Trinity News Vol. 62, Issue 7

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Volume 62, Issue 7

trinitynews.ie

NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR 2015

Photo by Cliodhna Mheadhra

As publication of Cassells report looms, TCD Seanad hopefuls discuss their views on higher education funding sor of economics in Trinity, outlined how education had been affected by servicing banking debt, stating that “we’ve had to cut on education in order to pay those banking debts. We’ve got 31,000 more students and 2,200 fewer lecturers...the state expenditure per student has fallen from 12,600 to 9,000”.

Matthew Mulligan Editor

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N A SERIES of extensive video interviews with Trinity News, Seanad candidates contesting the TCD panel have revealed their stances on a number of issues, including that of higher education funding. Voting slips went out this week to the more than 50,000 graduates of Trinity who are eligible to vote in this year’s Seanad elections, and who are living both home and abroad.

One of the biggest issues recent graduates will be aware of is the funding problems in higher education in Ireland, and indeed the continuous increase of the registration fee year on year. These issues were ones which most candidates addressed.

Incumbent senator Sean Barrett, who is also a profes-

Senator Averil Power compared the conversation around free third level education to the debate in previous years about free second level education. “The debate has moved on and you’re expected to have third level, and in a lot of cases you’re expected not just to have an undergraduate degree but to have a masters in many cases to get a job”. Power outlined her belief that education is a public good, saying that Ireland traditionally has been able to trade off of having a well educated population, which is now at risk.

Current TCDSU president Lynn Ruane reiterated opinions expressed during her tenure, saying that if you begin to make education “accessible to everybody, and remove financial and cultural barriers you can begin to address other issues...education can serve as a catalyst for change.”

Former army captain Tom Clonan said that the third level sector shouldn’t just be

Time to reintroduce tuition fees? We examine the models of other countries

InDepth p.6

“an engine for economic recovery” but should develop to be more encompassing, and become “a mechanism for promoting Ireland’s ethical and philosophical recover, so that we can become a real society.”

Trinity research psychiatrist and Seanad candidate Sabina Brennan told Trinity News that she is a proponent of investing in education across the lifespan, citing lifelong learning as a mechanism to lower health inequalities.

Ethne Tinney, former independent director of EBS declared herself to be a “great believer that students shouldn’t have to pay fees at all”, saying that if one does an MA they’re looking “at a small mortgage before you’re ready to start in life at all” and warned that a student loan scheme through banks which involved interest would see “the banks winning again”.

Chair of Trinity Business School Sean Melly is also a Seanad candidate. He stated that the situation os fast approaching where government funding accounts for only 35% of Trinity’s funding with the rest made up from donations, R&D investment and increase in number of international students. He said that “the fee as it should be called”, will evolve to a place where there may be an income contingent [re]payment loan, and it’s “not about

“Unspeakable paragraphs and varsity punctuation”: When Samuel Beckett wrote for Trinity News

Features p.8

whether you advocate it or not”.

Oisin Coghlan, director of environmental group Friends of the Earth outlined a desire to see more student accommodation built and expressed desire to see a system that placed importance on merit as the factor that allowed one to attend third level institutions, not money.

Maeve Cox, a barrister running as an independent cited equality and access to education when saying that she is flat out against fees, saying that she is “opposed to fees” and that they have been “creeping up and up by way of registration fees”.

Ed Devitt, a candidate aiming for the support of alumni abroad, stated that his preference is that in general third level education should be payed for through general taxation, which means a stable tax base. He noted that Ireland is currently facing an increased demand for third level education and that those at the upper levels of society should be making some sort of contribution.

Another candidate, Anthony Staines, a professor in the DCU school of nursing and human sciences took issue with the terminology that currently exists around higher education charges. “We have the second highest university fees in Europe, we call

them a registration charge, it’s not, it’s a fee”. He drew comparisons from other European countries, saying that the cost per year for a typical degree in Europe “would be [a charge of] less than 1,500 a year, and I think that’s where we should be going.”

The interviews come in the wake of news from the UCD paper The College Tribune, who reported earlier this month that the government working group on higher education funding would publish a list of three options for the funding of third level education in Ireland. Jack Power reported that the Cassells report would present an ungraded list, and that no one option would be recommended above the other. The options are said to be fully publicly funded higher education, a continuation of the registration fee along with increased state investment, or a deferred loan payment scheme set at multiple levels.

Voting for the Seanad ends on Tuesday April 26 and the results of the election will be announced in the Examination Hall by the returning officer provost Patrick Prendergast.

Video interviews with Seanad candidates can be viewed in full at trinitynews.ie

Inside

Actor/writer/director Olwen Fouéré, Game of Thrones actor Iain Glen, Illustrator Micah Lidberg, experimental documentary-maker Joe Lawlor

>> >> >>

Trinity Fencing win their ninth consecutive intervarsities trophy

My experiences as an Irish traveller in Trinity College

Abortion and the Zika Virus

Comment p.15

SciTech p.21

Sport p. 23

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

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What They Said

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This centenary has provided us with the opportunity to explore what happened within college walls a hundred years ago. And it’s an opportunity for us, as a centre of learning and scholarship, to examine the legacy of the Rising, historically and artistically Provost Patrick Prendergast speaking on Proclamation Day 2016

“

It is disappointing that we have no quorum, mainly in relation to USI hustings. I represent over 16,000 students, I would feel much more comfortable knowing that when I cast my vote at congress for USI officers that it is representative and [in] this case it won’t be

TCDSU President Lynn Ruane on lack of mandate for TCD delegates to USI Congress

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Whilst there has been significant advancement in the civil and legal rights of LGBTI people in Ireland, we need to address the issues many of our younger people face within schools and wider society

Professor Agnes Higgins who led Trinity’s LGBTIreland Report

Trinity reprimanded for attempting to seek favourable ranking reviews On Sunday, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) announced that Trinity could face suspension from the university ranking survey on account of a questionable letter sent out to academics and others affiliated with College Niamh Moriarty Online news editor

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N SUNDAY, QUACQUARELLI Symonds (QS) announced that Trinity could face suspension from the university ranking survey on account of a questionable letter sent out to academics and others affiliated with College.

According to the news site Inside Higher Ed, who received a copy of the letter from anonymous recipients, the contents of the document appear to be an attempt to encourage peers familiar with the College to register for the voluntary vote in the survey.

Written by Dean and Vice President for Research John Boland, an excerpt from the emailed letter reads: “University rankings are also important to Trinity, and all other universities around the world, and we were pleased that the latest rankings reaffirmed Trinity College Dublin’s position as Ireland’s top university and one of the best in Europe. We know that our research successes are augmented by our collaborations with world-class academics such as you.”

However, the contention surrounding the letter is due to a link embedded in the email, directing the recipients to the QS site where they may register to vote in the rankings. This link was preceded by an encouragement

to fill out the surveys and an indication that the conduction of both the QS and the Times Higher Education (THE) surveys were about to start.

Simona Bizzozero, a spokeswoman for QS, clearly outlined their position on the letter to Inside Higher Ed: “Any attempt to overtly influence a potential survey respondent to vote in favour of a given institution is unacceptable and where identified, such respondents will [be] excluded from analysis,” she said. “Further consequences for the TCD, up to and including temporary suspension from the ranking altogether, will be considered.”

In response to the statement issued by QS, Boland said that he was “surprised by the response to our letters.”

According to Boland, Trinity will be in contact with QS in the following days to discuss the situation.

Both QS and THE use surveys for calculating portions of their rankings, but only the former allows individuals to nominate themselves for the survey process.

In 2013, attempts by University College Cork (UCC) president Dr Michael Murphy to encourage members of staff to garner universityaffiliated survey participants sparked QS’s decision to remove a university’s ability to recruit participants for the survey.

However, QS reinstated the sign-up facility last year on the basis that it was a “crucial source of respondents.” In

order to maintain a restriction on “noticeable attempts to manipulate participation in QS surveys and therefore results,” they have now included a question within the survey asking respondents to specify from which institution they have heard about the self-nomination facility.

by the survey itself, rather than advancing their own areas of expertise: “What we’ve seen is universities running away from their areas of strength, and trying to do things that are privileged by the ranking systems, even though they don’t have the capacity to do them.”

