer lady feminist is aokay. Some circles view it as preferable, even.

Then, two years after my “feminist awakening”, I realised that I was trans. That I was a man. Am a man. Frankly, it threw a massive spanner in the works. Right when I’d been trying really hard to accept myself as a woman,

to purge my mind of femmephobia and internalised misogyny, something clicked and there it was.

And, to be completely honest, it was terrifying. Because the feminist movement, even on an intersectional level, is far from unified when it comes to the place of men in feminism.

I’m going to be speaking in terms of men in general because I think that’s important. There are a lot of intersectional feminists who will give trans men free passes when it comes to acceptable feminist behaviour, passes that they would never give to cis men. While I understand some obvious differences apply, especially when it comes to experiences of oppression and “what it’s like to be a woman”, I don’t accept these free passes.

They feel like I’m being sneaked in a back door, and on the way in I’m having “We know you’re really one of us” whispered in my ear. It feels degrading and it inflames my imposter complex. I’ve never felt like a woman. I tried really hard, but I couldn’t do it. When I was passing as a woman, I could invade spaces not meant for me all I wanted because I looked like a woman. Because I thought I was a woman. But now that I know I’m not, that’s not an acceptable excuse for me to make, and I shouldn’t let others make that excuse for me.

On top of that, there’s an insane level of hypocrisy within facets of the movement when it comes to deciding which trans people are allowed in certain spaces. It is far too frequently the case that trans men and non-binary people who were female assigned at birth will be allowed into feminist safe spaces, but trans women and non-binary people who were male assigned at birth will not be. It’s often explained by thinly veiled transmisogyny or something

about the inherent aggressiveness of the penis – despite the fact that some trans women and transfeminine people don’t have penises, or that so much of feminism is about rebuking biotruths – but I’m getting off topic, this isn’t a rail against TERFs right now.

Men’s place

So I find myself asking, “Where do men fit into feminism?”

Not “How can this cause that is primarily for women (and for good reason) benefit the privileged group more?”, but “Is there a place in feminist movements for discussing masculinity and the male gender without distracting from the more pressing issues at hand, which do tend to be women’s issues?”

Would such discussion require separatist movements along the same vein of black feminism or queer feminism or disabled feminism? Because, let’s face it, if someone was organising a male feminist group which was closed to men only, it would likely get pegged as closer to an MRA group than a third wave intersectional feminist faction.

I’m playing devil’s advocate somewhat here, because frankly, I don’t know where I stand. I just know I probably care. I generally disagree with people who say outright that men should not call themselves feminists but feminist allies (because feminism is ostensibly about gender and “male” is a gender, albeit the one treated as a default). I am, however, in the camp that dictates that in large feminist organisations and discussions, men shouldn’t speak over the experiences or concerns of women, and should work to elevate women’s voices.

On the other other hand, I shouldn’t feel like an asshole when I, say, point out how the

reproductive rights of men who can get pregnant, such as myself, are near totally ignored in discussions of abortion. I shouldn’t feel like I’m stepping into a conversation where it isn’t my place.

Running the very real risk of sounding like one of those guys who thinks feminists should sit down and listen to the men for once, I do think there should be at least some discussion of where men fit into all of this. Not as a distraction from greater issues,

not as a side door for men to take over. One of the things that makes intersectional feminism so fantastic is that it does try to encompass the many, many issues that have been utterly screwed by an unjust patriarchal system.

Men are, yes, on the top of the heap of screwed people, but we are screwed all the while I’m going to stop before I dig myself into a hole I can’t get out of. In short: where do men fit into feminism?

Should we be considered allies to the cause as opposed to white knights slaying the oppressive beast that is patriarchy (*heavy sarcasm implied*)? And would it be useful to have spaces for discussing male issues? Should all white cisgender straight men burn in hell (*more implied sarcasm*)?

Some things to think about, from a man who has not always known he was one.

Thanks for reading. *Tips fedora*

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Comment

18

1916 poses dilemma for government parties and for Fianna Fáil

G

OVERNMENT MINISTERS, their parties and the Fianna Fáil leadership are in denial. They have led numerous attacks on Sinn Féin at an increased rate since springtime. On March 20, at a Fianna Fáil event geared at unveiling their plans to mark the Easter Rising’s centenary, Micheál Martin became so wound up that the crux of his speech was focused on denouncing Sinn Féin. According to Martin, the all-Ireland party “attempted to distort history in a most appalling way to justify acts that could not be justified”.

One wonders how Martin and his party “justify” the acts of “good”, “old” IRA volunteers from the Easter Rising to 1921, or, in Fianna Fáil’s case, to 1923, undertook.

Let’s take just one instance from that period. In June 1921, Kate Wright, a 21-year-old student, was shot dead while standing alongside Trinity College’s cricket grounds as the British “Military of Ireland” played the British “Gentlemen of Ireland”. She was killed by an IRA active service unit that opened fire on the cricket game from beyond the Nassau Street railings.

What do Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael have to say for themselves? After all, Fianna Fail’s founder and leader for 33 years was the then president of Sinn Féin and president of the Irish Republic, the state to which the IRA pledged its loyalty. The IRA’s then chief of staff was future Fine Gael leader, Richard Mulcahy. Where is/was the hysterical denunciation of these individuals by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael? There is none and there never was any.

Politically cultivated hysteria is reserved for one’s contemporary political opponents.

After Martin’s lashing out in March, he remained consistent. The following month, he stood at the graves of fourteen Easter Rising leaders and decided that the 99th anniversary of their executions was a fitting time to declare that “Sinn Féin has aggressively been promoting the false claim that they have some connection to 1916 and to the volunteers who fought then”. He essentially recycled his speech from the same event two years earlier, in which he stated that “[t]here is not the slightest connec-

tion between the Republic declared in 1916 and [what he labelled] the Provisional movement”.

Let’s examine Martin’s claims. Sinn Féin, Irish for “Ourselves”, was established in 1905, a time when the Irish-Ireland movement and the Gaelic revival were reaching their zeniths. Sinn Féin gave greater electoral options to the Irish people, at least to those who had a right to vote (less than two-thirds of the adult male population), hoping to make sure the unionisthome ruler duopoly would be challenged.

Arthur Griffith, party founder, set down two key approaches for Sinn Féin.

Firstly, abstentionism – the policy that Irish representatives should refuse to take their seats in a foreign parliament, i.e. Westminster, and should create their own assembly. Secondly, self-sufficiency, which was encouraged because of the Irish nationalist interpretation of the relationship between Britain and Ireland as a relationship of colonial and economic exploitation of the weaker country by the larger power.

The approach was that if Britain couldn’t make a profit out of Ireland, its interest in remaining an occupying force would diminish.

Sinn Féin was the party that provided for nationalists disillusioned with the home rulers’ lack of success and bend-the-knee methods.

Between 1905 and the Easter Rising, the term “Sinn Féin” came to be applied to all things more radical than the Home Rulers. The Irish Volunteers came to be popularly referred to as the “Sinn Féin Volunteers”.

A Sinn Féin Rising

Sinn Féin as an organisation was not responsible for the Rising, but some members were heavily involved in it, not least Eamonn Ceannt and Seán MacDiarmada, IRB secretary. MacDiarmada was the campaign manager of the first Sinn Féin Westminster by-election attempt in his home county of Leitrim in 1908. He used the cover of his role as Sinn Féin national organiser to do what he did best: travel the country, talent-spot for the IRB and recruit 1,000 new members to the brotherhood.

Jennie Wyse Power, president of Cumann na mBan, a

very active force in 1916, was a Sinn Féin founding member and in about 1912 became vice-president of Sinn Féin.

She subsequently became its treasurer. The 1916 proclamation was signed in her home, 21 Henry Street, by the provisional government a couple of hours prior to the Rising.

Arthur Griffith met with the IRB’s Supreme Council on 9th September 1914 in 25 Parnell Square, then Gaelic League HQ, alongside James Connolly of the Irish Citizen Army.

They decided to make preparations for insurrection.

The Easter rebels flew an Irish tricolour embroidered with the slogan “Sinn Féin go deo”, Sinn Féin forever. It was auctioned by Whyte’s last year.

The British government and newspapers labelled the Rising the “Sinn Féin Rebellion”, ensuring, no doubt unintentionally, that those who supported the Rising could express that support electorally in the years ahead. More likely the government and press agenda was to discredit and sink Sinn Féin by portraying it as the driving force of the Rising.

Such attempted smears failed. By 1917, the party experienced a membership surge as veterans of Easter Week joined the party and made it their own, giving it a republican constitution. Sinn Féin quickly became the political party vehicle for the advancement of Irish national freedom and the establishment of a republic.

