Trinity News Vol. 62, Issue 5

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Volume 62, Issue 5

trinitynews.ie

NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR 2015 Ice Cube (left) and Kevin Hart receive patronage medals from Phil president Ludivine Rebet Photo by Conn McCarrick for The Phil

Many TAs are overworked and underpaid, work many hours for free or at substantial pay cuts • Graduate students do much of their teaching work for free or at sub minimum wage rates.

• Due to worsening conditions, many TAs can only spend ten to fifteen minutes on essay and exam script correcting.

William Foley Deputy editor

Nathanial Zavin Contributing writer

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EACHING ASSISTANTS (TAS) in several departments are being forced to work long hours on reduced wages or without pay, Trinity News has learned. Underfunded departments have been forced, in the face of cuts to budgets and teaching staff, to make many postgraduate students take on more teaching duties without compensation or at reduced pay. Under guidelines set down in the college

calendar, graduate students may be required to assist in teaching at the discretion of their head of department or school, but such work will be “paid for at agreed College rates and must not exceed six hours per week on average, except in circumstances agreed between the graduate student, Head of School and Dean of Graduate Studies, as appropriate.” But, for many departments, graduate students work for well over six hours per week, often without pay or at reduced pay levels. Most of the increased duties seem to involve correcting of papers with the result that TAs, who also have to do their own research and seek paid employment elsewhere, cannot dedicate more than ten or fifteen minutes per essay or exam script. TAs feel frustrated that they cannot provide as good a service to students as they would like, and feel that teaching standards have declined in general.

Worsening working conditions, and worsening teaching quality

There is no detailed framework for the pay and conditions of graduate students in College, and their circumstances vary substantially

What factors explain Trinity’s low drop out rate?

InDepth p.7

between, and within, departments. Some departments, such as economics, are better off than others and pay their graduate students for teaching hours and for marking and correcting. Others have been forced to pass stringent budget cuts on to the overworked and underpaid junior teaching staff. Paul, a TA in a department within the Faculty Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (ASSH), said that all PhDs on scholarships in his department have been working well in excess of the six hour maximum. The six hours are supposed to be worked in return for his scholarship money, which he describes as sufficient to pay the rent. In order to live he also has to work a parttime job. With the increased teaching hours, he spends twenty to thirty hours a week in his unpaid teaching job and his part-time job, leaving little time for his doctoral research.

Mark is a TA and PhD student in another ASSH department. He is paid for teaching, but not for the time he takes to prepare tutorials, which he says can be three to five hours per tutorial. There have also been cuts to to some components of teaching pay: “The pay for marking of scripts has been reduced. It was pre-

How to rig a students’ union election

Features p.10

viously 8 euro per script, it’s now five. Some departments don’t pay for marking at all.

So TAs are incentivised to take as little time as is physically possible, over marking.”

Students are thus unlikely to have their work evaluated in the most thorough and proper way. Their learning experience suffers too. With graduate students having to replace full-time lecturers in many modules, and having to take on larger classes and more tutorial hours, teaching quality will suffer.

Besides affecting the student experience, pay cuts for TAs have negatively affected their research as well. Jane, a TA in the ASSH faculty, says that “there have been a lot of people quitting because they can’t afford it financially”. A friend of hers almost dropped her PhD after taking two pay cuts: “If you come in promised a certain amount of money you should be guaranteed that amount of money the whole time. You are making specific financial decisions, it’s a huge time commitment, you’re not making money outside of it. And then your pay gets cut once or twice throughout a four year period? That’s pretty serious.” Paul points out that one component of international university ranking is PhD

output, which can only suffer in light of worsening working conditions. Trinity has continually declined in the international rankings over the past few years. “We have fewer PhDs because we’re running out of funding for PhDs, and we even have a few master’s students teaching in some departments,” says Jane. “So they’re stretched, they’re teaching more than they have in the past and in many cases are paid less. So you’re just getting a general fatigue. I don’t think students are getting the quality of courses that they should.”

Departmental discrepancies and casualisation of academic labour

All the TAs who were interviewed were reluctant to blame department heads and senior lecturing staff, whom they described as being broadly sympathetic. They are unable to enforce College guidelines on working hours and pay because of funding cuts implemented by College, cuts which derive from the present government’s policy.

Nevertheless, students in several departments have been told by department heads that their research funding will be cut if they do not comply with extended working hours and pay cuts. Even a

delay of payment can engender substantial difficulties for doctoral students, who generally live “hand to mouth” according to Gianna Hegarty, vice-president of the Graduate Students’ Union. Hegarty says she ran for election on the issue of TA’s working conditions. She intends to conduct a comprehensive report on pay levels and working hours across College before the end of term. There are no centralised structures for determining and processing graduate students’ labour and the College calendar’s guidelines are “ambiguous and open to interpretation.”

Her project is complicated by the “very different experiences across schools and departments”, and also by the small size of departments and the general lecturing pool.

“When you are a PhD student you are working very closely with academics who are important for your career,” she says. “You don’t want to burn bridges. It’s a very political situation.” Many graduate students, especially those who have their sights set on academia, want more teaching experience for their CVs and so are sometimes in competition with their peers and somewhat beholden to professors. “In the history department [where Hegarty

was a PhD student] we would feel so lucky when we were given teaching,” she says. “It’s hard to take a stand.”

Third Level Workplace Watch is an organisation established by academics who work casual or precarious contracts. In a document sent to Trinity News, the group called for an end to shortterm and zero hours contracts and for the implementation of pro rata pay levels.

The organisation claims that 80% of full-time researchers are employed under precarious conditions and that doctoral students are used “as cheap labour and [dismissed] once they graduate.” One postdoctoral researcher, who spoke on condition of anonymity to Trinity News for a previous article, said that “after eight years studying in the university, and graduating with a PhD, I have been left feeling that I have no future and that my contribution to research and training is not valued.”

Additional reporting by Matthew Mulligan

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Will Trinity be able to BT Young Scientist, meet needs of increased producing Ireland’s international students? future

Up in the air: Taking on the challenge of the trampoline during Refresher’s Week

Comment p.15

Sport p. 24

SciTech p.17

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 Jamuary

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What They Said

“ “ “ ADAPT demonstrates the commitment of SFI, Government and industry to establish a leading international position for Ireland in next generation digital content technologies

Smartvote is beginning to show the chasm that exists between politicians and young people USI President Kevin Donoghue in the Irish Times

Provost Patrick Prendergast at the launch of Adapt

Everyday, Institute of Technology lecturers see first-hand the damage that an era of austerity cuts wreaks on the student experience of higher education TUI President Gerry Quinn on institute lecture strike.

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I could not have been more surprised when my name was called out.

My wife and I were in the kitchen and we just started laughing.

Former Trinity student Lenny Abrahamson on his Oscar nomination.

College reversed decision to not allow student to sit Schols two days before exams began • An apparent outstanding payment prevented payment of sports centre charge, which in turn prevented her from being fully registered.

• College repeatedly confirmed that she could not sit Schols, despite the intervention of her tutor, Professor Peter Coxon, on her behalf.

Niamh Lynch Staff writer

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OLLEGE ADMINISTRATION HAS come under scrutiny recently following a case where a second year student was informed that she was eligible to sit the Foundation Scholarship Exams (Schols) less than three days before they were due to start.

Maeve Murphy Quinlan, a science student due to sit the maths and geology Schols exams, had been informed in November that she was not eligible to take the exams due to a clerical error in her application. However, she continued to argue her case, and, following extensive email correspondence with the Academic Registry, Murphy Quinlan was informed on the evening of January 8 that she was able to sit the examinations starting on January 11.

The error was due to a delay in payments being processed by the Academic Registry. In late October, Murphy Quinlan noticed a fee of over ¤1000 euro charged to her college account that matched a payment made by her the previous year relating to accommodation. This apparent outstanding payment prevented her from paying the sports centre charge of ¤128, which in turn prevented her from being fully registered – a requirement for sitting Schols.

Murphy Quinlan contacted the Academic Registry in October notifying them of the problem and again a month later, as the deadline for Schols applications was November 16. Despite having already submitted her application before this deadline, she had not received any confirmation of it.

The outstanding payment was cleared without explanation on November 17, leaving Murphy Quinlan to gather the outstanding fee of ¤128.

However, she was unable pay this money straight away due to the fact that her father had recently been made unemployed and her family was facing financial difficulties.

She paid the fee a couple of days after November 16. Despite this, Murphy Quinlan received an email around the same time claiming that she was not eligible to sit Schols as she had not submitted her application on time.

Over the course of December, College repeatedly con-

firmed that she could not sit Schols, despite the intervention of her tutor, Professor Peter Coxon, on her behalf.

On January 4, a final email definitively stated she would not be allowed to sit the exams.

In a last ditch effort to provide a resolution, Murphy Quinlan’s father contacted the Senior Tutor’s office.

Following a series of emails and calls over the course of a week, she finally received an email from the Senior Lecturer’s office, on the evening of Friday January 8, stating that she could now sit the Schols exams, which were due to start in less than three days, on Monday 11.

Speaking to Trinity News, Murphy Quinlan explained how the situation had adversely affected her mental health: “The guilt, stress, and emotional toll that the past term, and Christmas break, took on me is something no student should have to ex-

perience. First being told definitively, on multiple occasions, that I couldn’t sit the exams, and that I was to blame, (then) subsequently being told I could – two days before said exams started – left me in a vulnerable position, feeling confused, guilty, and angry… I feel that Trinity needs to take the mental health of its students into account when dealing with complaints like this.”

Murphy Quinlan also voiced her opinion that College administration needs to be improved significantly: “They saw me as a student number, not as a person. I was offered no initial apology for the fee issue, and no apology for the subsequent mess… I’ll start the new term drained, and rather disillusioned with the great and prestigious Trinity that only cares for the fees its wealthy students offer up. It’s taken me this long to wrap my head around the issue, and I am not sure what to look for in terms of compensation.”

Murphy Quinlan did not accept the offer to sit the examinations at such short notice. She has now inquired about the possibility of sitting the Scholarship exams next year but has so far received no response from College.

Schols are a set of academically rigorous exams that take place in the week before College resumes after Christmas break. The prestigious award aims to highlight excellence in the candidate’s subject.

Successful candidates, those who achieve a first in the majority of papers taken and who do not fall below 65% in any paper, enjoy significant benefits, including Commons free of charge, rooms free of charge and fee remission for up to five years.

College did not give comment about the case when contacted.

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They saw me as a student number, not as a person. I was offered no initial apology for the fee issue, and no apology for the subsequent mess - Science student Maeve Murphy Quinlan

USI election manifesto calls for rejection of loans Matthew Mulligan Editor

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HE UNION OF Students in Ireland (USI) published this month its Student General Election Manifesto in anticipation of this years voting. The manifesto targets issues faced by students and young people both inside and outside of third-level environments, and in addition has a broad range of social demands which would affect a wider demographic.

In his introductory statement to the manifesto, president of the USI Kevin Donoghue states that “since the economic crash of 2008 our education system continues to be seriously under-funded”.

Citing reduced household incomes, increases in rental prices and the dominance of the part-time employment market, Donoghue states that there is an increasing contrast between the rising costs of attending college and the stagnation in increases in student supports: “The next Government should seek to follow the example of most of our EU partners and introduce free, publicly funded education”, ends the statement.

Of the core asks to the next government, a complete rejection of any introduction of a student loan system or

increase in third-level fees is put forward. In December a motion to oppose increases in student fees and the introduction of a loan system were passed at TCDSU council, following the establishment of a Students Against Fees group.

The reinstatement of the non-adjacency rates for mature students and those living on islands along with travel passes for maintenance grant recipients and the reinstatement of the post-grad maintenance grant make the financial demands when it comes to grants. One important proposal of note is a review of how estrangement from parents or guardians when applying for grants is examined.

The issues of fees and grants are sure to weigh heavily on student voters minds in the run up to the election and the final recommendations of the Cassells group on the funding of higher education. In December reports emerged in the Irish Times that the group would recommend the introduction of a loan system, along with the increase of fees to ¤4,000 per annum.

How the student grant system would factor into these plans is unknown, but the continuing scaling back of the system does not show signs of stopping.

With students often times living away from home for

the first time, they may not have knowledge of their rights as tenants. In order to strengthen student positions, the USI is proposing that the next government amend the Residential Tenancies Act to allow for students’ unions “to have legal standing to challenge on behalf of their membership the introduction of new rents in purpose built student accommodation centres, where those rents are raised outside of term time.”

The use of NAMA properties is proposed alongside the request that the government create a Student Housing Strategy.

The precarious nature of work faced by students both inside and outside the academic world is also being challenged in the manifesto, with the USI demanding a dismantling of the JobBridge system and amendment to the laws surrounding working hours to help those on zero-hours contracts.

Following in line with more localised campaign groups like the one established by TCDSU, the USI manifesto requests that the next government commits to holding a referendum on the Eighth Amendment, and a repeal of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill. They also call for the government to repeal laws which restrict information on travelling for the purposes of securing an abortion and other “censorship laws”.

Ice Cube and Kevin Hart speak to packed Phil audience

Photo by Conn McCarrick for The Phil

Megan Thompson Staff writer

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CE CUBE, RAPPER, record producer, actor and filmmaker, and Kevin Hart, comedian and actor, were welcomed to the Graduates Memorial Building (GMB) by a cheering audience Friday. They were here at the invitation of the Phil, where they were awarded honorary patronage of the society.

Ice Cube and Hart are on a European tour promoting their new film Ride Along 2.

Ice Cube thanked Universal Studios for their support of the film, which he saw as particularly important given that

both of the leading actors are black: “You need that extra push sometimes when two black co-stars are pushing and starring in a film.”

When they were asked about the film industry, they both agreed that a true entertainer is diverse and can work in many different fields of entertainment. Kevin Hart compared an entertainer to a brain and said that entertaining is: “What you make of it.”

They also discussed the importance of films and how they have been given the opportunity to inspire and motivate people to achieve whatever they set their minds too.

Kevin expressed this point by saying: “We use this power… to inspire the younger generation to rise up and become

next in line.”

One of the questions that was asked was how they feel about the Academy Awards (Oscars) and the view that the nominees are lacking in diversity, which has caused many celebrities, such as Jada Pinkett Smith and Spike Lee, to decide to boycott the annual event. Many people were shocked that Straight Outta Compton, a film produced by Ice Cube, was not nominated or recognized by the Oscars despite the film’s major success around the world.

When asked what his view was, Ice Cube said that: “It really doesn’t matter.” He explained that he has never attended the event and that in his mind: “When you do a film like Straight Outta Compton, the awards come way before

the award shows. The awards come from the people, the studio and everyone involved in making the film.” Kevin Hart agreed with this view, stating that: “It’s for the fans and you guys going to see it, [that] is our Oscar.”

When asked about their plans for the future, Ice Cube talked about Cube Vision, his film and television production company, and how he plans to continue to work on and build the company. Kevin Hart discussed his upcoming project The Secret Life of Pets, in which he voices Snowball, a white rabbit.

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

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Cultural scholar discusses Islamophobia with TCD audience Conall Monaghan Online news editor Arun Kundnani professor of media, culture and communication at New York University (NYU) and author of the Muslims Are Coming! spoke in Trinity last night about increasing levels of Islamophobia worldwide in an event arranged by the department of sociology.

The talk was presented as a conversation between Kundnani and Trinity sociology lecturer David Landy. Ronit Lentin, emeritus sociology professor opened the discussion, in which she described “Islamophobia as terribly important in terms of understanding racism in the contemporary world.”

Taxation reform and government corruption among main topics discussed at Hist Party Debate Five representatives out of the 16 parties running in this year’s general election were present for the debate Niamh Moriarty Staff writer

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AXATION REFORM, ECONOMIC policy and government corruption were the primary topics of discussion at the Historical Society’s Party Debate on Wednesday evening, panelled by five representatives out of the sixteen parties running in this year’s general election; Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and Labour TD Alex White, Fine Gael TD Alan Farrell, Lucinda Creighton TD of Renua, Glenna Lynch of the Social Democrats and Annette Mooney from People before Profit spoke to the society at the Graduates Memorial Building. Morning Ireland TV presenter Gavin Jennings acted as moderator for the debate.

Alex White defended Labour returning to government, despite their current unpopularity. The party currently stands at 9% according to The Sunday Business Post’s Red C Polls, but White claimed that it was “vital” that the current coalition remain together in government to have the ability to influence change, with Alan Farrell echoing his statements, referring to the coalition’s work together as a “legacy”.

Creighton was critical of

White’s claims on government power: “the reform that was promised to…make our elected parliamentarians on all sides of the house relevant.. has fallen flat on it’s face.”

Glenna Lynch argued White and Farrel’s responses were indicative of the “cosy symbiotic relationship” of the coalition, criticising the parties on their inaction in response to low-level corruption within the government.

Creighton claimed that the Labour Party has rid itself of the role of the smaller party watchdog it was initially supposed to adopt and challenged them to account for their actions. She recalled the appointment of John McNulty to the board of a State gallery and most recently, former Irish Congress of Trade Union (ICTU) general secretary David Begg, to the chair of the Pensions Authority: “we’ll appoint the most high-profile bearded union boss to a big board and rally the troops.” Farrell pointed out that taking away publicfunding for parties wouldn’t level the playing field: “you open up every member of the Dáil…to envelopes… to the Galway tent.”

Commitment to job growth and the twice-increased minimum wage was Farrell’s illustration of the current government’s commitment to economic development, but conceded that cuts to frontline services were “un-

palatable” and tax burdens were and continue to be an “imposition” on house-owners: “It’ll probably take three [terms] to get back to a point economically…where we can start delivering services we deserve.” Creighton declared changes proposed by the OECD and the EU regarding the corporate taxation system, favouring bigger European economies, a threat to the Irish parliament, but furthermore that personal taxation is set to be “the biggest obstacle to growth”.

On the issue of taxation reform, Farrell was quick to point out the 440,000 lower-income earners who currently exempt from taxes as a result of the party’s efforts.

White emphasised that the gain from tax cuts would be focused on those on lower and middle income earners.

On Irish Water he admitted that PR was badly handled but he described it as an investment: “[It’s] a critically important piece of public infrastructure…[Water is]a huge resource issue for the entire world.”

Creighton outlined Renua’s flat-tax system fixed at 23%. Under their proposal, a minimum wage earner will retain 77c out of every €1 earned. She urged people to dispel the notion that higher tax leads to higher revenue; she emphasised that the growth in revenue of 1400% over the four-year period followed a reduction (from40-

20%) in capital gains tax.

Her proposal was, naturally, met with opposition from all other parties, with White describing it as “profoundly unfair”.

Lynch justified their higher-tax proposal on the grounds of a poll in June that saw 70% of the population in favour of investment in public services rather than tax cuts, stating community response to homelessness and flooding played a part in shaping people’s opinion on taxation: “you pay a little more tax and you have decent services…you pay less.. and you hollow out services”.

The Social Democrats are opposed to Irish Water, advocating for alternative water procedures to be set out in the long-term, leading White to question whether their opposition was solely based on negative popular perception of the entity.

Annette Mooney proposed the correction of the deficit on corporate tax income (from 6.25% to 12.5%), the introduction of a second band of tax for earners over €100,000 and for the increase of capital gains tax from 33% to 50%. She reaffirmed PBP’s position on water tax and property tax abolition.

Due to three members (White, Creighton, Farrell) of the panel leaving prior to questions opening to the floor, comments on the Eighth Amendment weren’t discussed with all members

of the panel. Dr. Gavin Jennings also took partial responsibility, stating he left the questions on abortion toward the end of the debate for fear it would take over the debate. Mooney raised the issue of the potential 14-year jail sentence for women procuring illegal abortion pills, and it’s implications in the case of rape, where the rapist may only get a sentence of 7 years in prison. She also denied Labour’s claim that they brought the Protection of Life Bill into action, stating that it was “people on the ground” that forced the party to take action.

Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil were the biggest parties among those who didn’t attend, apologising for having to decline the offer. Backlash online was aimed at the under-representation of smaller parties, and claims of bias on the society’s were made.

The society’s Correspondent Secretary Annabel O’Rourke issued a statement via Facebook to explain the society’s decision: “Unfortunately we could not invite all political parties to the debate. By our count, there are 16 political parties running in the general election, an unfeasible number for a debate”. Parties were invited based on the metric of having three or more elected TDs, a process she admittedly stated was one of necessity rather than the most preferred course of action.

Landy started the conversation by referring to some figures for Britain, which claimed that in 2015, four out of five Muslims experienced or witnessed Islamophobia and one out of six Muslims experienced a direct physical attack.

Kundnani responded saying: “We’re seeing something more intense than we’ve ever seen,” and further claimed that it is similar to how Jews were perceived in many societies during the 20th century.

He believed that the problem is largely structural. Using Britain and America as examples, he described how a large proportion of Muslims in both countries are under surveillance, which is legitimised through the use of deradicalisation theory.

Deradicalisation theory, he claimed, has allowed any form of political dissent within Muslim groups to be seen as a stepping stone to terrorism, as the theory argues that there are certain signs one can look out for which reveal that someone is becoming radicalised. Possible examples of radicalisation signs include opposing the Iraq war and giving up smoking, he claimed.

While in America it is largely the police force, FBI, and other security agencies who are responsible for spotting signs of potential radicalisation, Kundnani described how in Britain the job is “outsourced” to the public sector.

Students Against Fees group planning expansion to other campuses Members of the Union of Students in Ireland attended a meeting of SAF for the first time in an official capacity

From the skeletons of more than 80 individuals, seven skeletons were selected for whole genome analyses. Despite variation in isotope levels which suggested some of the 80 individuals lived their early lives outside Britain, most of those sampled had genomes similar to an earlier Iron Age woman from Melton, East Yorkshire. The poor childhood health of these men, has led the team to suggest they endured childhood stress. Their robust skeletons and healed trauma also led the team to suggest that they were used to wielding weapons.

Staff writer

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MEETING HELD on campus last week regarding the issue of incoming student loans and fee increases was attended by members of the Students Against Fees group, and the Union of Students in Ireland (USI), as well as students from such as DCU, UCD, and NUI Maynooth, who are interested in setting up similar groups in their respective university.

Oisín Vince Coulter, a coordinator for Students Against Fees, opened the meeting by raising the issue of collaborating with other colleges to oppose the incoming measures on a nationwide basis.

Coulter said, “as a result of the high numbers of people from other universities attending he hopes that they would set up similar branches within their own universities.”

There was discussion over sending members of Students

Against Fees to other universities to talk about how they had initially set up in Trinity to help those intending on setting up their own branch.

Furthermore, it was agreed that the students should demonstrate in solidarity with an upcoming one-day strike by the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI). The strike, which is planned for the 3rd of February, will centre around issues such as teachers’ pay and lack of counselling support for second-level students.

One of the issues of this evening’s meeting was the form the students’ demonstration should take. A rally in Front Square, a march, or a combination of the two were suggested as options. Eventually it was decided to do a later action as well as demonstrate on the 3rd February.

Co-ordination among student unions across Ireland was stressed. One speaker suggested that USI could be going down the lobbying and could become detached from grassroots movements. Student’s union president Lynn Ruane made similar com-

Online scitech editor Scientists from Trinity have sequenced the genomes of a set of individuals discovered in York, England revealing their origins. Archaeological evidence from the skeleton has led the scientists to speculate that the individuals may have been gladiators, soldiers or criminals in their lifetime.

ments, suggesting that USI were doing so to build up “political capital.”

President of USI, Kevin Donoghue, also acknowledged this. He said that there was often a risk that divisions may develop between groups that come together for a common cause, which may weaken their message. He stressed that “grassroots politics” were crucial.

He also urged people to contact their local T.D.s in the run up to the general election, to let them know how important the fees situation is, referencing pensions as an example of how successful this can be..

A key issue of the meeting was getting the issue of loans and fees into the public sphere, so that people would understand and care about it. One speaker lamented the apathy among students, suggesting that they would not take action because they did not understand what was at stake.

The period for promoting the message was debated at the meeting. It was argued that

the SU election period would be a difficult time, as there would be so many other issues in the public sphere that students would not notice.

However, it was also argued that this would be the ideal time, as it would be the time when students were most aware of issues such as loans and fees.

A similar meeting will take place in the coming weeks where the students’ plans for demonstrating will be discussed further.

The day before the meeting, Students’ Union of UCC pledged to “lobby for free education and to oppose an income-contingent loan scheme.”

The Students Against Fees Group was founded last November, after a motion by President Ruane that op-

posed student loans and fee hikes, was defeated by the SU Council. The group felt the defeat was not indicative of student opinion, as it focused only on loans and did not take fee increases into account.

On Tuesday 15 December, the group brought their own motion opposing loans and increases before the Council, which was passed with a comfortable majority.

President Ruane’s motion was in response to speculation that a government-appointed group (the Working Group of Higher Education Funding), established to investigate funding issues for third-level education, would propose student loans and fare increases. In December 2015, information came to light that the group meant to raise student fees to ¤4,000, while including an incomecontingent package.

“The correlation between an extreme religious ideology and a tendency for violence is just not there” said Kundnani, labelling the problem as “political not religious,” in response to Landy playing the devil’s advocate by asking if these are just necessary measures to stop terrorism.

He referred to the “frequent” cases of young men ordering Islam For Dummies when preparing to go fight for Islamic State as a by-product of this non-correlation.

Kundnani spoke critically of liberal political leaders, such as Barack Obama and Tony Blair. He claimed that Obama is responsible for “normalising the war on terror,” while Blair introduced a new form of nationalism into political discourse, spreading the idea that “liberal values underpin national identity.”

According to Kundnani, the left has failed Muslim groups, especially in Britain where it has “suburbanised and gentrified,” while the traditional problems that leftism had fought for still remain. He argued that policies based on deradicalisation theory prevent a solution emerging from Muslim communities, as any form of political dissent is seen as a sign of radicalisation. He suggested that the left need to start thinking deeper about these issues, saying, for example, that: “We’ve not even begun to understand the damage we’ve inflicted on Iraq.”

After Kundnani and Landy finished their discussion, questions were opened to the audience in which topics ranged from treatment of women within Islamic cultures to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine.

The talk took place prior to a conference, which was held and co-organised by Landy in Liberty Hall earlier today called “Understanding and Responding to Islamophobia in Ireland,” which Kundnani was also said to be speaking at.

Ancient British “gladiator” genomes sequenced by Trinity scientists Martin O’Donnell

Conn de Barra

It is a “statutory” requirement for public workers in Britain to report possible signs of radicalisation, he said. He referred to the news last week that a 10-year-old Muslim boy’s family were questioned by the police for his misspelling of “terraced house” as “terrorist house” in English class as evidence of this surveillance.

The Roman skeletons sampled were all male, under 45 years old and most had evidence of decapitation. They were taller than average for Roman Britain and displayed evidence of significant trauma potentially related to interpersonal violence.

All but one would have had brown eyes and black or brown hair but one had distinctive blue eyes and blond hair similar to the single Anglo-Saxon individual.

This individual was of Middle Eastern origin and grew up in the region of modern day Palestine, Jordan or Syria before migrating to the region and meeting his death by decapitation.