QS have defended the integrity of their survey system in the face of criticism: “QS runs sophisticated screening analysis to detect anomalous patterns in response and routinely discards invalid responses,” remarked Bizzozero, later adding that rival rankings compiler THE is not any less vulnerable to error in their survey practices: “A lower overall sample size, and the practice of drawing outcomes from a single year of response, will render their exercise more statistically sensitive.”

Wangenge-Ouma will be a member of the panel on university rankings at the British Council’s Going Global 2016 conference being held from 3-5 May in Cape Town, South Africa. He added that more needs to be done in utilising rankings as an incentive to improve university performance, rather than viewing them as ends in themselves: “I’m for a system that supports stability so that universities don’t think they have to keep moving here and there to clinch a top position in the ranking.”

However, outside of their statistical accuracy and safeguards against bias, the role that university rankings play in university improvement remains an even more contentious issue. Many argue that the predominant ranking systems do not give enough consideration to the different contexts in which universities are situated across the globe and are thus an inaccurate measure of reputation.

Speaking to University World News, Gerald Wangenge-Ouma, director of institutional planning at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, argues that current systems encourage universities to chase after improvements in fields of research and study most valued

Professor John Boland. Photo via tcd.ie

USI endorses Lynn Ruane and Laura Harmon for Seanad Kevin Donoghue: “Both candidates have a lot of experience in student politics and have been at the right side of history in movements like the marriage referendum and repealing the 8th” Greta Rosén Fondahn Staff writer

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HE UNION OF Students in Ireland (USI) last week announced that it is endorsing Lynn Ruane and Laura Harmon as Seanad candidates.

Ruane, president of Trinity College Dublin’s Students’ Union (TCDSU), and Harmon, former USI president, are both running as independent candidates for the Seanad. Ruane is running for the University of Dublin panel, while Harmon is running for the National University of Ireland panel In a recent press release, Kevin Donoghue, USI president, confirmed USI’s support for the two candidates.

He commented: “Both candidates have a lot of experience in student politics and have been at the right side of history in movements like the marriage referendum and repealing the 8th.”

In reaction to the news, Ruane told USI: “I am truly honoured by USI’s decision to endorse my Seanad candidacy and I pledge to strongly advocate on behalf of students if elected to the upper house.”

She also emphasised the role of students in the political arena, saying: “Students and graduates are the driving force of a stable economy and yet we consistently remain at the bottom of the political agenda. We need to elect a university senator who is willing to champion and defend higher education.”

In the press release, Harmon said she was delighted to hear that USI would endorse her. She commented: “As a previous USI president, I want to thank students’ unions for voting to support me.

Access to education, political reform and equality are at the heart of what I stand for and if elected I will work closely with civil society organisations like USI on this.”

Harmon also emphasised universal voting rights and political reform of the parliament as areas that she will focus on if elected.

As TCDSU president, Ruane vowed to fight austerity, and after being elected with over 42% of the first preference votes in February 2015, she has worked to oppose fees and loans, and campaigned to repeal the 8th Amendment.

Her presidency will end at the beginning of July.

Harmon, a University College Cork graduate, was USI president between 2014 and 2015, and the first woman in 20 years to be elected to the position. During her presidency, USI campaigned for marriage equality and managed to add 30,000 new names to the marriage referendum electoral register.

Harmon was active in the USI for two years prior to her year as president.

The Seanad consists of 60 members. Three seats make up the University of Dublin panel, which will be elected by graduates of Trinity. The NUI panel also consists of three seats.

Photos via USI

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

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Trinity’s Department of Sport secures Bank of Ireland Sponsorship deal worth ¤25,000 Claire McCarthy Sport editor

T Vice provost speaks at Hist panel discussion on feminism in modern Ireland The panel dealt with modern feminism and its relationship with the media, race relations, religion and the state Unforgettable Women’s NetProgressing to the topic of greater female participation one, solid entity, when it can Greta Warren Staff writer

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S PART OF the Burke Panel series, the Hist held a panel discussion entitled Feminism in Ireland 2016 in the Hist Conversation Room on March 21. The panel, consisting of three guest and three student speakers, dealt with modern feminism and its relationship with the media, race relations, religion and the state. Introduced by Sophie Fitzpatrick, first to speak was student Imaan Bari, who retold her personal experiences of being born and raised in Ireland with Pakistani and Iranian ancestry. Elaborating on her trouble in fitting in and relating to her predominantly white peers, she explained how the lack of ethnic diversity in Irish media impacted her as a teenager: “I assumed that white women were who I had to identify with.” She also went on, however, to caution against tokenistic representation, asserting that it is often flawed and rooted in stereotypes.

Ebun Joseph, author of Becoming Unforgettable and Trapped Prison Without Walls and founder of The

work, was next to discuss the topic of multiculturalism. Joseph accounted for the delay in her arrival by explaining that she had just come from an appearance as “the token black person” on RTÉ’s Claire Byrne Live.

Joseph articulated the difficulties she had in separating the discrimination she faced based on both her racial and gender identities, before proceeding to describe how: “In the Ireland we have today you are penalised for being different.” Expressing frustration in relation to how Ireland has yet to fully embrace a more diverse identity, she declared: “We’re multicultural to the point where we like your music, your food, your culture, but we won’t give anything back to you.”

She went on to highlight how the national unemployment rates for both the black and traveller populations remain significantly higher than those for the white, settled population in Ireland, as well as the lack of intersectionality in the Irish feminist movement, pointing out how even following the election of a record number of female TDs, women of colour remain unrepresented.

feminism and religion, student Grace Conway delivered a speech entitled Why God became bearded man on a throne and not a lesbian in a wheelchair. Addressing the oppression of women by several major world religions, she noted how: “There are only two types of women in the bible, beautiful, submissive virgins and whores,” while under Buddhist tradition, even the most senior female monk is considered inferior to the lowest ranked male monk. She asserted that the problem with the ‘undoubtedly male’ vision of God, worshipped by the most popular religions, is that: “He can’t resonate with any of the women in this room... or even the men.”

Linda Hogan, Professor of Ecumenics and Vice-Provost of Trinity, was next to speak, acknowledging that many organised religions “have strong strands of misogyny and patriarchy,” as well as how “often, religion stands behind and gives certain views a divine standing,” citing the debate preceding 2015’s Marriage Equality referendum as an example.

Hogan remarked that female leadership in religion has increased in recent years, however it appears that

comes at the price of more social conservatism. Concerning the current debate on the Repeal the 8th movement, she declared: “We need to hear feminist religious voices.”

Opening discussion on the relationship between feminism and the state, student Annabel O’Rourke commenced by relating her teenage self’s shock at discovering how Irish women in the 1970s were prohibited from activities such as drinking in public houses or sitting as a juror.

She went on to muse on the massive role that the state, as well as larger organisations such as the EU, can play in either oppressing or liberating women, asking herself the hypothetical question, “If I was from a foreign country, would I want to move to Ireland?” and concluding that if any change is to be effected, women must be encouraged to enter the political domain.

The final speaker, Muireann O’Dwyer, a UCD Ph.D. Candidate in European Law and Governance, began with the assertion that: “There is a real danger and difficulty in making feminist demands of the state.” She cautioned against regarding the state as

be as constrictive or liberal as the people in charge. She stated that “all sorts of emancipatory demands of the state are contradictory,” again using the Repeal the 8th movement as an example, as it juxtaposes a demand for bodily autonomy with a reliance on the state to provide abortion on a free and accessible basis.

A question from an audience member queried if, given the largely female attendance at the discussion, it should be compulsory for men to attend such talks rather than those who would be likely to already recognise the issues concerning feminism in 2016. Linda Hogan responded by clarifying that feminism is not agenda simply for women, and that historically, the voices and support of men have lead to faster results, but concluded by answering that no one should be obliged to attend these discussions. Joseph weighed in to agree, but highlighted that due to the unequal standing of men and women in society, caution must be exerted to ensure that men’s voices do not drown out those of the women they advocate for.