The current Fianna Fáil leader would do well to revise his blinkered view of history.

Just because de Valera, albeit as party leader, abandoned Sinn Féin when the party voted against dropping its policy against participation in the Free State parliament, it doesn’t mean Sinn Féin went into a time freeze until the 1970s and re-emerged as something completely alien to its earlier moulds. The party suffered throughout the 30s, 40s and 50s, often as a result of state repression, but against the odds, it never ceased to exist.

Republicans spent most of their energy on IRA activity as they judged that Sinn Féin was too weak to achieve anything substantial. But the party continued on in bleak times. Fianna Fáil meanwhile continued, as they continue

today with reduced success, to shamelessly expropriate the republican mantle while simultaneously doing less than one iota to achieve a united Irish republic.

Sinn Féin has commemorated the 1916 Rising every year since 1917, not just when it was electorally convenient to do so. Some of those commemorations were declared illegal by the parties who in 2015 are telling the Irish people that Sinn Féin is trying to hijack the Rising. We should welcome anyone’s participation in commemorating 1916, but that does not mean that some are not embarrassingly late to the show. Their incessant attacks on those who are more steadfast reveal that they know this is the case.

M

ARTIN IS A CORK man. So too was the famous Sinn Féin lord mayor, Tomás Mac Curtáin, who was murdered in his home

by Black and Tans in March 1920. Another Corkonian was that mayor’s only son, another Tomás. In 1940, that Tomás, as an incarcerated IRA volunteer, went on hunger strike in Arbour Hill prison. De Valera and Fianna Fáil were in power. They facilitated the deaths of two of Mac Curtáin’s comrades, Seán Mac Neela and Tony Darcy, and would have had no problem in seeing other hunger-striking republicans, including Mac Curtáin and Jack Plunkett, a 1916 veteran and brother of Joseph Plunkett, go to their graves.

In 1965, the repatriated remains of 1916 hero Roger Casement were buried by the Fianna Fáil government in Glasnevin Cemetery under tonnes of cement to prevent republicans from moving Casement to his desired final resting place at Murlough Bay, Co. Antrim. Even in death, Casement was denied, and 99 years on continues to be denied, the most basic decency by those who’ll be wrapping themselves in the green flag next year for the first time in a long time.

Lost legacies

Fianna Fáil are not alone in facing the conundrum of telling people that 1916 was great, but everything that followed, including the actions of nationalists in the North in 1969 defending themselves

Past heroes in the republican struggle for Irish freedom are succeeded by the republicans of later generations, not by the inheritors of the suppressors of that struggle or gombeen men and women, argues staff writer Liam Cowley against RUC-backed loyalist mobs intent on burning homes, was “unjustifiable”.

Fine Gael and the so-called “Labour” party are in the same, if not a worse, position.

The mud-guard party for Fine Gael’s neoliberal privatisation agenda has long abandoned the beliefs of James Connolly, the man in whose steps they claim to march.

Put simply, the instant “Labour” accepted the Free State, it became something greatly different and significantly less honourable than the organisation that had been founded in 1912.

Connolly argued, “[i]f you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain.

England would still rule you.

She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”

Six years after Connolly’s sacrifice, Labour surrendered the idea of socialism in Ireland when they took the oath to the British Crown in a parliament of the British empire.

Their party has limitless arrogance to claim James Connolly as theirs. Connolly was a socialist-republican, and a die-hard one at that. He opposed privatisation, foreign control of Irish interests and rack-renting landlords – all things that are maintained and strengthened by Burton et al.

Repulsive, but hardly surprising. After all, in 1976, the Fine Gael-Labour government oversaw the arrest of James Connolly’s eightythree year-old daughter, Nora, for her presence at the republican movement’s Easter commemoration, which was deemed illegal by the state – a state that suppressed the patriots of that generation, a state that was ashamed of the patriots of a previous one.

Fine Gael, the party of “law and order”, must be the most uncomfortable of the lot. I wonder what it’s like for them to see their party leader pay homage, no matter how disingenuously and cynically, to Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, a

“

In 1965, the repatriated remains of Roger Casement were buried by the Fianna Fáil government in Glasnevin Cemetery under tonnes of cement to prevent Casement being moved to his desired final resting place at Murlough Bay, Co. Antrim. Even in death, Casement was denied, and 99 years on continues to be denied, the most basic decency by those who’ll be wrapping themselves in the green flag next year for the first time in a long time.

pioneer of city centre bombing campaigns. What level of cognitive dissonance is conjured up when one sees one’s leader speak with admiration of an Irish freedom fighter who was executed in the aftermath of a policeman being killed in a shoot-out at the Kent family home? What kind of “law and order” message is that for Kenny to be sending?

Francis Fitzgerald’s Béal na Bláth speech in August was a cut above the rest. Denouncing the “misuse” of the Irish tricolour as a “symbol of violence” by activists opposed to her government’s policies

was priceless. Like most politicians, Fitzgerald requires a history lesson, badly. How can a flag directly inspired by the flag of the French Revolution that was literally soaked in the blood of the decapitated aristocracy, created by an Irish revolutionary known as “Meagher of the Sword” because of his determination to achieve freedom through violence, which flew from atop the GPO for six days of slaughter in Dublin City, be anything other than baptised and come-of-age in violence?

I

N 1898, BATTLES raged over claims as to who were the then inheritors of the United Irishmen republicans of the 1798 rebellion. Was it the republicans of 1898, fonted by the Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee, or was it the Redmondites who were happy with the idea of Ireland being a loyal little fiefdom in the empire?

The answer was clear then and it’s clear now. Past heroes and attempts to achieve victory in the continuum that is the republican struggle for Irish freedom are succeeded by the republicans of later generations and their attempts, not by the inheritors of the suppressors of that struggle or gombeen men and women.

Perhaps during freshers’ week you snapped a selfie with the hijacked Shinner at the Young Fine Gael stand. A cardboard cutout of a former IRA director of intelligence: the architect of the killings of at least 70 suspected British intelligence officers in Dublin; the creator of a ruthless IRA assassination unit, “The Squad”; the man who masterminded the IRA’s finances for three years, funnelling about $6 million into its coffers, and the man who said of suspected spies and agents, “[b] y their destruction the very air is made sweeter. For myself, my conscience is clear.”

Young Fine Gael proudly present the one, the only, the highly respectable Mr Michael Collins, Sinn Féin TD for Armagh (that’s probably foreign country to Fine Gael), 1921-22.

This coming year, the words of Connolly are especially apt. “Apostles of Freedom are ever idolised when dead, but crucified when living.”

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Op-ed

19

In France, student life attempts to continue as normal Bláithín Sheil Staff writer

O

H FRANCE. A country of liberty, a country of freedom.

From a gory revolution that inspired the formation of the United States of America as it exists today, to a country currently in its Fifth Republic, because the first four simply were not good enough, they hold true to the definition of a United Republic in many ways. Most towns and cities have a “Place de la République” to mark its commitment to establishing and maintaining a republic for all, and to commemorate all the lives lost on this path.

When I think of the word “terrorism”, my mind is instantly brought to everywhere except Europe. It was always something that happened elsewhere, something I heard about, and obviously disagreed with. But it was always slightly detached, because it never affected anyone I knew, or a country that I have such strong connections with. With the London bombings, and in similarly in Madrid, I was young and I didn’t fully understand. All I knew was that there were bad people out there who wanted to kill people. I didn’t understand that these events were organised crime.

This time was different. I was just about to go to sleep in preparation for an exam on Saturday morning, when the news of the attacks in Paris started to come in. Story after story, it worsened as the night went on. But this time was different, because I had people I needed to check on. We got word early on from our friends studying in Paris that they were fine, and a quick message to family friends living there confirmed that the worst had not occurred. Nobody who I loved was hurt.

It’s quite surreal watching events unfold in a city I have spent many months living, seeing it shook by terror, yet being so far away that I knew I was safe that night.

Or maybe I wasn’t safe at all,

maybe I should have been more scared. I went to bed that night feeling devastated for the people who died, and those traumatised. My main feeling is of disappointment and anger, that in 2015, 70 years after World War Two has finished, safety from bomb threats is no longer guaranteed. I thought we had left all that instability behind.

That was the point of the European Union - a union to prevent any such atrocities from happening again.

I went to a minute’s silence on Monday at the Palais Universitaire. It is a grand, spectacular building at Place de la République, with large columns and lots of gold. We filed in, stood in silence for a few minutes, the organiser said a simple “merci”, and then the crowd spontaneously sang La Marseillaise. The silence was sombre and grim, these were not the right circumstances to witness the sheer beauty of the building for the first time, I shouldn’t have been there.