The demographic profile of the skeletons is said to resemble the population structure in a Roman burial ground believed to be for gladiators at Ephesus although the authors also speculate that it could fit with a military context as the Roman army had a minimum recruitment height and fallen soldiers would match the age profile of the York cemetery.

As well as Trinity, the multi-disciplinary scientific analysis involved scientists from the University of York and The York Archaeological Trust, as well as the universities of Durham, Reading and Sheffield, University College London and the University Medical Centre in Utrecht.

The research also included experts from York Osteoarchaeology Ltd, City of York Council and the Natural History Museum.

Professor Dan Bradley, from Trinity, said: “Whichever the identity of the enigmatic headless Romans from York, our sample of the genomes of seven of them, when combined with isotopic evidence, indicate six to be of British origin and one to have origins in the Middle East. It confirms the cosmopolitan character of the Roman Empire even at its most northerly extent.”

PhD Researcher and lead author, Rui Martiniano, from Trinity, said: “This is the first refined genomic evidence for far-reaching ancient mobility and also the first snapshot of British genomes in the early centuries AD, indicating continuity with an Iron Age sample before the migrations of the Anglo-Saxon period.”

The Trinity College team also recently published the first prehistoric Irish genomes.

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Trinity graduate honoured for World War II codebreaking work Eileen Leslie Greer worked at Bletchley Park, the centre for code-breaking and intelligence-analysis during the war Megan Thompson Staff writer

ity with a first class honours in German. After her studies were finished she became a German lecturer in Queen’s University Belfast.

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When the war broke out Greer put herself forward to help. In an interview with The Irish Times, she stated that: “It occurred to me that there was the war going on and it seemed to me that the war was more serious than teaching German.”

rinity College Dublin alumna Eileen Leslie Greer was honoured with the Bletchley Park commemorative badge last week for the codebreaking work she did during World War II. Mrs Greer was part of Bletchley Park's topsecret team of intelligence analysts during the war.

The award was presented to 98-year-old Greer by the British ambassador to Ireland, Dominick Chilcott, at St Mary's Home, Pembroke Park, where she lives.

She was also presented with a certificate, expressing the British government’s “deepest gratitude for the vital service you performed during World War II.” Before the war Greer attended Alexandra College and later Trinity College.

Greer graduated from Trin-

Due to her knowledge of the German language she was offered a place at Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park was the centre for code-breaking and intelligence-analysing during the war. It is at Bletchley Park that Alan Turing and his team created the Enigma machine that broke the German code. Greer’s job was to write intelligence reports on the then decrypted German army and air force signals.

In a College press release, Eunan O’Halpin, Professor of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity, commented: “Leslie Greer's Bletchley Park badge and certificate of

honour but do not fully reflect her work in Britain's vital code-breaking operations, which tends to be acknowledged generically under the heading of 'women’s contributions' as though all females were filing clerks, typists or machine operators. She was a German language specialist, initially concentrating on the tedious but vital tasks of categorising and indexing decoded German military messages. Her talents were soon recognised, and she was selected to be one of a small group who regularly advised the code-breakers on what enemy traffic they should concentrate on.”

Greer worked at the codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park from 1941 to 1945. Postwar, she continued working for the Foreign Office and was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for her wartime achievements.

When asked about the award, Greer expressed her enthusiasm: “Who wouldn’t be excited getting a medal!”

Institutes of technology lecturers plan to ballot for strike action This development comes in addition to the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) strike planned for February 3 Caoimhe Brennan Contributing writer

T

HE TEACHERS UNION of Ireland (TUI) has decided to ballot for strike action among its members in February. The planned ballot is in response to proposed new government legislation, which TUI perceives as detrimental to the institute of technology sector.

This development comes in addition to the TUI strike planned for February 3 over what it has described as chronic issues of underfunding in third level education, the increase in student numbers while staffing numbers decrease and the unstable employment status of many lecturers.

The ballot for strike action is over the government’s Technological Universities Bill, released in December, which requires institutes of technology to merge before applying for university status. The strike will concern 4,000 lectures and researchers in institutes of technology around the country.

TUI president Gerry Quinn has said that he is critically concerned about the potential consequences of the Bill, “given the current crisis of underfunding, understaffing and precarious employment in the institutes.”

According to Quinn: “Between 2008 and 2015, funding for the sector was cut by a massive 35%, or ¤190 million.

Over the same time period, lecturer numbers fell by 9.5% (535), while student numbers rose by a staggering 32% (21,411).”

The TUI believes that no academic considerations have been made for the merger of institutes. Mergers will impact the individual values, ethos and missions of institutes, they said.

The TUI also said on Friday that the Technological Universities Bill contains “significant threats to the institute of technology sector and to the working conditions of the academic staff” and that legislation was “being rushed through the enactment process with reckless haste and without the provision of adequate opportunity for the deep and considered engagement and debate that is required.”

The union has stated that it will withdraw from all talks on mergers with immediate effect.

88% of Smartvote users support abortion

Trinity researchers contribute to diabetes breakthrough

The Smartvote app is a new election tool launched by USI earlier this month

Lia Flattery News editor

Lia Flattery News editor

N

EW DATA RELEASED by the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) and Smartvote.ie has revealed that 88% of users of the Smartvote app are in favour of abortion.

The Smartvote app is a new election tool, which has been referred to as ‘The Tinder of Politics.’ USI is asking young people to download and use the app to find out which candidates in General Election 2016 best match their political views.

The app, launched earlier this month, asks the voter a series of questions on 30 key policy areas which include housing, the environment and abortion rights.

The voter’s answers are then matched with candidates in their constituency, who have provided their own answers to the same questions.

Answers to each question range from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree.’

USI’s new figures show that out of 15,484 Smartvote users, 88% are in favour of abortion. 72% ‘strongly agree’ that abortion should be allowed in cases of rape, incest or when a baby is unlikely to survive outside the womb.

9% agreed and a further 7% slightly agreed, meaning that 88% of users agreed in total.

Eight out of 13 political parties also agreed with this statement. The remaining five parties were noncommittal on this issue, saying that they neither agreed nor disagreed.

USI President Kevin Donoghue said of the app: “There

is no such thing as a civil war vote anymore. We’re seeing an increase in a personal, informed vote across Ireland with Smartvote because it makes deciding who to vote for simple, easy and fast. It cuts through any grey areas or long-winded political answers and gets straight to the point. After just three days, over 15,000 people have already used the site and USI expects this number to soar coming up to the General Election.”

Founded in University College Dublin’s (UCD) Innovation Academy, it is hoped that Smartvote will be helpful to students in deciding their vote; Stemwijzer, a similar app from the Netherlands, is used by 80% of 18-25 yearolds during election time.

Smartvote was first used in the UCD Student Union elections last March, and then in the recent Carlow-Kilkenny by-election.

Trinity Ents prepares for longer eleven day Rag Week Ríain Fitzsimons Staff writer

W

ITH RAG WEEK beginning next Monday, kicking off with VDP’s Rose of Trinity, Katie Cogan, student union entertainment officer, spoke to Trinity News about her plans for the week.

Rag Week will run this year for nearly two weeks, from Monday the 25th of January to Thursday 4th of February. It will contain a range of events with all proceeds going to charity.

In terms of what most excites her in the run up to the week, Cogan has said that while she “really likes running night events” she is mostly looking forward to “seeing other people involved and engaged.”

Major events planned for the period week include: The Rose of Trinity with VDP, The Rag Dining Hall Quiz with TTV, Rumble for Rag with Suas, The Raise and Give Party, The Trinity Games, Chapel Gig with S2S, Trinity Come Dancing with DU Dance.

The event she was most looking forward to, she told Trinity News, was the Blue Planet: “this event for me is the best I’ve ever done because of how cohesive the theme is,” she claimed. The event is partly inspired by David Attenboroughs nature documentary series of the same name and will involve an underwater theme. According to Cogan, this will be “more than an event - more like a piece of art.”

Cogan encouraged students to get involved and expressed that she liked Rag Week because it involved participation with several societies. She encourages students to to run their own events and mini fundraisers.

Any students who needed assistance, should contact the Ents Committee, she said, stating that they can: “facilitate whatever they want within reason”. Rag Week, according to Katie, is a way to “get a good idea what the Ents committee do”.

Tickets for Rag Week events are now available from an app named YPlan, which she claimed has been fantastic and have been supporting Rag Week since the beginning.

R

ESEARCHERS FROM A number of Irish third-level institutions, including Trinity College Dublin, collaborated in the discovery of a series of new compounds whose anti-diabetic effects mimic those of exercise, marking a significant breakthrough in diabetes research.

The new findings are the result of five years of work by a team headed by Dr John Stephens of the National University of Ireland Maynooth’s (NUIM) department of chemistry. The team also included collaborators from NUIM’s department of biology, Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Trinity College and the University of Leeds.

Diabetes is a chronic condition associated with abnormally high blood sugar (glucose) levels.

The new compound mimics the effects of exercise on the body’s cells. Exercise requires cells to convert more glucose into usable energy (adenosine triphosphate or ATP) than they would while the body is in a rest state.

The new compound makes it more difficult for cells to convert glucose into ATP. This means that the cells take up more glucose than they otherwise would, thereby minimising the elevated levels of glucose that exist in the blood of people with type 2 diabetes.

The newly discovered series of compounds have shown the ability to improve glucose handling and to reduce weight gain in laboratory studies at considerably lower doses than those required by existing therapies.

As such, they may prevent some of the intestinal problems associated with the existing higher dose therapies.

Speaking about the discovery, Dr Stephens said: “The benefits of exercise for those suffering with type 2 diabetes have been well documented…

The discovery of this series of new compounds that mimic these benefits is a significant development in the treatment of diabetes.”

He added that: “We are now looking forward to our next phase of research, which will see us undertake further lab studies and early clinical trials. We are still a long way from seeing this reflected on the shelves in pharmacies; however, these compounds have the potential to become an important tool for the treatment of type 2 diabetes for future generations.”

Trinity’s MBA course ranked best in Ireland, fifth in Europe Jessie Dolliver Staff writer

T

RINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN’S MBA courses have placed fifth in the “best masters ranking for full time MBA’s in Western Europe 2015-2016”, recently published by Eduniversal, making the course the most highly ranked full-time MBA in Ireland.

The first, second, third, and fourth programmes were; the full time MBA programme in IESE Business School, Barcelona, the full time MBA in Copenhagen Business School, the London Business School MBA, and the INSEAD MBA, respectively. Placed sixth was the full-time MBA in the IMD Business School.

Eduniversal is a university ranking company under the French consulting company and rating agency SMBG, which specializes in higher education. The company implements an evaluation system centred around the rep-

utation of the programme, the level of Eduniversal’s “Palme of Excellence” of the school, the salary of the first employment, and the student satisfaction of graduating students.

In the 2014-2015 rankings the full time MBA programme in Trinity Business School placed ninth, and in the 2013-2014 rankings the course placed in the twelfth position.

The listings put Trinity’s full-time MBA course ahead of both the Cambridge MBA (ranked twelfth), and Oxford’s Said Business School MBA(ranked fourteenth), with UCD’s Smurfit Institute MBA placed in the eighteenth position.

In fact, very many courses running in Trinity Business School placed very highly in other rankings published by Eduniversal for Western Europe – the MSc in Business and Management places third

in the best masters ranking in General Management, while the Diploma in Project Management is fourth in the best masters ranking in Engineering and Project Management.

The part-time MBA comes fifth in the best masters ranking in Executive MBAs and part-time MBAs, and the MSc in Finance also places fifth in the best masters ranking in Corporate Finance.

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Leadership race 2016

News

5

The number of candidates running this year is the same as last, with a total of 17 candidates since Jason Leonard withdrew from the presidential race earlier this week.

Despite the SU’s efforts in recent years to encourage more women to run for sabbatical positions, there are considerably fewer women participat-

ing this year compared to last. No women are running for the position of SU president, after Lynn Ruane’s historic win last year to become the first female president in 12 years. Of the 17 candidates running across all races, only four are women, participating in the races for entertainment officer, welfare officer and University Times editor. In comparison,

of the 17 candidates announced last year, 8 were women.

The race for University Times editor is the only uncontested race this year. This is only the second year that the position has existed in its current form, as separate from the communications and marketing officer role.

All other races are be-

ing contested, with the races for welfare officer and entertainment officer being the most heated with four candidates running in each. For the first time two in years, the race for education officer will also be contested, with three candidates vying for the position.

- Lia Flattery - Photos by Matthew Mulligan

Keep up with full coverage of the 2016 Leadership Race including interviews with all candidates, photos, daily updates and hustings reports on trinitynews.ie

President

Kieran McNulty:

Kieran McNulty, who is in his fourth year of a law degree, currently holds the position of citizenship officer in the SU. He has been involved with the SU throughout his college career, progressing from a class representative in first year, to a position on the electoral commission (EC) in second year and then finally to chair of the SU last year. He also acted as a delegate for Trinity at the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) congress in 2013. Outside of the SU, McNulty was the senior freshman representative for TCD Law Society and, last year, was secretary of the society. Up until recently he was the chair of The University Times’ editorial board, as well as being a senior staff writer. – UH

Stephen Carty:

Stephen Carty is a junior sophister sociology and social policy student. He is the current SU sports officer, a position introduced last year to promote sporting activities and physical health among the student body.

He held both the vice-president and treasurer positions for Trinity Hall JCR last year. An award winning rower, he is a member of DU Boat Club and founded his secondary school’s first rowing team. Carty is also an active fundraiser for the Simon community, a charitable organisation providing emergency accommodation and support for the homeless. – NM

Dan O’Brien:

Dan O’Brien, a fourth year business, economics and social studies (BESS) student, is the current assistant managing editor of The University Times, having previously served as opinion editor and senior staff writer. He is the speaker coordinator for Trinity Economic Forum (TEF), helping to organise speakers and panel discussions for the society. Outside of society life, he also works as a student shelver in the Library of Trinity College Dublin. -LF

Caolan Maher:

Ents

Caolan Maher is a second year Earth Sciences student. Maher made his name in terms of student nights out by founding the student night Wrekt, which started last January in the Twisted Pepper but has now moved to Grand Social. – CM

Grace O’Boyle:

Grace O’Boyle is a third year History of Art and Architecture and Sociology Student at Trinity College Dublin. O’Boyle has experience with DU Players, and has been involved in organising entertainment nights for the society. – CM

Padraic Rowley:

Padraic Rowley is a fourth year computer science student. He has been heavily involved in student life in the past four years, having served as Ents Officer for Student2Student, the SciFi Society and fencing club, as well as an ordinary committee member for TrinityFM. He was the chairperson of the ‘Relay for Life’, Trinity’s only ‘twenty-four hour sober event’ which involved over thirty societies. – OVC

Katie Brown:

Katie Browne is a psychology undergrad and an entertainment manager. She has worked as an S2S mentor and she served as social officer for Trinity GAA. She also served as chair of DU Psychology Society. – MM

Kieran McNulty

Education

Nicholas Spare:

Nicholas Spare is a fourth year law and German student. Spare spent last year in Erlangen, Germany, as a part of the Erasmus programme. He has contributed as a staff writer for The University Times, focusing on comment and opinion pieces, and has also written for The Piranha. In his second year, as a class representative for law and German, he proposed a motion for the SU to oppose an increase in non­EU student fees, which was later passed. After the recent three percent increase of non­-EU student fees, Spare spoke out again about the lack of reaction from the SU to these changes. – GRF

Dale O’Faoilléacháin:

Dale O’Faoilléacháin is a junior sophister physiotherapy student. He is the current health sciences convener in the SU. In addition, he sits on the SU’s education committee. In his senior freshman year, he was the SU’s school of medicine convener and the sports officer at Trinity Hall JCR. Before this, he was junior freshman physiotherapy class representative.

He is the serving public relations officer (PRO) at DU Clinical Therapies Society. O’Faoilléacháin was listed on the Dean of Students’ List for Volunteering in 2015 and the Dean of Students’ Roll of Honour in 2014. He is also an S2S peer mentor. – NL

Patrick Higgins:

Patrick Higgins is a third year history and political science student. He has previously worked for Trinity News as a staff writer and later held the role of online news editor. – LF

Grace O'Boyle

Nicholas Spare

Caolan Maher

Patrick Higgins

Welfare

Aoibhinn Ní Lochlainn:

Aoibhinn Ní Lochlainn is a third year medical student. She is a head mentor with S2S, welfare volunteer coordinator in the SU, and was secretary of Trinity’s TradSoc last year, which saw the society win “Most Improved” society at the CSC Society of the Year Awards. She plays the fiddle and has a history of being involved in fundraising in college, participating in Jailbreak last year. She was also a member of Doctors for Yes for the Marriage Equality Referendum 2015. – JF

Éamonn Redmond:

Éamonn Redmond, a fourth year social studies student, is the current volunteer liaison officer for Trinity Vincent de Paul Society (VDP). Last year, he co­organised and led the society’s annual fundraising hike of the Camino de Santiago in February, having walked it the previous year as well. Redmond has also been heavily involved in the annual VDP pantomime for the past two years. He has served as an SU class representative for a number of years and was also previously the SU school convener for social work and social policy. – CdB

Tom McHugh:

Tom McHugh is a final year English student and former Film student. He was chairperson of the TCD Sign Language Society for two years and is currently secretary and has campaigned on many issues related to disability rights in college and Deaf awareness and rights outside college. He is also currently Librarian for DU Modern Languages Society, and has previously or currently been involved with campaigns with QSoc, YesEquality, and Students Against Fees. – MM

Andrew Wafer:

Andrew Wafer is a third year politics and economics student involved with Trinity Surf Club and is a sailing instructor. He took part in a colours surf competition against UCD. – MM

Aoibheann Ni Lochlainn

Eamonn Redmond

Emmet Broaders

University Times Editor

Comms & Marketing

Glen Byrne:

Glen Byrne is a senior sophister law student. Having returned from an Erasmus year in Leuven, Belgium, this year he holds promotional positions on two society committees, as public relations officer (PRO) for TCD Law Society (Law Soc), and visual communications officer for DU Photography Association (DUPA). He has written for The University Times and has a history of debating in college, having been involved in The Phil. He has also carried out design and layout work for publications such as The Piranha and Law Soc’s Law Shock magazine, and has designed posters for various society events. Byrne took part in Jailbreak 2014. – JF

Sinead Baker:

This will be the second year running that students will elect the University Times editor in the leadership elections since the role was split from the communications post. Like last year, the election will be uncontested with only one person, a senior member of UT staff, running for the position. Sinéad Baker is a long-time UT staff member and is presently deputy editor of the publication. She has also been deeply involved in TCDSU, serving as convenor for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences faculty. She also held the position of social secretary for Cancer Soc. Baker is a final year English and Philosophy TSM student.

– WF

Dan O'Brien

Emmet Broaders:

Sinead Baker

Emmet Broaders is in his third year of a computer science degree. He was the technical officer with Trinity Hall JCR last year. Broaders is also a member of DU Computer Science Society (DUCSS). – LF

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

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Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

InDepth Trinity perches atop a class-based education system The educational system functions, among other things, as a way of sorting sorting students into social classes. Those who attend third level institutions which are regarded as more prestigious or better quality are more likely to have careers that will place them in higher socioeconomic categories. And, because of the way the education system works, those who attend the top universities are more likely to come from the higher socioeconomic categories in the first place.

William Foley Deputy editor

T

RINITY IS OFTEN popularly conceived as a college for snobs and posh people. This is a prejudiced and disparaging portrayal, but it is one generated by a substantial truth: College is perched at the top of an education system where success is correlated with social class. This is the picture painted by a recent Higher Education Authority report “A Study of Progression in Irish Higher Education”.

The report focuses mainly on “non-progression” rates across all third level sectors (institutes of technology, universities, and colleges) and National Framework of Qualification (NFQ) levels 6, 7 and 8 between the 2012/2013 and 2013/2014 academic years.

But it also provides information on the socio-economic category, gender, nationality, age, and previous educational attainment of new third level entrants for the same time period.

According to the report 16% of new entrants for the 2012/2013 period did not progress from first year to the following academic year.

This represents a pretty static trend with the average being 15% in 2007/08 and remaining constant at 16% from 2010/11 to 2012/13. But when the figures are decomposed into the different third level sectors, a large imabalance appears. The overall non-progression rate for universities is 11%. But that rate shoots up for institutes of technology. The overall dropout rate is 23% at all levels for institutes of technology, and rises to 26% and 28% at level 6 and level 7 respectively. Trinity has the lowest non-progression rate of all universities and institutes of technology at 7%.

What explains this discrepancy? There are no doubt many reasons why students drop out, repeat years, or defer. Research from The National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, cited in the HEA report, identifies five core themes which have causal impact on progression: course, personal, financial, medical/health, family. Gender is shown to be an important factor as nonprogression rates are higher for men. 17% of women at the institute of technology level and 27% of men did not progress though that gap shrinks to 10% and 12% respectively for universities. Furthermore, women tend to be better represented than men the higher up the third level hierarchy you go. At the level of national-

ity, “non-Irish” students have a general non-progression rate of 15% (1% below average).

Taking this into account, there does not seem to be evidence in the non-progression figures of discrimination against women or ethnic minorities (although discrimination against these groups undoubtedly exists in general). There is, however, evidence that students from lower socioeconomic groups are systematically disadvantaged. The HEA collected informationsurvey information on the socioeconomic background of new entrants for the 2012/2013 year. The data is not perfect: the response rate was 64% and the student’s socioeconomic background is classified according to their household occupational class.

Regardless, it shows a clear discrepancy in progression rates. The “all others gainfully employed and unknown” category has the highest rate of non-progression at 17% and “a large proportion of this group are considered socially disadvantaged with reasons for non-classification that they are so removed from the labour market that they are unclassifiable”. Farmers and higher professionals are tied for the lowest rate at 10%. In general, students from the non-manual, semi-skilled, unskilled and agricultural workers, and “others” groups have higher rates of non-progression. The difference is even more marked for the 2011/12 cohort with the average rate for these groups being 16%, compared to 11.5% for professionals.

Overall patterns of classbased disadvantage

This reflects overall patterns of class-based disadvantage in the educational system. The HEA describes prior educational attainment as a significant determinant of the non-progression rate. More importantly, and unsurprisingly, educational attainment in secondary school is highly correlated with progression to more prestigious and highly ranked third level institutions.

The most common points attainment for university entrants was 455 to 500, while for institutes of technology it was 305 to 350 for all levels.

Trinity has the highest points requirements of any university, with 43% of courses having a points requirement of 500 or more, according to the Irish Times.

It’s not surprising or significant that students who did well in secondary school

will do well in third level.

But what is important is the strong and undisputed correlation between socioeconomic status and academic success.

In effect, the educational system functions, among other things, as a way of sorting sorting students into social classes. Those who attend third level institutions which are regarded as more prestigious or better quality are more likely to have careers that will place them in higher socioeconomic categories. And, because of the way the education system works, those who attend the top universities are more likely to come from the higher socioeconomic categories in the first place. This is how social classes reproduce themselves.The HEA notes the clear differentiation in socioeconomic profiles between institutes of technology and universities :”the student composition in the university sector tends to be skewed towards the middle and upper ends of the socio-economic spectrum.” When students from working class or lower middle class backgrounds do attend the top universities they are more likely to drop out as they “are less likely to have access to the social and cultural capital networks associated with higher education, and by consequence often have a less smooth transition to higher education, when compared to their more affluent peers” Trinity itself sits atop this skewed system. As previously reported by Trinity News, College has the lowest number of students on the grant of all third level institutions at only 24% of students in 2013/14.

This compares to 36% for all universities and 56% for all institutes of technology. 35% of new entrants to Trinity in 2013 attended fee-paying schools, yet only 7% of the Irish population attend such schools. We have the highest points requirement across all sectors. Taking all this into account, it is likely that College has the lowest proportion of working class students of any third level institution.

And when students from disadvantaged backgrounds do get here, they are more likely to drop out, alienated by a foreign class culture. Trinity students may not be more snobbish than average, but they certainly are more privileged.

Tables shown taken from the HEA Report "A study of progression in Irish Higher Education, 2012/13 to 2013/14, by Dr Miriam Liston, Ms Denise Frawley and Dr Vivienne Patterson

Photo by Eoin Cambay

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

InDepth Institutes of technology need protecting Oisin Vince Coulter Deputy news editor

T

HE TEACHERS’ UNION of Ireland (TUI) members at third level will be going on a day’s strike action on Wednesday the third of February in protest over worsening conditions, having voted in favour by a margin of 92%. The TUI currently represents 4,000 academics in Institutes of Technology across the country.

They have stated the strike is but the beginning of a campaign of industrial action aiming to draw attention to a number of crisis issues within the sector, and are currently balloting for a second strike.

The TUI have pointed to “chronic underfunding” of third level as the source of their concerns, with their crisis issues relating to substantial cutbacks which have occurred concurrently with huge increases in student numbers.

Institutes of Technology have seen a 190m cut between 2008 and 2015, a cut of 35%. These cuts took place against a background of economic recession when third level as a whole faced large and sweeping pay cuts or freezes and reductions in staff numbers.

Indeed, the TUI claim they now face “critically low staffing levels”, having lost 535 full-time academic positions in the sector between 2008 and 2015, a cut of 9.5%. During the same period there was an increase in student numbers by 21,411 – a rise of 32% across the sector, referred to by the TUI as “staggering”.

The TUI also point to increasingly precarious working conditions for those who have managed to remain employed. Third level as a whole has seen the widespread usage of flexible hours contracts and reluctance of institutions to take on permanent staff.

Teaching unions across third level, including the Irish Federation of University Teachers and the TUI have pointed to how cutbacks have had a direct negative impact on the quality of teaching they can provide with “larger class sizes, less access to laboratories and libraries and sharp cuts to tutorials and other student supports.”

The individual workload for lecturers has also increased “significantly and intolerably” over the last number of years.

A survey carried out by the TUI in April of 2015 indicates that lecturers “are experiencing high levels of work related stress as a result of cutbacks of rationalization measures”.

Cutbacks and ‘efficiencies’ have had similar effects across the third level sector as a whole, with staff to student ratios increased from 23:1 to 27:1 between 2008 and 2014. In the five years to 2012 alone student to staff ratios increased by 17%. In large part this is due to stagnating funding or cuts while student numbers continue to increase. Student numbers at third level have increased by over 31,000, 16% from 2008 to 2014.

Between 2014 and 2015 alone, third level student numbers increased from169,254 to173,649. Exchequer funding – money directly from the state – has declined by 36.4% between 2008 and 2014 for the sector as a whole, while in the same period ‘core staff’ numbers have decreased by 12% across the sector. Broader

staff numbers have also declined in third level as a whole, by 4,500 from 2008 to 2013.

These statistics put into stark relief a recurrent theme in discussions about third level: that it is in the grip of deep crisis and solutions must be found. The contrast between student and staff numbers alone points to a sector starved of money and struggling to provide the same service to an ever increasing number of students.

A number of solutions have been proposed, primarily targeting students as the solution to the existing funding gap.