Ennis plays host to USI’s 2016 congress Motions on non-EU student fees, the casualisation of third-level labour, and the feasibility of drug testing kits to be voted on , along with the election of a new USI sabbatical team Lia Flattery News editor The Union of Students in Ireland (USI) Congress 2016 is taking place in Ennis, Co. Clare from Monday March 21 to Thursday March 24. Delegates from students’ unions across the country will be in attendance to elect the next leaders of USI. Delegates will also vote on a large number of motions under the headings of academic affairs and quality assurance, student welfare, the Irish language, equality and citizenship, union organisation, national affairs, and union administration and finance.

Congress will vote on whether USI should be mandated “to oppose the current national policy of unregulated non-EU fees.” According to the agenda document for Congress, “a large number of third-level institutions have responded to a contraction in state funding by endeavouring to attract students of “non-EU” fee status. These students do not qualify for the HEA “free fees” scheme, and, as such, pay a much higher fee to attend higher education in Ireland.”

Congress observes that these students are regarded as “cash cows” by third-level institutions, and that they do not have “a significant degree of fee level certainty,” as institutions have been increasing fee levels on an almost annual basis.

Congress will also vote on a motion to launch an investigation into the extent of

the casualisation of labour amongst postgraduate research students in third-level institutions. The agenda document refers to a recent Trinity News investigation that “highlighted that postgraduate research students are being cajoled into taking on more teaching duties without compensation.” It notes the negative impact that this kind of work has on the abilities of these students to carry out their research and the effect that this can have on their mental health.

Delegates will decide whether USI should “facilitate a feasibility study into the effects, and implications of drug testing kits being introduced in third-level colleges across the country.”

The Congress agenda notes the prevalence of the use of recreational drugs in institutions nationwide and comments that the current ‘Just Say No’ approach to tackling this drug culture is “ineffective.” It is stated that taking drugs is “a highly reckless and dangerous activity” and that “the safest action is to never take drugs,” but at the same time it is acknowledged that “a damage-limitation approach,” such as kits to test the safety of drugs, should be considered.

Other motions to be voted on include a motion to introduce a new USI student accommodation strategy as well as a new USI student finance strategy, a motion to lobby for students living in student accommodation blocks to be exempt from paying water charges during their academic term, and a motion to work with the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation

to mobilise student nurses on a campaign on the issues of pay, emigration, bullying and lateral violence.

Delegates from Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) to USI Congress are not mandated on how to vote in relation to the various motions or the USI officer elections. Not enough class representatives attended SU Council on Tuesday March 15 to reach quorum – the minimum number of reps required to hold votes. As a result, Council could not pass motions, including on mandating how delegates to USI Congress must vote.

Every constituent union in the USI gets one delegate per 1,000 students, which gives Trinity 16 delegates. Council usually votes to mandate how delegates must vote at the conference, including which candidates they should vote for in the sabbatical elections.

Delegates are now free to choose who they want to vote for, without any obligation to vote according to the wishes of Council. Their votes will not be made known to Council. Only one of the positions – welfare – is contested, although delegates may vote to reopen nominations.

Speaking to Trinity News after Council on March 15, SU President Lynn Ruane said: “It is disappointing that we have no quorum, mainly in relation to USI hustings.

As I represent over 16,000 students, I would feel much more comfortable knowing that when I cast my vote at Congress for USI officers that it is representative and [in] this case it won’t be.”

Two of Trinity’s delegates to Congress dropped out the day before it began, meaning that they had to be replaced by observer members of the Trinity delegation.

RINITY’S DEPARTMENT OF Sport has secured a sponsorship deal with Bank of Ireland to be made available for next year. The annual fund, worth ¤25,000, will be utilised for the benefit of student sport activities and club developments. The application process is based on matched funding so clubs and student sport groups will be expected to make a contribution along with any funding granted. The closing date is the 24th March 2016 and no late applications will be considered. A panel will then meet to discuss all applications and the distribution of the fund. The criteria to apply for the fund includes that the purpose of the funding must be of benefit primarily to Trinity students and a sporting event or activity must supported by Trinity Sport and the Students Union. The club or student sports activity also must not already be in receipt of funding from Bank of Ireland.

Sports clubs affiliated with DUCAC can apply for the funding to be used for coaching and professional sports services such as nutritional workshops, overseas competition or training, playing or training equipment, funds for new event/programme or activity and more. This funding will come as a bonus to many sports clubs as they are already in receipt of funding from DUCAC to cover their basic costs although many struggle to acquire funding for surplus costs. At the DUCAC Executive Meeting on the 21st October 2015, Cyril Smyth, Chairman of DUCAC, explained that DUCAC simply did not have the monies to fund all the needs of clubs and the Bank of Ireland sponsorship would bridge some of these gaps.

continued contribution to Trinity Sport. Michelle Tanner, Head of Sport in Trinity, announced the sponsorship deal at the DUCAC Executive meeting in October 2015.

Tanner expressed her delight at the “significant sponsorship” secured by Trinity College’s Department of Sport with Bank of Ireland, awarding Trinity Sport ¤1.5 million over 5 years, ¤300,000 allocated in 2015/16. Main benefactors from Bank of Ireland’s “proud partnership” with Trinity Sport are the four high performance sports clubs, the Rugby, Hockey, Boat and GAA clubs. These clubs have been given direct sponsorship from Bank of Ireland and they are not eligible to apply for the aforementioned fund for other sports (the ¤25,000 fund).

Tanner clarified that of the four high performance clubs mentioned, both men’s and ladies clubs were to benefit from the funding however, D.U.F.C (Rugby) would be receiving a substantially larger amount as the club already had an agreement with Bank of Ireland and that amount of sponsorship was written into the contract.

At the meeting, Tanner explained that the Bank of Ireland made their choice of the four high performance clubs by a combination of wanting to work with these specific sports and other factors.

Tanner stated that of the ¤300,000 allocated for the year 2015/16, ¤275,000 was going to student sports clubs and student sports initiatives, and the remaining ¤25,000 towards infrastructure and signage. Nothing was going into current normal sports expenditure by the Department of Sport.

This sponsorship fund follows on from Bank of Ireland’s

Colm O’Gorman and Averil Power attend launch of 2016 Trinity Rainbow Week Megan Thompson Staff writer

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AINBOW WEEK WAS launched on Monday March 21, with a miniature Pride parade and reception in the Atrium with Colm O’Gorman and Averil Power in attendance. Rainbow Week, jointly organised by Trinity College Dublin’s Students’ Union (TCDSU) and Q Soc, is dedicated to raising awareness of LGBTQ issues.

Speaking to Trinity News about the importance of the week, Jessica McKeon, auditor of Q Soc, stated that: “While we at Q Soc try to do all we can, we obviously don’t have the pull and publicity of the SU which is why it’s great that such a week exists and that we can have so many varied events for the wider queer community in Trinity.”

McKeon expressed excitement over the plans for Rainbow Week: “This year we want the week to really be a celebration of being LGBTQ and all that our community has achieved. The past number of years we feel the week has been very politicised, and not without good reason.

However, this year we wanted to bring it back to being out and proud and happy and celebratory.”

There will be lots of events on during the week, such as the Robbie Lawlor talk on HIV on Wednesday and a walking tour of Dublin’s LGBT history in association with ArcSoc on Thursday.

McKeon also pointed some events that would be of in-

terest such as the Q Soc and Hist debate, This House Would Identify as Queer, on Wednesday: “The debate on Wednesday should also be really interesting and insightful. A lot of people have different opinions on the use of the word ‘queer.’ Trinity has really reclaimed it, but that’s definitely not the case on a wider scale. And the reception afterwards is going to be rainbow themed, from the decorations to the food.”

The debate will be followed by a night out in PrHomo: “We’re taking over the back room, filling it with pillows for a nineties sleepoverthemed, pillow fight room.

There’ll be glitter face paint and nineties tunes and movie reels playing. It’ll be so much fun.”

The topic of the MSM blood ban will also be addressed as part of the week.

McKeon explained that there will be a stand in the Arts Building where: “People can sign the postcards and write in their own personal reasons too as to why they think the ban is a bad idea.” The postcards will be then be sent to the Minister for Health when elected to show how students feel about the ban.