But when the national anthem was sung, I got chills. It was as if with each rise in volume, the French were uniting stronger against terrorism. It was powerful.

But, there is only so much a public gathering can do.

Singing the anthem is a beautiful gesture, it gives people comfort and makes them feel stronger. The reality is that this is a very live danger.

Following the receipt of concrete information about a serious threat, the Germany v Netherlands match at Hanover was cancelled. France has just invoked the European Union mutual assistance clause, seeking military help for the first time, to relieve the burden of being the only country waging this war at the moment. European Union member states will now have to help.

Meanwhile in Strasbourg I am aware of at least three evacuations in the city, all being false alarms, but alarms nonetheless. To cross the border to Germany on the bus to do my shopping now involves bringing my passport. Every conversation I have with a French person begins with an expression of my condolences, followed by a sombre

discussion of how awful it is.

Events have been cancelled for safety reasons and as a mark of respect. There are scares everywhere. Everyone is on edge. This is serious.

I have refrained so far from making a Facebook post, changing my profile picture, or sharing photos, because quite frankly, I don’t know what to say. These terrorist attacks are so far beyond posting a simple opinion on Facebook, I need to write an essay to dissect the whole thing. A small gesture is not large enough.

Moreover, the issue of why we do not react so strongly to other tragedies around the world has been debated, and given me plenty of food for thought. Partly because these incidents are so far removed from our daily lives, it is hard to fully understand them. There are also so many of them, a testament to how unstable the world actually is, that if we were to change our profile picture every time a tragedy happened, we would be changing it everyday.

P

ARIS, HOWEVER, WAS different. It happened in a country renowned for its republican values and its stability.

This, and the Charlie Hebdo shootings, shouldn’t be happening in a stable country.

These type of acts, as awful as this sounds, occur in unstable countries, where terrorist groups reign, or they are in the middle of a civil war.

Not in a democracy. Not in a country where rights exist and are respected.

On the other hand, my reluctance to engage with social media activity on this matter also stems from the fact that I am definitely in denial about how serious this is, and only on writing this piece am I really understanding what is at stake. When the attacks were over, it became clear that everyone responded differently to them. Some people were devastated, couldn’t stop crying. Others were worried sick as their friends were actually out in one of the areas hit, and couldn’t sit still, even after their friends confirmed their safety. I tried not to

NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR 2015

/TrinityNewsDublin

/Trinity_News

/TrinityNews

dwell on it, as if ignoring the fact that it happened would mean that this is not a live issue. In the following days, articles of other bomb scares were widely circulated, and I felt that was just spreading the panic.

It’s not that I am not scared, more that I had still not come around to the fact that there are probably more events to come, that this is far from over. I now realise this, and am more wary than I was this weekend. But I am reluctant to live life here in fear. There has been a notable army presence in public places and synagogues in particular in Strasbourg since my arrival in September, and this initially made me feel safe. Now when I see them I think “I am currently in a target zone”.

I feel like rebelling against it. The last thing I want to do is to let ISIS attacks rule my life. They want to spread fear, so naturally, being stubborn, I won’t be succumbing to them.

Not this month anyway. People are proclaiming that they will leave Strasbourg if the Christmas markets are cancelled, as they will only be cancelled if the authorities have reason to believe they pose a threat. To me, this would be succumbing to the power of terrorism, letting them win.

You may call me naive, you could say that I am not being realistic, and that it might just cost me my life one day.

But how dare these groups come here, or anywhere for that matter, and shake a country. For want of a more sophisticated argument, terrorism is ridiculous. I’m a typical 21-year-old student.

I am not accepting this, and in order to not accept this, I must continue life as normal.

For now, anyway.

Deputy editor

W

HEN HE SET down his will and testament, Ernie O’Malley, accomplished writer and veteran of the war of independence, specified that when he died he would be buried upright and facing east across the Irish sea so that he could face his old enemy for all eternity.

Here though he could not suppress a posthumous literary flourish: “In fact they are no longer my enemies,” he said of the British. “Each man finds his enemy within himself.”

Earlier this month, exTánaiste Eamon Gilmore published a memoir of his time as a senior member of government. You could say that, over the course of his long political career, Gilmore found the enemy within himself, and then, like many former socialists, he became it. As a student Gilmore was an avowed enemy of political and economic elites. As a member, and later elected representative, of the Workers’ Party, Gilmore signed up to a political programme that officially advocated the overthrow of capitalism. As leader of the Labour Party he helped implement a vicious and regressive austerity programme, At what point did he lose his ideals? Was it a slow decline, or a series of punctuated spurts?

Gilmore’s book is titled Inside the Room. As the name suggests, it is the work of an insider, someone comfortable, proud even, of his membership of the political elite.

In the book he laments that he was not given the European Commissioner position, a job that he felt he deserved, and he bemoans the what he regards as his summary dismissal from the leadership.

His petulance was well reviewed. In a cosy and sympathetic discussion of the book on Claire Byrne’s Radio One show, Pat Rabbitte and Fionnan Sheahan agreed that he had been hard done by. Sheahan cited an episode where Gilmore sat crying in his sitting room after he realised he

Tim Cook’s Patronage

This was amply evidenced

by Tim Cook’s recent visit to College. Cook, Steve Jobs’ successor as CEO of Apple, received the honorary medal of patronage from The Phil.

And in return he gave the assembled students an honorary patronising. I didn’t attend the event, having already endured more than a lifetime’s quota of gushing proselytising for Apple products. But the The Phil’s twitter coverage and the University Time’s article on the event gave a clear idea of the kind of reverential and adulatory atmosphere that reigned in the exam hall. Cook lectured the audience on human rights, about how it “takes courage to overcome oppression” and about how he is “deeply proud of the role that our products, like the iPhone, play in social progress.” Not one student challenged the Apple CEO on his company’s evasion of billions of tax dollars, or the gross abuse of human rights by their Southeast Asian suppliers.

The New York Times won a Pulitzer prize for a 2012 series of articles on these issues. One of the pieces revealed that, according to then most recent information released by Apple, Ireland was home to “more than onethird of Apple’s worldwide revenues.” According to The Irish Times, Apple paid an effective tax rate of 2% in Ireland in 2013. Meanwhile millions of Irish people have suffered further government cuts and the effects of the austerity-prolonged recession. the scale of research is highlighted by a recent move by the EU to censure the government for providing this tax shelter. If the ECJ finds against them, the state will be forced to recoup $19bn dollars in tax. (And in a sign of where their true priorities lie, the government is reportedly ready to fight the decision).

Another piece in the New York Times series documented the “human costs built into the iPad.” Foxconn, Apple’s main manufacturing supplier, has seen workers die in explosions and be harmed by toxic chemicals. Working conditions in the plants violate many labour and human rights codes, with under-age workers being employed and regular violations of the already excessive 60 hour work week limit imposed by Apple.

Infamously, the company has installed netting in its dormitories in response to a plague of suicides. Apple regularly

conducts safety audits of the manufacturing facilities and finds widespread and massive abuses. Little or nothing is done to address these issues and the company turns a blind eye because actually enforcing change would negatively affect their bottom line. The NYT article quoted an anonymous former Apple executive who said: “We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on. Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

Generational change

Is this the type of “social progress” that Cook is “proud” to have his products play a role in? We do not know, because nobody asked him. When he was asked about LGBT rights and the soft power of Apple, Cook, according to The University Times said “I don’t think about power. That’s a word that I’m not fairly comfortable with.” It is a bizarre and convenient myopia for Cook not to think of the power he exerts over the tens of thousands of workers suffering in Foxconn’s latter-day satanic mills. But it is illustrative of the obscuring effect of ideology on our own generation of students.

In the modern campus, certainly in Trinity, the huge power that private, for-profit entities exert over our lives is effectively ignored and unnoticed. Our college has been captured by a corporate culture in which the moneymaking activities of such companies are morally neutral processes, and corporations can and do function as the primary vehicles for social progress. We are reminded constantly in lectures, emails, conferences, sponsored events, and arts block stalls, of the prestige and importance of KPMG, Slaughter and May, Microsoft, Google etc. Students compete for the chance to be wined and dined on the company dollar, to slip their CV bullet points in between sips of the house red.

Sadly, many will have their pretensions to grandeur realised when they leave college.