To understand these solutions we must first sketch out the existing system. Since the early 1990’s Irish third level has technically been free, with the state paying the fees of students. However, with the onset of the financial crisis students now find themselves paying 3,000 a year in a ‘contribution charge’.

The government, outside of university control, decides the contribution fee. The possible solutions vary widely, but the one recently suggested by the Cassell’s report on higher level funding would involve increased fees tied to a new loans system, allowing students to cover the increased fees and pay back the amount later. Also suggested is scrapping the existing grants system.

Alternative proposals include graduate taxes, or fully state funded third level. Given the ongoing general election it is almost impossible to know what the final solution will be, but it seems likely that it will depend more on political will than the realities of the solution.

The TUI have pointed to “chronic underfunding” of third level as the source of their concerns, with their crisis issues relating to substantial cutbacks which have occurred concurrently with huge increases in student numbers.

The individual workload for lecturers has also increased “significantly and intolerably” over the last number of years. A survey carried out by the TUI in April of 2015 indicates that lecturers “are experiencing high levels of work related stress as a result of cutbacks of rationalization measures”.

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Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Features

Three of our writers consider the proposals of parties new and old in what will be the first election many students are eligible to vote in

page 12

Permission to write Online life, the abstraction of self and the role of the writer in engaging with our changing relationship with time and space: D. Joyce-Ahearne speaks to Trinity’s Writer Fellow Gavin Corbett.

D. Joyce-Ahearne Contributing editor

“I

LOVED THOSE occasions in school when you’d be punished by having to write some story that the teacher thought was an ordeal but was actually great fun, like write six pages on the inside of a table tennis ball. I’d do that sort of thing for my own amusement anyway.” You believe him then when Gavin Corbett says that he wanted to write from a very young age. Writing, he says, was the only thing that really engaged him in school. When he came to study History in Trinity, Corbett continued to write stories though never sought to get anything published in student publications and his first serious attempt at creative writing, which he always intended on being a novel, only came after leaving Trinity.

His first novel Innocence (“a terrible name, given to it by the publisher” says Corbett) came out in 2003 with Townhouse, a Dublin affiliate of Simon & Schuster. Corbett signed a two book deal with the publisher but ended up breaking the contract: “I didn’t deliberately decide to break it I just couldn’t do it, I just didn’t have a second novel in me. I did submit a really bad second attempt at a novel and I just became despondent about writing.”

The contract with Townhouse lapsed and Corbett began working as a sub-editor with the Sunday Tribune, which he believes was very useful training for him as a writer: “To be fussy about language to that level. I learned grammar for the first time.

It conditions you to privilege clarity and to tighten language. You develop a sense of it through sheer dint of practise.”

During this time Corbett also signed up to the Faber Academy, a once a week writing course, which he saw as a vehicle to allow himself the time to write again. He credits the course with giving him

a space to “get in the frame of mind of being a writer again, meet other writers, feel happy about being a writer, feel I had permission to be a writer.”

Corbett acknowledges the difficulties in self-motivation for writers when faced with the thought of the struggle that goes with the territory: “It’s very hard to motivate yourself to write again when you have that nagging sense that it’s all going to end in nothing, that it’s a waste of time when you could be doing more economically productive pursuits, let’s just say.” Through the Faber course he met other writers and relished the opportunity to meet others in the same boat.

The Sunday Tribune went under in early 2011 and shortly after Corbett completed his second novel, This is the Way, which came out in early 2013 and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award that year.

His third book Green Glowing Skull came out in May of 2015.

Last November it was announced that Corbett would be the Trinity Irish Writer Fellow for 2016, a position he will hold until July.

Back to Trinity

The position of writer-inresident is a patronage that allows writers to concentrate on their work. Corbett says that Gerald Dawe, who runs College’s Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, told him that, with regard the position, “The priority is you. You take this opportunity to write. Use this time well for yourself. Make sure you get a lot written.”

Having said that, Corbett feels an obligation to make the most of the teaching opportunities that come with the role and to “share what I know, what I’ve learned through hard, sometimes bitter, experience.” Corbett teaches on the masters in creative writing, as well as teaching students who take the creative writing module of the masters in Irish Writing, available through the Oscar Wilde Centre. He is also running an undergraduate workshop in creative writing, set to begin in the next few weeks.

Corbett sees the classes as being there to offer young

writers what he found in the Faber course: the gift of space in time to write, the “permission to write” as he calls it.

Corbett sees his role in these classes as that of facilitator, offering a space in which writers can meet and discuss their work and craft with each other, as much as work under the eye of the Writer Fellow: “There’s a huge benefit to a bunch of writers getting together and exchanging thoughts on writing, on the ups and down on trying to actually get writing done, the frustrations of trying to get something to work. Just getting your prose unstuck.”

Though he recognises the prerequisite of inherent talent, Corbett believes that, just as you can learn to play an instrument, you can learn to “write better”: “Rewiring the brain to be sensitive to the power of language, the power of sentence construction. To condition the ear to better attuned to the sonic quality of words. That’s all something that can be improved through practise and immersion.”

C

ORBETT ALSO HAS strong ideas on the responsibility that writers have in “engaging with the now”. That now, for Corbett’s generation of writers, is, he believes, defined by “the end of the industrial revolution in the west and the beginning of age of data and abstraction”. Online living, says Corbett, is facilitating the “devolution of self into further and further abstraction”.

But engaging with the present doesn’t necessarily mean that the focus must be explicitly and solely concerned with virtual reality: “Our novels don’t have to all resemble somebody standing in the middle of the information superhighway with words and images flashing by them.”

Rather, Corbett seeks the energy that underpins the “the rhythm or the texture of our life today”, lived as it is increasingly online, and utilising that energy in his prose to produce something more crafted than much of the output we consume online: “Let’s

use what’s around us, at what makes the world today, at the basis of our interactions but let’s not just slap it onto a page. I mean the traditional skills of craft: of the judicious eye for aesthetics and the ear for sound are still necessary and relevant.”

Time as a symptom

Corbett is currently working on his fourth novel and continuing the experiment of time and space seen in Green Glowing Skull: “Time seems to have a kind of concreteness to it, a solidity, and I like the idea of engaging with other times within a timeframe, but not just flashback. I’m very interested in the chronotope [how time and space are portrayed in literature], in the idea of all time and space in flux and how it’s achieved in fiction, in how temporalities emerge and crash into each other. I think that’s a very honest and apt method to use for today, given how we live our lives. The textual ecosystem online is a kind of merging of time and space.”

At a time when the student body of Trinity is becoming more and more aware of the growing ties between College and private industry, and amid the mounting commodification of education and an increasingly economic emphasis being placed on degrees, the position of Writer Fellow seems to be one of the few positives in the other direction. The existence of the position is a concrete investment in the arts and a legitimate valuing of creativity, something hugely lacking in College’s agenda when it comes to cultural engagement.

For Corbett, and for all writers who secure such a placement, the position allows him to fully invest himself in his craft and do his talent and drive justice, something that is exceptionally difficult to do when it’s done a side project or in spare moments. It’s clear that being able to devote himself entirely to his work will be a huge positive: “I don’t feel properly engaged if I’m not doing writing.

It’s a way for me to engage my brain: to engage every part of

Photo by William Foley

me, draw on my memory, my knowledge, my reading. Otherwise I’m walking around in a daze, I’m just a flossyheaded zombie. When I write every part of me that makes up my non-solid parts, I feel is drawn into focus and I just need that.

That’s what I missed when I wasn’t writing, when I had those ten years of pricking around trying to earn money to pay a mortgage. That’s what frustrated me, I left writing by the wayside and I was unhappy. And when I wasn’t writing I wasn’t really living I was just drifting. Writing makes me understand myself.”

The mood in Germany before Cologne became an international news story Caoimhe Gordon Online features editor

„A

US SCHADEN WIRD man klug.“ Those five simple words are a popular German proverb, which translates directly to “Out of trouble, one becomes clever.” It is increasingly evident that many German people are clinging to the hope that this phrase rings true.

Germany, only months ago a country that wholeheartedly welcomed vast numbers of refugees, is now a nation in the midst of great „Schaden.“ With an alleged cover-up and the growing prominence of xenophobic groups hostile to the influx of over 1 million new migrants, Germany’s policy on asylum seekers continues to be internationally scrutinised. Additionally, the question remains: how does the increasing tension surrounding Merkel’s liberal refugee policy manifest within Germany itself?

Schaden

Last summer, I spent two months au-pairing in Berlin.

The opportunity arose for a friend and I to return during the Christmas holidays.

With heavy suitcases and light hearts, we arrived to temperatures of -10 degrees. This represented quite a change from the balmy conditions we had experienced previously. However, the snowy transformation of the city was not the only change that we encountered. The mother of the hostfamily put it simply to us upon our arrival: “We can no longer afford to be naïve.” She asked if we had heard anything about

New Year’s Eve in Cologne.

This was the fourth of January. After exchanging glances, my friend and I confirmed that we had not noted media coverage of any happenings in Cologne. We then discovered what had transpired, namely the serious harassment of young women by groups of migrants at Cologne’s train station. We were shocked and appalled then finally confused that this event was not receiving media attention.

The most iconic tourist site in the city of Cologne is the incomprehensibly large cathedral with two spires that pierce the clouds. If you stand in the square in front of the cathedral, among the many hundreds of tourists and turn your head to the left, there stands the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station. It is enormous.

Over 280,000 passengers pass through the station daily, and there is an abundance of shops and eateries. It more closely resembles a shopping centre than the Irish definition of a train station.

It is not difficult to imagine the frightening volume of people that would have assembled in the station that night. More than 120 criminal complaints have been filed by women in relation to New Year’s Eve who were sexually assaulted or robbed, including at least two cases of rape.

A police spokesperson said at least three quarters of the complaints had a sexual component.

My friend and I took an SBahn into the centre of Berlin on our second day. An air of apprehension hung between us. We remained unsure what to expect. As we strolled past a sign that announced our arrival to the Museuminsel, we noted the black graf-

“

There’s a huge benefit to a bunch of writers getting together and exchanging thoughts on writing, on the ups and down on trying to actually get writing done, the frustrations of trying to get something to work. Just getting your prose unstuck.

- Trinty writer-in-residence Gavin Corbett

Caoimhe Gordon considers her experiences in Germany during the a ermath of the alleged liberal cover-up. that events in Cologne took four days to be revealed to the general populace and that the first arrest took until 17 January, have spread alarm among many German people.

Meanwhile, for many, the refugee and terrorism dilemmas have become muddled into one large debate. A man who was shot down in front of a Parisian police station this month as he was about to attack was registered under several aliases as an asylum seeker in Germany, and before he travelled to France was residing in a German refugee centre. Many find it difficult to separate the two major crises that have seized Europe.

The remainder who continue to express their outrage are simply those opposed to the influx of outsiders into their society. Predictably, events like those in Cologne have been co-opted by xenophobic far right groups such as the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident in an attempt to legitimate racist characterisations of newcomers.

The long-view fiti scrawled roughly upon it: “Köln ist Merkels Schuld” Cologne is Merkel’s fault. This was not the only anti-Merkel sentiment we encountered that day. The frosty atmosphere permeated the air as we passed the Brandenburg Gate. A young man dressed in exercise attire jogged past us. However, his plain white t-shirt had been customised as it read: “Merkel must go.”

Merkel’s response

Angela Merkel now faces constant attacks concerning

her treatment of the refugee crisis from those within Germany, and also European leaders who opposed her open arms approach to refugees from the outset. While her New Year’s Eve address to the nation was broadcast with Arabic subtitles for the first time, a small percentage of the migrants she was attempting to reach were not paying attention to the most powerful woman in Europe. At that exact time, migrants were in clusters in the train stations of major cities, harassing

other passengers while taunting police about how they wanted to be treated. Reportedly one migrant demanded respect as he was “invited to Germany by Mrs. Merkel.”

Bavarian state premier and a prominent supporter of Merkel’s government, Horst Seehofer, said he would send the federal government a written request within the next two weeks to restore "orderly conditions" at the nation's borders and vowed to take legal action if his attempt to take action was ignored. The facts

However, not all Germans disagree with Merkel’s open door policy. Many German people, including those that I have the pleasure of knowing, understand why Merkel’s government have adopted this approach. Even 70 years after the end of the Second World War, the Nazi stigma still continues to haunt the German people. The family that we stayed with have experienced fellow tourists questioning them about their German nationality while they were abroad. When they confirmed that they indeed were from Germany, on two separate occasions the inquiring party

had then responded by carrying out the Nazi salute in front of them. In order to attempt to escape this image, the family revealed that many Germans feel it is best to welcome all so that the country can never again be accused of such heinous acts. Although Merkel has received criticism for her continued policy of keeping German borders open, it has not particularly affected her standing among the majority of her voters. 44% of Germans surveyed this month still rally behind Merkel’s liberal approach to the crisis. This is only a drop of 5% from October.

On the final evening of our trip, we attended a gathering of college students. There was no talk of migration, only of lectures, of what the plans were for the night and the debate over which techno tune should be played. Apart from the music and casual attire, it could have been Dublin.

“How’s university going?” one asked another. He laughed and replied: “It’s going but it’s not the number one priority.”

They raised their beers and laughed before changing the subject to the S-Bahn line disruptions over the weekend. Life in Germany goes on unabated. For many, a strong belief that Germany can and will surmount issues presented by the European refugee crisis is enough to let them continue on as normal. This determined nation, which overcame the odds to become the most powerful country in Europe and rebuild their reputation worldwide, knows that out of trouble, it is possible to become clever.

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Features

10

How to rig the students' union election Conall Monaghan Online news editor

Jessie Dolliver Staff writer

W

ITH SABBATICAL ELECTIONS only a month away, candidates are putting the final touches to their manifestos, preparing husting speeches, and drafting potential flyers - all in preparation for the run up to polling week, the results of which will determine a large aspect of their lives for the following year. The stakes are high with free accommodation and a paid job on offer for the most preferred candidate in each race. Yet, according to a former polling-station staff member who will remain anonymous, the high stakes do not mean the system is infallible - indeed, far from it. Our source claims there are several possible ways someone could unfairly influence the results of any election in Trinity, including referendums, class rep elections and sabbatical elections.

Methods

The first way involves former students. Our source claims as long as you received a card during your time at Trinity you will be able to vote next month: “if your student card has expired there’s no way of telling.” While it’s not impossible that a polling staff member might catch this if they check the date, our source claims that “they never check student card date - they at most check that it is the person in question.” Because the electoral commission (EC), who run Trinity elections, have the same process for all its elections, in which a polling member takes your card to scan it which registers you as having voted, this possibility exists for every type of vote cast in Trinity.

However, checking the face of the cardholder, they claim, is often only a formality: “the EC don’t thoroughly check...we were never told to confirm someone’s identity, just request the student card.” When asked if it is possible for a student to use the cards of others to repeatedly vote, they responded: “with the speed at which we tried to accommodate voters on a busy day, it’s likely that someone could use the card of someone who looks vaguely similar to them.”

Furthermore, in class rep elections it is possible to use your card to vote in another class. Every stu-

dent is capable of voting once, but “the Students’ Union have no way of telling what class the student is in when they go to vote.” If a student wanted to vote for their friends in another class rep election rather than in their own, there is nothing in place to prevent this, they claim.

Occasionally Wi-Fi can fail at polling stations, which means the EC’s system of registering people who have voted also fails. The standard way of dealing with this in all elections is to have students write down their names, student number, and voting preference on a piece paper or in a word document.

Our source is critical of this method because it leaves open the possibility that someone could vote several times, as it allows votes to be submitted into the box without a card being scanned.

The final way is malpractice by the electoral commission. Since there are usually only two people at a polling station, “It’s entirely possible for someone working in a polling station to fill out stamp ballots and put them in the box or take stamp ballots away from the box if one of the other polling staff goes to the bathroom.”

However, our source further said: “while there are several potential ways to manipulate the elections big or small I’ve never have had any reason to expect anyone has. It is entirely theoretical.” Yet, considering that there are “definitive ways of exploiting the current paper ballot system,” it only makes sense to move to a more online system, they claim, as they see it as more secure.

When asked why Trinity has chosen to keep using the paper ballot system if the online system was, in their opinion, the better option, they said: “Part of it is tradition.

What we have always had is perceived to work. There’s been less of an incentive to take the risks involved in adopting a new one.” As well as that, they claim: “there’s a perception that any type of computer based system wouldn’t be as easy to verify as paper ballot - they think it could manipulated or it would be impossible to prove that it hasn’t been manipulated.”

However: “there are several institutions that have secure online voting systems and it’s quite the standard for operations much larger than TCDSU and with easily as much at stake,” so, it is our source’s belief these criticisms are not grounded.

SU response

Speaking to Colm O’Halloran, Chair of the TCDSU Electoral Commission, many of the concerns raised by the source were revealed

to be justified. While O’Halloran initially denied that an expired Trinity student card could be used to vote in a future election, he amended this in a subsequent email sent to Trinity News where he claimed his initial comment was inaccurate: “I checked again and was wrong on this. So long as they have a Trinity student card they can vote.” However, O’Halloran also disagreed with our anonymous sources claim that the dates on the card are not checked: “If a student card does have a number from years ago then we will question whether the person is currently a registered student.”

what we pay for paper ballot elections in two years.” O’Halloran added that the cost of such a system would range from ¤17,000 to ¤20,000, thereby involving longterm investment. He remarked that for the upcoming elections, TCDSU will have some form of online voting available for students on Erasmus or students who “can’t have access to polls.”

O’Halloran also confirmed that there is in fact no way of verifying that a voting student is in the right class for a class representative election, saying “there’s no way to actually prevent, say, a Law student from voting in a Medicine election.”

However, a student cannot vote for more than one class, he claimed, and therefore: “it doesn't work to their benefit to vote in another class.”

Yet, O’Halloran mentioned that there is “a kind of a worry though.”

For example: “online voting system could be taken down by a particular person, say if a candidate knew that someone's campaigners were all going to vote at a particular time, and the voting system went down then, they couldn’t vote then, and that would kind of be a big flaw in the system.” He also mentioned the USI’s failed attempt at using online voting as a possible concern.

Discussing the consequences of the scanning system failing, O’Halloran admitted: “That has happened in the past, where the Wi-Fi is generally not the best in Trinity,” and that in these cases the students’ ID numbers are recorded in a word document. When asked if there were risks related to this system, O’Halloran conceded that “possibly in that, you know, a student that has already voted could vote again. But it's very unlikely.”

The risks associated with having only two individuals manning each polling station were also admitted. O’Halloran agreed that “obviously there's the fact that someone could just grab a stamp ballot and stuff it in the box, but unlikely, very unlikely... not impossible though.”

However O’Halloran explained, with regards to the non-EC polling station workers, that he himself will “hand-pick them ... I get in contact with people I know and I can trust,” and presented the fact that they are being paid as disincentives for malpractice.

O’Halloran was confident in the current polling system, believing that there’s “advantages and disadvantages” to both paper and online voting systems. Yet, he agreed that an online voting system would be preferable. “I think personally it would be a really good idea,” he said, and claimed several Trinity computer science students had already outlined a framework for building such a system themselves.

When asked about the cost of a system he said the “long-term investment would pay itself off in

The benefit, O’Halloran claims, is it would likely lead to an increase in voter turnout, and help to identify correct voters for class rep elections.

O’Halloran said the project has “hit a dead wall and at the moment I’m trying to talk to [computer science students], to see if they can get any further.”

Online voting

In 2012, the USI attempted to use an online system for a preferendum to help decide the union’s position in relation to student fees. According to a Trinity News piece at the time, the system “has been called into question after it emerged that database errors allowed former and part-time students to vote.” One student also put up photos of him claiming to have accessed the administration account of the website used for collecting votes.

However, in other examples, online voting systems have been demonstrated to work effectively, including at DCU and Queen's University, Belfast.

According to Stephen Keegan, a DCU student, the electronic system in place there is “a quick and simple process,” describing it as “brilliant” as it allows one“to vote from the comfort of home, and I bet that increases turnout.”

T

RINITY NEWS SPOKE the Steve Conlon, a Computer Science lecturer responsible for managing the online voting system DCU. The elections are held on a virtual learning environment called Loop, which is run

by Moodle. Students log in and vote through a module called Students’ Union, which disappears once a

Responding to some of the common fears and doubts related to online voting systems, and the perceived nature of their vulnerability to hacking, DCU computer science lecturer Steve Conlon said that the likelihood of such a system being hacked is comparable to “someone going up to a ballot box and lighting it on fire with gasoline.”

vote has been cast. The system was built by a Moodle recognised programmer.

Conlon reports that as a result, voter turnout increased by 19% in the last election. Another benefit was that the system was accessible from anywhere in the world. Subsequently, the university received positive feedback from many Erasmus, nursing, and part-time students who had felt alienated from the elections beforehand. Conlon further reports that DCU saved 150 hours of man-power between removing accounting and polling stations, as well as saving 190 kilograms of carbon, and 38,500 paper ballots.

Responding to some of the common fears and doubts related to online voting systems, and the perceived nature of their vulnerability to hacking, Conlon said that the likelihood of such a system being hacked is comparable to “someone going up to a ballot box and lighting it on fire with gasoline.” He points out that the DCU system is backed up every 5 seconds, and again every 20 seconds by the Higher Education Authority.

Every Irish university is run by the HEA net, Conlon says. Since the HEA is a state body, he suspects that anyone caught attempting to hack or tamper with the HEA net would face serious jail time and certainly would never be able to enrol in a university again. Conlon also clarifies, responding to O’Halloran’s concern in the scenario of the system being brought down, that if their network were to go down their SU constitution has a “buffer mechanism” which allows them to extend the voting period.

Regarding the problems that occurred during USI’s preferendum, Conlon said that DCU’s voting system did not allow former students to vote. Students are organised in different cohorts, he explained, which separate students by enrollment status as well as faculties. He asserts that “only live registered students and pending registered students can access it. If you are a graduate you are taken out of the cohort.”

The USI vote failed because, according to Conlon, administrators said they “didn’t realise they were adding graduate students” and this is not a problem in DCU because of their cohort system.

While neither our anonymous source nor O'Halloran claim to know anyone who has taken advantage of these forms of manipulating the paper ballot in Trinity, the possibility of it happening is still there.

These ways of tilting the election in a certain candidate’s favour are mostly things that could be done with a small amount of effort. It would not be hard for such a student to cover their tracks. Bearing this in mind, both writers of this article felt it was important to expose these flaws before the upcoming election. Since candidates are expected to put a significant amount of effort into the weeks ahead, they deserve assurance that any rewards from these efforts are decided fairly.

Illustration by Sarah Larragy

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Features

11

It’s the big things With the HSE’s “#LittleThings” campaign gaining prominence nationally, Sarah Taaffe-Maguire examines if it really is the little things that make a difference to mental health.

Sarah Taaffe Magire Deputy features editor

I

T WAS A big thing when Stephen Byrne died. He told the staff at Beaumont Hospital he wanted to kill himself. He had attempted to two days prior. They offered to send his file to his clinic in Ballymun. It didn’t offer much consolation and he died by suicide four days later. Regrettably the story is not uncommon. When Caoilte O Broin died by suicide, after his family had attempted to engage with his psychiatrist, it was a big thing. Caoilte faced difficulty getting treatment as he suffered both from substance abuse and a mental health problem, known as dual diagnosis. He was turned away from some services; his family say “nothing could be done to help Caoilte, because he drank heavily”. Dual Diagnosis Ireland hope to highlight “the lack of services” and to advocate for sufferers to “get the right kind of treatment at the first time of asking”, for them Caoilte’s experience was not a once off.

Problems

The National Office for Suicide Prevention was set up in 2005 to “to oversee the implementation, monitoring and coordination of Reach Out, the first national suicide prevention strategy”. In October 2014, in conjunction with The Health Service Executive (HSE) they released the #LittleThings campaign. Posters could be seen in Pearse Street Station and on the sides of Dublin Buses, adverts are shown on national television and banner ads are visible on the side of your email account. It was hoped that little things will improve mental health and presumably (as the

campaign originates from the National Office for Suicide Prevention) lower Ireland’s high rate of suicide. The Central Statistics Office reported there were 459 suicides in 2014. That is more than double the number of people (196) who in 2014, died on Irish roads.

The nine adverts encourage viewers to sleep eight hours, eat healthy food, keep up with a “friend [that] seems distant”, drink less, listen to your friends, “add friends to your tea”, share feelings with friends, do things in a group and exercise. None of this information is new to someone experiencing troubles with their mental health. A common problem suffers encounter is their illness being dismissed as temporary and easily fixed. All that is needed is to take a walk or to eat more healthily. A campaign which perpetuates the idea that mental illness can be made better by little things promulgates the dismissal of mental health problems as trivial and passable with a “little” effort on the part of the sufferer.

Presumably the rationale of any campaign encouraging action against stigma relating to mental illness, is that mental illness is like any other illness.

Yet any other illness would not have an advert stating that a small action would have be “proven to have a positive impact on how you feel”.

Lack of solutions

The campaign places the onus on the unwell individual. Achieve mental wellness by taking the recommended steps. Become better without government assistance.

Reliance on a peer group is a heavy feature; nowhere is it

suggested that professional help may contribute to mental health recovery. Perhaps the HSE are aware of the waitlist and know that if an unwell person reaches out for help, they may have to wait nine months for an appointment.

Certainly in England people are dying while they wait.

What the campaign does not seem to be cognisant of is that people with mental illnesses can sleep eight hours, eat well, exercise have friends for tea and still be mentally ill.

It is deeply patronising to be someone in the depths of psychosis, mania or depression and see a sign telling you that simple steps make a big difference in your health. It is particularly patronising and upsetting to see a sign telling you to talk to a friend if you have already done so and the friend’s advice is to seek professional help on which you have been waiting six months.

It is patronising to the family of one of 14 mentally unwell prisoners waiting for an inpatient treatment in 2014. Nor is a poster likely to be of assistance to someone forced to leave inpatient treatment after six months over two years, as their insurance cover does not cover any more.

Politicians profess to support mental health. The Green Ribbon is worn throughout May and was launched by Minister Simon Coveney. A marketing campaign is easier to show a commitment to mental health improvement compared to the alternative of funding accessible community mental services. It makes sense that there would be a government initiative to ensure a conversation about mental health goes on. It was left to various non-govern-

mental organisations, such a Head Strong, Grow, Walk In My Shoes, Suicide or Survive, Spun Out and See Change to spearhead. It is important to talk about mental health, but we let suffers down when there isn’t the support to materially better their condition.

Of all the above charities only Suicide or Survive hopes to “fill gaps in current service provision” and Walk In My Shoes seeks to raise their own funds, as a goal.

Charitable organisation, Genio works “to bring Government and philanthropic funders together to develop better ways to support disadvantaged people to live full lives in their communities”.

They developed a multidisciplinary care team, based in communities for at risk people. Results have been positive, with “570 families throughout the country are benefiting from 30 community-based” services. The same model is used by St Patrick’s Mental Health Hospital; however, the option is only open to those who can afford high quality health insurance or roughly ¤100 per session with a psychiatrist.