On Q Soc’s hopes for the week, McKeon said: “We hope the week goes well and that lots of people come to lots of things. A huge amount of organisation goes into pulling off big campaign weeks like this so people should make the most of it.”

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

News

News in brief

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CSC grants provisional recognition to new Trinity Musical Theatre Society

Trinity scientist creates Donald Trump robot that mimics Republican candidate’s Tweets

One of the aims of the new society is the holding of larger scale musicals that will be worked on throughout the year

The AI has so far tweeted phrases such as “Sanders is a dopey-clown” and “People know NOTHING”

Matthew Mulligan Editor THE CENTRAL SOCIETIES Committee on Friday granted provisional society status to Trinity Musical Theatre Society, Trinity News has learned.

DU Players and DU Music society are currently active on campus, however after reviewing the Musical Theatre Society application, the CSC executive was satisfied the application met their criteria.

Part of the criteria for establishing a society is to ensure the proposed society’s objectives do not overlap with those of an existing society.

One of the aims of the new

society is the holding of larger scale musicals that will be worked on throughout the year. This contrasts to the smaller scale musical productions that DU Players are currently able to produce.

Trinity News understands that the new society plans to use the Royal Irish Academy of Music on Westland Row as a rehearsal space. RIAM became an associated college of TCD in 2013, which was described at the time as a “dynamic and thriving partnership.”

For a group of students to form a society under the CSC’s rules, the signatures and ID numbers of 200 students and staff members who would like to see the society being recognised in College must be first collected. The

constitution of the proposed society and the list of signatures to must then be sent to the secretary of the CSC. The students will then be assigned a time where they can come in person to put their case for society to the executive of the CSC. Once a society has then been in existence for a year and submitted satisfactory accounts of their income and expenditure, a secretary’s report for the same period, a copy of their constitution and evidence showing that the society has 50 or more fully paid-up members, they will be proposed for full recognition at a CSC AGM. They will then become a full member of the CSC with voting rights, and eligibility for full grants.

Trinity-Harvard robotics research collaboration a huge success More than 76,000 people in over 150 countries have used the programme since its launch Jake Trant Staff writer A PIECE OF software designed in a collaboration between engineers in Trinity College Dublin and Harvard University is fostering significant interest since its launch 18 months ago. The Soft Robotics Toolkit was launched to help engineers share advice, how-to videos and case studies for next-generation soft robotics.

According to Conor Walsh, assistant professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the aim of the toolkit

is to “advance the field of soft robotics by allowing designers and researchers to build upon each other’s work.”

Dr Gareth J. Bennett, associate professor of mechanical and manufacturing engineering in the School of Engineering at Trinity spoke of how: “The toolkit has now been identified as having made one of the most significant contributions to the development of the nascent and disruptive soft robotics research field.”

The area of soft robotics focuses on soft, malleable structures that take their inspiration from nature and can adapt to any non-uniform environment - for example, taking inspiration from chameleon camouflage - as opposed to the traditional rigid, hard-bodied prototypes.

More than 76,000 people in over 150 countries have used the programme since its launch.

The latest development regarding the toolkit is the creation this year of the Soft Robotics Competition. This competition, which had 87 entries this year, encourages students to avail of the resources provided by the toolkit to design and build their own soft robots.

Dr Dónal Holland, one of the lead developers of the toolkit, said: “Last year, we were really impressed with the variety and quality of entries.” He also spoke about how: “The participants came up with fantastic ideas that we never would have thought of, and we hope that this year we will receive even more submissions.”

Megan Thompson Staff writer DR KILLIAN LEVACHER, a research Scientist at the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology at Trinity College Dublin, has created a Twitterbot that mimics American Republican candidate Donald Trump’s Tweets. The robot is known as the Trump Deep BS Quote RNN Generator.

In a press release, Dr Levacher spoke about the pro-

A new study involving researchers from Trinity has shown that Earth’s magnetic field was essential for the inception of life Jessica Ní Mhainín Contributing writer A NEW STUDY involving researchers from Trinity College Dublin, in conjunction with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), has shown that Earth’s magnetic field was instrumental in enabling life to evolve.

Earlier this month, an unmanned Euro-Russian probe was launched in a bid to investigate signs of life on Mars.

It is widely known that planets need water and warmth in order to foster life, but they also need shelter from violent young suns and vicious stellar winds. A magnetic field

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OR THE FIRST time ever, Irish colleges are facing penalties due to “poor performance.” The Galway-Mayo institute of Technology (GMIT), Dundalk Institute of Technology and the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) face financial penalties, which will see the withholding of up to hundreds of thousands of euro worth of state funding for the colleges, due to their inability to pass a new assessment process for the higher-level education sector.

This new initiative, spearheaded by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) and in close connection with the Department of Education, aims to incentivise institutions to strategise their finances in anticipation of the tumultuous years ahead for third-level education.

This project, which has been devised over the past two years and will be implemented annually, seeks to ensure that Irish third-level institutions provide accessible, high-grade, efficient and relevant education and re-

search. The end goal is to attain and maintain world-class standards across the board.

Among the deficiencies highlighted by the HEA, the three institutions were penalised for failing to meet performance targets relating to research, student numbers, income generation and international focus. Some were also found to lack coherent strategy and failed to demonstrate critical analysis and self-reflection.

Dr Fergal Barry, president of GMIT, assured that the penalties are not related to the “standard of academic performance.”

The three institutions face charges that equate to 2% of their state funding, yet the HEA is liable to withhold up to 10%. HEA officials claim that this is enough to incentivise change without threatening “financial viability.”

However, the penalties have come under scrutiny as the colleges are already financially vulnerable.

HEA officials say that these institutions can avoid the fines by submitting plans on how they intend to rectify the shortcomings. Following this, Dr Barry stated that he is working closely with the HEA to tackle the problems facing GMIT. Ireland is among the first countries to implement

this approach and the HEA worked in conjunction with the institutions involved to set out the performance targets. As part of this, the government set out expectations for the system as a whole under seven different headings including “meeting skill needs, equity of access and excellence in research.” This model is also intended to act as a template for other areas of the public sector; performance across all public institutions could be subject to ongoing scrutiny to ensure high quality service through a similar approach.

Apart from the three institutions penalised, the majority of other institutes and universities performed well overall. Six institutes, Athlone Institute of Technology, Dublin Institute of Technology, IT Tallaght, IT Tralee, IT Blanchardstown and Letterkenny IT met the performance level required, but still need to address certain areas of weakness.

HEA officials reassured institutions that these assessment measures are not a judgement on quality of education and research. Rather, they are assessments of how capable third-level institutes are in dealing with the “volatile” years that lie ahead for the education sector.

can provide protection from such elements, but Mars, unlike Earth, does not have a magnetic field. As a result, its atmosphere has gradually been eroded, creating the seemingly inhospitable desert landscape for which the ‘Red Planet’ is known.

The Trinity researchers initially focused on finding a young solar twin of the Sun. They found Kappa Ceti, a young star with roughly the same mass as our Sun. The research teams found that the young Kappa Ceti emitted violent winds. This allowed the teams to glean insights into the early history of our solar system. Our young Sun would have emitted similarly powerful winds, which would have had the power to erode Earth’s at-

mosphere and create a landscape like that of Mars.

The study proves that Earth’s magnetic field was strong enough to provide sufficient protection from the young Sun’s winds. The magnetic field preserved the atmosphere and allowed life to be sustained.

Referring to the study, Professor Aline Vidotto from Trinity’s School of Physics said: “We found that Kappa Ceti, a proxy of the young sun, should host a wind that is about fifty times stronger than the present day solar wind. This would have led to a larger interaction via space weather disturbances between the wind of the young Sun and the young Earth.”

Trinity scientists make important discovery in blood pressure research

RESEARCHERS AT TRINITY College Dublin have found that a drug, commonly used by older people to treat hypertension (high blood pressure), could actually increase the risk of low blood pressure in the patients.

The finding is significant as low blood pressure is associated with a greater risk of falls, fragility and poor brain health.