Much of this can be contributed to the class composi-

Editor:

Matthew Mulligan

Deputy editor:

William Foley

Digital editor:

Dee Courtney

Editor-at-large:

Eva Short

Contributing editor:

D. Joyce-Ahearne

Copy editor:

Elspeth Payne

News editor:

Lia Flattery

Deputy news editor:

Oisin Vince Coulter

Online news editor:

Patrick Higgins

Features editor:

Tadgh Healy

Deputy features editor:

Sarah Taaffe McGuire

Online features editor:

Caoimhe Gordon

Comment editor:

Naoise Dolan

Deputy comment

The reaction to Eamon Gilmore’s book and the reception received by Tim Cook at Trinity both point to the dominance of corporate culture in our society and indeed in our College was going to lose his position as party leader.

This forthright sympathy for the diminished exTánaiste is illustrative of the dominance of neoliberal ideology in Irish society.

The case is an almost exact duplicate of the reaction to the Joan Burton Jobstown protest, which was aptly dissected by Richard McAleavey on his blog Cunning Hired Knaves. McAleavey points out that neoliberalism “mobilises common feelings of sympathy, respect and veneration” for those who serve its interests. And while it aims to destroy collective solidarity amongst those who oppose it, it fosters sympathy and mutual support amongst the members of the elite ingroup. Joan Burton had to sit in her car for two hours and she was treated like the victim of some Dostoyevskian ordeal, her discomfort magnified into a trauma. By contrast, the protestors were dehumanised, portrayed, as McAleavey puts it, like an “an amorphous, menacing swarm.”

Confining Burton to her car was a “fascist crime” (this type of language was actually used at the time). But there was no mention in the hysterical discourse about Burton’s role in implementing austerity policies that have literally forced people to live in their cars. Similarly ignored are the people who have sat in their living rooms crying, not because they are no longer Tánaiste or because they won’t get the commission job, but because they can’t afford to eat or to pay rent.

People like Gilmore and Burton aren’t born with these neoliberal values, they are socialised into beleiving them when they join the elite, through birthright or ascension. This no doubt at least partly explains Gilmore’s political degeneration, and the uniformity of the media. It is also a process which has infiltrated and now dominates our own university’s political culture.

editor@trinitynews.ie

Editorial Staff

Neoliberal ideology: Tim Cook and Gilmore’s book William Foley

www.trinitynews.ie

tion of college. In an system where socio-economic class is the most important determinant of economic attainment, it is not surprising that the economic interests of the middle and upper classes will be reflected in College political life. Trinity does have a disproportionately high number of private school graduates as well as the lowest proportion of students on the grant (see our InDepth section for more on this).

Still, a generation ago, radical political ideology and action had a much greater footing in our college. In the sixties and seventies, Trinity was rife with radical leftwing and republican groups. Revolutionary Struggle, a “small militant Irish Althusserian” group (according to Wikipedia), shot a visiting British businessman.

On another occasion Brian Lenihan, Sr had to escape from protesting students through a toilet window.I am obviously not suggesting that Tim Cook should have been kneecapped, or be made crawl through a bathroom window. But isn’t it disappointing that not a single student questioned him on his hypocrisy?

A similar exhibition of ideological capture was displayed recently when TCDSU council opposed a motion proposed by the president, Lynn Ruane, for the SU to oppose a student loan system. The introduction of such a system, recently advocated by Ógra Fianna Fáil, ultimately entails a more expensive and more exclusive college education. Surely this is the type of thing that the student body elected Ruane to oppose? It seems that some students are more attracted to the surface appearance of progress than of its substantiation. Indeed, people voting against their own interest represent the ultimate ideological capture by neoliberalism. If social progress is to be regarded as something more than a bullet point in Apple’s marketing strategy then students need to reject corporate culture and apply the idealism of yesterday’s generation to the problems of today’s.

editor:

Matthew Collins

Online comment editor:

Kerrie Danaher

SciTech editor:

Katarzyna Siewierska

Deputy scitech editor:

Conor O’Mara

Online scitech editor:

Martin O’Donnell

Sport editor

Clare McCarthy

Deputy sport editor:

Michael Foley

Online sport editor:

Ken Donnelly

Creative team:

Aisling Crabbe

Art editors:

Natalie Duda Sarah Morel

Graphics editor:

Mike Dolan

Photography editors:

Huda Awan Kevin O’Rourke

Video editor:

Jack O’Kennedy

Digital illustration:

John Tierney

Business Manager:

Liam Mulligan

Printed at The Irish Times print facility, City West Business Campus, 4000 Kingswood Rd, Dublin 24.

Trinity News is partially funded by a grant from DU Publications Committee. This publication claims no special rights or privileges. Serious complaints should be addressed to: The Editor, Trinity Publications, 6 Trinity College, Dublin 2.

Appeals may be directed to the Press Council of Ireland.

Trinity News | Tuesday24 November

SciTech Martin Shkreli controversy brings the frightening power of pharmaceutical companies to the fore The 5500% rise in a drug used to treat Aids patients was a prime example of pharmaceutical companies making profit at the cost of human health and life.

Carol O’Brien

plies.

Secondly, when a medicine has such a small target market, as Daraprim does, generic drug manufacturers often deem development of a competitor drug to not be worth the investment. However, if they do decide to go ahead with production, then generic makers need to prove their drug is equivalent to the branded drug. To do this, they need to get their hands on large amounts to test, something that can be difficult to do if the branded drug is under tightly controlled distribution.

Staff writer HEN TURING PHARMACEUTICALS bought the rights to a littleknown drug called Daraprim this past September, it didn’t take long for the story to sweep across social media, evoking a particularly fiery response. Immediately after buying Daraprim, Turing raised the price for a single pill by an incredible 5500% from $13.50 to $750. The price increase didn’t go down well with patients, and soon the controversy spiralled out of Turing’s control, with an onslaught of criticism exploding across the internet.

Daraprim is a drug that fights toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. It’s a relatively common parasite, but in those with weakened immune systems, such as Aids and cancer patients, infection can cause serious or fatal illness.

The CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, 32-year-old Martin Shkreli, was vocal in his defense of the increase, but by his own admission handled the controversy poorly.

He was attacked on social media, shamed by politicians, and denounced by doctors.

Turing’s share prices fell following the price increase. It wasn’t long before Shkreli buckled under the pressure, and backtracked, vowing to reduce the price. However, he still hasn’t said by when or how much. In the meantime, he’s been busy hiring a new PR firm, lawyers and lobbyists, and being as brash on twitter as ever.

W

Industry precedent

Although Turing’s move hit the headlines, they were not the first pharmaceutical company to buy a drug and swiftly increase the price, nor are they likely be the last.

Such behaviour appears to be a common tactic, endemic within the industry.

Companies are on the lookout for opportunities to buy already developed drugs, particularly ones they believe are undervalued, and then increase the price. It’s an easy way to boost income without the years of effort required to research and develop a new

Seizing opportunity

Illustration by Sarah Morel

drug, which can be seen as inefficient and risky.

Another company that has come under fire is Valeant Pharmaceuticals International. Last February they acquired the rights to two life-saving heart medications, Nitropress and Isuprel. On that very same day, they increased the prices by 212% and 525% respectively. An influential New York Times article last month exposed their their minimal spending on R&D, as well as their sales tactic of acquiring other pharmaceutical companies, laying off their staff, and raising prices.

After the article, Valeant’s share prices dropped. Gilead Sciences increased the price of their hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi, more than twofold in 2011. An improved iteration of the drug, Harvoni, now costs $100,000 for the 12-week treatment. Because of the price, insurance companies are resisting pay outs to pro-

vide the drug, often deeming it necessary in only the most advanced liver disease cases.

Reputational damage

Although Shkreli has been quiet of late, the pharmaceutical industry is still feeling the heat. They are facing a publicity crisis, at a time when “Big Pharma” already has a rocky reputation.

In the US, the huge public backlash over Daraprim didn’t escape the attention of next year’s presidential candidates.

Democratic hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders was quick to take a stand on the controversy, writing a letter to Turing Pharmaceuticals denouncing their actions. He has since been a prominent target of Shkreli’s tweets. Hillary Clinton tweeted about the controversy not long after it broke, and issued a plan the following day.

Among Clinton’s prominent proposals are restricting direct-to-consumer ad-

vertising by pharmaceutical companies, capping monthly prescription drug payments to $250 a person, and proposing that Americans should be allowed to purchase their drugs abroad (where they are often significantly cheaper).