Clearly money has been spent somewhere. The campaign shows an understanding of hashtags. The television advert slogan tells us “it’s the little things” but the print campaign opts for #LittleThings, as to add the grammatically correct “it’s” would break up the hashtag. It would be easier if it were the little things, but for people with mental health problems the campaign is of no consolation.

SU joins movement against ban on MSM blood donations After passing a motion at December’s SU Council, Samuel Riggs sets out Trinity’s campaign against the outright ban on gay men donating blood in Ireland

Tadgh Healy Features editor

M

AY 2015 IS remembered by many as the month Ireland granted equal citizenship to all its citizens regardless of their sexuality. At Dublin Castle, rainbow flags were raised aloft as the institution of marriage was opened to all men and women.

In the same month, Tomás Heneghan, a student journalist from Castlegar, Co Galway, walked into an IBTS (Irish Blood Transfusion Service) clinic in D’Olier Street intending to donate blood. As is required by all donors, he filled out a questionnaire and underwent an interview process to determine his eligibility.

As part of the questionnaire, prospective male donors are asked to confirm whether or not they have ever engaged in sexual activity with another man (MSM). Heneghan replied honestly to the question, and as a result he was informed he was to be permanently and irreversibly banned from donating blood in Ireland.

During the interview, Heneghan informed the clinic staff that the sexual activity he had engaged in was categorised by the Health Service Executive (HSE) as posing “no risk” of acquiring HIV. He also provided the clinic with test results confirming that he had tested negative for all sexually transmitted infections including hepatitis and HIV, and that he obtained the test results well after the window period of detection had expired. (This window period refers to the incubation period where viruses can remain

undetectable.)

Three days before Ireland voted through the Marriage Equality Bill, Heneghan was permanently denied the opportunity to donate blood solely because he admitted to having sex with a man. The nature of that sexual activity, when it took place, and most importantly, the fact that his blood was medically viable in every respect, had no bearing on the decision. It is not without a cruel irony then that the IBTS last year called for a greater number of men to donate blood amidst a national shortage.

Heneghan sought to challenge the decision of the IBTS and brought the case before the High Court. The case is ongoing, so solicitor Colin Lenihan spoke to Trinity News on Heneghan’s behalf: “Tomás argues that the permanent deferral issued against him is in breach of European Union law and that the current policy of the IBTS is disproportionate and discriminates against homosexual males contrary to the Constitution and the European Convention of Human Rights.” The case will be next be heard by the High Court on 26 April.

During the marriage equality campaign, Trinity students were nearly unanimous in their support for the Yes campaign. This conviction that sexuality should bear no hindrance to equality under the law recently resulted in the Students’ Union passing a motion to campaign for reducing the lifetime ban on gay men giving blood to a six-month abstention period. Minister for Health Leo Varadkar has similarly hinted that there may be a case for reducing the ban to a 12 month abstention period, following the ex-

amples of the UK, the US and Australia.

SU involvement

Samuel Riggs, the LGBT Rights Officer for the SU, brought the motion before Council in December. Speaking to Trinity News, he says that ideally a six-month abstention period would be a “stepping stone” to full equality where no abstention would be required, as is generally the case for women and heterosexual men. However, Riggs freely acknowledges there is some scientific thinking behind the bans and proposed abstention periods imposed on gay men: Permanent bans were introduced globally during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, where gay men were the group most at risk from contracting the disease.

Even today, Riggs explains, “HIV diagnosis is far more likely to present in gay men.”

Blood donated by a gay man is therefore more likely to contain the virus than blood donated by a heterosexual man. However, Riggs argues that if lifetime bans were introduced out of fear during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, “they are certainly not justified now.” He points to a greater understanding and detection of HIV and other STIs, along with the fact that the current law is discriminatory, not considering the eligibility of each donor individually with the scientific facts of their case. As the example of Tomás Heneghan demonstrates, a gay man with viable blood who fulfills the abstention period will still be rejected.

For Riggs, such an illogical situation can only exist because of an enduring homophobia: “It is a phobia in the

purest sense of the word - a literal fear of gay men giving blood.” He points out that the vast majority of gay men have never and will never contract HIV, and the disease can of course occur in heterosexual individuals too. This demonstrates that the absence of an abstention period is regarded as a very small risk for the majority of donations. Added to the fact that all blood is screened for infections before it can be used for medical purposes, it becomes difficult to disagree with Riggs that the restrictions placed on gay men are anything other than a relic from relatively recent age when homosexuality was feared by lawmakers.

Future actions

Since the motion passed, he has spoken with SU president Lynn Ruane about the aims and practical implementation of the campaign. “It will have two prongs: visual and political.” Riggs explains that this semester, he and a growing team of volunteers will produce a series of videos, posters and sharable web content to raise awareness of the issue.

Speaking to Riggs a few days into Trinity term, the details of the campaign had yet to be finalised, however, he said that the second, political element of the campaign has been particularly approved by Ruane, who is keen to train students in activism and lobbying political representatives.

Riggs is visibly excited by the prospect that students trained to lobby within the walls of Trinity might “go home to their counties and lobby local politicians.” He explains that his team will produce a lobbying document, with clear and concise points presenting the argument for a reduction in the MSM blood donation ban.

Ultimately, Riggs is hopeful that the campaign will receive national attention, believing that “if TCDSU started kicking up a fuss, people would start noticing.” In practical terms, this means that he would like to see the issue raised in the Seanad, and meetings arranged with TDs. And asked if he would like to

see the MSM blood donation ban become an issue at either the upcoming sabbatical elections or the General Election, Riggs replied very succinctly: “Yes, both.”

As national elections approach, many students who were politicised by the Yes campaign for marriage equality will join the electorate for the first time. Riggs is hopeful that the MSM blood donation campaign can provide a new avenue for these energies and the national movement for equality kept alive.

Illustration by Odhran McLaughlin

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Features

12

A student voter’s guide to the 2016 General Election Three of our writers consider the proposals of parties new and old in what will be the first election many students are eligible to vote in Dee Courtney

Bláithín Sheil

Eoin O'Murchu

Online editor

Staff writer

Contributing writer

Abortion

in Ireland unable to travel or raise the necessary funds have the choice to access a medically supervised abortion?” From the conservative edge of the party to the more progressive vanguard led by Leo Varadkar, the current answer appears to be no.

F

INE GAEL IS currently in government with its junior coalition partner Labour. As the largest party, they are the main ideological drivers behind current policies.

The success of the Marriage Equality Referendum was a particularly bright moment for the coalition. The Yes campaign attracted near unanimous support from the student body, and politicians like Leo Varadkar offered a more modern and liberal face to young people. This was followed up by The Gender Recognition Bill, an historic milestone in transgender rights in an historically conservative country. However, LGBT oppression is still a serious issue in Ireland with cuts to services devastating vital lifelines for those in need.

Enda Kenny has recently declared a free vote for members on a future vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment. However, bills to repeal the Eighth have been repeatedly voted down by Kenny’s party. Ireland’s abortion laws are considered some of the most restrictive in Europe, falling 40 years behind similarly developed countries like the US and the UK. Nevertheless, many women act in their own interests regardless of decisions made in the Dáil.

This is illustrated by the fact that it is illegal for a woman to self-medicate with mifepristone, a WHO approved abortifacient, yet 1017 of these pills were seized by Irish customs in 2014 alone. The question is not: “Will Irish women have access to abortion?” Many do - approximately 3600 in 2014.

The question is: “Will women

Housing

Dublin rents are nearly 10% above the national average and have steadily risen since FG have come to power, exacerbating homelessness in the city. Speaking to Trinity News, housing activist Rory Hearne states: “It is a national emergency and without a significant shift in policy the crisis will only worsen. At the current rate of families becoming homeless there will be more than 6,000 children in emergency accommodation by 2017.”

It is also important to know that Fine Gael is overwhelmingly a party of landlords. Recent declarations of assets revealed that Fine Gael topped the rankings in property ownership. This is not to suggest a conspiracy against students and tenants but to be wary that those in power often act in their own interests.

NAMA is a useful resource pool from which the state can draw to help ameliorate the chronic shortage of suitable housing. But so far, precedence has been given to high-end apartments and office spaces over affordable accommodation. There are two conflicting interests at play: the need to provide affordable shelter for thousands of Irish citizens, and the need to ensure Ireland is an attractive investment location for foreign capital. That is, the interest of utility and

L

ABOUR HAVE CENTRED themselves around working families. After the extension of free GP care to undersixes, they promise to roll this out for every child and adult, to reduce class sizes and build new schools, and to extend paid parental leave. They have also promised to reduce the student contribution by ¤500 if elected, and to abolish the USC for low and middleincome earners following last year’s decrease. As with every other party, they have promised to create jobs and invest in infrastructure; more information on this may come with their manifesto.

17.5% of people born in Ireland are currently living abroad, the highest percentage of all OECD countries.

Abortion

Though they point to their role in the marriage equality referendum and the Protection of Life During Pregnancy

Photo via Labour Party Flickr

F

IANNA FÁIL’S WEBSITE is filled with promises of a fairer deal for ordinary people. Their plans include increasing funding for CIE and Bus Éireann, new council housing, investing in broadband, increasing farm subsidies, increasing the size of the Garda force and a tax funded health system instead of universal health insurance.

Fianna Fáil have essentially ruled out coalition with Fine Gael in two successive Ard Fheiseanna. They also ruled out coalition with Sinn Fein this year, despite Gerry Adams’ refusal to rule this on Sinn Fein’s end. Fianna Fáil have never been the junior party in coalition, but it remains to be seen if that could change with this election. It is clear that their intention, at least, is to

be the main party in government – and it would put them on the back foot right away if they were to enter a government with Fine Gael after multiple commitments not to.

Abortion

The party is openly opposed to repealing the Eighth Amendment. It is conceivable that things would change with public pressure, particularly since FF TDs are being allowed a free vote on the issue, but if the leadership have their way on abortion the Eighth will stay where it is.

Public sector

Fianna Fáil’s plans for the public sector generally amount to more investment.

They want to increase the number of nurses and hospital beds, but also state that they

will rebalance the system towards primary care and fund a national program for mental health. Their willingness to cut the budget and impose austerity measures during their last tenure could be seen to cast doubt on these plans, though the change in leadership might simply have different ideas.

Taxation

Alongside their promises to fund more public sector projects, they also promise to increase tax credits, increase the threshold for inheritance tax and cut capital gains taxes for businesses to encourage job creation. They, like some other parties, have also promised to reform the USC, stating that we have to recognise people’s ability to pay.

The biggest question in

L

AST SUMMER, THREE independent TDs (Catherine Murphy, Roisin Shortall, and Stephen Donnelly) formed the Social Democrats, a new centre-left party. Catherine Murphy is probably the most well-known for her use of Dáil privilege to highlight the “extremely favourable interest rates” given to tax-exile Denis O’Brien from the “toxic” IBRC when repaying his debts to the state-owned bank.

Their website claims the party embodies the “principles of progress, equality, democracy and sustainability.”

Joint-leader Catherine Murphy has recently revealed the Social Democrats would be willing to work with any rival party, provided the

coalition doesn’t reduce her newly formed party to taking “crumbs from the table.” How this strategy will play out remains to be seen, as the current government has seen a traditionally left-of-centre party work as a junior partner to Fine Gael much to the detriment of Labour in polls.

Voters should also note that the Social Democrats have signed a pledge to keep water in public ownership.

mum we can expect is “provisions for abortion in cases of rape, incest, or when the baby is unlikely to survive outside the womb.” The recently released manifesto has alluded to a “people’s convention” on the Eighth. This may be a deciding factor among Trinity students, bearing in mind the Students’ Union is formally mandated to campaign for pro-choice legislation.

Abortion

In their manifesto the Social Democrats call for a reduction in the student contribution, capping it at ¤2,000.

They also promise to protect the maintenance grant and reintroduce it for postgraduate students, aiming to “ensure broad sociodemographic rep-

The Social Democrats intend to repeal the Eighth Amendment, but it is unclear to what extent they will advocate for abortion liberalisation. According to the Chair of TCD Social Democrats, Ronan Mac Giolla Rua, the mini-

Education

The Cassells report, a government working group tasked with finding a solution to falling investment in thirdlevel education, has proved a contentious issue. Its findings will recommend an increase in the student contribution by ¤1000, no longer covered by a means-tested grant, but paid for by all students through a loan or otherwise.

Post-education, the unemployment rate for those aged between 20 and 24 is 20%.

This coupled with the fact that 26% of workers earn less than the living wage doesn’t present an encouraging picture for graduates. Not coincidentally, 17.5% of people born in Ireland are currently living abroad, the highest percentage of all OECD countries.

- EO'M Act, their website specifies no plan for social progress.

Several prominent Labour candidates have made a commitment to repeal the 8th Amendment if elected, but it remains to be seen whether this will take centre stage in their manifesto. They fulfilled their only manifesto promise relating to abortion in 2011, which was legislating for the X Case; though advocates for abortion rights have argued against that legislation because of the introduction of a potential prison sentence for women who have an abortion.

Education

On education, Labour pledge to reduce the cost for families and the class sizes in schools. They have pledged to reduce the student contribution by 500 euro, though it is worth noting their U-turn af-

Photo by Kevin O'Rourke

ter their 2011 promise to hold the contribution steady. While this may have been technically kept, the increase in the contribution demonstrates their inability to keep fees off the table.

The problem, once again, with the promises Labour have set out is that they will almost certainly fail to secure a mandate to deliver on them.

In 2011, Ruairi Quinn signed a declaration in front of Trinity promising not to introduce fees. Labour drew a red line on child benefit, and made cuts to it in government; their citation of the raise in this year’s budget comes across as slightly less sincere when this is remembered. If you were to comb through Labour’s 2011 manifesto and look at each of their promises, they plainly failed to deliver on many. This is commonplace for junior

Education

coalition partners; of course they would have to make compromises. Now the coalition partners are cooperating much more and it seems that a vote for Labour is a vote for the current government. This means that they cannot be expected to deliver on all of their promises, especially ones that Fine Gael are openly against.

But they can be expected to push for some, as they pushed for the protection of grants and free GP care for children.

- DC

The biggest question in mind when examining Fianna Fáil’s promises is how they intend to pay for their plans.

Similar to their aims in other sectors, Fianna Fáil want to increase spending on thirdlevel education and reduce class sizes in schools. They also favour a loan scheme for those who do not have access to grants for college. It is unclear from this policy whether they intend to use this scheme as a stepping stone for fees or if the increased third-level funding will be used to prevent that.

- DC

S

Photo via Sinn Fein Flickr

Education

mind when examining Fianna Fáil’s promises is how they intend to pay for their plans.

INN FÉIN HAS found it difficult to free itself of historical associations with the IRA, and Gerry Adams remains president even after 33 years at the helm. However, firmly left-wing and anti-corporation, they have seen a surge in popularity since the economic crash: Sinn Féin have managed to increase their number of Dáil seats from the four secured following the 2007 General Election to 14 in 2011.

At the Ard Fheis last May, Adams expressed his intention to lead Ireland’s next government, adding that Sinn Féin will not “prop up” Fine Gael or Fianna Fail. However, last September, Adams stated

The Students’ Union is formally mandated to campaign for pro-choice legislation.

that of commodity.

resentation across the thirdlevel system.”

These measures run counter to the poll-topping parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, so may be a point of compromise in any potential coalition. Mac Giolla Rua insists that “increasing fees and introducing student loans to cover those extra costs shuts people out from going to college. We are completely opposed to them.”

He cites education as “the single most important route to achieving equality and prosperity.”

With 14 candidates running, the party hopes to reach seven TDs for Dáil speaking rights and to distinguish itself from a number of other recently established parties.

- EO'M

that Sinn Féin would be prepared to enter a coalition with whichever party was successful in the election. Meanwhile Fianna Fáil, Labour and Fine Gael have all ruled this out.

months. More recently at the Ard Fheis in May, the party voted to support abortion in cases of fatal foetal abnormality, thus confirming their stance.

Abortion

Public Sector

The party’s stance on abortion has been somewhat unclear following an abstention last year on TD Clare Daly’s bill for abortion in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities.

However, they have shown long-term support in favour of legislating for the X Case, supporting the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill 2013.

And when Peadar Tóibín defied the party position on the vote, he was suspended for 6

Sinn Féin have promised that if elected they will endeavour to move away from a “two tier health system to universal healthcare,” including plans to introduce free GP care and prescriptions, and additionally increasing investment in the health service generally.

In relation to the housing crisis, Adams’ party have promised to build 100,000 new affordable homes. Par-

ticularly relevant are plans to introduce legislation capping the interest rates that banks can charge and the introduction of rent controls.

Taxation Sinn Féin would abolish the Local Property Tax, water charges, and remove those on minimum wage from the USC net. To compensate, they would target the wealthy by introducing a third rate of income tax on individual earnings of over ¤100,000, as well as a tax on individual wealth exceeding ¤1 million, excluding working farmland and business assets.

- BS

In their manifesto, the Social Democrats call for a reduction in the student contribution, capping it at €2,000.

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

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Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Comment Should the purchase of sex be illegal?

What we really need is the end of poverty and the socio-economic conditions that make the sex trade so profitable.

Jason Michael McCann Contributing writer

W

ERE THE MOTORCAR to be banned, it would stand to reason that manufacturers in the automotive industry would stop shelling out hundreds of millions of euros on top-dollar advertising. This would be the same for any industry throughout the economy if the product itself could no longer be sold. Sex, however, owing to it being one of the primal drives of the human psyche, has flouted and will always flout this marketplace law.

Sex and sex appeal sell.

Marketing departments and advertising agencies have used sex to sell everything from cheap deodorant to new cars, and all because they understand that in one way or another, the consumer wants to buy sex. As Avenue Q lyrically pointed out, it’s no secret that the demand for online pornography is almost limitless, making porn a ubiquitous fact of the internet. Worldwide, the porn industry, an industry to which both the sale and purchase of sex are indispensable, is worth in excess of $97 billion, and whether we like it or not, its online demand and consumption makes every online viewer complicit in the sex trade.

Of course, when we ask about the legality of the purchase of sex we aren’t really interested in pornography.

We’re talking about prostitution: the exchange of money or something else of value between persons for the performance of a sex act, even though the distinction between this and pornography is paper thin.

By and large our society has made its peace with pornography, but it remains squeamish when it comes to the more private, less voyeuristic – one for everyone in the audience – reality of prostitution. Historically our Western legal systems have treated it as the sin of fallen women leading men astray – assuming most prostitutes to be women – and so it was the seller and not the weak-willed buyer who felt the force of the law.

Syphilis and ultimately the need to keep easily led soldiers fighting fit finally put an end to medieval Europe’s relative comfort with prostitution, and naturally it was the female seller who was demonised and criminalised.

Tracking changes and influences

Centuries of legislation, censure, and changing social norms have failed to end prostitution. Instead it has thrived in brothels, private apartments, and on street corners – maintaining, for the most part, an undisturbed relationship with the economic conditions of those involved. With very few exceptions buyers buy when they have expendable income, and sellers sell when they are in financial want.

Global income inequality, coupled with the lucrativeness of the sex trade, has fuelled an international slave trade. Highly organised criminal gangs have amassed fortunes by trafficking women and children across borders for sale as prostitutes in wealthier countries. Risking punishments of increasing severity, these thugs are

prepared to continue their business because the demand for sex makes their efforts worthwhile. Every year during the Super Bowl in the United States, for example, arrests pertaining to human trafficking offences spike.

The last time Ireland’s soccer team played in Poznan it was reported by the authorities there that women from around Poland travelled to the city to satisfy the expected demand for sex, and many of these women were either trafficked or engaging in casual prostitution to supplement low incomes.

Yes, it’s true – as it is with all rules – that there are exceptions, but in the main, the supply side of the prostitution equation is linked to poverty.

More enlightened and compassionate social thinking in North America and Europe since the 1970s has put greater emphasis on understanding the plight of prostituted people, giving attention to the complex reasons behind the sale and purchase of sex, and the causes and nature of sexual exploitation and human trafficking. Changes in legislation and social policy in various places – Ireland included – have reflected these developments. Yet the shift in the focus of criminal justice systems from the seller to the buyer has not been without its difficulties.

Amnesty International

Following two years of consultation, the International Council Meeting (ICM) of Amnesty International voted in favour of a policy advocating the complete decriminalisation of prostitution and all forms of sex work last August in Dublin. This massively controversial position, supported also by Human Rights Watch, has flown in the face of Irish government plans to legislate against the purchase of sex in the state and the abolitionist Turn Off The Red Light campaign, which has been headed by the Immigrant Council of Ireland with the broad support of women’s organisations and trade unions.

Quite rightly, Amnesty, in its official statement on the 11 August ICM decision, said that “Sex workers are one of the most marginalized groups in the world who in most instances face constant risk of discrimination, violence and abuse”. While the objectives of safeguarding the human rights of prostituted persons and furthering the global fight against human trafficking are to be commended, the trouble begins for this line of argument when it comes to defining who is and is not a “sex worker”.

In the Twitter storm that erupted as a consequence of the Dublin vote, many Twitter users who spoke out in support of Amnesty identified themselves as sex workers.

What was noticeable, however, was that without exception these people, predominantly from Los Angeles, New York, and London, fit the category of the so-called high-class escort; mostly young, educated women in reasonably comfortable circumstances with access to other opportunities who chose sex work. As previously mentioned, these sex workers are by no means representative of the majority of people in prostitution.

C

ÉSAR SANDINO, IN a 2012 article for The Prisma, observed that in Britain, over seventy percent of sex workers were young single mothers who were not in receipt

of social welfare. Economic depression and a government policy of benefit sanctioning have severely reduced the income and employment opportunities of people pushed into poverty, and have made sex work more a necessity than a choice. Other research across Europe and the United States – based on the testimonies of people involved or formerly involved in street prostitution and the organisations that work with them – draws much the same picture. Around sixty to seventy percent of sex workers are motivated by extreme poverty and the need to care for dependent children, and the greater part of the remainder by varying degrees of poverty and alcohol or drug addiction.

Those not driven by poverty and addiction – the “highclass” escorts – account for a tiny minority of the whole internationally.

Moreover, as discussed in some depth by Catherine Arnold in her 2010 book City of Sin: London and its Vices, the high-class call girl or courtesan (in the historical rather than the pejorative sense) has, with the protection of people in high places, never truly been the subject of concerted legal censure. This is evident in both Britain and Ireland in the preponderance of websites advertising escort services.

In a number of instances support for Amnesty’s proposal came from others who openly admitted to being “in management”. The proliferation of urban based escort agencies in what is a highly profitable industry has meant

that those who had been heretofore labelled “pimps” – responsible for sexual exploitation, sometimes trafficking, and sometimes the procurement of the trafficked – have been able to successfully rebrand themselves as sex industry administrators, and therefore sex workers.

The inconvenient fact of the insidiousness of the organised criminal element throughout the entire sex industry has returned already to haunt Amnesty. Indeed, Amnesty International did consult with sex workers and human rights organisations.

It just so happened that one of those human rights organisations, the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP), had a problem. Its vice-president, Alejandra Gil, was a “sex worker” who was convicted and imprisoned for fifteen years after these consultations for human trafficking.

Of course an incident like this might be explained by saying that Gil was one bad apple who was ultimately caught and brought to justice – if it were not for the fact that her influence on Amnesty and others was significant, to say the least. Writing for The Guardian (22 October 2015) Kat Banyard broke it down: “Amnesty’s draft policy also cites as evidence a report written by the NSWP; a report annexe written by the UNAids ‘advisory group on HIV and sex work’ – which is co-chaired by the NSWP; and a World Health Organisation (WHO) report in which Gil is personally acknowledged

as one of the ‘experts’ who helped develop its recommendations.”

Infiltration

Hidden in plain sight as legitimate sex workers, characters like Gil, who was convicted for the sexual exploitation of over two hundred women, are free in a climate of libertarian ethics to infiltrate otherwise well-meaning organisations to further their business agendas for the legitimisation of what amounts to a slave trade. Revelations of this nature alone should be enough for Amnesty to rethink its recent policy decision. Everyone makes mistakes.

Back in July 2015 Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch in New York, tweeted (@KenRoth, 31 July): “It’s a bad option, but if no coercion, who are we to deny poor women the option of sex work?” along with a titillating image of a young woman in her underwear enjoying a cigarette.

Roth, a Yale Law School graduate and former US federal prosecutor, when speaking of poverty and prostituted women – while reducing them to the caricature of the “Happy Hooker” – betrays his ignorance of the economics of prostitution for the poor.

Perhaps it is easy to think this on a salary of $345,000 per annum.

In 2008 it was reported in the Independent that a half hour “service” with a Dublin escort cost ¤150, but today according to the prices listed on the same website quoted by the paper that has fallen

to ¤50. It has to be assumed that the women are either worth-less, or the going rate reflects the reduced state of the national economy. It is to be remembered as well that this is at the “high” end of the industry.

Austerity and criminalisation

Where EU-directed austerity has hit harder, the picture is worse. In November of last year, a flurry of reports on prostitution in Greece revealed that more extreme hardship had pushed the cost of sex down as low as ¤2 per session, with many sex workers operating on the streets of Athens exchanging sex for something to eat. The only available conclusion here is that prostitution is not a way out of poverty. At best it is a dehumanising act of desperation.

Should then the buyer rather than the vendor be punished? It is hard to say.

The reasons why men – and some women – pay for sex are as complex as the reasons others sell it, and arguments claiming that all buyers are rapists are too simplistic.

There is some merit to the position that complete – and enforced – criminalisation will merely drive the sex trade further underground, putting already vulnerable people in more danger.

It does seem to be the case that both sides of this discussion are responding to a wider political red herring.

Centuries of the criminalisation of the sale of sex have done nothing more than put the predominantly female

sellers in jail. A shift in focus to the buyer will result only in buyers going to jail. In either case someone is going to jail, because prostitution is not going anywhere. As a consequence of poverty – national and international – prostitution is here to stay until its underlying causes have been addressed. s a motion to criminalise the purchase of sex gets closer to the chamber of Dáil Éireann, what we are actually witnessing on the side of the abolitionists and on that of those seeking full decriminalisation is a diversionary tactic. Neither position truly has the capability of ridding Ireland or indeed the world of sexual exploitation, abuse, and human trafficking. What is needed, and what is capable of bringing about this change is the end of poverty and the socio-economic conditions that make the sex trade so profitable. This, we must fear, is the real pipedream. Too many powerful individuals and institutions – Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch included – are invested in this system.

Illustration by Sarah Morel

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Comment

15

Resistance and Revolution: Kurdistan’s Long Road to independence The West owes the Kurds continued support, but what of Turkey?

Deepi Virk Contributing writer

T

HE PROBLEM WITH dominant nationalisms is that they often lack nuance. Nationalism sometimes has an antagonistic relationship with truth, because the truth is that nationalisms are invented; and if they can be invented, they can be dismantled. Thus, to preserve itself, a nationalism which feels threatened becomes aggressive, it transforms into jingoism; it becomes authoritarian.

In a state where up to 20% of the population does not prescribe to the myth, it might seek to go on the offensive; it might seek to deny the existence of a minority altogether.