In Ireland, around twothirds of those aged over 50 years suffer from high blood pressure. While, one in three

Dominic Neau Contributing writer

The AI has so far tweeted phrases such as “Sanders is a dopey-clown” and “People know NOTHING.” The system learns character per character how to generate words and punctuation, eventually coming to use Trump’s vocabulary to produce and express Trump-like sentences. According to the press release, although not always clear, the language bears a significant resemblance to Trump’s speech.

Dr Levacher has been documenting the Twitterbot’s development on his blog.

Trinity study produces new findings about possibility of life on Mars

Luca Arfini Contributing writer

HEA to penalise three third-level institutions over “poor performance” standards

ject: “This project uses artificial intelligence (AI) Deep Learning techniques to learn Donald Trump’s language patterns. The robot has been trained with official quotes spoken by Trump that are fed into the system from Trump’s Twitter account.”

He continued: “The training model finds natural language patterns and the algorithm then generates different combinations of the data that reflect what it has been taught in order to produce realistic Trump-like quotes.”

people in Ireland over 65 and half of those over 80 fall every year, often resulting in serious injury and disability.

The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) team examined beta blockers, which are frequently prescribed to stop blood pressure getting too high.

The research, published in the journal Plos One, concluded that patients taking the medicine were three times more likely than those who were not to experience sustained drops in blood pressure when standing.

Trinity’s Dr Mark Canney, the lead researcher, said it was important that people with high blood pressure, who are at risk of experienc-

ing lower blood pressure after standing as a result of the medicine they are taking, are identified.

Professor Rose Anne Kenny, principal investigator of TILDA and director of the Falls and Blackout Unit at St James's Hospital, said: “It is projected that by 2020 the cost of fall-related injuries in older people will rise to €922m-€1,077m.” She continued: “The benefits of drug treatment for hypertension must be weighed against potentially harmful effects.”

Senator David Norris defends comments about TDs’ salaries Senator says he is “absolutely unashamed” of his controversial statements in an interview with Trinity News Conn deBarra Staff writer IN AN INTERVIEW with Trinity News, Senator David Norris has defended his recent controversial comments regarding TDs’ salaries and their treatment by the Dáil.

Speaking to the Irish Examiner in recent weeks, Norris argued that TDs are worse off than those working lowpaying jobs.

Norris called the basic salary of €87,258 plus expenses that TDs are paid a “financial cushion… pretty bloody thin.”

He claimed that TDs are more at risk of losing their positions while those in lowpaying positions are “usually secure in a job.”

He described the Dáil pay system as “a tough, cruel game” and said that those who lost seats in the election had “passed out into the desert with a family and no income.” He added that money is no reward for the strains of a political career.

Norris also said that politicians are restricted in how they can vote and express themselves publicly.

Speaking to Trinity News, Norris said that he was “absolutely unashamed” of his remarks.

He also criticised the discriminatory culture in politics, saying TDs in the Dáil are always attaching unfair motivations to their colleagues' actions while “a hatred of politicians [is] stirred up by a vicious media.”

Norris stood by his comments regarding TDs’ pay, claiming that he had been subject to “ignorant abuse” over them. “There is a cruelty out there in the public, and in particular in the 'Twitterati,'” he said.

According to Norris, TDs are in a vulnerable position due to a lack of sympathy from the government towards those who lose their seats.

He said that he was recently contacted by a fifty-yearold TD with three children who lost his seat in the General Election and is struggling financially, and he asked: “Do

people not think of these human issues in addition to the crushing blow to the personality of somebody who's been massively rejected by the people?”

This former TD, according to Norris, received a €10,000 severance package and will receive half-pay for three months.

Norris insisted that he was just as concerned about the financial security of those outside of government, particularly those on minimum wage. He claimed he had been “one of the very few voices” to speak out on behalf of the workers who were made redundant when Clerys on O'Connell Street was closed in June 2015. Norris was one of 12,000 people who signed a SIPTU petition calling for negotiations between redundant staff and Natrium, the consortium that bought up Clerys.

Senator Norris told Trinity News that he will continue to defend TDs in public, even if it means losing his seat.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

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Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

InDepth Is it time for Ireland to reintroduce fees?

T HE DEBATE ABOUT the best way to fund higher level education in Ireland has recently been reignited, with Fine Gael pledging to introduce a student loan scheme for third-level education if the party is returned to government. The scheme has received backing from the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) who claim the introduction of a loan scheme is necessary to curb the decline in funding and quality in third level education in Ireland, with total government funding allocated to universities declining by 36% between 2008 and 2014. Trinity has been consistently slipping down the tables in both the QS World University Rankings and the Times Higher Education rankings in recent years. Last year Trinity placed 78th in the QS rankings, compared to being ranked 43rd in 2009. In response, Trinity has recently announced the establishment of the Rankings Steering Group, to be chaired by Provost Patrick Prendergast. It is apparent that this decline seen by Trinity is reflective of the lack of resources and funding available and thus it is clear that student fees could have an important role to play in solving the issue.

Despite the introduction of “free fees” two decades ago, an annual student registration fee has climbed to ¤3,000. This fee has risen by ¤250 a year over the past four years. Fine Gael’s education manifesto states that a scheme would ensure college is free at the point of access and that graduates would begin to pay back tuition fees once

their income reaches a certain threshold. The Government would remain the main provider of funding to third-level education. In light of this, we will compare and contrast different models of college funding systems from around the world, dealing with four case studies in particular: The United Kingdom, The U.S.A., Sweden, and Ireland.

In the United Kingdom, tertiary education is mainly privately funded, and individual households, through the tuition fees paid by students, account for the largest share of that funding. An income contingent loan system was introduced in 1999. Fees have risen over the past decade to the point that now university students in the U.K. face bills of around ¤11,000 a year. At least 70% of students rely on a public loan to help fund their studies.

In the U.S., the system varies from state to state.

Universities receive little support from the government meaning the primary source of their income comes from student tuition fees. Students receive little in the way of financial aid from the government and depend on student loans in order to fund their college education. Tuition fees at a public university costs around $15,000 a year. For private universities this number rises to around $30,000 - $40,000 and can be even higher still for some of the elite private universities. The cost of college in the US has nearly sextupled since 1985.

This is all exclusive of living expenses, for which

InDepth editor Dylan Scully and staff writer Jonathan Deane take a look at the implications of introducing tuition fees in Ireland by investigating some of the different systems of funding higher education that exist abroad.

there is almost no public support whatsoever.

Tuition is completely free in Sweden with all costs being covered by the Government. Financial aid is also generously available from the CSN, a state sponsored entity which distributes grants and loans to students to help cover living expenses.

Attendance Rates Despite the huge financial barriers that exist in the U.S. at the point of entry to college, the amount of young people expected to enter tertiary programmes, as defined by the OECD, before turning 25 stands at 53%. This is significantly greater than the OECD average of 48%. Ireland sits just above the average at 50%. In spite of the fact that Sweden has completely free college tuition fees, their expected attendance rates comes in below the OECD average, at 44%. A young person in Sweden whose parents received a university education is 2.3 times more likely to go to university themselves, while in the UK they are six times more likely. When the income contingent loan system was introduced in the UK in 1999, people argued that fees would drive down the numbers applying to higher education. In fact numbers have increased, with individuals from some of the most deprived parts of Britain being now two times more likely to attend a university than they were a decade ago.

Research Output A big factor in influencing Ireland's recent debate about the introduction of fees is the lack of funding for primary research currently available for Ireland’s universities. The RIA is taking the stance that the introduction of fees is essential if Ireland wants to maintain a high standard of research output, believing we have slipped in recent years due to budget cuts and rising attendance rates. The RIA believes that an additional funding of €100m per year over the next decade would be required just to sustain current standards. The Global Innovation Index (GII) assigns scores to countries for Research and Development based on factors including number of researchers, gross expenditure on research and development, and the QS university rankings. The United Kingdom comes out on top in this regard with a score of 77.6, with the U.S. coming in second with 71.1. Perhaps this is not surprising considering the huge endowments of the big private colleges in The States, with many of the top universities having resources of billions of dollars. Ireland trails these two leaders by a substantial margin, scoring 63.2.