Not surprisingly, the pharmaceutical industry was quick to vocally oppose Clinton’s proposals. On the other side of the political divide, even the Republican candidate Donald Trump, surely an advocate of free-market capitalism if there ever was one, commented on Shkreli “He looks like a spoiled brat... He’s zero. He’s nothing. He ought to be ashamed of himself.” In the lead up to a presidential election year, the pricing of medicines in the US has now become a politically charged issue.

Government intervention in the form of regulation to ensure affordable medicine would likely be a popu-

lar move with voters, but it’s doubtful anyone wishes to do battle with the monstrously powerful health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Turing and others have been quick to defend their actions. They claim that the cost of Daraprim is now in line with those for other rare diseases, and that the money earned will be used for research into new drugs – a dubious claim, given the often scant budget allocation to r&d of these companies. They also insist that their medicines will be given free to those who cannot afford it, another claim that has been criticised.

Expectations public

from

the

Shkreli has commented “There’s this expectation that drug companies should act differently from other companies, because you have to buy their products. That notion needs to disappear.” Except

there is a fundamental difference between pharmaceutical companies and other companies, in my mind at least. They specifically target vulnerable people. Their products are often a need rather than a luxury. Their customers are often highly emotionally fragile. It’s no wonder pharmaceuticals is such a reviled industry.

The business model of a pharmaceutical company looks something like this.

They invent a drug, patent it, and sell it. When the patent runs out, 20 years later, it becomes available for any company to produce a generic version, and due to competition, the cost to the consumer usually drops dramatically.

Daraprim has been around for 52 years though. Its patent ran out a long time ago. The issue here arises instead firstly because Turing Pharmaceuticals bought the exclusive marketing rights for Daraprim. In the US, they control all the sup-

Another twist in the Daraprim saga came late last month, when Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, a San Diego based company, announced that they were launching a low-cost alternative to Daraprim, apparently costing just $99 for a bottle of 100 pills. The catch here is that they are not offering an exact replica of Daraprim. The sole component of Daraprim is a compound called pyrimethamine. Imprimis are instead offering a combination of two compounds; pyrimethamine and leucovorin.

Leucovorin helps reverse the negative effects of pyrimethamine on bone marrow. By combining the two in one pill, Imprimis can overcome the restrictions around Daraprim’s rights. Imprimis’ finished compound drug formula is not FDA-approved, but individually the compounds are, meaning that the new pill will be available by a doctor’s prescription to a specific patient.

While it is important to note the Daraprim price hike does not affect patients in Ireland, the issue is of interest nonetheless considering that the US is a powerhouse of biomedical and pharmaceutical research, meaning any major changes are likely to have global repercussions.

Clearly pharmaceutical companies have to make a profit, and innovation should be rewarded, but too often the pricing of medicines seems ridiculously arbitrary. Many feel now is the time to question pharmaceutical companies to justify their prices, to think seriously about the faults in the system and the balance of incentivised versus predatory pricing.

The first female director of CERN Dr Fabiola Giannoti visits Trinity Before this month, Trinity and Ireland had only one Nobel Laureate in science. Now we are proud to say that we have a second.

Katarzyna Siewierska SciTech editor

Blaise Delaney Contributing writer DR GIANNOTI IS the incoming director of CERN. She is the previous spokesperson of ATLAS project at CERN that was involved in the 2012 discovery of the Higgs Boson.

She will take over the post of director from January 1 2016 and she will be the first woman in this role.

In her speech to the Phil, Dr Giannoti explained that CERN is the fundamental lab for most elementary constituents of matter. The new challenges include the need to develop new technologies, including cryogenic technology to cool the particle accelerators down to extremely low temperatures of about 4 K. She also spoke about CERN being a place that brings people from around the world together to work towards a common goal using the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. While the LHC was used to make scientific discoveries, like the Higgs boson, the technology developed to achieve that, is now applied

to other areas such as medicine or industry. Hence, particle accelerators can be used commercially for the benefit of the society.

Questions and Answers

During the question and answer session students asked many important questions.

One question was about why Giannoti came to CERN in the first place and what her new vision for CERN is? She replied that physics contributes to fundamental questions.

To her particle physics was the natural answer to the fundamental nature of the world. In the future she plans on expanding CERN’s mission in fundamental research, technological innovation and education. She stressed that diversity is a very important aspect of the population of CERN staff and affiliations.

Giannoti was then asked if she was ever discriminated against in science because of being a woman and she replied that personally she did not feel discrimination of any kind in science, although some colleagues of hers do not share the same experience. She said that 20% of the CERN population is female.

Similar or lower figures are seen in other physics facilities and in physics and mathematics departments. Studies show

that women are victims of unconscious bias and research should not present female candidates with obstacles of this kind. But all candidates should also be able to fight for research positions by never giving up.

When asked if she has any concerns about being the director, Giannoti replied that although worried she likes challenges and will do her best. She said that a great thing about CERN is that it is a network of collaborating researchers. With an average age of staff of just 26, she hopes her young colleagues will help.

In search of what’s missing

New high energies and the Standard Model of Particle physics also featured in the question session. All particles and their interactions predicted in the model have been discovered. However, SM is not complete. The universe is a dark place: we see only 5% of the matter in the universe.

The rest of the universe, that is dark matter and dark energy, are basically unknown.

We can deduce their existence from observations, e.g. from motion of galaxies. We see that there must be more matter around galaxies to explain their dynamics. A theory beyond the standard model

Left to right; Dr Giannoti with Cian Henry and Ludivine Rebet of the Phil / Photo by Katarzyna Siewierska

is still to be discovered. Perhaps with new energy scales, new aspects of the beyond the standard model theory can be revealed Giannoti was asked to comment on China’s plans to build a supercollider. CERN and China are both designing a supercollider with a larger ‘ring’.

Although such machines won’t start working before 2035, early planning is necessary. Indeed planning for the LHC began in the 1980s.

Other options, such as a linear collider are still open, and the final decision will rest on what we find now.

One very important ques-

tion was how do you justify being a member state of CERN. Giannoti replied that member states participate in the advance of knowledge of matter and universe. On a more practical level, the high technology instruments developed in member states are great for the researchers working on such projects.

And the fundamental research undertaken in member states is the most stimulating for creativity. It is not constrained by research with say, direct commercial purpose.

Creativity and new ideas are the fuel of whole progress.

As history has shown, sci-

ence goes forward by breakthroughs that come from fundamental research.

About what advice she’d give to students, she said that if you love science, just do it!

There is nothing better than contributing to the advancement of human knowledge.

Indeed, 50% of undergraduates go on to graduate studies.

The rest are highly sought after by the private sector.

The final question asked Giannoti if she could change her career, what would she do. She replied that she would do many things, perhaps play the piano or work in neuroscience.

Ireland and CERN

It is a shame that Ireland is not a member state of CERN. Because of this Irish scientific research in particle physics is non-existent and we are missing out on many projects and other opportunities. Students and researchers must migrate to member state countries to become particle physicists and do research. A strong public information campaign should be carried out to convince the nation and the politicians of the benefits of joining CERN. If this doesn’t happen soon, Irish science will continue to suffer.

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

SciTech

21

Members of the Trinity Student Scientific Review gear up for their second year in print Anna Aleshko interviews members of this year’s TSSR team and describes their plans for the upcoming year.

Anna Aleshko Staff writer FOLLOWING ITS SUCCESSFUL inaugural year, the Trinity Student Scientific Review (TSSR) is back again to offer undergraduate students the chance to submit a review on a scientific topic of their choosing. Successful applicants will get the opportunity to get their reviews published in TSSR’s annual journal under the following four categories: environmental, evolutionary and earth sciences, molecular and cellular biosciences, chemistry and physics.

Nothing to lose, much to gain

As any budding scientist will know, for a successful career in academic research, publications are vitally important.

Initially inspired by the more established Student Economic Review which has been running now for almost thirty years, TSSR came about in order to give undergraduate students an opportunity to be published.

It provides a great opportunity for all participants to gain valuable experience in researching a specific area of either biology, chemistry or physics and putting together a scientific review, a view shared by many of those involved in bringing TSSR back this year.

Taking part would provide great experience, particularly for those looking to go into research, in putting together a well-structured, analytical piece of work that summarises the current developments in a topic that has been chosen.

As James Orr, TSSR’s publication’s manager put it, “it is not a magazine, it’s a journal” for

undergraduates to showcase what they are made of.

A wide range of topics

While many students would be more preoccupied with memorising lecture material for their annual exams, TSSR encourages students to engage more with the research side of science, especially at an earlier stage of their academic career. One of TSSR’s advantages is that students can choose and research any area of science they wish. They are not limited to the content they encounter in their course nor are they told specifically what to write about.