It might employ all means to forcibly assimilate the minority into its structure.

Such is the case with Turkey and the Kurds. But the Kurds are not Turks, no matter how much the nationalist myth portrays Kurdistan to be an extension of Turkey.

The problem with such nationalism is that it, by definition, sees its own claims as being above all others, and holds that its own narrative is the only legitimate source of information. From this position, it is only natural to silence dissenters, whether they be individuals or an entire people, and there are few peoples who have been silenced quite like the Kurds.

It was Winston Churchill who, in 1919, argued in favour of using poison gas against what he deemed to be the “uncivilised tribes” of Kurdistan, claiming that it would “spread a lively terror”. The British government decided against this policy, concluding instead that sustained aerial bombardment would have the desired effect of crushing Kurdish rebelliousness. Within seventy years of Churchill’s pronouncement, the Saddam Hussein regime put his wishes into effect, and for much the same reasons. “A lively terror” indeed; perhaps 100,000 Kurds were murdered, often after exposure to mustard gas and sarin, and their bodies dumped in unmarked mass graves.

The deserts of Iraq, then,

are made of more than just sand. They’re also made of human remains, a greyish powder which fills the air whenever a mass grave is uncovered; a common occurrence to this day. In the city of Halabja, the site of a 1988 massacre of Kurdish civilians, the chemicals used by the Iraqi army tainted the air for years after, and the chemical burns they caused never completely healed. It is perhaps important to note, then, given the almost prophetic nature of his words, that one of the rebels Churchill was so adamant about exterminating was a sixteen year old named Mustafa Barzani, whose son, Masoud, is the current President of Iraqi Kurdistan, Britain’s chief ally in the war against ISIS.

Western Betrayal

This has become a dominant theme in the history of Kurdistan. Time and time again, the West has either been directly responsible for undermining its national aspirations or has abandoned the Kurds in their hour of need. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush encouraged the Kurds and Shia Arabs to rebel against the weakened Ba’athist regime. Yet when these revolutions faltered, and Saddam retaliated with his signature brutality, the United States was hesitant to intervene. As a result, perhaps another 200,000 civilians perished and over a million Kurds were forced from their homes before NATO effectively established no-fly zones.

This slow response to protect a revolution which the US encouraged goes beyond simple negligence; it was an act of betrayal. Yet despite this, Iraqi Kurdistan has flourished. A civil war in the late 90’s threatened to transform it into a failed experiment, but the idea survived.

Since then, the region has prospered while to the South, Iraq has withered under the yokes of Saddam, Islamism and sectarianism, proving that left to themselves, the Kurds can succeed. It must be the policy of the West to ensure that Kurdish claims to sovereignty are recognised; a strong Kurdistan is necessary for defeating ISIS and is the key to the future of the Middle East. The West, then, does

not have a choice. We must be on the side of the Kurds.

But Iraqi Kurdistan is only one constituent piece in a larger puzzle – one that challenges four of the great nationalisms of the Middle East.

The historical repression of the Kurds living within Turkey’s borders mirrors that of Iraq, although in this case, the mass graves were shared with the Armenians. Later, Ankara tried to convince itself and the world that the Kurds simply weren’t there; the words ‘Kurd’ and ‘Kurdistan’ were banned, the Kurdish language was outlawed while officially, the government referred to them as “Mountain Turks”. Kurdish traditions, dress and even names received a similar fate, and as recently as the 1990s, political parties representing Kurdish interests were illegal.

This decades long forced assimilation project amounts to cultural genocide: an explicit attempt to destroy the Kurds as a culturally homogenous group. Such is the legacy of Kemalism, the official ideology which replaced the Ottoman Empire, and which justified its repression of the Kurds under the guise of national unity.

Turkey’s embrace of the Islamist Erdogan means that Kemalism is dead, or at least dormant. Under the new regime, steps were taken to empower the Kurds by reviving their language in the media and restoring Kurdish names to previously “Turkified” cities. PKK guerrillas who surrendered were offered a partial amnesty and in 2011, Erdogan apologised for the Dersim massacre of 1938, in which thousands of ethnic Kurds were butchered.

But ultimately, the Neo-Ottomanism of Erdogan’s AKP is directly opposed to any meaningful autonomy for the Kurds. The reason for Ankara’s refusal to recognise that it shares Anatolia with another people lies deeply embedded in Turkey’s history of empire. The reconstruction of this lost empire remains the single-minded pursuit of the Erdogan regime; the creation of a pan-Turkic harmony and the unity of the Turkic peoples under a single banner, presumably draped around Mr Erdogan himself. Such expansionist tendencies do not sit well with minority rights,

especially when the minority views itself as a distinct people with its own banner to fly.

Syrian Unrest

Syria was Erdogan’s great gamble, his chance to recreate Turkish power by controlling the outcome of the civil war from the shadows.

From the outset, Turkey took an exceptionally hard stance towards Assad, and found itself supporting unsavoury elements within the revolutionary movement.

Its support for the Army of Conquest, a ragtag coalition of assorted Jihadist types with rather ambiguous views on ISIS, raised an eyebrow in Washington, but nothing was done to bring Turkey into line. Emboldened by this false sense of untouchability, Turkey’s involvement in Syria increased, but as much as Erdogan fancies himself as a master strategist, he simply isn’t. During the Arab Spring, Turkey lent its support to the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East, but the Muslim Brotherhood failed spectacularly in every country.

Realising that he had isolated himself and that his proxies had made little progress, Erdogan withdrew back into the shadows. He focused on a problem which had presented itself in the aftermath of the Arab Spring; the successful revolution of the Syrian Kurds and the consequences it had for his control over parts of his own country.

Assad knew that he could not hold Syrian Kurdistan. As a result, the army abandoned large parts of the Kurdish provinces early during the civil war. These cantons quickly came under the control of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish militia associated with the Democratic Union Party (PYD).

Almost immediately, radical reforms were introduced; women’s councils, direct democracy and a cooperative economy based loosely on libertarian socialist principles.

Despite some problems, notably alleged human rights abuses of Sunni Arabs, Kurdish sovereignty has produced a marked improvement in the lives of the people who live there. The Kurds of Syria have begun the arduous process of building a democratic alternative, but

their cause is being undermined by Turkey. The PYD is a sister party of the PKK, the leftist insurgency which forms the backbone of the Kurdish autonomist movement in Turkish Kurdistan and is considered a terrorist organisation by the West. Despite the PKK’s role in rescuing thousands of Yazidis from ISIS encirclement at Mount Sinjar, the West has been reluctant to change its policy towards them. Given this association between the PKK and the YPG, it is clear why the success of the Kurds in Syria is worrying for the rulers of Turkey. Thus, Erdogan has consistently sought to undermine Syria’s Kurds, even as they fight ISIS, for fear of their revolution spreading.

It was in the little known city of Kobanî that the war cries were sounded once more. Memories of Madrid in 1936 came to the fore as the chant of ‘No Pasaran!’ became the unofficial anthem of Kurdish resistance in the face of Daesh brutality. Comparisons with Stalingrad were common; vicious street fighting, with both sides knowing that surrender was not an option, only victory or death.

It was believed that, like Stalingrad, Kobanî would be the turning point in the war. If ISIS could be defeated and its momentum halted, then it would be perpetually on the back foot. The world willed the YPG to succeed, to invoke the spirit of the antifascist partisans of old and defeat Islamist totalitarianism.

In the end, Kobanî did not fall to Daesh, yet Turkey did everything it could to ensure

that it did. Instead of intervening against ISIS, Erdogan denounced the mass rallies on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara in support of the Kurds. The blockade of Kobanî, which arguably amounted to tacit collusion with ISIS, demonstrates precisely Erdogan’s fears; so terrified of Kurdish emancipation, that he is willing to collude with the forces of barbarism to crush the democratic aspirations of a people. Soon after, fighting resumed between PKK militants and the Turkish military.

ing method in Trinity differs widely to many countries is something that Trinity could provide support on. Two students mentioned how the struggled with the teaching methods used in Trinity, and how unstructured they are compared to France, where the contact hours are greater, and the lectures are much more specific in learning outcomes. It was very difficult to come from that Trinity, where there is large booklists and learning is very self directed. This wasn’t seen as a negative, it was just very different and students struggled to adapt without help. Being unsure of this system meant that the courses the student

undertook felt very superficial, and they felt left behind.

Not understanding what to read meant that often they were confused in lectures. A practical session explaining how lectures at Trinity work (particularly with regarding to Arts) and how house reading lists would enhance international students experiences of the academic side of an erasmus exchange. This would also be beneficial to first year students. It is something the college can easily provide support on, and individual departments could make sure students understood in relation to the requirements of their course Between 2012/2013 and

Erdogan’s Loyalties

With the success of the Kurds in Syria and the protests denouncing Turkish inaction, Erdogan was forced to take direct measures. Determining who started the fighting inevitably turns into a matter of whose propaganda you believe, but one thing is certain; the high levels of civilian casualties during Turkish bombing raids on the PKK shows that nothing has changed. Erdogan, despite his early rhetoric of rapprochement with the Kurds, turned to indiscriminate violence at the first stirrings of autonomy in Turkish Kurdistan. What’s more, he has forced the Iraqi Kurds to side with him. The fate of Kurdish national aspirations in Iraq lies on a single pipeline, running from the oil fields to the Mediterranean via Turkey. Erdogan can shut it off at any point, at any time. The result is that the Kurdish Regional Government has failed to condemn the Turkish assault; it has even called for

the expulsion of PKK units from Iraqi Kurdistan, while allowing Turkish troops to enter its territory. In this way, Erdogan has purposefully sown the seeds of discord in the Kurdish liberation movement.

Erdogan has managed to combine ultraconservative Islam for the rural peasantry, absolute neoliberalism for the cities, and unrestricted use of state power against the opposition and the Kurds. Far from curing the original sin of Turkey, the AKP has allowed it to re-emerge, and its resolve to demolish the nascent beginnings of a long awaited emancipation will only grow.

By defending themselves against vicious theocracy in Syria, the Kurds are defending us all. By undermining the Kurds at every opportunity, Erdogan is undermining us all. By attacking the Kurds in Turkey, cutting them off in Syria, and tacitly threatening them in Iraq, Turkey is objectively aiding our enemies.

Far from defending the universal principles of democracy and secularism, a NATO member in the 21st century is actively trying to prevent the implementation of these principles. The Kurds remain our principal allies in the war against ISIS, and there can be no doubt that the West owes them its continued support; but what of Turkey? The late Tony Benn once said that we should strive to ask those in power five questions, but in the case of Turkey’s rulers, there is only one question that remains to be answered; whose side are you truly on?

Assessing the prospects for future international students at Trinity Speaking with students from outside Ireland about their time studying in College, we can identify the areas the administration needs to improve upon Caoimhe Brennan Contributing writer

W

ITH THE PROPOSED increase in international students, it is more important than ever to examine how past students from outside Ireland have experienced being a visiting student at Trinity. The students contacted for this article have all on the whole had mostly positive experiences but it is obvious that the college needs to improve in some areas.

The accommodation crisis in Dublin is difficult when you are an Irish student, so coming from another country makes it very difficult to find accommodation that is affordable. One student, doing law remarked that it took three weeks to find affordable accommodation, and he got little help from the college with this, apart from a “bit of help” from the SU. They suggested that a workshop be provided for Erasmus students to help them with finding accommodation, and a specific room with computers and advice if you had questions. It was pointed out by all students that they felt left alone by the college to find accommodation in a foreign city.

The Wi-Fi was another issue that regularly cropped up in students’ responses. All mentioned how bad it was, but in relation to home universities it didn’t appear to be worse, and in some cases better. The problem was in its reliability, and this is something that the Provost needs to address, both for Erasmus

and home students. The fact that the Wi-Fi is so unreliable, even if it is accessible in all of our classrooms, is not acceptable for a modern university. Access to the internet needs to be reliable and fast as so much of course content, timetables, lecture slides and contact with lecturers outside of class time is conducted through the internet. Even if the Wi-Fi was comparable to home universities, it is something that could enhance both Erasmus and home students and is an important thing to address.

Short term lessons from Erasmus

The experience of Erasmus students with the courses they were studying while here differs wildly and needs regulation. One student describes arriving at the history department to sign up for modules and being told that the module options they wished to take, which they had got information on the department website of, was outdated, and that they wished to do probably didn’t exist anymore.

Their course meetings for history and social science took place at the same time, they were left very unclear about what modules they could take, and the only information available was at the department meeting, which clashed. The other Erasmus students they met had the same experience, and were left going from department to department, with no assistance from the college, hoping to get the signatures for the modules they wished to take, but not knowing if they could take them.

The same student signed up for two modules with another Arts Department as the

description interested them and had a lecturer that did not follow the course description and regularly turned up 15-20 minutes late. The lecturer in question sent other people to teach the module, invited guests, showed videos and did not manage to cover the course outline.

“Since the only way Erasmus student have to choose their modules is their description, it is not easy to know which courses not to take”. This is a huge shortfall on behalf of the college. If international student numbers are to be increased, the system for choosing what to study needs to be overhauled. Much like the TSM students that seem to fall through the cracks, international students do not receive support when liaising with different departments, and there is a lack of communication between different schools. This was not the majority experience, and seems to be the same issues that TSM students face, with the added barrier of language and being unsure of the system.

Despite this, all students mentioned how much support Trinity gave them via the International Office. It was noted to be quick and effective with resolving problems. The fact there were meetings organised for international students in the Global Room, social events organised by the Dublin University International Student Society and lectures on Irish customs and culture were hugely beneficial, and all the students reported how this made their experience positive and helped them integrate into student life. Most students said that Trinity was more supportive than their

home universities, and the student experience was incomparable.

The range of clubs and societies really surpassed all the students home universities, and really aided international students with integrating into college life. The freshers fair was mentioned as an incredible way to make friends and see what college life has to offer. The facilities in the sports centre also surpassed those in several students home universities, and one student says on his experience of Trinity college “Trinity is definitely a genuine student experience, whereas my home university is just the “functional” place where you try to get as much knowledge as possible in the quickest way. Contrary to Trinity, I don’t keep a lot a memories from my home universities, I just need its diploma.” The only negative thing mentioned with regards to student life was the fact there could be more social events for internationals.

Library and teaching

The facilities in the library were mentioned as being better than home university, although being in the Berkeley and Lecky was likened to being in a soviet bunker. The students seemed impressed with the system of counter reserve, and most noted that although grades did not matter in an erasmus year, they spent a lot of time studying or working on projects in the library. One student remarks that although they spent so much time in the library, they never figured out how to take out a book. Special library sessions for erasmus students that focus purely on practical skills would benefit here.

The fact that the teach-

2014/2015 Trinity student body coming from outside the EU has increased by 30%.

This year ten new student exchange programs were signed in the US, Latin America and Asia, bringing the number of places for Trinity Students to undertake an exchange to a non- EU country to over 100.

Over a quarter of the student body now have the opportunity to undertake an international exchange including Erasmus. The students in Trinity are evidently putting in huge effort to welcome international students, and as their numbers increase the college must do likewise.

Photo by Eoin Cambay

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Comment

16

Head to Head: Is Jeremy Corbyn to blame for Labour’s problems?

Rory O’Sullivan Contributing writer

W

ILL JEREMY CORBYN’S Labour automatically support strikes in any circumstances?

What will they do about Trident? How do they plan on winning Tory voters over?

How will they be different to Ed Miliband? Would they try to negotiate with ISIL? All of these questions are from Andrew Marr’s interview with Corbyn on the BBC on January 17th. HIs answers are incomprehensible; Corbyn likes to ignore questions, to waffle and obfuscate. One of my favourite examples comes from a poster that aims to show how the media twist Corbyn’s words ­‘How to speak Corbyn: a headline writer’s guide’. Asked if Tony Blair should stand trial for war crimes, he says: “If he’s committed a war crime, yes.

Everyone who’s committed a war crime should be … Is he going to be tried for it, I don’t know. Could he be tried for it?

Possibly.” The headline in T​he Express i​s “‘Tony Blair must face trial for war crimes’, says Jeremy Corbyn”. The headline may have been wrong, but Corbyn also completely failed to answer the question.

This might have been forgivable if Corbyn had not been Chair of the Stop the

War Coalition (surely he has an opinion on this of all issues?) or if a major sticking point of his campaign had not been that he was somehow purer than other politicians, that he was authentic, that he was principled. We were told that Labour was going to introduce a new kind of politics, but now in January the new is looking awfully similar to the old. Corbyn’s “broad church” Cabinet – another major issue in the campaign – has been deemed too broad, and several Blairites have been ostentatiously removed.

His old friend, John McDonnell, is the Shadow Chancellor; and his son, Seb Corbyn, is McDonnell’s Chief of Staff.

Apart from a flirtation with a local newspaper, he has never had a job outside of politics or political activism. The young people who voted for him, I’m convinced, thought they were getting an Owen Jones figure; they thought they were getting Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter. The extent of their mistake became clear when Corbyn, instead of bringing in Owen Jones, brought Seumas Milne into the strategy end of his inner c­ircle: Seumas Milne, who has been a dedicated defender of the Milosevic regime in Serbia; who really genuinely regrets the fall of the USSR; who is so far left, so anti­-West, that his politics lead him to support fascists and ignore genocide. He is a

thoroughly old hat.

The simple fact is that there isn’t a whisper of new in Corbyn’s Labour; it represents cobwebbed principles from a different century, and its claim to moral authority depends upon ignoring voters. It’s the kind of echo­chamber where Trident rather than Health or Housing is the most important issue of the day, and where the Tories are the enemy rather than the political opposition. It’s a party with doctrine rather than policy platforms, and with values so ridiculous to the vast majority of the British people that Corbyn can’t admit to them on ­air. In an earlier interview, Andrew Marr asks Corbyn if he’s a Marxist, and gets a string of non-­answers, featuring: “Does it all [Marxism] apply now? Well, obviously philosophy applies at all times”. The irony of this behaviour, of course, is that it’s exactly the kind of thing for which Blairites are condemned: diluting principles for political reasons. In so many areas, he simply won’t say what he believes.

Corbyn, of course, has avoided a lot of these difficult

questions about his leadership.

He’s avoided the Jewish Chronicle’s “The Key Q u e st i o n s Jeremy Corbyn Must Answer”, and cried “Media bias!” when asked why he thinks Osama Bin Laden’s death is a tragedy – while John McDonnell’s answer to a question at a Labour leadership hustings in 2010, in which he implies that if he could do one thing differently in the 80s, he would assassinate Margaret Thatcher, suggests that hers might not be to Corbyn.

He has been very keen in his career to meet with ‘friends’ in Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRA, and though we’re told that each of these occasions were to do with negotiation and peace, there’s no evidence of his meeting any Israelis, or any Unionists, to follow through on these. He opposes bombing Syria because of potential civilian deaths, but doesn’t seem to have a way to reduce the number of civilian deaths caused by the targets of bombing. He would never use a nuclear weapon even if it would avoid hundreds of thousands of deaths, as it did

in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In other words, he’s a man who cares more about being morally superior than he does about saving people, and who believes that that inaction and action, when the consequences of either are death, are different things. He’s a man who believes the enemy of the West is his friend, no matter how terrible they are.

None of this, however, is the worst thing about Jeremy Corbyn. The worst thing about Corbyn is that his leadership is completely incompetent. His tenure so far has been a farce to anyone who didn’t want him, and a betrayal to anyone who did.

He clearly has no strategy.

John McDonnell can produce Mao’s Little Red Book during the budget on his own initiative, the reshuffle takes days, Corbyn stands up after Paris and says he doesn’t believe police should kill terrorists mid-­attack like those in the cinema in Paris.

Maybe someone’s telling them to tone it down and they don’t always listen. Maybe Corbyn felt much more strongly about shoot-­to-­kill than he did about Marx or the Iraq War. Looking from the outside, however, it feels like the reason for all of this is that no one has a plan for getting Labour into government – that on some days he feels he wants to reach out to moderates, and on other days he doesn’t.

“The media” get a lot of criticism from Corbynites, who feel that the Daily Express and the BBC are in some kind of conspiracy to embarrass him, but in reality he doesn’t need them. As far as I can tell, Jeremy Corbyn has never said anything quotable in his life. He’s a man who uses his whim more often than his intellect. He is neither clever nor competent; instead of principles, he has anti­-principles; instead of reforming politics, he has destroyed his party’s unity, and with it, any meaningful opposition to the government.

Every serious analysis of the 2015 Election says that Labour lost because people didn’t trust them on the economy. Now, under Corbyn, people don’t trust them on security either. As long as the British people believe that a man firing at them with an assault rifle would not be killed by policemen to save their lives under a Labour government, the Tories will rule Britain.

Anyone who believes the same things as Corbyn should be deeply troubled by him, because he isn’t fit to run a country. Like Owen Jones, they should quietly start looking for someone else.

The rest of us should hope the Tories pick Boris Johnson as their next leader instead of George Osborne.

what the split in Labour over bombing Syria seemed to be about – undermining Jeremy Corbyn.

There has been a media narrative constructed around Corbyn. It says that he is unable to unite the party, that the in-fighting is turning voters away from Labour, that the appointment of left-wing ally John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor has stripped them of credibility as an alternative government. Political commentators cannot conceive of an electorate that does not think the way they do. It is obvious that the establishment is trying to undermine Jeremy Corbyn, but their ability to do so is hindered by how little they understand him or his supporters. The appeal of Corbyn’s left-wing programme to working class people, who have been sacrificed to pay for a crisis of British capitalism, is beyond their understanding.

Corbyn’s Labour has not swept aside all comers as his leadership campaign did.

They are still behind the Conservatives in the polls, and it appears he is struggling to generate enthusiasm amongst the wider public in the face of such embittered media resistance. He has been unable to stop the rot in Scottish Labour, who stand little chance of wrestling back their support from the SNP. But the doomsday warnings of the political commentariat over the summer have not come to past. The Oldham by-election in December, the day after Corbyn’s defeat on Syria, was to be the nail in the coffin, the moment it all came crashing down for the “loony left”. UKIP, it appeared, was ready to take the seat and expose the unelecta-

bility of Corbyn’s “poncified Labour”. Corbyn himself was named by the Daily Mail as “the greatest threat to Labour’s hold on Oldham”.

Labour, of course, won with a positive swing of 7.5% and a majority in excess of ten thousand votes.

Before the b y- e l e c t i o n , when the media were predicting a UKIP victory, it was because of Corbyn.

So it had to be that Labour’s victory was then in spite of him. Extra points to the Telegraph who, days afterwards, were still able to declare this victory “the beginning of the end for Corbyn” in a story slamming the Labour leader for his “hubris”. The problem with such a transparent media campaign is that it’s easy to see through it. The most amusing aspect of the leadership campaign over the summer was that Corbyn’s support seemed to increase proportionally to the Labour establishment’s smears against him. The same phenomenon has not exactly repeated itself during his leadership, but the media’s prediction that Corbyn would reduce Labour to a shivering, unelectable mess has not been the self-fulfilling prophecy they hoped it would.

Corbyn’s victory was a defeat for the British establishment. With the rise of neoliberalism and its twin political expressions, Thatcherism and Blairism, politics has been defined around the no-

tion that “there is no alternative” – to capitalism, to neoliberalism, to privatisation and deregulation, and now, in the wake of the economic crisis, to austerity. This is ideology; it is an understanding of society that has been moulded by and embedded in the state, political parties, the media and universities. Corbyn won a landslide victory with the message that there is an alternative to Tory cuts.

His greatest contribution so far has been to talk about politics in class terms and challenge the Conservative government on an explicitly left/right divide in a way no Labour leader has done for decades. The way in which Corbyn is lambasted for daring to speak of taxing the rich and corporations should earn sympathy from those of us in Ireland, where any mention of taking more from our scandalously undertaxed corporations is forbidden.

The essence of the establishment’s hatred of Corbyn is this: he represents a politics they thought dead and buried. The policies Corbyn stands for are in fact popular ones – an end to austerity, the nationalisation of public services such as the railways, disarmament of nuclear weapons, opposing war.

They are not unrealistic, they do not challenge the fundamental structures of capitalism – his economic policies have received support from a number of moderate centre-

left economists. But Corbyn is trying to tap into the idea of Labour as a workers’ party defined in unassailable opposition to the Conservatives.

He wants to turn Labour into a “social movement” that can transform Britain along the lines of classic social democracy. As Richard Seymour has pointed out, Corbyn is polarising voters in a way no Labour politician has for years.

This is politics divided on the axis of class, and we should have more of it. In an age of centre-right conformity, we should demand anti-war, anti-austerity politics.

We should expose the media’s attempts to stamp out Corbyn’s belief in a world better than this one, and at the same time be aware of the limitations of Labour to deliver that alternative. Corbyn ought to have resisted calls for a free vote over Syria and demanded that his MPs oppose war: this would have simply been imposing the democratic will of the Labour membership, up to 75% of whom opposed bombing Syria. But under mounting pressure from all sides, Corbyn assented to a free vote that strengthened the pro-war faction’s hand. Corbyn’s politics are not Labour’s politics, and there are doubts over how long he can withstand the pressure to compromise more and more, lest he see his party fall apart at the seams.

The balance of forces within Labour seems too strongly aligned to British capitalism for Corbyn to overcome.

SNP MP Mhairi Black said she would “never forget the noise of some Labour and Tory [MPs] cheering together at the idea of bombs falling.”

This, sadly, is the Labour Party that Tony Blair and Gor-

Yes

Apart from a flirtation with a local newspaper, he

has never had a job outside of politics or political activism. The young people who voted for him, I’m convinced, thought they were getting an Owen Jones figure; they thought they were getting Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter.

Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

Rory O’Neill Contributing writer

Corbyn’s victory was a defeat

for the British establishment.

With the rise of neoliberalism and its twin political expressions, Thatcherism and Blairism, politics has been defined around the notion that “there is no alternative” – to capitalism, to neoliberalism, to privatisation and deregulation, and now, in the wake of the economic crisis, to austerity.

O

N THE EVENING of Wednesday 2 December, the British House of Commons voted to undertake bombing action in Syria against ISIS targets, with 397 votes for and 223 against. 66 of those votes in favour of military action came from the Labour Party, with a significant section of the parliamentary party weighing in behind David Cameron against their own leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Hillary Benn, son of the late, and much greater, socialist activist Tony, gave the closing speech in favour of bombing.

Benn’s closing speech in favour of bombing Syria was lauded as “electrifying” and “spine-tingling”. Martin Kettle of the Guardian compared Benn to “a great conductor” weaving “a symphonic argument”. Perhaps these matters come down to differences of opinion, but Benn’s speech seemed anything but extraordinary – he emphasised the need to “do our bit”, reminded parliament of how they “hold our values and democracy in contempt”. This was a greatest hits of jingoistic, liberal-interventionist clichés. This is to say nothing of the merciless cynicism with which Benn appropriated the efforts of the International Brigades who went to Spain to fight fascism. Then, a series of opinion columns began to emerge hailing it as the speech “of a true leader” and one that could “transform the Labour Party”. It became clear (if it wasn’t already)

No

don Brown have bequeathed us. In the five months of Corbyn’s leadership, we have seen little evidence that it can be transformed into a left-wing social movement.