However, by far the worst off is Sweden which only comes in at 47.7. This is slightly surprising considering that Sweden spends ¤18,466 per student on tertiary education, substantially more than the OECD average of ¤12,381. More than 50% of this expenditure is on Research and Development (R&D). Sweden ranks in the top three for expenditure on R&D out of OECD countries. The results of the GII could be skewed by the inclusion of QS university rankings in which the U.S. and the U.K. would perform strongly in due to the status of the countries respective elite universities. Sweden is ranked 2nd across the OECD for publications per head and 7th for the number of researchers per head of the population.

Income Advantage The OECD produced a report on income advantage for people attending tertiary education. The scores are compared to a base score standardised at 100 based on the average income of an individual who has received an upper secondary education, but no higher. Ireland tops the board on this comparison, edging the U.S. for first place with an income advantage of 75%. People who have attained a college education in Sweden receive the lowest level of income advantage out of our four case study countries. Sweden have the second lowest income advantage across all OECD countries, with an income advantage of just 28%. One of the main factors in dissipating the earnings premium from obtaining a college degree in Sweden is probably their progressive taxation system.

Sweden supports the second highest tax burdens in the world, with most people (those earning over €40,000) paying between 49 and 60 per cent income tax. The bigger wealth gap in America can similarly be attributed to their tax structure.

However it is important to consider, the massive price tag on college entry in America reinforces a barrier to education for those less well off, widening the income advantage for the educated. 31% of US adults who have completed a university level education earn more than twice the median, compared to the OECD average of 28%. A tertiaryeducated individual in the United Kingdom earns more than 55% more than a person with upper secondary education (the OECD average is 59%).

Dropout Rates The average non-completion rates for third level students across all OECD countries is seen to be 31%. Both the UK and Ireland fair quite well in this category, coming in significantly below the average at 16.8% and 18% respectively. Sweden sits well above the OECD average at 45%. College dropout rates are notoriously high in the US, with the current figure sitting at 53%, meaning the US has the lowest college completion rate in the developed world. The non-completion problem in the States is inherently linked to the high levels of student debt and high tuition fees.

Student Debt The U.K. has by far the highest levels of student debt out of our four countries, coming in with an average total debt of ¤56,700. Despite having free fees, Sweden still comes in with one of the highest levels of debt across OECD countries, with ¤17,024.

This may seem peculiar, but the culture of parents supporting their kids by funding their expenses through college does not exist in Sweden, as it does in Ireland for example. It is common for Swedish students to take out loans and grants from bodies such as the CSN in order to fund their living expenses. It is surprising then that 85% of Swedish students graduate with debt, versus only 50% in the US. New Swedish graduates have the highest debt-to-income ratios of any group of students in the developed world somewhere in the neighborhood of 80%. According to data collected by the OECD, despite nonexistent tuition costs, Sweden has a virtually 100% uptake rate on student aid.

America, despite its very high college tuition fees, still has a significantly lower level of average debt for students than the U.K. A lot of American parents start a college fund for their kids from the time of their birth and this helps ease the burden of the high costs of college for American students, and results in this lower level of debt. A standard student loan scheme doesn’t currently exist in Ireland and as a result most Irish students come out with little to no debt, it is hard to find exact figures for this. Students less well off are helped through college usually by grants such as the SUSI and it is also common for parents to pay for any other expenses such as rent.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

In depth

7

“

Trinity has consistently slipped down the tables in both the QS World University Rankings and the Times Higher Education rankings in recent years. Last year Trinity placed 78th in the QS rankings, compared to being ranked 43rd in 2009. Fees have risen over the past decade to the point that now university students in the U.K. face bills of around €11,000 a year.

At least 70% of student rely on a public loan to help fund their studies

O

VERALL THE PROSPECTS for British and American graduates is quite grim considering the levels of debt which they leave university with. British and American universities top the tables in the university rankings but it comes at a massive cost to the student. Despite Sweden having free fees for all, students still leave college with some of the highest levels of debt seen across the OECD and also have one of the lowest income advantages for a third level qualification.

Even with Irish universities slipping down the rankings in recent times, the higher education system looks quite good from the offset in the areas we have investigated. We have more people attending college than the OECD average, relatively good quality of research output, little to no student debt upon graduation, and a huge income advantage of around 75% compared to those who do not obtain third level education. In fact this focus on college rankings has been argued by many recently to be an unhealthy way to approach thinking about college in the first place. Our primary focus should not be on where we rank internationally, particularly due to unrealistic standards of resources as seen by the world leading universities such as Harvard and Oxford, compared to the limited resources we have in Ireland due to the economic environment in which we unfortunately

live. Rather, the focus should be on the quality of education and equality of access for Irish citizens.

A problem exists however in that current standards are unsustainable given that high birth rates mean that the amount of students entering tertiary education is expected to increase by about 30% over the next ten or so years. In order to simply meet this demand an additional funding of around €1 billion a year would be needed. A rethink is required if we want to be able to cope with this demand and also to curb the decline in quality of Irish universities’ research standards.

The high proportion of people attending college seems good at the outset, but maybe we need to change the way we think about universities. The amount of people with college degrees has almost reached a saturation point over the last number of years. If everyone has a degree, does this just make the qualification a worthless but necessary piece of paper to obtain? Are we just pushing the problem back further in the sense that it’s almost reached the point where it seems that one needs a postgraduate qualification in order to distinguish themself? Our second-level education system is completely focused on the Leaving Cert, the sole role of which seems to be to determine what you can study in university. But academia is certainly not for everyone, and why should we be spend-

ing money on sending people down the university path to which they are not suited, and to study for a degree that will have no benefit for their future career (assuming it is not an academic career path)?

Obviously, there is so much more to attending university than just what’s learned in lectures. The value of moving away from home and meeting new people from completely different backgrounds of course goes a long way in personal development and becoming a more rounded individual. But perhaps we must put new structures in place to facilitate the development and education of those less academically oriented and to ease the burden on our universities. This system would be more in line with that of Germany where people who come out of second-level education have another option to university, which is to pursue dual training, in which their course incorporates not just lectures but also more practical work experience and apprenticeship style training. The problem in Ireland has been come to be known as the “Cinderella” effect. The university path is considered the best option for Irish school-leavers regardless of their abilities and prospects for the future. Similar to in Cinderella when the protagonist’s sisters are willing to cut off their toes to fit the princess’s shoe because they are so keen on the prospect of the lifestyle, in Ireland people are forced to fit into a

highly academic university system as there is no real alternative.

It is hard to see from looking abroad how the introduction of fees will have any benefit for the student. Total student debt in the US recently exceeded $3 trillion. This level of debt has massive socio-economic knock on effects. For the individual leaving college, it means people are now delaying purchasing things such as homes and cars which can lead to a hindrance on future economic growth. High levels of student debt can also worsen economic inequality and reduces the potential for education to be a driver of social mobility. The existence of fees means the existence of an entry barrier to third-level education and the existence of debt means that less well off students leave university worse off than they started.

We are currently facing a crossroads in Irish education and it is apparent that we must change the way we think about education. We must turn our focus away from rankings, and towards the quality of education we are providing to our students. We must ease the financial burden on our universities not by the increase of fees, but rather by providing realistic alternatives to university for school leavers who do not want to pursue an academic route.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Features

How does a an American socialist magazine commemorate 1916? We meet the editor of Jacobin Bashkar Sunkara

page 10

When Samuel Beckett wrote for Trinity News The short fiction From an Abandoned Work was originally published in these pages, however Beckett castigated the edit it received from Trinity News’ editorial staff. Tadgh Healy spoke with Danae Stanford who – as an editorial team member of the third volume of Trinity News in 1956 – had persuaded Beckett to publish in the young newspaper of his alma mater Tadgh Healy Features editor

I

N 1956, SAMUEL Beckett was at the height of his powers and on the cusp of worldwide notoriety.

The last of his trilogy of novels, L'Innommable (The Unnamable), was published in 1953 and En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) premiered in Paris in the same year. His reputation grew in later years as his works were translated into English from the original French, yet scholars generally agree that the prolific output from this post-war decade marked the summit of Beckett’s literary achievement.

Trinity News, describing Beckett as the “most well known of the Trinity Graduates to-day […] from America to Japan”, was three years old at the time. The newspaper was a six-page weekly and covered sporting events in College, profiled staff and students, advertised local businesses, reviewed student poetry, and reported on the biggest stories on campus.