The choice is completely theirs. It’s a great opportunity for people to look outside of what is currently being taught to them on the curriculum. This year’s physics editor Blaise Delaney agreed with this, stating “especially in physics, there are a few topics that maybe people are not too exposed to and it’s a great opportunity to research into this.” As this year’s chemistry editor and receiver of last year’s best freshman prize, Kate Reidy put it, “It would be great to get a great variety in the chemistry section to show the diverse interest of Trinity chemistry students as well as other disciplines.”

Participation of professors

The reviews that are to be published will be chosen by the editors and their academic advisors. All the reviews submitted go through a rigorous selection process that is supported by current professors from the various depart-

The committee of TSSR 15/16 from left to right; Amy Worrall, Blaise Delaney, Kate Reidy, Sarah Deegan, James Orr, Alison Hennessy / Photo by Mike O’Hanrahan

Alison Hennessy, “We’re so touched by how the departments have been so understanding and helpful”.

Kate expressed gratitude to all the professors who have taken time out to ensure that a high standard of the selection process is upheld, stating “It really couldn’t happen without them”. Professor Mike Southern from the Department of Chemistry is one of the professors who returns as an academic advisor return this year.

Structure, structure

structure,

It is understandable that many people at an undergraduate level, in particular freshmen, would have never have written a review before.

As a result, some may find the TSSR programme to be intimidating and as a result may become discouraging from participating. For these people, it is important to keep in mind that the editors understand that a lot of people are new to this. From talking to a few of the people involved in

“

While many students would be more preoccupied with memorising lecture material for their annual exams, TSSR encourages students to engage more with the

research side of science.

TRAUMA - Built to break Exhibition opens at Science Gallery The latest exhibition at the science gallery explores the theme of trauma

Katarzyna Siewierska SciTech editor THE NEW EXHIBITION at the science gallery explores how trauma may affect our bodies, our brains and our minds. It conveys different ways of dealing with a traumatic experience and conveys its aftermath.

Everyone experiences trauma, hence visitors of all ages and backgrounds will find pieces that they can identify with. At the same time, there are pieces that will allow you to experience ‘virtual trauma’ which will allow you to understand another person’s emotions and thoughts. I would strongly recommend to visit the Science Gallery to everyone.

Physical Trauma

The pieces downstairs strongly relate mainly physical trauma. You can compare the structures of helmets used in different sports, by looking at their cross sections. The study by teams in Trinity College Dublin and IT Tallaght on how much trauma can helmets protect your head from is displayed nearby. In the middle you will see 3 beautifully knitted skulls and a knitted model of the spine.

This piece by Nola Avienne

was inspired after she had a very serious accident. She fell through a trap door and suffered head and spinal injury, broken ribs and broken sacrum and lost a few teeth.

Her body healed faster than her mind, so one day she decided to knit herself a new spine, then a new skull and a new brain. This piece captures how art, like knitting for example, can be very therapeutic, because physical trauma is always accompanied with psychological trauma.

Stalking

Upstairs there is a series of very intense pieces. Three pieces are by Jane Prophet from the UK. They were inspired by her delusional stalker that was diagnosed with psychosis. For 25 years Jane received hundreds of letters, from two words to hundreds pages long. Jane’s three pieces in the gallery are the outcome of her mission to understand the state of mind of her stalker. One of the pieces is a projection of her writing “Leave me alone” multiple times until the white page goes completely black.

Another piece features extracts from the letters she received and images of google results from searching some of the words he used in the letters. Jane’s work to me is very intriguing. Being a victim of stalking is a seriously traumatic and destructive experience. I imagine that trying to understand what the stalker is thinking and expressing it in an artwork could have possibly been a way that Jane dealt with the experience. However, I do find it a bit unusual.

Syrian Refugees

The piece that moved me the most was called Project Syria by Nonny De La Pena.

You put on special “goggles” and headphones that allow you to enter the virtual reality created by Nonny. You find yourself on the streets of Syria and suddenly a terrorist attack occurs. You see people and children screaming, lying on the ground injured, running away. Smoke and dust obscures your vision and is suffocating.

Next you find yourself at a refugee camp where people live in tents, there is not enough food for everyone, and the atmosphere is very intense. The virtual reality was reconstructed from images and videos registered by journalists. It put you right in the middle of the nightmare of the Syrian refugees. You can see the horror and the conditions they need to survive in.

The experience is nothing like watching a news report or YouTube video. It was so intense for me I started to cry after it. I think we become very used to hearing that people die in terrorist attacks around the world and over time we become numb to it. However, when you can really picture yourself in the situation, you start to feel like you are really there and you can really empathise with those who actually lived it.

In conclusion, the exhibition has many brilliant pieces that relate to the theme of trauma in many different ways. I personally found the experience of it very informative and interesting. I believe TRAUMA is going to be one of the best exhibitions in the gallery since its opening, because it carries important messages and it is very interactive.

TRAUMA: Built to Break runs from November 20 to February 21

Photo via Photocall Ireland

putting together the second issue of TSSR this year, one thing stands out. “First thing I’m looking for is that it is coherent”, said Kate.

Indeed, a good structure and layout is valued by more than one of the editors. Adding to Kate’s comment, Blaise mentioned that what he’s looking for is “a coherent piece of work where there’s been a lot of attention to a few aspects…. such as abstract, plagiarism and graphs”.

Out of the reviews that will be chosen for publication, prizes will be awarded for the best essays in environmental, evolutionary and earth sciences, molecular and cellular biosciences, chemistry and physics. Prizes are also going for overall best essay as well as best freshman essay. The general manager has expressed hope that a session will be organised for the winners to present their reviews to an audience.

Moving on

“We want to make sure that it’s a lasting publication”, the general manager Alison reflected looking to the future.

Part of making TSSR a lasting publication would involve financial stability. Last year, TSSR was largely funded by the Faculty of Engineering, Mathematics and Science (FEMS) and continues to do so.

T h i s year, efforts have been made to add to this, with one or two companies taking an interest to support and finance the programme in the future. Looking forward to this year, all the people involved expressed enthusiasm for the coming year. James Orr managed to summarised it in one sentence “I’m really

looking forward to this year, it will be really cool”.

Getting involved

For those who are looking for more tips and on how to write a scientific review and also information of how to take part, the group is hoping to hold an information evening. For updates, and for more information, keep an eye on TSSR’s website, trinityssr. com, as well as their Facebook page and posters displayed on College noticeboards.

Participants can also contact the editors directly with any questions.

Trinity News | Tuesday24 November

Trinity Publications Trinity College Dublin’s independent student media

Submissions Wanted Trinity Publications is currently seeking applications for new publications.

If you have an idea for a publication and would like to apply for funding please contact secretary@trinitypublications.ie Your submission must include a detailed proposal including a title, a broad outline of content, details of an editorial team, how many issues you intend to print, how many pages the publication will be, who is going to print it and how much it’s going to cost.

Assistance can be given with sourcing printers once you get in contact.

secretary@trinitypublications.ie

WRITE HERE. WRITE NOW.

Trinity News | Tuesday 24 November

Sport

23

Orthorexia and athletes: an area for concern The term orthorexia was coined by Dr Steven Bratman in 1997 in the USA as a “fixation on righteous eating” but has yet to be officially recognised as a clinically diagnosed eating disorder.

Bláithín Sheil Statt writer HEN ONE THINKS of eating disorders, one automatically thinks of anorexia nervosa, the most spoken-about eating disorder.

With anorexia, the scars of the disorder are borne physically.

It is clear that the person is underweight. However, there also exist other types of eating disorders, particularly among athletes that are harder to define, more difficult to notice, and almost impossible to catch.

Orthorexia nervosa, a relatively newly identified eating disorder, shares characteristics with anorexia nervosa. Yet rather than restricted eating, it involves obsessive healthy eating. The term orthorexia was coined by Dr Steven Bratman in 1997 in the USA as a “fixation on righteous eating” but has yet to be officially recognised as a clinically diagnosed eating disorder.

W

When healthy eating becomes unhealthy

Righteous, pure eating is very much a phenomenon of the 21st Century, a quick scroll through Instagram reveals pages dedicated to clean eating, paleo diets, glutenfree, dairy-free, sugar-free, and everything-free recipes.

Health food is everywhere, which is a good thing. We are making an active effort to live healthier lives and combat obesity. The term orthorexia serves to define the grey area between what is considered to be a healthy diet and a clinically diagnosed eating disorder.