But one thing is certain: the problem with Labour is not Corbyn, it is those trying to get rid of him. Whether the fight within Labour is won or lost, the left must continue to organise around anti-war, anti-austerity struggles.

Could a Corbyn-led government even deliver a socialist Britain? The capitulation of SYRIZA in Greece should come as a warning to those seeking radical transformation of society through existing parliamentary avenues. Our political and state structures are not neutral terrain – they are fundamentally aligned to the interests of those who own and rule our society and economy. A Corbyn government would come up against the same pressures that every left-wing government has throughout history.

In every case, the outcome has been compromise and defeat. This does not mean the kind of society Corbyn talks about isn’t worth fighting for. We should reject right-wing attacks on Corbyn: their objective is to enshrine that there is no alternative to capitalism. But to deliver a socialist society, we have to look to the self-organisation of working people. These are not abstract questions – as the struggle inside Labour intensifies, these are the questions that will be posed to the new layers of activists inspired by Corbyn to fight for change.

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Comment

17

So long, selfies Mumbai is right to say yes to no-selfie zones Majella McParland Contributing writer

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N THE 13TH of January, Mumbai City officials announced that sixteen areas of the city are to be declared “no-selfie zones”. This was in response to a tragic incident in which three teenagers fell into the Arabian Sea while posing for a selfie. A passerby managed to rescue two of the girls but drowned trying to save the third, who also is presumed to have drowned although her body has not been recovered. A few days later, statistics revealed that India has the most selfie-related deaths in the world and the unfortunate trend continued with two more people losing their lives in accidents in Jodhpur and in Doon.

These deaths are certainly tragic and, although the majority of incidents took place in India last year, there were serious accidents reported from across the globe, including one in America in which a person was gored while trying to snap a photograph with a bison in Yellowstone National Park and another in which a man was gored by a bull whilst partaking in the bull run at Pamplona. Statistically, there were more deaths attributed to selfie-related accidents than there were to shark attacks last year. It is a worrying trend and Mumbai city officials should be commended for taking steps to address it.

Other jurisdictions have tried to curb the taking of selfies in dangerous places with the Russian Interior Ministry releasing a pamphlet last summer warning that “A cool selfie could cost you your life”. Sadly, that is exactly what happened just two months later when a teenager died when trying to take a selfie on top of a nine storey building. On a website like Instagram on which there are millions of people taking the same types of photographs, it is tempting for one to go to extremes to get

noticed. The teenager who died in Russia had previously posted risky selfies on Instagram; the one that tragically led to his death was not a once-off dare. If people cannot exercise common sense when taking selfies then it seems that the next logical step is to ban the taking of them in particularly dangerous places.

There has also been a rise in the amount of injuries due to the use of selfie sticks.

They have been banned from theme parks and sports grounds in addition to museums because of the dangers associated with them. One visitor to the Walt Disney Park in California caused a ride to shut down for an hour because of his use of the device. It isn’t just because they are a nuisance; park officials feared that the selfie stick could inadvertently come into contact with the mechanisms controlling the ride. Of course, one could argue that photographs taken during the thrilling experience have always been a staple of rollercoaster rides (and a moneyspinner for the operators).

When the desire for the perfect shot overrides the need for safety, though, it is time for us to reconsider our use of selfies.

Cultural Acceptability

Safety isn’t the only issue in the debate regarding whether selfies should be banned.

Even when they are taken in a safe environment, they can still be problematic. When I visited Birkenau-Auschwitz last winter, I was surprised at the amount of people taking selfies. There were some taken in front of the infamous gates and others in the yards.

That seemed disrespectful enough, but some tourists took it further. One group of teenagers even posed laughing with their fingers extended to make a peace sign in front of the display of all the glasses taken from the prisoners. It didn’t seem appropriate in such a solemn

and historically important environment, regardless of their intentions. Indeed, last year, an Israeli Facebook page was set up to document selfies taken at the camp with the intention of encouraging debate around the issue. It was quickly shut down due to its creator receiving death threats but it had the added effect of encouraging some of the people featured to remove their own photographs.

The selfie, which is usually associated with nights out and having the craic, cannot be an appropriate form of expression in places such as Birkenau-Auschwitz because it implies a sense of frivolity in what should be a respectful, solemn atmosphere. The same applies to selfies at more personal sombre events. Journalist Jason Feifer established a Tumblr page to compile a collection of selfies taken at funerals.

It has been discontinued and the last image on the page is of Barack Obama, former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt and David Cameron at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. The fact that even world leaders have adopted the practice might suggest the cultural acceptability and the ubiquitous nature of the selfie. However, surely there is a time and place for selfies?

Surely the focus at those sorts of events should not be on the self but on the person who has died or the atrocity that should be commemorated?

Narcissism

The link between the taking of selfies has been extensively studied in recent years across academic disciplines.

One view of selfies espoused by the media, such as in the May 2013 issue of Time Magazine is that they symbolise a rise in narcissism. However, studies investigating this concern have shown mixed results. While some studies, such as two recent ones published in October and November in “Personality and Individual Differences”,

have suggested that there is a link between selfies and narcissism, especially amongst males, others have been less conclusive. Indeed, a forthcoming article In the aforementioned journal argues that there is no correlation between selfies and narcissism.

Although the jury is still out on the narcissism debate, it is undeniable that the taking of selfies causes problems at tourist spots which go beyond the safety element. Selfie sticks are obtrusive and irritating to other tourists and photographers. Others do not want to see selfie sticks in their frames, but with the rise in popularity of the gadget, that can be difficult to avoid.

Lost Opportunities

Selfie sticks also negate the need to ask a stranger to take your photograph. For safety

reasons, that seems like a good thing, of course. Giving your new iPhone to a complete randomer isn’t always a good idea. Again, however, like the taking of selfies in the first place, it all comes down to a hefty dose of common sense. Taking the photograph for a stranger can foster contact and positive memories of a holiday. When I asked an English family to take my picture on holiday, that question turned into a fascinating conversation about literature and film and it is something that remains as sharp in my memory as the photo is on my phone.

I do not think selfies are inherently a problem; they can be put to very good use, such as for the #nomakeupselfie campaign for charity a few years back and The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. I do have a problem with them

“

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

when the desire for the perfect image takes precedence over safety or when they are used in such a way that is disrespectful or annoying to others. If people cannot exercise common sense then a ban unfortunately seems to be the only option. Yes, it is a minority that has necessitated this ban; there are millions of selfies taken safely every year. If the ban on selfies in Mumbai is successful, perhaps other places, such as Birkenau-Auschwitz could consider, it for reasons of respect if nothing else. With the worrying number of accidents in recent years, the authorities’ decision to try something new can only be a good thing. People are dying to get something the best or most novel photograph and it is a senseless trend that hopefully will decrease in 2016.

Examing the subtle structures of College life Oisin Vince Coulter examines how extracurricular organisations in college reflect similar characteristics to wider society.

Oisin Vince Coulter Deputy news editor

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EYOND ACADEMIA, MOST Trinity students will take part in some kind of extracurricular activity during their time in college, be that a society, sports club, publication or the student union. Although nebulous, this disparate collection of groups is often taken together and referred to as ‘College life’. When talking about those who are heavily involved in College life, a common claim is that they are just preparing for future careers.

This generally aims to underline how so many parts of College life are simultaneously pretentious and meaningless - bringing to mind the famous quote that student politics are so intense exactly because the stakes are so low.

However, there are good reasons to examine college life closely, not least that taken together student organisations in Trinity have annual income and expenditure that runs into the millions.

Subtle structures

Many student organisations seem to overtly ape wider society; clearly, student publications draw directly from newspapers and journals. The student union, with its elections, sabbatical positions and hierarchy draws obvious comparisons to government or a civil service.

Others are less clear-cut, but there are plenty parallels in goals and structure between various college societies and national organisations.

However, the way in which College life most reflects wider society is how deceptively small the number of people actively involved is, and the degree to which they all know each other. Across College there cannot be more than a few hundred people who control College life, a tiny small

fraction of the sixteen thousand total students.

This group make up the committees of the largest societies, direct the students union, run student publications and sports clubs, and they come to know each other through this involvement: this is common knowledge amongst people who become actively involved during their time in Trinity.

What is less known, or at least less discussed, is the subtle and less subtle ways in which these few hundred people shape College life. A simple example is how many positions are actually occupied by the same people.

People who become active in College life often do so across the board, being a class representative for the students union, on a society committee and writing for College paper at the same time.

I should be clear, before getting into more detail, that I’m not claiming some grand scheme on the part of anyone to control things. Rather I think it’s interesting to note how the social structures of College life naturally and perhaps inevitably lead to some people or groups exerting control over others.

Sabbatical elections

The best example, perhaps, especially given we are now in the run up to them are the student union sabbatical elections. After almost four years in College, including one year heavily involved in a campaign, I’ve picked up on much of the unspoken rules and features of student union sabbatical elections.

To begin with, no one who wishes to win will do so simply because they have good ideas or might be good at the job - bar a few exceptions.

There are some important steps that most successful candidates have to follow, obviously varying from position to position.

To begin with, involvement in the dizzying student union bureaucracy of class representatives, committees, convenors and more is extremely important. It is through this that a prospective future sab-

batical officer learns about the SU, makes friends with those involved and builds ‘profile’ among a large section of those likely to vote.

Some successfully run for sabbatical positions purely from involvement in the SU, but most add a few more elements to their CV’s first. Involvement in a large society, like LawSoc, the Phil or VDP is always a plus. Writing a few articles for a student publication always helps. Something charitable or vaguely activism related like S2S or Amnesty rounds things out.

This checklist gives some prospective candidates a clear edge, ignoring how good or bad their policies are. They have a higher profile around College, more friends that’d be willing to help out with their campaign. They have friends reporting on them within Trinity News and the University Times, instead of strangers.

Conservative attitudes

After all of this, the prospective sabbatical officer is ready for the campaign trail.

Again, let me stress that although some people likely do plan out what I’ve mentioned, and decide that they are at least vaguely interested in running within your first year or so in College, I’d like to think most of not so calculating. Rather, the kinds of people who become very active in college life generally are the ones who consider running for sabbatical positions.

It seems natural that those who spend more time doing things around College, getting involved and making friends, would do better in elections. However, this view ignores some important side effects.

The main problem is the conservative attitudes and traditionalism that occurs when there is a set path people follow to achieve any kind of position. Having spent time involved in the student union, and in College life, prospective candidates are unlikely to look at it with a critical eye.

Instead, much is taken for

granted as simply being ‘the way things are’. This feeds into the second main issue, how anti-democratic the entire process is. The student’s union is meant to represent students and give them all an equal voice; this clearly is not the reality when only a few dozen people stand much of chance at winning.

Although Lynn Ruane’s campaign bucked this trend, that was a once in a generation event. I’ve used the sabbatical elections as an illustrative example of phenomenon that occurs at every level in College.

Simply put, when people are involved in organisations, putting time and energy into being successful within those organisations they inevitably accept the internal logic of those organisations.

Recurrent characteristics This is true across the board: the central societies committee (CSC) and central athletics club (CAC) have many of the same problems and plenty of their own. The first example is the degree to which large societies exert control within CSC and over smaller societies.

Every year, the CSC executive is elected by the treasurers of all the societies, acting as proxies for their respective committees. As a rule, large societies have considerable pull in these elections because, as mentioned before, many of their members are active in multiple different societies.

By having large committees with members active across many different societies certain societies are able to successfully lobby for CSC positions in a way smaller ones are not.

On a more overt level, when people want to run for positions in societies they generally bring their friends along to vote for them. This is taken to another level when large societies can essentially turn up en-masse to elections with sufficient numbers to win any election.

This has occurred a number of times in recent years, with smaller societies being, in frank terms, taken over by

Photo by Eoin Cambay

larger ones and becoming de facto satellites of that larger society. Again, this may not be something that is planned – but it happens all the same.

This is important because CSC is both the mediating body for societies as a whole, as well as deciding grants and overarching rules. I should note that I know these things happen because I’ve both seen it happen, and occasionally taken part myself. It’s very much a regular part of involvement in College life.

Publications of all breeds are far from free of this, with a large number of writers and editors also current or former members of committees and the student union. In fact, publications compound this as most editors directly choose their replacement, meaning that many groups

of friends often run the same publication over a series of years.

I must admit that my knowledge of the inner workings of DUCAC is limited, but from the conversations I’ve had with those who are involved in sounds like similar things occur there as well: large, older sports clubs whose budgets are substantially larger than newer ones and who often get added benefits like rooms on campus.

Judgment call

I really can’t stress enough to degree to which these things often occur on an unconscious level. People don’t think too deeply about them because they are organic and natural behaviors: asking your friends to vote for you, choosing you friends to

replace you, accepting established attitudes.

Nor do I think all of these behaviors are bad, or always bad – they are often good, useful or at least inevitable.

Rather, I think College life would benefit from a more frank acceptance and open discussion about how subtle social structures exist and reproduce themselves, and shape peoples interactions.

After all, extracurricular activities are regularly cited as the most enjoyable and sometimes important part of attending third level. In Trinity, hundreds of people devote huge amounts to them, along with vast amounts of money. It would be a disservice to ourselves not to question College life in the same way as students are expected to question wider society.

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Comment

18

Ready for Tweedledum: Why Hillary won’t change a thing Five reasons

Naoise Dolan

Comment editor There’s a representational hygiene to liberal feminism. It’s polishing the silverware at the bossman’s table till you can see your face in it. It’s an umbrella-shaped “M” for “Maggie” keeping us safe and dry as Mrs Thatcher takes us to the cleaners. Blair’s Babes signing up to bomb Iraq. Box ticked, quota met; job done.

Meet Hillary. Her well-funded super PAC are perfectly correct in claiming that the Democrats and the US are “ready” for her: its current institutions all have readymade Hillary-shaped crevices where they can slot her in without incident. Uncle Sam becomes Auntie Same. His hands are still up, only now we can’t see them.

Clinton offers a female-fronted version of the same old parliamentary politics. Whether you want that is a matter of ideological preference, but we should at least agree not to pretend that her leadership would be anything other than business as usual. Relative to the Democrats, she is revanchist if anything, vowing to recover US national pride by taking two military-imperialist steps forward from Obama’s half-a-step back.

Let’s have a bit of background before we put HRC up on the dissecting table. By “liberal feminism”, I mean the pursuit of what Hillary calls “equal rights”. This holds that the state should be worked within as currently formulated to get nonmen a fifty per cent share of the spoils. (I simplify not because I don’t think there’s more to liberal feminism than that, but for brevity.) Most feminist objections to Hillary come from radical or postmodern perspectives and revolve around the idea that a) the state needs to go, or at least be substantially Nip/Tucked, and b) other oppressions affect experiences of misogyny and are overlooked by liberal feminism’s elision of racism, classism, transphobia, queerphobia, ableism, and many marginalisations besides. Remember that fifty-three per cent of young wo­ men backed Obama over Clin­ton by the end of her first adventure in primary-land.

But the problem with trying to divide feminism into “waves” is also the problem with pinning down a “feminist” reaction to Hillary: not all feminists think the same. Pundits who wonder whether Hillary has the “feminist vote” are adorably naive. Lots of “millennnial feminists” (quoth the Daily Beast) love Hill Rod Clint; lots of us can’t stand her. Here are five unexhaustive reasons I’m not taken with her.

First: She’s a hawk if ever there was one. As Senator she was a diehard fan of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; she has since responded with lukewarm backpedalling and no apology. Former Defence Secretary Robert Gates – a Bush-appointed Republican – observes in his memoir that she took a harder line than he did on Afghanistan, Libya, and the bin Laden raid. Her State Department was incredibly helpful in enabling Obama’s expansion of lethal drone strikes. Pakistani nineyear-old Nabila Rehman came before Congress in 2013 and drew them a picture of the strike that killed her grandmother; deplorably ungrateful for Hillary’s impassioned pursuit of gender equality, she omitted to crayon in the words “Girl Power!” to mark it as a feminist bombing.

Second: Her engagement with Black Lives Matter is shoddy, and that is putting it politely. In an interview with fellow state-hugging liberalista Lena Dunham, Hillary had this old chestnut to offer: “They have to respect the police, and the police have to respect the community.” Spitting on Sandra Bland’s grave by calling her death a “not respecting the cops” problem is, shall we say, unpersuasive.

Third: She votes with the flow.

Her last-minute go-ahead on samesex marriage is the stuff of infamy.

State monogamy isn’t necessarily a good thing, but it is in Hillary’s eyes; it is therefore pretty damning that she didn’t want queers to have it until the umpteenth hour of political expediency. As with Iraq, she has never apologised for her previous stance, this time offering up a bromidic little concession that she has now “evolved”. Evolve faster next time, hun. Isn’t “ready” what you’re meant to be all about Fourth: While we should be careful about branding HRC as an unreconstructed she-Bill, she was instrumental in getting his 1990s welfare-slashing passed – later bragging about it in her 2003 memoir – and in marshalling congressional support for crime legislation that expanded incarceration and the death penalty and kicked the drug war up several notches.

Fifth: Look at the company she keeps. The Human Rights Campaign – those respectability-politicking media darlings – heart the Hill. Goldman Sachs gave her over $600,000 in speaking fees in one year. Walmart have been loyal donors since she served on their board, where she ignored the struggles of their labour unions and made no comment when the

Naoise Dolan argues that Hillary Clinton offers a femalefronted version of the same old parliamentary politics.

company was later the target of the largest gender discrimination suit in history. Anyone opposed to such entities should ask what it is about Hillary’s politics that gets them so excited.

Identity Politics

Lots of Hillary criticisms are gendered. Take the furore last October when fellow primary candidate Bernie Sanders accused her of “shouting” about the need for gun control, then papered over charges of invoking shrill-irrational-woman rhetoric by saying he didn’t intend it. (I love that one. Someone drops a concrete block on your foot: “Didn’t intend it, so no harm done.”) Even if there is absolutely nothing wrong with telling a woman that her shouty invective won’t get her anywhere, “Could activists be a bit more reasonable about all these bullets going into all these children’s heads?” is a condescension richly bullioned by the reasonable/emotional, male/female binary opposition. I’m fond of Bern, but “shouting about gun control” was a lemon of a comment and a lemon of a response.

More to the point, though, why should sexist criticism nudge me into the Hillary camp? A lot of criticism of Carly Fiorina, too, is sexist.

Lucinda Creighton. Theresa May. Maggie Thatcher. How far right do we have to go before liberals give up the notion that experiencing misogyny allows you to represent people who don’t share your politics?

When individual criticisms of Hillary are sexist, they should be called out in no uncertain terms; I have no time for the left’s habit of labelling people who bring up sexism as censorious solidarityruiners. But beating down sexists is more effective when you don’t peg it to supporting Hillary. It means you discuss sexism on a structural level rather than selectively deploying identity politics to get a neocon-in-disguise into the Oval Office so she can cut welfare for single mothers.

“A lot of criticism of Carly Fiorina is sexist. Lucinda Creighton. Theresa May. Maggie Thatcher. How far right do we have to go before liberals give up the notion that experiencing misogyny allows you to represent people who don’t share your politics?”

Structural Problems

Pulling a Maggie is not just compatible with non-male representation in a capitalist democracy. It is inevitable. This is so because partisan politics is a hamster-wheel that spins in order to a) validate false choice as the only choice, and b) divert our gaze from the bullseye of all parliamentary governance: protecting the private property of the capitalist class. Again, whether you want that protection to happen is a question of ideological sympathy; that it does happen is undeniable. Even the US “libertarian” right agree with me here: their position is often that the state is illequipped to do anything but protect property.

You can shake up the aesthetics of candidacy if you want, but by the time Ready-For-Tweedledum has gotten elected, she has convinced voters that she will do whatever Tweedledee had done before; mainstream candidates must appear make themselves seem like viable custodians of the state asis, and that means keeping the status quo freshly validated and in good repair. Often, Ready-ForTweedledum takes pride in going further than the male alternative – Maggie-ing at its finest. So yes, you get non-male leaders. Leaders of? Well, let’s leave unsexy prepositions (and unsexy propositions) for another day.

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MMA GOLDMAN, EDWARDIAN anarchist par excellence, saw this one coming. In her 1917 essay on women’s suffrage, she writes: “[I]t is a fact to those who know the real political conditions in Australia, that politics have gagged labor by enacting the most stringent labor laws, making strikes without the sanction of an arbitration committee a crime equal to treason.

Not for a moment do I mean to imply that woman suffrage is responsible for this state of affairs.

I do mean, however, that there is no reason to point to Australia as a wonder-worker of woman’s accomplishment, since her influence has been unable to free labour from the thralldom of political bossism.”

To sharpen a concept I have been implicitly relying on: I think capitalism is intrinsically unfeminist. (Here, too, I’m showing up to the party ninety-nine years after Emma said it better.) Substantiating this is probably another article’s work, but in brief: men primarily own and control the major means of production, perform the high-level production tasks and receive the greatest share of surplus production. Individual non-men can start rich or get rich, but they do so by joining an elite core whose activities remain unchanged. It is impossible for everyone to be a capitalist (again, many on the right would agree – see every Telegraph thinkpiece on why inequality is a natural result of capitalism). This screws all non-capitalists, but especially women and non-binary

people: they are the poorest within the poorest. And even if they did successfully colonise the capitalist class, it only has so many vacancies: there are always going to be a lot more non-males left outside.

A common right-wing response is that a rising tide lifts all boats, even if they are at different levels – but our current level of production is depleting and flooding the Global South, making it dubious how sustainably we can step it up.

The answer does not lie in producing more things; we cannot do that without destroying the planet. We have to divvy up the things we’ve got more evenly.

By “liberal feminism”, I mean the pursuit of what Hillary calls “equal rights”. This holds that the state should be worked within as currently formulated to get non-men a fifty per cent share of the spoils. Most feminist objections to Hillary come from radical or postmodern perspectives and revolve around the idea that the state needs to go, or at least be substantially Nip/Tucked, andthat other oppressions affect experiences of misogyny and are overlooked by liberal feminism’s elision of racism, classism, transphobia, queerphobia, ableism, and many marginalisations besides.

This is why I find questions like “Why does Jennifer Lawrence earn fewer millions than her male co-stars?” rather uninteresting: the morally salient thing, to me at least, is that someone else is surviving on minimum wage by cleaning both of their trailers, and someone else again is working in a sweatshop to make the only clothes the cleaner can afford to buy, and this will never change for as long as we protect the interests of the capitalists benefiting from their labour.

Damage Limitation

But you don’t even need to agree with me on the limits of liberal statist capitalism to think Hillary would be bad for feminism. It is sufficient to note her militarism (dead people tend to have a hard time Leaning In), her corporate bedfellows (Walmart are sexist by liberal standards), her consistent disregard for black lives (again, not something even the most centrist of liberals should support), her welfare-gutting (same, or at least not on the scale involved here), her carcerality (same), her droning (same).

There is long-standing socialist debate on whether taking part in sham-elections can ever be justified by practical gains, and on whether those gains are outweighed by the risk of our organising losing its fangs and abandoning direct action. I tend towards the latter view, but a little intellectual generosity is only appropriate when human lives depend on the outcome of US politicians’ disagreements over exactly how miserly welfare policies should be, exactly how many black people to incarcerate, exactly how many drones to send hovering over Yemen and Pakistan and Somalia and Afghanistan.

For that reason, I wouldn’t judge anyone who held their nose and checked Hillary’s box if the Democrats selected her. I would categorise it, though, as damagelimitation. Her policies are better than Trump’s, but nothing to write home about. It is worth considering, too, that you take the sanitising hit of politics seeming, like, so super gender-equal now, guys.

The idea of women as purifying agents is nothing new. Now we gatekeep the state itself: nothing enters, nothing leaves.

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Op-ed

19

Don’t put Descartes before the horse: why philosophy won’t save the Junior Cert Dearbhail Clarke Staff writer

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T’S COMMON KNOWLEDGE at this stage that something vague and formless is shifting in the Junior Cycle. The Junior Certificate is rebranding itself as the Junior Cycle Student Award (JCSA). The Department of Education and Skills are throwing out buzzwords like ‘continuous assessment’, ‘digital media’ and ‘critical thinking’ without actually explaining much.

The NCCA have released a 60-page Framework for Junior Cycle which consists of tentative hypotheses and pictures of scones. Not much has changed.

I wish that I didn’t have to be so sceptical about these developments, I truly do. However, I completed my Junior Cert just over three years ago.

Though I may be naïve in the particulars of forming new educational policies, I know what it’s like to be trapped inside them. And nobody can deny that the Junior Certificate is a shaky foundation for secondary education.

Reform in the Junior Cycle is undoubtedly a good thing.

The curriculum as it stands is a three-year preparation for the Leaving Certificate and not much else. What incoming secondary students need is exactly what the JCSA promises to provide: a practical education where teenagers can learn to care for themselves and think for themselves in addition to developing their literacy and numeracy. They need to be allowed to sample a range of up-to-date subjects which can help them develop their interests and skills.

To facilitate this, the JCSA have proposed a series of short courses, up to four of which can be taken in con-

junction with existing exam subjects. The short courses in development include Coding, Digital Media Literacy, Chinese Language and Culture, Artistic Performance and – controversially – Philosophy.

I firmly believe that Philosophy is as relevant and important to modern life as every other subject that has been proposed for the JCSA. Taught well, philosophy is a toolkit for thinking critically: it gives names, structure and context to the big questions that teenagers are doubtlessly already contemplating.

Regardless of whether they’re taught or not, people will think philosophically. We’re hardwired to wonder ‘why?’ and ‘how?’, and to question existence on some level. We’ve already been exposed to the ideas of great philosophical thinkers through the stances of our parents and peers. Books, movies, TV shows and videogames all have their own philosophies and pose their own questions, regardless of their target audience. The Matrix is often seen as a modern elucidation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and the animated adult comedy show Rick & Morty embodies the philosophy of nihilism while exploring the multiple universe theory. Videogames are the perfect platform to explore ethical and moral issues – Bioshock and Undertale being two great examples.

Teenagers don’t shy away from considering these questions: they openly embrace them. I voraciously consumed ideologies over my Junior Cert and tried them on for size – I was an anarchist, a communist, an atheist, an existentialist, a pacifist.

Eventually I picked up the popular philosophy book Sophie’s World, got hooked, and started sifting through my thoughts.

I was taking my Junior Cert in a deeply conservative all-female Convent of Mercy,

so to say my thoughts were unwelcome in the classroom would be a massive understatement. I’ll never forget the clammy days spent in Junior Cert Religion with our poor, harried substitute teacher – particularly when the other students felt brave enough to pipe up. In the middle of a particularly sluggish class, a student who was usually quite reserved came out suddenly with the exact question that’s been haunting the philosophy of religion since its beginnings: “Miss, if God exists, and he’s so great, why do so many bad things happen in the world?”

pered holes into my Leaving Cert year show anything, it’s that teachers already aren’t happy with the terms of this reform.

What’s my solution? Make a compromise with the teachers of Ireland. Their concerns around the JCSA – mainly, the removal of a third party for marking the standardised exams – have solid grounding. Impartial examiners serve several important functions in our education system.