Some headlines will be familiar to current readers of Trinity News, such as “Colours Match Lost”, and “Round the Societies”, however others recall more adventurous days. A front page story titled “Vengeance is ours: Success to Night Raiders” from 1956, for example, recalls a “skilfully planned and skilfully executed” raid on Queen’s University Belfast, where four trophies were removed from the university’s Council Room. The raid was conducted in retaliation over similar thefts in the rooms

“

Trinity News made a great hames of my text with their unspeakable paragraphs and varsity punctuation.

They made a balls of the text"

of the Hist and Phil societies made the previous year.

A speculative request

The editorial team during this time was made up of a Chairperson, Assistant Chairperson and three editors. One of those editors was the then Features editor Danae Stanford (now Danae O’Regan), who graduated from Trinity in French and German. In advance of the aforementioned edition featuring the raid on Belfast on the front page, O’Regan had written to Samuel Beckett in the hope that he might produce something for the young newspaper of his alma mater.

Speaking to Trinity News, O’Regan explains that she considered the request speculative as Beckett’s stature was international, even then. And although Beckett may have had a brilliant undergraduate career in Modern Languages and earned colours playing cricket for College, it is likely that his memories of teaching in Trinity were less fond: After graduating, Beckett worked briefly as a lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure, and then in Trinity. However, he soon left academia entirely after what he called a “grotesque comedy of lecturing”.

It was to O’Regan’s surprise, then, when “Beckett sent back his text immediately.”

Although by her own admittance, “we had no idea then that he would become as big as he did”, O’Regan was nonetheless delighted to publish work by a writer who presumably had the pick of any number of literary journals and presses.

The text in question is From an Abandoned Work, one of Beckett’s lesser studied pieces of short fiction. The elusive narrative follows the recollections of an old man over the course of three days.

There are some semi-autobiographical elements, such as: “Fortunately, my father died when I was a boy, otherwise I would have been a professor, he had set his heart on it.” And the familiar Beckettian themes of interior doubt, the unchanging mundanity of daily routine, and the futility of a search for meaning or direction, are all met with a stoic resolution that they must be faced: “Nor will I go out of my way to avoid such things when avoidable. No, I simply will not go out of my way, though I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way.”

Beckett first intended From an Abandoned Work to become a novel, however that plan was abandoned and the piece took its final form when it was broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Third Programme on 14 December 1957. The recording was the first time Beckett came across Irish actor Patrick Magee. He was so impressed with Magee’s rasping voice that he immediately set about writing a dramatic monologue initially called Magee Monologue. That title was later changed to Krapp’s Last Tape, a play still widely performed today.

The publication in Trinity

News on 7 June 1956, however, is the first occasion From an Abandoned Work was seen in public, and is consequently an important tool for literary historians wishing to chart the development of Beckett’s style and preoccupations. Beckett was the third of four Irishmen to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in a nation which markets itself on the appeal of its writers, this edition of Trinity News represents an important document of Irish history.

However, the contents of Beckett’s collected letters, only published in recent years following extensive scholarship, reveal that he himself was far from pleased by the treatment of his fiction at the hands of Trinity News’ editorial staff. In a letter to his friend H.O. White, a lecturer in English at Trinity, dated 2 July 1956, Beckett wrote: “Trinity News made a great hames of my text with their unspeakable paragraphs and varsity punctuation. I asked them either not to print it at all or to print it as it stood and above all to send me the proofs.” Beckett went on to conclude: “Well I suppose I should be used to being improved behind my back and to the horrible semi-colons of well brought-up young blue pencils, mais ce n’est pas ça qui vous encourage à recommencer (but it’s not the kind of thing that would encourage you to do it again).”

He was more succinct, but equally damning, in a letter on August 30 to a publisher at Grove Press in New York: “They made a balls of the text.”

Illustration by Daniel Tatlow Devally

eral, rather than any specific passages. Indeed, O’Regan insists she didn’t alter any of the words: “We would never have changed it. You’re not going to meddle with a piece by Beckett.”

by Trinity News, Beckett changed very little back before submitting the text to be read on radio.

Similarly, if the “horrible semi-colons” were the reason for Beckett’s bad temper, it is difficult to sympathise with him. For a piece of text published in a 6-page newspaper, From an Abandoned Work is generously long – the spoken radio broadcast is 24 minutes in length. And yet in the

Trinity News’ response, 60 years on

Beckett was true to his word and never wrote for Trinity News again. Until now, O’Regan and the other editors had no idea Beckett felt this way about their editing. Characteristically polite and reclusive in public, but known to be kind and generous with his friends, Beckett expressed none of these complaints to O’Regan or anyone else at Trinity News about their handling of the text. 60 years later, O’Regan is happy to apologise and take responsibility for any transgression on her part. “I’m responsible for the mistakes. It was a long time ago, but I do know it was me who took charge of Beckett’s piece.” And reacting to Beckett indirectly calling her a well brought-up young blue pencil, O’Regan responded gracefully: “I’m sure he’s right.”

But in O’Regan’s defence, it remains unclear why exactly Beckett was so irked.

His complaints refer to semicolons and paragraphs in gen-

A

COMPARISON OF the 1956 text with the radio broadcast the following year suggests O’Regan is speaking truthfully: Beckett actually revised the manuscript very little after it was published in Trinity News.

The structure and length of the work remained unchanged, with only occasional phrases removed or added.

Whatever changes were made

entire text, there are just three semicolons. Assuming Beckett used no semi-colons in his original, three were added, all of which make grammatical sense in their context.

The last of Beckett’s objections, the “unspeakable paragraphs”, is equally puzzling. Again, even though she does not remember doing so,

O’Regan gallantly accepts responsibility for adding paragraphs to the text. She does however offer a potential explanation: “The paragraphs might have happened down at our printers on Pearse Street.

Sometimes they would insert paragraphs for reasons of spacing when the plates were getting laid out.”

Of course, without access to the original text before it reached Trinity News, it cannot be known for certain what changes were made during the editing

pro cess. This could be solved if Beckett’s request that the proofs were returned to him was carried out, or if they were archived in the records of Trinity News. O’Regan, however, who was in contact with Beckett by letter, has no recollection that such a re-

quest was made, nor can she recall what happened to the proofs after From an Abandoned Work was published.

“I’m sorry to say they were probably thrown away at the printers. There really was a lack of awareness of how lucky we were.”

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this episode is that Beckett would consider publishing in Trinity News at all. It is difficult to imagine a writer of similar stature today giving an original piece of fiction to the newspaper of their old university for free.

However, despite the picture which emerges in Beckett’s letters of a man fiercely protective over the finest details of his art, O’Regan maintains that the fact he was so willing to write for Trinity News, even if only on one occasion, is evidence of his decency: “I think above all it shows a TCD graduate being kind to students.”

It is unlikely that O’Regan’s high opinion of the man will change, however she jokes her admiration will now have to be reconciled with “the fact that Beckett hated my guts.”

Every edition of Trinity News from 1953 to 1970, including the June 1956 edition featuring Samuel Beckett’s From an Abandoned Work, can be viewed at www.trinitynewsarchive.ie

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Features

9

Reviewing the 2015/16 TCDSU sabbatical officers

L

President

YNN RUANE WAS elected as president in 2015 with a groundswell of support behind her. Coming into office on the back of a resounding victory over her three competitors, Ruane is the first mature student president since the 1990s, and the first female president since 2003-4. From the off, her presidency has been determined by big issues and ideals.

Her manifesto and first report to SU Council identified the principles of Equality, Inclusion, and Access as the central pillars of her mandate. Her manifesto further identified the issue of student engagement, saying her aims were guided by “an ideology of empowering students to take ownership of their SU”. At the first Council of the year, she stated a further set of aims, including increased engagement among students, creating “space for debate and conversation” among students, and building bridges between those in Trinity and outside the college community.

Ruane has had a busy year, although some promises have inevitably fallen by the wayside.

Proposals such as every sabbitical and part-time officer writing a University Times article at least once a term, or class reps being obliged to make three class addresses every term appear not to have been implemented. Turnout in this year’s SU elections was down 18% on 2015, although on the other hand, the scale and success of the Students Against Fees and Repeal The 8th campaigns point to a high level of engagement.