The difference between orthorexia and anorexia is that while anorexia is a fixation on being thin, orthorexia is a fixation on following a strictly healthy diet, and banishing all impure substances from the body. It is not, as some might believe, an obsession with ex-

ercise. Although in most cases enthusiasm and often dependence on exercise play a huge part in establishing a “clean and healthy” body for the orthorexic person, it is not, however, a key characteristic.

Prevalence in athletes

Orthorexia is far more nuanced than other eating disorders because it starts out with the intention of improving general health. In particular, the prevalence of eating disorders in athletes is a huge question yet to be properly investigated. The first study to examine the prevalence of orthorexia nervosa in athletes was undertaken in 2012 and showed high incidences of orthorexia nervosa across both male (30%) and female (28%) athletes in a range of sports including running, swimming and basketball.

It is normal for elite athletes to maximise their nutritional intake for optimal benefits and attempt to follow as healthy a lifestyle as possible for the benefit of their sport; a distance runner will try to achieve a low body fat percentage to be lighter and more agile, a thrower will emphasise strong core and upper body strength resulting in a larger body size, and a dancer will need stronger than average legs.

This is achieved by exerting strict dietary control to reach a certain weight or body shape in conjunction with a specific training plan. Not just limited to elites, anybody committing to a sport will endeavour to give themselves the best chance possible at a good performance. Yet, the uncertainty lies between when these healthy eating habits become unhealthy eating behaviours.

It is possible that orthorexia begins similarly in athletes and non-athletes with a desire to eat cleaner foods. But athletes are less likely to be questioned because they are eating “clean” for the benefit of their performance and health, rather than a non-athlete who eats clean for the benefit of their health alone. The additional motivation of performance

present in athletes is another possible barrier to the detection of this disorder.

Athletes are therefore prime candidates for orthorexia, particularly in judged sports such as diving, gymnastics, and ballet, although it would be incorrect to conclude that all athletes are orthorexic.

It is a condition found more frequently among athletes and therefore athletes are at a higher risk of developing the disorder. In an area where both elite and amateur athletes are vulnerable it should be better surveyed and studied because as we know, mental health is fragile, and it could be a bigger problem than we realise.

Detection and intervention

It is very easy to get sucked into an obsession about food.

For elite and non-elite athletes, this can involve striving to achieve a perfect performance body, starting out as a conscious decision to reduce bad foods and increase good ones. Your coach, if they engage in this type of dialogue with you, should be happy to hear you are taking care of your diet, as it will have an influence on your performance.

However, it is next to impossible to survey the eating habits of someone who may be suffering from orthorexia because on the face of it, they are following the perfect and ideal diet for an athlete.

A lot of qualities of a good athlete are similar to symptoms of orthorexia, such as a strict, healthy diet and excessive amounts of exercise. Why then, would a coach encourage their athlete to eat bad foods when it is not really in their interest? It is likely that they will encourage and support the maintenance of a balanced diet. The issue lies in the fact that a coach cannot see into the mind of an athlete, and cannot tell whether the behaviour is normal, healthy or obsessive, leading to little or no intervention.

Orthorexia often occurs during periods of transition, such as the move from school to

DU Archery Club on target at Intervarsity debut Aaron Matheson Reen Statt writer

DUNDALK INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY played host to last weekend’s instalment of the Ireland Archery Intervarsity League. This was an historic occasion for the men and women of Dublin University Archery Club as it represented their first official outing in a collegiate event.

The club, a brainchild of science students, Dáire Healy and Oskar Ronan, was formally recognised by the Dublin University Central Athletics Club (DUCAC) in October.

Upon entering college, Healy and Ronan were surprised to learn Trinity lacked an archery club. As such, they met with other enthusiasts to rectify the situation. This cohort of archers began lobbying in favour of establishing an official club in 2012. They were consistently rejected on grounds of lacking suitable facilities and insurance issues.

Undeterred, the group worked tirelessly to present a functioning club with a wide membership base to DUCAC. This resulted in their receiving formal recognition this academic year. Healy cites ‘’drive and determination’’ as underpinning a successful conclusion to this process.

These qualities were in abundance on Saturday in what was a standard indoor

competition. This event features archers shooting target faces of 20 to 60 centimetres from a distance of 18 meters.

Each participant uses 60 arrows and shoots three at a time. Trinity’s recurve team was comprised of founders Healy and Ronan alongside Christo Pretorious, Choy-Ping Clark-Ng and Eve Kearney.

Members of the club involved in the barebow event were Siobhan Flynn and Max Fursman. Others who participated from the college were Cormac Begley, Bronwyn Berkley and Jack Buttery.

Many of those competing have recently took up the sport. This contingent has availed of the beginners’ course offered from 7 to 8 pm on Mondays in Greenside House on Cuffe Street. In the cosy confines of this community centre more experienced club members teach the ropes of the 2 most popular archery styles, barebow and Olympic recurve. It must be stressed, however, that the club welcomes all codes within the sport including the traditional and compound techniques.

These Monday sessions are preoccupied with mastering the mechanics of wielding a bow and arrow whereas training nights held in Belvedere College focus on accuracy.

The facilities in the latter allow for a full indoor distance of 18 meters and are shared by athletes from Dublin Institute of Technology. This makes for a comfortable and social location to hone your skills.

The hours spent in preparation were manifest in some

fine performances from Trinity’s archers. The recurve team, buoyed by years of experience, produced some excellent scores. Those competing in the barebow event similarly acquitted themselves extremely well. Overall, Saturday proved a very informative introduction to competition for DU Archery Club. Those who participated eagerly await their next intervarsity event in Dublin City University in February.

Aside from its competitive commitments, DU Archery Club is keen to emphasise its social aspects. Given that the bow is the weapon of choice for many of the film’s protagonists, the club hopes to host a Hunger Games movie night. A number of trips away are also planned. One such excursion will sample the most recent incarnation of the sport, Archery Tag. This combination of a lively social scene, intervarsity success, a new and expanding group of members and official recognition mark DU Archery Club out as an exciting strand to Trinity sport.

university sports or a change of coach who may encourage a new type of training. This transition period also includes short time periods of following a specific diet to prepare for a competition.

The person should be able to transition smoothly, or in the case of a short-term diet, to return to normal eating habits after a specified date.

Orthorexia occurs where equilibrium is not achieved or re-established, when the person is unable to transition back into a normal lifestyle.

The obsession becomes long term, leading to high stress, difficulty in social situations and the decline of your mental health.I have heard stories of athletes going on no-carbohydrate diets for a period of time, or living entirely off soup a week before a race to get to race weight. It is unclear whether this amounts to orthorexia or not. It certainly seems extreme to cut a whole food group out of your diet, particularly when carbs are an excellent and primary source of energy.

On the other hand, the soup diet was temporary with a particular goal in mind: to shed excess pounds for a particular race. This does not fit in with the criteria of orthorexia as it is not a long-term obsession, while cutting carbohydrates out of your diet seems to resonate with the idea of an eating disorder.

This leaves us with a serious question: how do we detect orthorexia in athletes, and how do we distinguish between good-healthy eating, and obsessive-healthy eating? One thing is clear, this area is majorly under researched as it is a relatively new phenomenon.

It needs to be given more attention, particularly in relation to female athletes who are already more susceptible to acquiring an eating disorder by virtue of being a female in a society that often values a woman’s physical appearance as much as or even more than their intelligence or athletic ability.

Illustration by Nadia Bertaud

Trinity News | Tuesday24 November

Sport

24

The rise of orthorexia, a fixation on rigourous eating, and how it has effected top athletes page .23

Not that new to the parish Memebers of the Trinity hurling team, left to right; Jack Banks, Fionn Ó Riain Broin, Cian Ó Riain Broin Photo by Matthew Mulligan

Even though GAA has been played in Trinity since the 1950s, rugby and cricket are more well known in the college. Dillon Hennessy speaks to talks to Trinity hurler Cian Ó Riain Broin about his love for the sport, his hopes for the season ahead and the supposed “taboo” surrounding his team.

Dillon Hennessy Contributing writer

HE MEMBERS OF Trinity Hurling Club make a pilgrimage between the beating heart of the pale and Clan na Gael Fontenoy Gaelic Club once a week. Twice if they have a match. Cian Ó Riain Broin is one of those 30 or so members and he has high hopes for the future.

He’s aware Trinity isn’t known for its hurling, but then as famously reported, Seán Óg Ó hAilpín’s mother was from Fiji and his father was from Fermanagh, neither of which are hurling strongholds. He wants to represent Trinity in the top-tier college hurling tournament, the Fitzgibbon Cup. After speaking to him, I’d say it’s only a matter of time.