Their removal would add great stress to the workloads of Irish teachers and make them vulnerable to criticism from local parents.

Taken aback, the teacher gave the Christian explanation of original sin and the fall of man. This didn’t satisfy us. We knew this story. Before the moment passed, I asked if there were any justifications that didn’t rely on the Bible.

I was sent out of the class. As per usual.

Not only that, but Irish students deserve anonymity in their grading. Whether they’re conscious of it or not, teachers cannot mark their own students with complete impartiality. Their knowledge of their past essays and exams, their behaviour and their work ethic will indubitably influence their perception of their performance.

This is especially important in a subject like philosophy, where students are expected to give their own thoughts and opinions on learned material. If students know how to pander to the thoughts and opinions of their teachers for extra credit, they will.

I’m not trying to imply that I was treated unjustly in secondary school – I definitely had a problem with authority, and I’ve since mellowed down into secularism. But the fact remains: there is no scope for philosophical debate in our schools, especially on topics as important as the philosophy of religion. And I’m not sure if that will change with the introduction of the JCSA. Considering that 90% of Irish secondary schools are still run under Catholic patronage, I’m not sure if we’ll ever be able to achieve a healthy questioning and diversity of theological beliefs in the Junior Cycle.

This is my primary reservation around the JCSA: students are eager to learn, and curriculums can be changed, but can you change entire institutions and the ingrained habits of our teachers? I’m not sure. After all, the teachers are the important part.

And if the persistent ASTI and TUI strikes which pep-

Another important step for the Department of Education and Skills is to quell the squabbling of the ASTI and TUI and form a singular, united teacher’s union. The schism between the unions has already led to fragmented teaching and unnecessary complications in the education system. Frankly, there is no room for minor political differences when we’re dealing with something as important as the education of children.

It’s widely acknowledged among the younger generations that the Catholic Church needs to be pried

away from schools. Children deserve a balanced and accepting education which promotes equality, diversity and independent thought. This is the 21st century: I can’t quite believe that until recently I was attending a school where males and females were separated, where non-Catholic students were either denied admittance or isolated, and where I was regularly sent out of class for expressing unchristian sentiments or refusing to say the prayers which opened every lesson.

Promisingly, the Minister for Education expressed the intention to abolish Rule 68 of Rules for National Schools, the 1965 document which still governs the running of Irish primary schools. Rule 68 begins as follows: “Of all the parts of a school curriculum Religious Instruction is by far the most important, as its subjectmatter, God’s honour and service, includes the proper use of all man’s faculties, and affords the most powerful inducements to their proper use. Religious Instruction is, therefore, a fundamental part of the school course, and a religious spirit should inform and vivify the whole work of the school.”

The fact that Jan O’ Sullivan has received huge backlash over this plan shows how backwards this country really is. We have a lot of baby steps to take before each religion is given equal weighting in our schools, and before our Catholic-centred Religion course can be replaced with broader subjects like Theology and Philosophy instead.

The problems in the Junior Certificate run far deeper than the curriculum itself, and until they’re solved the JCSA just isn’t going to work.

Forbidden Love: a student’s struggle for LGBT rights in Tunisia Ralph Hurley O’Dwyer

Contributing writer

“I

HAD TO leave my family for I couldn’t face the harassment, the threats any longer.” Ramy Ayari is a 22 year-old computer science student from Tunisia. In the middle of December, via a muffled telephone conversation in French, Ramy shared with me his experiences as a young gay man and LGBT rights activist in a country simmering with social and political tension, where only two weeks ago, six gay university students were imprisoned for three years and banished from their hometown on account of their sexual orientation.

Birthplace of the Arab Spring in 2011, Tunisia remains, in the views of many political analysts, the country where the outcome of revolution has been most positive: a lone success story in a storm of terror and turmoil. Tunisia’s revolution began five years ago on 17th December 2010, when Mohamed Bouazizi, a poor street vendor, set himself on fire in protest against the humiliation and harassment he endured from a government officer in his hometown. Bouazizi’s self-immolation and subsequent death served as a catalyst for huge protests across the country, manifesting the frustration and anger of the Tunisian population towards the 23 year old brutal dictatorship of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali. 28 days after Bouazizi’s self-immolation, Ben Ali was forced to abdicate and flee to Saudi Arabia.

Ben Ali’s ousting was followed some months later by national elections, which were won by Ennahda, an Islamist party affiliated with the transnational Muslim Brotherhood movement.

The ascension of Ennahda to power worried many members of Tunisia’s LGBT community. Yet it is under the current rule of Nidaa Tounes, a more avowedly secular party, that LGBT people in Tunisia have been most severely persecuted. Many view the increasing state oppression of gay people as a means for Nidaa Tounes to appease the conservative Islamist fringes of Tunisian society. In a post-revolutionary tumult,

Tunisia’s LGBT citizens are increasingly finding themselves as scapegoats in a battle for political control.

Emergence of rights groups

LGBT

Yet the revolution has also brought welcome changes, most noticeably the empowerment of a well-educated and increasingly vocal civil society. “People are beginning to speak out”, Ramy tells me. The revolution allowed for many new human rights organisations to be established or to finally enter the public sphere. These groups include Without Restrictions, a society Ramy set up, and Shams, a partner organisation, both devoted to advancing LGBT rights in Tunisia.

One of their principal aims is to bring about the depenalisation of homosexuality through repealing Article 230 of the Tunisian Penal Code, which decrees imprisonment of up to three years for “sodomy”. (Of note: the French and Arabic versions of the article differ slightly, the Arabic referring to “male homosexuality (liwat) and lesbianism/ tribadism (musahaqa)” , the French referring simply to “sodomie”) Both organisations found themselves brought suddenly to national and international attention in October, when a 22 year-old Tunisian student, Marwan, was sentenced to one year in prison for homosexuality. Ramy tells me that Marwan had been summoned to a police station to be questioned in relation to the death of a previous partner of his, after the police found Marwan’s details in the phone of the deceased. Upon arrival, he was arrested for homosexuality, beaten and then brought to a hospital where he was forced to undergo a humiliating anal test.

These tests, sometimes termed “the test of shame”, involve a digital rectal exam and sometimes the insertion of objects into the rectum in an effort to prove homosexuality. While the results of such exams are wholly unscientific and bear no relation to past sexual behaviour, they are being increasingly performed in Tunisia. Such exams amount to torture, indeed rape, of the individuals arrested, and thus have been condemned by national and international human rights organisations, including Tunisian medical organisations.

Due to significant international pressure, Marwan’s sentence was reduced in late December to two months in prison and a 300 dinar (roughly 130) fine. While the judgement in Marwan’s case was a positive sign, increasing cases of arrest and imprisonment are muting the hopes of LGBT people in Tunisia to create a more tolerant society, treading on their dreams of a brighter future in their homeland.

Only a few days before Marwan’s sentence was shortened, six gay Tunisian students were banished from their home town of Kairouan for five years and sentenced to prison for three years.

Since speaking to Ramy, a young gay man was murdered by his brother on account of his sexuality. Shams also reports more than fifty known cases of young Tunisians who committed suicide in 2015 due to familial and societal rejection on account of their sexual orientation.

Furthermore, one of Ramy’s friends, Bouhdi Belhadi, was recently made the target of a death threat from ISIS militants after appearing on Tunisian national television. A recent sermon in a mosque in Hammamet, his hometown, also called for his death. Furthermore, the chairperson of Shams, Hedi Sahly, was forced to leave Tunisia in early December after his family pleaded with him to escape, following ever more frequent and serious threats to his life.

Being openly gay Tunisian society

in

After discussing these current cases of persecution against LGBT people in Tunisia, I asked Ramy how he felt himself as a young and openly gay student living in this society: “Life isn’t easy although at least now I fully accept myself. I realised I was gay as teenager but for years I couldn’t accept who I was. I was terrified for I had grown up hearing in school, in wider society, that gay people were wicked, that they would burn in hell. But slowly I began to realise that what I heard wasn’t true and I began to accept myself. The internet helped me a lot in this respect.”

At age 19, Ramy came out to his friends, most of whom supported him. He didn’t formally come out to his family

at the time but noted that his Mum knew of his sexuality, but chose not to discuss it.

At this point in our conversation, Ramy spoke to me about the “schizophrenia of Tunisian society,” referring to the strict borders delineating private life from public spheres, of the importance of the unsaid: “In Tunisia, as long as something remains unarticulated, it is tolerated. A guy might sleep with a girl in the evening and denounce sex before marriage the following morning. And so LGBT activists here, by openly assuming our identities and fighting for better rights, are the first to challenge these hypocrisies in Tunisia. In this way, we are helping all Tunisian citizens, regardless of their sexuality.”

Ramy’s relationship with his family grew troubled in the autumn, after they came across a picture of him kissing another man, and after the LGBT organisations in which he was active started to receive national media attention. Ramy’s mother forced him to visit a psychiatrist, who explained to her that Ramy’s sexual orientation was not an illness and that he did not require treatment of any kind. Unfortunately, as Ramy explained, not all young Tunisian LGBT people are as fortunate. Despite overwhelming consensus statements on sexual orientation from the World Health Organisation, many Tunisian psychiatrists, particularly in rural regions, still treat LGBT teenagers as being mentally ill. Sadly, Ramy’s mother didn’t accept the psychiatrist’s verdict. Due to his activist work and on account of publicly assuming his identity, Ramy found himself increasingly harassed and threatened by his family members, forcing him eventually to leave his home.

Perspectives and solidarity

Despite being rejected by his family and despite the homophobic slurs Ramy encounters on a daily basis, Ramy remains hopeful for the future. He notes the significant level of support for LGBT people amongst Tunisia’s youth, who having found their voice in this post-revolutionary society are tearing down barriers and challenging social and religious norms. Many of the most famous and influential of Tu-

nisia’s artists, musicians, writers and other public figures, have come out in support of the actions of Ramy and his fellow activists. Support has even come from more unlikely quarters, including Mohamed Talbi, Professor Emeritus of Islamic history in the University of Tunis and one of the most respected Islamic scholars in the country, who recently stated during an interview on Tunisian television, that homosexuality is permitted according to the Qur’an.

NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR 2015

Students must make mental health a priority at election time Recently, a group of politicians from the major parties and Dail political groupings got together for a discussion on what they would do for mental health if elected to government. The results of this conversation were uninspiring. Focusing on what the candidates had to say about youth mental health in particular would mean avoiding questions over reduced dole allowances, doctors putting depression down to being a teenager, huge amounts of emigration and the language we use when we talk about mental health. None of these were spoken about at the meeting, and indeed a question from an audience member who lost male friends to suicide asking what the next government would do for young men’s health in particular was met with pithy applause but nothing else. We need to be the ones to talk about these issues.

The prospect of even small nominal fees for use of the College health service for example would add as yet another obstacle for those with mental health problems. It gives the image that the service is not something which should be taken lightly by students, that the reason a cost is there is perhaps to deter those who do not need to seek help from doing so. Individuals may anxiously worry whether they themselves are the ones that such service providers may consider unsuitable. Are they really that in need of assistance?

Surely there are more deserving people than them. So they leave it, and things fester.

Two things need to be done. Firstly, a ranking, rating or feedback system should be set up for patients to chart their experiences with GPs who are either competent with mental health issues or completely inadequate and unprofessional. A similar concept has been put into practice by grassroots groups such as Re(al) Productive Health to chart which pharmacies in the country dispense the morning after pill, and outline the barriers faced by patients others.

Secondly, and possibly more challengingly, the language around mental health needs to evolve so that it listens to those receiving treatment and experiencing problems. At the all party debate on mental health, both those on the left and right of the political spectrum seemed to ignore or brush over the very real testimonies given to them by members of the audience.

Politicians on the left repeatedly brought up the notion of overmedicating and the idea that young people shouldn’t be on medication.

Telling a room full of people that are potentially on medication that gave them the energy to get up that morning that they have somehow been duped by the system is extremely dangerous. It erodes and sense of achievement or progress that one may be feeling while on a course of medication. And it shows a clear lack of understanding of things like depression, which may have been triggered or induced by an upsetting or emotionally turbulent incident or may simply be down to a lack of the right chemicals being produced by your brain.

Students and young people in general need to be the ones to drive these conversations. In the run up to the election, engage potential TDs in conversations on mental health, share your experiences with them and demand they treat you as people who deserve action, not platitudes.

Editorial Staff

Before finishing our conversation, we discussed the history of LGBT rights in Ireland and I asked Ramy if there was anything he felt that Irish people could do to help LGBT people in Tunisia: “Solidarity! We’d really appreciate to have the support of others around the world, particularly from LGBT organisations in other countries such as Ireland. It would help so much to know that our story is being told abroad, to know that others care and that we aren’t alone. Thank you so much to everyone who takes an interest in our story.”

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Ramy’s voice was filled with warmth and a courageous enthusiasm as he spoke to me about his commitment to creating a more equal Tunisia. Humble and filled with compassion for the suffering of other LGBT people in Tunisia, his struggle for equality has doubtlessly given hope to many. But Ramy’s courage has meant not only losing the support of his family but also facing significant threats to his safety. I ended the interview by asking him if given such threats, he intended to leave Tunisia and seek refuge in Europe. Pausing for a moment, Ramy replied, his voice filled with a quiet determination: “If the risks become too great, if my life is in imminent danger, of course, I will have to leave and continue my activism in another form.

But for the moment, I wish to stay. I want to stay in Tunisia, stay and fight for the rights of LGBT people in my country. ”

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Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

SciTech

Are we alone?

The search for alien life Carol O’Brien discusses the history and future of the scientific search for extraterrestrial life Carol O’Brien Contributing writer

F

OR THOSE KEEPING an eye on the stars, and with an interest in extraterrestrial life, the past few months have been exciting ones. Last July saw the announcement of a US$100 million dollar search for intelligent life in space.

This was followed days later by the announcement that an Earth-like planet had been found around a sun-like star.

Then in September liquid water was found on Mars, and in October gaseous molecular oxygen was found streaming out of a comet.

Recent developments

London’s Royal Society was the backdrop for the July announcement, led by Stephen Hawking, of a new ten-year endeavour, named Breakthrough Listen, to search for signs of intelligent life in space. The project aims to survey the one million closest stars to Earth, as well as one hundred other nearby galaxies.

The Project is being entirely financed by Yuri Milner, a Russian venture capitalist who made his billions by investing in Facebook, Twitter and other such online enterprises.

Milner has a long connection to space; he is a theoretical physics graduate of Moscow State University and was born in 1961, the year the man he is named after, Yuri Gargarin, became the first man in space. Despite the obvious excitement surrounding the launch, Milner was careful not to hype up the project, conceding that “It’s quite likely that we won’t find anything.”

The Breakthrough Listen launch was followed just three days later by the announcement that NASA’s Kepler mission, which aims to detect small planets orbiting distant stars, had done exactly that, and found the first nearEarth-sized planet in the socalled ‘habitable-zone’ around a sun-like star.

The newly discovered

planet, Kepler-452b, is older than Earth, is 60 percent larger in diameter, has much stronger surface gravity, and has a good chance of being rocky (as opposed to being entirely gaseous or liquid). It has a 385-day orbit around a star of a similar type to our own sun. It is within our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, and is approximately 1,400 light years away. The fact that it is older than Earth, means there has been a significant amount of time for life to arise. John Grunsfeld, the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, declared that the discovery “brings us one step closer to finding an Earth 2.0.”

In September, another NASA announcement brought us the news that liquid water had been found on Mars. The trickling water is salty and seasonal, only appearing in warmer weather. Although it’s not known exactly where it comes from, we do know there is buried ice on Mars, so it is possibly melt-water.

Alternatively, it could be that the salt absorbs water vapour from the atmosphere. The water is potentially capable of sustaining life, but it may be just too salty.

In October, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft discovered that gaseous molecular oxygen, O2, was being pumped out by a comet. Although oxygen is highly abundant in the universe, it’s also highly reactive and rare to find in space as molecules of O2.

Here on Earth we have plants to continuously top up our supplies. Although there are many ways to produce oxygen that don’t involve life, O2 still tops the list of so-called ‘biosignatures’ that could indicate the presence of life.

And then came the curious case of a star called KIC 8462852, which emits an unusual light pattern. Its brightness dips irregularly, in a manner that would suggest it is being circled or surrounded by something.

It’s not a planet and a cluster of comets has been ruled out, and some are still excited

about the possibility of an ‘alien megastructure’.

When did the search for extraterrestrial life begin?

There is no doubt that people have been staring at the skies for centuries, pondering life’s deepest questions.

There is no doubt that people have been staring at the skies for centuries, pondering life’s deepest questions. The issue of whether we are alone in the cosmos may well have been a persistent fascination, but it wasn’t until the dawning of the space age in 1957, with the launch of Russia’s Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, that the discussion took on a more serious tone, and people began to think about credible methods of communication.

In 1959 two physicists from Cornell University, Cocconi and Morrison, published a seminal paper in the influential journal Nature entitled “Searching for Interstellar Communications”.

Here they pondered that in assuming intelligent life on other planets had actually arose, then how would they attempt to communicate with us? They decided that sending out electromagnetic radiation

would be a legitimate option, and even discussed possible wavelengths for the transmission.

Here on Earth, many of our technological inventions, such as televisions and radios, emit electromagnetic radiation. We could tell that these signals come from an artificial source because the signals are of a repetitive nature and within a narrow bandwidth. These are exactly the kind of artificial signals we can look for coming in towards Earth from outer space. Radio telescopes with large radio antennas are used to pick up such signals, radiowaves being particularly efficient at penetrating the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Breakthrough Listen project will involve the use of two major radiotelescopes in West Virginia and Australia, while a third telescope in California will search for optical laser emissions from technological sources, across the electromagnetic spectrum from near infrared through visible light to near ultraviolet.

If we do ever find life in space, it may indeed come in the form of intelligent beings sending out radiowaves. But it’s more likely to come in the form of microbes, or so-called extremeophiles: organisms with the ability to thrive in extreme environments that would be inhospitable to other forms of life. They exist on Earth in places such as inside a volcano, in the desert and on top of the Himalayas. These would be the sort of organisms we might find in the salty water on Mars.

In order to figure out where we are likely to find life, we first need to ask what is needed to support life. And the key to this question is water.

Water is an absolutely critical component for life (well, at least for life as we know it).

Having liquid water on the surface of a planet requires it to be at just the right temperature, which means it has to be at just the right distance from its star. A planet sitting in this ‘Habitable zone’ is said to have the potential to support life. Some have even

Gravitational waves could be detected this year Katarzyna Siewierska discusses what gravitational waves are, and their importance.

Katarzyna Siewierska SciTech editor

W

HEN EINSTEIN WAS formulating the general theory of relativity, he considered this simple question: ‘If the Sun suddenly disappeared right now, when would we found out about it on Earth?’ To understand why this is an interesting problem, one must know one of the most important consequences of the Special Theory of Relativity - nothing can travel faster than light!

This concept, follows from the Lorentz invariance that requires the laws of nature to be independent of orientations and velocity boosts of the laboratory in space in which experiments are carried out.

This had to be present in the general theory of relativity. The distance between the Earth and the Sun is about 150 million kilometres, which means that it takes about 8 minutes for the light to travel from the Sun to Earth. So, we know that if Sun suddenly disappeared, we would definitely know so in about 8 minutes because in that time it would get dark. But what about gravity? If we look at Newton’s theory of gravity, the answer is that if the Sun was removed suddenly from the Solar System we would know instantaneously because the ‘speed of gravity’ is infinite and in the absence of the Sun’s gravitational pull Earth would fly out into the freezing cold space and we would descend into the darkest and coldest ice age ever. However, the gravitational force cannot be allowed to propagate faster than the

speed of light in Einstein’s gravitational theory. Newton was wrong, so to correct this the theory of general relativity predicts that the gravitational force travels in waves that we call gravitational waves that travel at the speed of light.

Therefore, if the Sun disappeared just as you started reading this article, you have exactly 8 minutes and 20 seconds to finish it.

What are Gravitational Waves?

In general relativity, one considers a (3+1)-dimensional space, that is 3 space dimensions and a time dimension, hence the name 4-dimensional spacetime. This formulation simplifies the mathematics of the physical theory. To qualitatively understand gravitational waves, one can imagine 4-dimensional spacetime to be like a surface of a swimming pool. If two people were to get into the pool and start and started walking around in a circle, like two supermassive black holes orbiting a common center of mass in spacetime, they would create ripples on the surface of the water analogous to the gravitational waves generated by the two black holes. Anyone can generate gravitational waves by simply wave their arm in a circle, but their frequency would have extremely low intensity and impossible to detect with current technology. As mentioned before, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, but they are quite different to light waves. One very unique and important property is that they propagate through matter undisturbed, therefore they contain undisrupted

information about their source. This is not true for a light wave which can easily be scattered or absorbed.

However, just like light waves, they can be redshifted, i.e. their apparent frequency can be less than their frequency at the source, either by the Doppler effect or gravity.

The Big Bang Theory and Cosmic Inflation The Big Bang is the term used for the moment of creation of our Universe.

There are number of theories that attempt to model the evolution of the universe after the Big Bang and one of the most popular is the cosmic inflation theory. This model assumes that after the Big Bang the universe expanded exponentially, i.e. at an extremely high speed.

This rapid expansion would have generated the first gravitational waves. The detection of these primordial gravitational waves would be one form of supporting evidence for cosmic inflation.

In 2014, Stanford scientists published their analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) gathered from their BICEP2 telescope.

CMB is a map of the radiation left over from the time when the universe cooled down to a level so that protons and electrons could combine to make hydrogen. By studying the tiny fluctuations in the intensity of this radiation, the scientists were able to find evidence for those primordial gravitational waves. This is because these waves left a distinct pattern on the cosmic microwave background due to their squeezing of space.

After the promising results from Stanford, scientists are running and designing

experiments to try to directly detect gravitational waves. One very promising project operated by Caltech and MIT is the Laser Interferometer Gravitationalwave Observatory (LIGO).

LIGO has two L-shaped interferometers, with each arm measuring 4km in length.

This allows for the detection of high frequency gravitational waves, from 30 Hz to 7000 Hz. Larger interferometers are impossible to build on the ground. The interferometers are separated by 3000 km.

In September 2015, the two interferometers began their search for gravitational waves, after 5 years of renovation.

About two weeks ago, rumours sprung up on Twitter about LIGO’s successful detection of gravitational waves. This was a very exciting news for the scientific community and cosmology fans. The spokesperson for LIGO, Gabriela Gonzalez said that they stopped taking data now, after only four months of taking measurements. She has not confirmed any of the rumours. At the moment the data is reviewed and analysed.

It may take a few months before the scientists fully analyse and understand the data, but an announcement can be expected sometime this year.

Future of Gravitational Wave Detection To explore gravitational waves at low frequencies, from 0.03 mHz to 0.1 Hz, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) joined forces to build the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). This will be a giant triangularshaped interferometer

in outer space, with each triangle side 5 million km in length! It is expected that the gravitational waves in this range will be very intense and will allow a very detailed study of the systems that generate them. Some such systems can be the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy and some star binaries, i.e. two stars orbiting each other in an elliptical or quasielliptical orbit.

A New Tool to Study the Universe The experimental discovery of gravitational waves will be another strong piece of evidence to support the general theory of relativity and will very likely be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. Most importantly, it will provide unique insights into many astronomical phenomena.

Examples include the formation and growth of massive black holes and galaxies, dynamics of galactic nuclei and the populations of stars in our galaxy. Furthermore, scientists will gain data to test general relativity in extreme conditions and perhaps discover new physics. This is why now is such an exciting time in cosmology. Technology has allowed science to uncover more secrets of the universe. LIGO is doing pretty well so far and will surely yield many interesting results. Cosmologists are also looking forward with great anticipation for LISA to be built and start running to expand the frequency range and our knowledge further.

Illustration by Mubashir Sultan

taken to referring to this zone as the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ - not too hot, not too cold, but just right. Where exactly this zone occurs depends on factors such as the size and energy output of the star; hotter stars will have their habitable zone further away from them.

What have we found so far and what does the future hold?

Although signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life may have escaped us thus far, we have managed to confirm approximately a dozen Earthsize planets situated within habitable zones. 2105 was an exciting year, and this year promises more cutting edge research in the field as well as the beginning of Breakthrough Listen’s search.

Until we find an earth-like exoplanet showing signs of life that we can point our radiotelescopes at, the search for habitable distant worlds continues.

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

SciTech

21

Over 50 years of the BT Young Scientist competition Many successful scientists won this prize in their childhood.

Conor O’Mara discussed this year’s winners and presents an overview of some distinguished past winners.

Conor O’Mara Deputy scitech editor

A

NEW YEAR brings a new istalment of the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition (BTYSTE) to the RDS for its 52nd year running.

This year was the biggest yet and in total a staggering 59,000 people visited the exhibition.

The competition was rife, with over 2077 project applications made from students all over the country from which 1174 of these projects were accepted to present at the fair.

The exhibition is a fantastic platform for secondary school students, an opportunity to perform some independent and original research on a scientific field of interest.

The range of categories on offer spanned across all the fields of science. There were 857 entries in the social and behavioural sciences category, 539 in the biological and ecological sciences, 338 in the technology category and 314 in the chemical, physical and mathematical sciences category. Projects explored topics such as ways to measure the viscosity of fluids, the effects of electronic devices on our sleep, research into oesophageal cancer and apps for an automated courier delivery service. With the vast variety of topics on offer every visitor was bound to find something that sparked their imagination.

This year’s winners were Maria Louise Fufezan and Diana Bura of the Loreto Secondary School in Balbriggan. Their project was titled “An Investigation into the Effects of Enzymes used in

Animal Feed additives of the Lifespan of Caenorhabditis Elegans.” To decipher what that means, the victorious pair looked into the effects of animal feed on the soil’s fertility. Their findings were that animal feed that is actually intended to enhance animal growth in fact has the effect of harming many of the small nematodes (roundworms) in the soil. The nematodes play a crucial role in the soils fertility and the girls were able to scientifically prove the detrimental effects the food additives had on the worm’s ability to search and find food, and thus lifespan.

Early beginnings

Alongside the BT Young Scientist ran a parallel version specifically for primary schools, called the “RDS Primary Science fair”.

Primary schools are able to acquire stands for 4th6th class groups to exhibit projects.

This annually expanding younger sibling to the BTYSTE may just be the catalyst of inspiration many of the very young visitors need in order to engage with the exhibition, if some of the senior school projects seem too advanced for them.

The BT Young Scientist is certainly closer to the missing link between STEM courses in college and their corresponding subjects in the leaving cert curriculum. The treatment at the secondary school level follows a welltravelled path walled on either side, not allowing for much deviation from a welldefined syllabus. However upon reaching college a lot of STEM students are expected to perform some independent research for a poster project or

thesis on a topic they’ve never covered. So while the leaving cert curriculum is devoid of deeper exploration into subjects, perhaps the BTYSTE is filling a gap between second and third level education with how it prioritises research.

Desire to learn

Invariably all contestants share the same insatiable desire to learn, discover and solve. They possess a certain level of tenacity to solve problems they meet.

For example, the inspiration for this year’s winners was that Diana noticed that the chickens on her grandmother farm were significantly smaller than commercial The committee of TSSR 15/16the from birds and wanted to find left to right;reason Amy Worrall, scientific behind Blaise this.

Similarly, Shane Curran, the winner of the best individual award got the idea for his automated courier delivery app when he was trying to deliver a parcel and was stuck between delivering it himself or sending it in a taxi.

His solution, was to develop less barbed wire than all an app which could run an previous versions. In fact, automated courier service. she even offered her design Trocaire’s emergency Often it is an elegant solution to response team. to a simple problem.

Turning the clock back to There is a myriad of great projects that have laid claim 1986, Niamh Mulvany and to the title in the past. A few Breda Maguire came out on particularly stand out. “The top with “Focus on the Viola Mathematics of Monopoly” Tricolour - an In-depth study

by Raphael Hurley who won on Bull Island”. Both went on in 1998, which even earned to study in Trinity College their undergraduate him a trip to the Hasbro for specialising in manufacturing plant to see degrees the game made. In 2008, Botany. Their project was Emer Jones won with the a huge success going on to project entitled “Research and take the top honour in the development of emergency Philips European competition sandbag shelters”.

She for Young Scientists and designed a sandbag shelter Inventors in Oslo. to be used in emergency response to natural disasters Into the future The final winner we’ll look that required significantly

at is Luke Drury with his project “Construction and use of a spectro-photometer to investigate complex ion formation in a transitional metal” that won in 1969. He has since gone down an amazing route of academia, obtaining a B.A. in Experimental Physics and Pure Mathematics from Trinity College Dublin, then a PhD in Astrophysics in Cambridge University and later became a professor and a researcher. He is the former President of the Royal Irish Academy, present school director of astronomy and astrophysics at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies and the current holder of the Andrews Professorship of Astronomy at the School

of Mathematics in Trinity College Dublin. In fact, just last week on the 21st January, Prof. Drury gave a fantastic talk to DU Physics Society, outlining the Science Programme of the European Space Agency’s working group of which he is the chair.

Every year the BT Young Scientist never fails to amaze me with the calibre of its entries, the standard within Ireland is truly world-class.

The managing director of BT, the events main sponsor, goes so far as to say “The talent of our young Irish students is surpassed by none, and the commercial success of some of our past winners proves this event is a real stepping stone for the next

generation of innovators and entrepreneurs.” Here’s to the young scientists who constantly manage to bring out the amazing and awe-inspiring science in everything. From a seemingly mundane cooking stove to the more abstract field of cyclic graph theory, they try to explain it all. Let’s hope this fantastic exhibition continues to grow and inspire, because anyone who enters and presents their work at the exhibition, can consider themselves winners.

Illustration by Mubashir Sultan

The science of New Year’s resolutions Are these annual promises superstition or can they be a productive measure?

Una Harty Staff writer

T

HE INSTITUTION THAT is the New Year’s Resolution is not just a convenient creation of the fad diet connoisseur or the Nicorette distributing companies. The concept of beginning one’s year on the ‘right foot’ stems back to Babylonian times, when the polytheistic rulers of the Mediterranean four thousand years ago made promises to their almighty gods in return for good fortune throughout the year. The Romans followed a similar concept, by making promises to their god Janus and the month ‘January’ is called after him. In the Christian faith, the resolution phenomenon is echoed by their liturgical season, Lent. But should we follow in these “correct footsteps” of our ancestors or is it more worth our while to not even attempt to halt the habits, pull the plug on the patterns or to adjourn the addictions?

New Year’s Resolutions are notoriously known for being unsuccessfully followed through on by their pursuers.

In fact, they are so ineffective that the term ‘Fail Friday’ has been coined for Friday the 24th of January of this year.

This date has been proven statistically to be the day by which most people break their New Year’s resolutions.

The key to making a solid resolution lies in the methodology of George T. Doran. In 1981, Doran devised the SMART goal system for a Management Review.

The premise of the system is to set achievable goals, or SMART goals. S stands for specific; the goal needs to be precise. For example, stating that you’re going to improve your grades this semester isn’t a specific target but saying that you wish to upgrade your 2:2 in Thermodynamics to a 2:1 is. M represents measurable, meaning you can tell whether you’ve achieved

the objective you’ve set or not. A is for attainable. It’s the devil’s advocate on your shoulder explaining why you’re not going to make it to the Moon and back, but you might just squeeze in a visit to that exhibition you’re mad to see in the National Gallery across the road. R denotes relevant; a goal that you have the necessary skills to attain or perhaps a goal that aids you in achieving a more ambitious one. Finally, T means timebound. It is imperative to specify to a time frame in which you wish to achieve your goal, otherwise there is a risk that you will constantly postpone it.

It is comforting to realise that it is better to set a goal following the SMART mnemonic than to aim too high. It’s always tempting when you’re compiling a to-do list to run away with yourself.

Much easier said than done, however. On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for starting your resolutions in February.

When to start?

Think about it. January 1st – you’re probably still at home and haven’t taken those fleece pyjamas and fluffy socks off for three days now, the tin of Roses remains strategically placed on the coffee table in the sitting room, and there’s that bottle of Baileys you got as a present from your aunt that you simply have to finish, and realistically, you have two episodes left to watch on that Netflix Original and you’re not a quitter.

So start in February. Don’t be one of the 92% of people who fail to maintain their resolution. By analysing the top ten most commonly made resolutions it seems that they fail to pass the SMART goal system immediately, with “lose weight” taking the top spot and the majestically ironic, “get organised” in at number two.

Don’t inundate yourself with any more than three resolutions. One resolution is the optimal number. To enhance your motivation, compile a list of pros and cons

and keep it handy when you’re tempted to wander off course.

It’s also highly advisable to share your resolutions to others. According to a study carried out by the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania, people who explicitly make resolutions are ten times more likely to attain their goals than those who don’t explicitly make resolutions.

Achieving Goals

Long

Term

The psychology behind achieving long-term change boils down to behavioural addiction.

Often, people fall victim to ‘False Hope Syndrome’, which causes us to have unrealistic expectations about the ease of changing our behaviour. A rather methodological way of looking at combatting poor behaviours or habits, is by classical conditioning, a theory exemplified by the famous ‘Little Albert Test’ in which a young baby was taught to fear furry objects. Classical conditioning involves the learning of a new behaviour via a process of association.

Using this principle, drugs such as Varencline have been developed which induce nausea when the body begins to yearn after a cigarette. Over time, the body will reject the cravings because of classical conditioning, i.e. that it has been conditioned to oppose Nicotine hankerings. A similar example is seen with nail varnishes designed to stop people from biting their nails.

The varnishes are sharply flavoured which leave a bitter taste in one’s mouth every time they try to bite their nails.

It seems cruel, but classical conditioning can certainly be utilised to your advantage, in particular with cases that feel like Everest to climb.

Pair behavioural therapy with SMART goals and hopefully, you will not ‘Fail Friday’ and instead be throwing back Thursday to a time when ‘five a day’ was your average daily consumption of Maguire’s chicken rolls!

Illustration by Daniel Tatlow-Devally

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Sport

23

Olympic achievements

Natalya Coyle. Photo via Pentathlon Ireland

With 2016 being an Olympic year, Clare McCarthy looks at two of Trinity’s own Olympian’s, past and present Clare McCarthy Sport editor Natalya Coyle Natalya Coyle is a recent graduate of Trinity College, and an Olympian who competed in the London Olympics in 2012. Coyle competes in the Modern Pentathlon, an Olympic sport comprised of five events involving; fencing, 200 m freestyle swimming, equestrian show-jumping, and a combined biathlon of pistol shooting and a 3200m crosscountry run. The Modern Pentathlon has been on the Olympic program since 1912 and a women’s event was officially included in the year 2000.

Coyle was just 21, a Senior Freshman in Trinity College, when she made history as the first Irish woman to qualify for the Modern Pentathlon in the Olympic Games. Coyle competed at the London Olympics in 2012 where she finished a spectacular 9th place, her top ten finish exceeding all expectations.

Coyle was one of the youngest competitors in London and had been placed 28th in the world rankings before the Olympics were held in August.

Unbelievably, Coyle had only taken up the sport three years previously in her 5th year of school.

Now at 25, her sights are firmly set on Rio 2016 as she hopes to qualify for the Olympics once again. With four years more experience under her belt, Coyle is

solely focused on the road to Rio this year. Competing in a multi event sport means training at a heightened sense of intensity yet also with plenty of diversity. With five different events to train for, no one day is the same.

“In terms of training, I swim about four times a week, I run four or five times a week, gym twice a week, and then horse riding and fencing three or four times a week,” says Coyle, her training totalling up to a Spartan 14 sessions per week.

The qualification process for the Olympics in the Modern Pentathlon is based off an international ranking system. Hopefuls will compete internationally until May of this year when at that point, the athlete’s international ranking determines if they qualify for the Olympics or not. Thirty-six athletes in total will compete in the Modern Pentathlon at the Olympic Games. Natalya is hoping to compete in the upcoming World Cup Circuit, World Championships and World Cup final in her attempt to secure a place to the Olympics in Rio. In a sport so gruelling and time consuming, it’s a wonder how Natalya juggled all the training and competing while studying BESS as a student here at Trinity. Coyle was a consistent recipient of the Sports Scholarship, awarded to Trinity students like Natalya Coyle with an outstanding ability in a particular sport.

Natalya accredits being able to continue her academic studies alongside her sporting career to the support given to her by Trinity College. “I split

my time between college half of the year and competing the other half, so I’ve actually only graduated from my course this year – finally!”

Natalya found time to compete for her College and was Intervarsity Tetrathlon Champion in 2009 and 2010. She was chosen to represent Trinity College as a torchbearer in the historic Olympic Torch Relay in Dublin, in June 2012, which happened to be held just after Natalya had qualified for the London Olympics herself. “I ran with the Olympic torch outside Trinity and that was a crowning moment on it all. It was a strange time as it’s mad, when you want something for so long and then you eventually get it, it can be a bit surreal.”

Maeve Kyle This Olympic year of 2016 also celebrates the Diamond Jubilee of Ireland’s first female athlete to compete at an Olympic Games. It’s been 60 years since Maeve Kyle competed in the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, making her mark on the history books as the first female Irish athlete to compete at an Olympic Games and later as Ireland’s first triple Olympian at the Tokyo Olympic Games in 1964.

With Kyle’s grandfather a former Provost of Trinity College Dublin, W.E. Thrift (1937-1942), it was perhaps inevitable that Kyle would attend Trinity College and she graduated in 1950 with a degree in Natural Sciences, later completing a masters in 1977.

Kyle’s achievements in athletics were revolutionary as even during her time in Trinity there were no opportunities for female athletes. It wasn’t until 1965 that DUHAC – the athletics club in Trinity College would open its doors to women, becoming the second athletics club in Ireland to do so.

Luckily, Maeve Kyle was a woman before her time.

“Ireland really was a dark place back then for any woman in any sport,” said Kyle. In 1950’s Ireland, when Kyle was picked for her first Olympics in 1956, the news of her selection was not well received by all. She faced critics such as the anonymous letters written to the Irish Times calling her “a disgrace to Irish motherhood and the Irish nation”. Her selection was deemed by one letter writer as “most unbecoming, unseemly and degrading of womenfolk” also stating that “a sports field is no place for a woman”. In preparation for the Olympics in Melbourne, Kyle had to endure verbal abuse and even had objects thrown at her while out training. She was seen by some to be off gallivanting in a foreign land, leaving behind a husband and a two year old daughter rather than being hailed as a pioneer of sport and Ireland’s first female sports star.

Kyle was not swayed by her critics however and backed by the support of her family, friends and the majority of her community she went on to compete in three Olympic Games, in 1956, 1960 and 1964.

Maeve competed in the 100m and 200m at the Melbourne

Ladyball highlights difficulties for women’s sport in media Despite being labelled as bizarre and insulting, the “Ladyball” campaign has highlighted the problems women’s sports face in getting exposure Kenneth Donnelly Online sport editor

L

AST WEEK SAW one of the most bizarre advertising campaigns in recent memory with the launch and subsequent reveal of the “Ladyball”. It branded itself as a special ball perfectly fit for the needs of women with a “soft touch” and “lite weight” and most importantly a stylish pink exterior. The public reaction was

unanimous. This was either a terribly insulting idea or a joke…or both.

About a week after the launch of the Ladyball came the inevitable reveal. A joke it was. A joke played by the LGFA, the governing body of ladies gaelic football, to give the sport greater exposure. The main objective of the PR stunt was to challenge any negativity towards women’s sport across the board.

Mixed reaction The reveal sparked a mixed response among twitter users and journalists alike. Some people were impressed with the PR stunt

and felt it would help the cause of women’s sport. However some felt the campaign was misjudged. They claimed the stunt was a crass and belittling method of promoting women’s sport. They claimed that the LGFA should be able to use the positive aspects of the game of ladies gaelic football itself to promote it.

After all, ladies gaelic football has progressed hugely in recent years, both in terms of the professional nature of players and the level of support at games. 31,083 people attended last year’s All Ireland Final between Cork and Dublin, making it the highest attended women’s sport event in Europe for the year. The Ladyball campaign has taken the emphasis away from these achievements.

However, it is hard to remember a time when Ladies Gaelic Football got as much media attention as it did following the Ladyball campaign. The hashtag “Ladyball” was trending all over the country for several days, creating far more Twitter traffic than the women’s final did. In this regard, the Ladyball campaign has been a resounding success. It has got people talking about ladies gaelic football and women’s sport in general. This is true regardless of whether or not the joke was misjudged.

Innovative methods The reality is that women’s sports can’t rely on traditional methods to promote the games.

With the funding and sponsorship imbalance, women’s sport lies firmly in the shadows of men’s sport. The LGFA has a fraction of the GAA’s budget for advertising.

Therefore they need to find innovative ways of using the money allocated. The Ladyball campaign was certainly innovative.

The Ladyball campaign has shed light on the difficulty for women’s sport to grab national or international attention. While huge progress is being made there remains a monumental difference between the level of exposure given to women’s sport compared to men’s. While the Ladyball campaign is not without fault, it should be commended for highlighting the exposure gap and bringing women’s sport into the spotlight.

Olympic Games in 1956 and also qualified for the Rome Olympic Games in 1960, also competing in the 100m and 200m. She became Ireland’s first triple Olympian at the Tokyo Olympic Games in 1964 at age 36.

Her preferred distance was the 400m race but it came too late for Kyle. In the Melbourne and Rome Olympics the only events for women on the track were the 100m and the 200m. “They felt we would require resuscitation if we ran any further”, explained Kyle. By the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, the Olympic council had added two new events for women, the 400m and the 800m. Kyle competed in these two events and excelled in both, reaching the semi-finals of the 400m and the 800m.

At her peak, Kyle was ranked amongst the fastest 400m runners in the world, winning the British Championships and setting a British record in the 400m.

An athletics suffragette, Maeve Kyle’s legacy lives on through the Irish sportswomen of today and though her celebrity is not synonymous with the likes of Sonia O’Sullivan or Katie Taylor, the greats of today acknowledge her significance in Irish sport. Katie Taylor views Kyle as the “trailblazer” and an “inspiration for Irish women in sport”. She was the first to pass through the newly opened door for Irish female athletes onto the international stage and deserves to be credited. “It was such an honour for me as an Irish

woman. And it remains so today,” says Kyle.

In recent years, Maeve Kyle has been honoured for her role in sporting history and her continued dedication to sport as a coach for Ballymena & Antrim Athletics Club, which she co-founded with her coach and husband, Sean Kyle. Most recently, the 87 year old Trinity graduate was recognised by the International Olympic Committee for her outstanding contribution to promoting women in and through sport receiving the “Women and Sport Achievement Diploma” signed by the IOC President Thomas Bach. Her name was honoured by Trinity College in 2010 when she was inaugurated into the DUCAC (Trinity College) Hall of Fame.

Trinity News | Tuesday 26 January

Sport

24

Looking back on the achievements of Trinity’s Olympic contenders page .23

Up in the air: Taking on the trampoline during Refresher’s Week Emma Dooney gets into the spirit of Refresher’s Week and vows to conquer the dizzy heights of the trampoline This is how she did

I

HAVE NEVER enjoyed sports. When I walk into my living room and find that my older brother has left Sky Sports on, I instinctively leap towards the remote control to drown out the noise.

When I hear the details of the latest match creep into conversation, I find any way to divert the topic onto something more tolerable. When people casually ask me, ‘Did ya see that game last night?’ I typically just nod, grin and pray they don’t catch me out. All through secondary school, I dreaded P.E. To most students, it was a brief escape from the mundanity of academics. For me, it was an agonizing hour of confusion and pain. I think the humiliation is aggravated by the fact that, unlike other subjects, your errors are totally exposed for everyone to see.

There really is no hiding the fact you are completely physically incompetent when playing a hockey match. What’s even worse is the shameful knowledge that your mere participation is a threat to your team’s triumph. It may sound dramatic, but to be fair, when you’re fifteen years old and social acceptance is everything, the fear of antagonising your entire class is a pretty heavy burden to carry.

Is Trampolining a Sport?

Needless to say, I was more than relieved to say goodbye to P.E. when I graduated school. Mildly scarred from the memories, I vowed to never relive the experience.

When I began my studies at Trinity, I didn’t even flirt with the idea of joining a sport. I convinced myself that I was simply not cut out for it and

that I’d be wasting everyone’s time by even attending the introductory lesson. And there lies the problem – my understanding of sport was limited to basketball and hockey. I’d dismissed all the desserts, having only tasted the meringue. So, when my delightful friend decided to surprise me with the news that she had signed us up to try out a new sport, my natural reaction was pure fear. I envisioned us getting down and dirty with the rugby lads, frantically grappling in the mud and suffocating in the belly of the scrum.

I became an overnight fan of George Hook, hoping to score some tips from him on how to deter my impending destruction. It turns out all my gruelling preparation was for nothing. My friend revealed to me that we would be joining trampolining, to which I instantly replied, ‘Is that even a sport’?

It’s almost like I’d been conditioned into believing a sport must have balls to be a sport, and if it didn’t, well, it was just pretending to be a sport.

I recognise fully the lack of logic. Despite my shock that trampolining was considered a sport, it still posed a threat to me. For one, it was situated in the gym, a building I had vehemently avoided for my first two years of college. Secondly, I had little to no knowledge of it. Would I literally just be jumping or did they expect me to launch into backflips on the trampoline? My mind was plagued with uncertainty.

I decided that the only way to alleviate this anxiety was to bite the bullet and force myself to go to the class.

Reopening old wounds To be honest, I was crippled with nerves the evening before the big day. My sleep was disturbed by vivid nightmares of me breaking my legs, or even worse, my arms, and not being able to write this and share the joys of bouncing with the world. I woke up feeling so frazzled that I considered pulling out altogether. I had come to terms with the reality that I was not a sporty person – why reopen old wounds? However, I was tired of being bound by this self-inflicted identity. I knew in my heart I’d regret it if I chickened out. I told my mother about my upcoming adventure over breakfast and it took me a good a few hours to convince her that I wasn’t lying. In fact, it wasn’t until she saw me leaving the house in sports gear, which I had resurrected from the depths of my laundry basket, that she finally believed me, at which point she almost broke down into tears of pride.

I arrived at the gym and found myself perplexed at my inability to get through the barrier. Was this a sign? Surely enough, my friend quickly diagnosed the problem – my student card hadn’t even been activated. Two and a half years in Trinity, and I hadn’t stepped foot inside the gym. After sorting out that little pickle, we proceeded towards our destination. Remarkably, my worries greatly subsided once I entered the hall. I saw the majestic trampoline in all its glory and realised how absurd all my worrying was. It’s just a trampoline, Emma – they don’t bite. Not to mention,

the atmosphere was relaxed and friendly. I was concerned I’d be lunging into a competitive, intense environment, but I soon discovered it was just a group of fun loving people, bouncing high and some doing some cool acrobatics.

Once we had been introduced to everyone, Sinead, one of the long term club members, led a short warm up to get the blood flowing. We did a few worship laps of the trampoline, followed by a series of stretches.

I was slightly self-conscious of my struggle to straighten my legs as I reached for my toes, but luckily, nobody else was – they were all too busy laughing and chatting to notice my incapability.

After observing a few of the more adept members perform on the trampoline, it was finally my turn. In a bizarre moment of sheer optimism, I wondered if I’d take to it like a duck to water – master each technique instantly, invent unprecedented moves, take over the entire club…It didn’t take long for that dream to come crashing down. I struggled to execute the most elementary move, despite the reassurance and patience of the captain, Roisin. As I continued to refine my jumping, I quickly developed an appreciation for trampolining as a sport which requires focus, discipline and perseverance. I was in awe of the talent unfolding before me. And while I may have been flopping and floundering around like a ragdoll, I found myself thoroughly enjoying the class. It helped a lot that there was no pressure on me, no pivotal moment when I could potentially cost the

team the winning goal. There was no embarrassment or guilt if I slipped up. I had nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

Social ‘Tramps’ One thing that I did not anticipate was the amount of socialising that went on.

When I’d heard it was a two hour lesson, I felt my stomach weaken at the prospect of jumping continuously for so long. Thankfully, the class was broken up into breaks, which gave us an opportunity to cool down and bounce off one another instead. Some of the members were just there to have a good time and work out, while others were training for competitions. Although everyone was at different levels, there was a strong sense of camaraderie and encouragement in the air. I was comforted and impressed to learn that a lot of the members had only joined in college. One of the more advanced girls, Pippa, revealed she hadn’t started until her second year. And there I was, thinking these kids had bounced their way out of the womb.

But it’s not all bouncing and making new friends. Listen up, my fellow singletons! The captain was telling us how they often spice things up by playing music and rolling out Twister while waiting for their turns. Twister: the only time it’s soberly acceptable to break into each other’s boundaries of personal space – who needs Tinder? Trampolining is sure to send your heart flipping.

But back to the sport. I can’t lie, I collapsed into a state of panic when my friend roped

New year Trinity sports roundup

W

ITH PLENTY OF action so far, 2016 is shaping up to be a great sporting year. With a number of events and fixtures in the coming weeks and months let’s take a look at the most recent sporting action.

Basketball Our Men’s Basketball side had a close encounter with rivals UCD in the Dublin Men’s Basketball League on Friday 22nd Jan. Chris Anderson finished the game as Trinity’s top scorer with 12 points, and despite solid performances from Manus Darby, Ryan Hewitt and Joel Nordin came up short losing 61-49. Next up for our basketball men is another league outing, this time against Northside highflyers Kubs.

Hockey Our ladies second team are through to the semi final of the Irish Junior Cup following a 3-1- home win over UCC Soccer Having overcome the disappointment of a weekend without fixtures last weekend our men’s Leinster Senior League Saturday side came out on top in a close encounter with St Francis FC. With the game tied at one goal apiece at half time thanks to a Pearse Butler goal for College, Trinity pulled away in the second half and came out 3-1 winners with further goals from Conor O’Hora and Oisin McMenamin. With a month to go until the Collingwood Cup things are looking very positive for the club.

Camogie Our Camogie girls were out for a Fr Meachair Cup qualifier. Qualifying matches are run as a round robin and College had a tough first fixture away against Athlone IT. With everything to play for our Camogs put in a brilliant performance drawing the game 2-11 to 2-11. Next up is a home game against St Marys of Belfast.

Fencing Pride of place this week is Philip Cripwell on placing second in the Northern Ireland Open in the Men’s Foil section. Philip had a great start to the year placing 84th in the Junior World Cup. On top of a great win Philip has also been selected to participate in the Junior European Championships in Serbia.

Rugby Our Men’s first team are still well in contention in the Ulsterbank League Division 1B sitting third in the league.

Having had eight straight wins in the league, their luck ran out against Shannon losing 22-23 on home soil. On the back of some excellent performances Trinity Rugby has had four players selected to represent Ireland on the Irish Clubs side for the upcoming games against France and Scotland.

Players selected are Brian DuToit, Angus Lloyd, Jack McDermott and Conor Kearns.

Athletics DUHAC’s Laura Frey won an all Ireland silver medal at the GloHealth Indoor Combined Events Championships in Athlone on Saturday 23rd January 2016. Laura com-

peted in the Senior Women’s Pentathlon which includes five events, the 60m Hurdles, High Jump, Shot Put, Long Jump and 800m race.

Reindeer Run The annual Trinity Sport Reindeer Run took place on Wednesday 16th December.

With almost 60 participants the conditions were perfect for the 3K run through campus. David Kirwin was the first across the line in a time of 9:10, and the first female home was Clare McCarthy in a time of 10:09. All proceeds from the run went to St Vincent de Paul.

Boccia Trinity Sport are looking to recruit 18 Boccia players for a one day tournament to highlight Brain Injury Awareness

me into doing this. I desperately hoped she would forget all about it, and when she didn’t, I wracked my brains trying to conjure up a credible excuse. Funnily enough though, there was a tiny piece of me that wanted to go. I wanted to challenge myself and to confront this overwhelming fear of sport. And I’m so glad I did it. Maybe G.A.A. or soccer isn’t for me, and that’s okay.

But what’s not okay is blacklisting the entire spectrum of sport, just because I disliked one or two. I’d like to especially recant my incredibly ignorant position on trampolining. I strongly encourage anyone who is unfamiliar with the sport to check it out and surrender your bouncing virginity. Really, despite all the ups and downs, it was worth it. Whether you’re a novice or a competitive athlete, there’s something for everyone in this club. As irrational as it is, I

think many people don’t realise how daunting sport can be.

In fact, there’s even name for the fear of sport. Seriously, it’s called athlimataphobia. And thanks to Tramp club, I am now proud to call myself a recovered athlimataphobic.

Want to become a ‘Tramp’?

The club meets in Main Hall A on the 3rd floor of the Sports Centre, on Mondays from 5pm to 7pm, Wednesdays from 7.30pm to 10pm and Fridays from 5pm to 7pm. All levels are welcome, so don’t be afraid to stop by if you’re never trampolined before.

The only thing you’ll need to bring is yourself and a thirst for bouncing. If you want to enquire further, you can email the club at bounce@tcd.ie or contact them through their Facebook page, Trinity (Dublin University) Trampolining Club.

Caroline Duggan on January’s sporting successes and failures Week. Boccia is traditionally a Paralympic sport normally played by participants in wheelchairs. However, we are looking for any student to participate who is willing and able. Dublin City Sports will supply four training session in advance of the competition on March 11th. For further details contact caroline.duggan@tcd. ie Intramural Intramural soccer is back for Hilary Term! Registration takes place at 10am on Monday 25th Jan in the Sports Centre reception. For more details contact sport@tcdsu. org.

Just a reminder for all the Dodgeball teams that the Intramural Dodgeball league is back and games will continue each Wednesday in the Sports Hall at 4pm. The leagues would not be possible without the dedication of the volunteers (Alla, Sam, Noella, Declan and Stephen) who organise and run the games each week as well as updating the league tables on a weekly basis.