“Last year we won the Ryan Cup (the second division) for the first time in Trinity’s history, which is a huge step forward for hurling here. We could have been promoted this year but because of the huge turnover of players we decided to stay where we are for now.”

T

Difficulties facing Trinity Hurling

Cian touches on just a few of the challenges facing Trinity Hurling Club and their campaign for promotion. “There’s no break, the seasons all melt together, which can be relentless.” The players, who come from all over Ireland, are often committed to club and county, as well as to Trinity.

If players start to prioritise, it is Trinity that loses out.

As a result there are dozens of excellent players in Trinity who don’t play for the college. It just isn’t worth their time. “With players out injured, leaving college, playing for their local clubs, it’s hard to know exactly what sort of numbers we have.”

Last year, in a classic example of quality over quantity,

they fielded a Freshers team with just 16 players. One of them played with a dislocated shoulder for much of the season and another was a rugby player who was handed a hurley.

Attracting and retaining the most talented hurlers is a serious issue for the club. Cian highlights how hurling is regarded as a minority sport in Trinity and receives very little support from the college. “My brother and I were pucking a sliotar around next to the cricket pitch recently and we were told to stop. We weren’t even on the pitch.

“When my brother asked why, he was called in to the groundsman.” You’d think the time when hurlers were seen as subversive elements

by College Authorities had passed but it seems there is an implicit campus-wide ban on hurling, echoing the equally absurd ban on “foreign games” the GAA enforced for so long.

All of which means it’s easier to play ultimate frisbee, american football and even croquet on campus than to use a hurley.

No wonder Cian feels that there is a taboo around their name. “Lads in my club who would be great players and who go to Trinity have no interest in playing for the team.

Trinity is seen as an academic college, while UCD is seen as the college for hurlers. The whole ethos at UCD is completely different.” There is only one scholarship available to hurlers each year, while the colleges Trinity compete with can offer far more support, even just in terms of facilities.

“We don’t have a clubhouse or a room, somewhere we can meet on campus. We can’t train on campus, except for an hour during freshers week.

We have to walk over to our home ground near Ringsend.

Even if we had a small space to train on campus it would really raise our profile because there’s not much awareness of Trinity Hurling. Only hurlers know we exist.”

The impression that hurling is viewed as a niche interest by the college was reinforced by

the Trinity sport awards ceremony last year. Trinity Hurling received just three invites, despite their historic Ryan Cup victory. When the rest of Ireland has moved on and is commemorating both the Somme and the 1916 Rising next year, is Trinity still frozen in the past when, although it rightly is celebrating its staff and pupils who fought in WWI, it is still chasing hurlers from the edge of the boundary of a cricket pitch?

A passionate group

Despite swimming against the current, he sees a way forward for the club. The passion and commitment of its members is unquestionable, as is their ambition. “We have an excellent manager, Shane O’Brien and backroom staff in James Morrisey, along with our Chairman Eoin O’Leary .

They demand a very high level of work from us, which we need if we want to improve.”

Cian was very clear about his goals for his time in Trinity: “We have the squad to retain the Ryan Cup. I would love to win the Ryan Cup this year and then play in the Fitzgibbon Cup. If we move up to the Fitzgibbon, that will show people we’re serious and attract the best hurlers to play here, the way the Champions League attracts soccer players. It would leave a legacy that future players could build on.”

This desire to take Trinity Hurling into the big leagues is admirable, but is it achievable? Talking to Cian, you have to hope so because it’s clear his relationship with the sport is as long-running as it is intense. “My mom’s family is from Tipperary so when we’d go down there a lot, my brother and I. You’d be in a parish where all they do is hurl, it’s all they talk about.

It’s just the natural thing to do there, like breathing. You weren’t forced into it, but because it was happening all around you it was the natural thing to do. On top of that, my mom was always very passionate about being Irish and playing your native game, she

“

“We don’t have a clubhouse or a room, somewhere we can meet on campus. We can’t train on campus, except for an hour during freshers week.

We have to walk over to our home ground near Ringsend.

Even if we had a small space to train on campus it would really raise our profile because there’s not much awareness of Trinity Hurling.

Only hurlers know we exist.”

loved the sport, how intense it was, she loved the ties to the Irish language and to the history of Ireland.”

I thought it was strange that despite his introduction to hurling in Tipperary, he supports Dublin when they play each other. “Since I play for a Dublin club, I know the players who play for Dublin, the Dublin Seniors. You come to respect them, you’re connected to them, so you support them.”

It also helps that Dublin have improved dramatically over the past few years. As Cian’s situation demonstrates, loyalties can be tangled in hurling, so I was expecting a pause after I posed the question, club or county? He didn’t hesitate for a second. “Club.

You talk to people who play county and sometimes they don’t enjoy it. It’s so intense, it almost takes the fun out of it. Your club is the people you grew up with, where everyone knows who you are, even the people in the parish. That personal element makes the difference.” This idea, that hurling is not just a game but a way of life, is one many hurlers return to again and again.

It’s the fuel that fires them, the force that drives them to make the sacrifices hurling demands of its disciples.

Sacrifices

And the sacrifices are not insignificant. When I asked Cian about the worst injury he’d ever had playing hurling I didn’t expect there would be so many contenders. “At the minute I’m playing with two torn hip flexors. Both of them are torn. I’ve been playing on them for six or seven months, which isn’t great.” I consider asking him why he doesn’t stop hurling until they’ve fully recovered, but then I realise, well, he’d have to stop hurling.

“At the start of the year I had a suspected fractured vertebrae, three weeks ago I was in hospital with damaged kidneys.”

Those injuries were painful, but healed. “Someone stepped on my left hand and damaged the nerves so I can’t feel anything here anymore” he says,

indicating what looks like the upper part of his arm. Of course, he’s also broken his fingers so many times he can’t count anymore but that goes without saying. “I’m no different to anyone else playing, no one escapes the injuries.”

Winning makes it all worthwhile though. The standout moment of his hurling career was beating Lucan in the Dublin Senior Hurling Championship Semi-Final with his club, St Jude’s. “It was my debut, I didn’t expect to play but I was thrown in and I played well enough. People at the club started calling me Ryan Bertrand after the Chelsea player who started in the Champions League Final that year. It was an incredible feeling.”

Speaking of players he’s been compared to, everyone who grows up playing sport has an idol, someone in their game they look up to and Cian is no different. “I wanted to be Pádraic Maher. He’s a wingback for Tipperary and I play the same position myself so he was an obvious role model.

He’s huge, he’s a monster who catches everything, I always loved that as a kid. He won an All-Ireland in 2010 and I worshipped the ground he walked on.”

He got the chance to see Pádraic Maher live in action in the first game of the 2014 AllIreland Final, which turned out to be an absolute thriller.

“Tipperary were playing Kilkenny. We were in the Hill and the atmosphere was electric.

One of the Tipperary players had a free to win it at the death, they had to use Hawkeye to decide if it was over or not. Being in the stand, waiting to know the final score, was unbelievable.

When the match was finished you just sighed. Days like that you know why you love hurling.” Occasionally in sport a match comes along that exemplifies everything attractive about it, that captures its allure. Rugby has Japan beating South Africa at the World Cup. Football has Liverpool’s comeback against AC Milan in 2005. For Cian and for hurling, it was that match.

Taking centre stage

Thanks to the internet and in particular to coverage from Buzzfeed, more and more people from all over the world are experiencing hurling for the first time. Americans especially can’t seem to get enough of the frenzied, combative action. With increasing numbers of hurlers taking the opportunity to spend a summer playing in the States, I ask Cian if it’s only a matter of time before we see hurling franchises springing up. “Obviously it would be amazing if hurling took off internationally, but the chances of it happening are very slim.

People know about it though. Sky Sports are covering it now so people in England and all over the world are watching it. They do it very professionally as well, it’s a great step forward. The only problem is that they have exclusive rights to broadcast some matches. People might have to pay to watch hurling and that was never how it worked before. My dad isn’t happy about the exclusive rights.”

It’s worth remembering that no one is paid to play hurling.

It is still an amateur sport, all the way up to the All-Ireland Final, so some people find that business model jars with the nobler ethos of the GAA. Whether hurling becomes popular internationally or not, Cian is convinced Ireland will always be the best at it. “We live it. We love it. It’s in our blood. Our history. My friend who knew nothing about hurling went along to a game a week or two ago and now she’s raving about it. Hurling will always have that effect on Irish people, the same way rugby does in New Zealand.”

Cian is confident that with hurling going from strength to strength it won’t be long before the Trinity team get the recognition and the Fitzgibbon Cup reward that their hard work deserves.