In truth, large-scale social issues and lobby campaigns have been the backbone of Ruane’s time in office. She spoke forceful-

ly against increased fees and the prospect of student loans at successive Councils early in the year.

She has been heavily involved in TCDSU’s Repeal the 8th campaign, which has seen well-attended panels and widely shared media output over the course of the year. Campaigns like that promoting awareness of sexual consent, or the TCD Divestment initiative, have also proven to be popular. Ruane’s Activism Festival occurred on campus recently to great acclaim, with speakers from diverse fields speaking at a number of talks and panels.

An Impact Report, half-funded with money from the HEA, is being set up to “thoroughly evaluate the effect that Trinity College Dublin is having on society and the economy”, intended to show how much the college is able to achieve with a limited, and decreasing, amount of state funding.

Ruane stated at the outset of the year that she was aware of the potential perception that, at times, she was ignoring “the everyday requests of students”, like “fun, better library, more efficient tutorials and student spaces”.

She admitted that “to an extent I probably will”, because she saw her primary focus as advocacy and representation on “issues that fall through the cracks”. Whether this strategy has been a success is something that only the student body itself can judge. However, one aspect of Ruane’s legacy has been that the question of whether the SU should emphasise college over national issues, or vice versa, was at the forefront of this year’s presidential campaign. Whatever her individual successes, she has certainly succeeded in bringing activism and advocacy back to the centre of SU politics.

M

Education

OLLY KENNY WAS elected unopposed to the position of Education Officer at the SU elections in 2015, having served first as a class rep, and later as EMS faculty convener. Her manifesto promised the introduction of “extendible skills workshops” to increase students’ employment prospects. These were to include barista and bartender training, and courses based around computer skills and personal finance. Office hours for SU school conveners, and the implementation of electronic voting were among the other policies put forward in the course of Kenny’s campaign. None of these specific proposals appear to have been implemented so far in this academic year. Her main goal was to create a more studentcentred college experience, mentioning in particular the procurement of a dedicated student space in the Business School currently being built.

As of yet, this has not happened.

In an interview with Trinity News during her election campaign, Kenny agreed that a single year was “probably not” long enough a time in office to affect major change, but that worthwhile change was certainly possible. At the first SU Council of the year in October, she said that her work on the Trinity Education Project takes up about 60% of

her time. The TEP is a college initiative attempting to evaluate the college experience, update the Curriculum, and deliver a “distinctive student experience”. Kenny sits on five of the Project’s seven strands, while Communications Officer Afric Ní Chríodáin sits on the remaining two. The new programs arising from the Project are expected to begin in 2018. Kenny undertook a trip to Manchester with TEP to look at learning spaces.

Kenny’s subsequent reports to Council have noted the introduction of a new appeals process with the Academic Council, and a new procedure for student complaints.

The first half of Hilary Term saw Kenny heavily involved in this year’s SU elections, which were a success. Much of the rest of her work over the year has been taken up with the day-to-day obligations of an Education Officer. This has included regular meetings with different college services. She noted a rise in the amount of her casework around the time of the fifth Council of the year, which she speculated could have been related to the elections themselves. Finally, Kenny organised Education Week at the beginning of December, while top-up training for SU personnel took place on March 8.

What have the five elected SU sabbatical officers achieved, and have they met their manifesto promises?

Senior features writer Cathal Kavanagh breaks down the wins and losses of the past year

Comms and Marketing

T

HE MAIN DIVERGENCE between Aifric Ní Chríodáin and her competitor Jemma O’Leary in the race for the Comms & Marketing position last year was her comparative enthusiasm for TCDSU getting income in the form of headline sponsorship. It is a commitment she has followed through on. As of the first Council of the year, the SU had garnered over ¤14,000 in sponsorship from various businesses.

KPMG’s graduate program was vigorously promoted through SU channels in September and October. Other businesses which sponsored the Union in one way or another included Dominos and Vodafone. Anonymous tomfoolery app Yik Yak came in to promote themselves in College in November, including the giving away of free branded socks, for which the SU got ¤800.

Meanwhile an event with TG4 later in the year brought in ¤300.

Speaking with Trinity News during the election campaign last year, Ní Chríodáin stated the need to rebrand the Union’s avenues of communications and marketing, and that the SU website needed to be updated with more basic information, for example relating to extensions and sexual health.

As of now, the website still lacks some

K C

Welfare

ONOR CLANCY CAME out on top of a crowded field in the Welfare race last year. He is almost unique among recent sabbatical officers, in that he is the only man on this year’s five-person team.

2015-16 has seen a number of major issues which fall under the Union’s welfare umbrella come to prominence in the college community. The accommodation crisis at the beginning, and indeed throughout the year threw up enormous difficulties both for students and for College authorities and the SU. Meanwhile, Clancy was involved in organising campaigns such as TCDSU’s involvement in Repeal the 8th, What is Consent? and I am/I exist, which highlighted bisexual and asexual identities.

At the start of the year, the accommodation crisis meant that many students required the Union’s services. The Accommodation Advisory Service was set up by Clancy. It provided deals in hostels and hotels to students whose

accommodation had fallen through, while the Union’s Rent a Room scheme was also a success, considering the trying circumstances.

Similar to most years, campaigns and advocacy seem to have occupied Clancy for a large part of the year. As well as the sexual consent and the I am/ I exist campaigns, the What’s in the Pill drug awareness initiative was undertaken in cooperation with members of other student unions in Dublin. Most of the themed weeks that the SU runs in the course of the year fell under the remit of the Welfare Officer. These included Body & Soul Week, Mental Health Week, and Rainbow Week, all of which seemed to have been deemed successful.

Clancy has dedicated a large amount of time to the procurement of more student spaces in College. These efforts have centred on the development of the Sun Room, a space in Goldsmith Hall which was approved by Council in late 2014, but which has since stalled. As of last week’s aborted Council meeting, Clancy

was waiting to hear back from College on a proposed design for the room. The proposal was originally given €70,000 of funding, but it seems that the full costs may top €100,000.

Clancy has been honest in admitting that many of the promises contained in his manifesto have yet to be fully realised. His Safecab scheme, whereby students can charge a taxi fare to the SU and pay the Union back later, has been implemented. Other policies like the laptop borrowing scheme, and his commitment to drug awareness, have been followed through on. However, many others, like the TCD Lunchbox scheme and the provision of more 24 hour library toilets, have yet to be implemented. Clancy’s report to Council last week contained a list of manifesto promises, colour-coded as to the level of completion.

Two were coded green, indicating completion, nine were coded orange, and one, the provision of phone charger outlets, was coded red and described as being stalled.

information and services, although updates are apparently in progress. A TCDSU app is also in development.

Whether or not her promise to better promote the SU to off-campus students has been a success is debatable, but the changes there have been have hardly been revolutionary. She mentioned that students tend to be somewhat “jaded” with the SU, and that part of her role would be to increase engagement. While such an enormous undertaking is inevitably beyond the power of any individual officer, the problem of non-engagement in the SU has not gone away, and will need to be continually pursued by sabbatical officers in futures years if a difference is to be made.

Ní Chríodáin has been heavily involved in the Union’s campaigns over the course of the year, contributing to the marketing of the Repeal the 8th campaign and International Women’s Week, among others, and Union-specific events like RAG Week and the college Consent campaign. She also sits on two of the seven strands of the Trinity Education Project (TEP), and other areas of work have included updating the SU Café and shop.

Entertainment

ATIE COGAN FENDED OFF competition from Conor Parle and David Gray to become the first female Ents officer for a number of years. Aside from her promises to put on certain events, her campaign included a policy of increasing student engagement with the Ents side of the Students’ Union. As with similar intentions from other sabbatical officers, the issue of limited engagement with the SU is one which will take longer than a single year to fix, and whether there has been any fundamental change over this year is debateable.

Nonetheless, with Cogan at the helm, Ents has had some notable successes this year.

Fresher’s week went off without any major problems, although the event planned for Friday of

that week was cancelled as a mark of respect after a death on campus that afternoon. Events like the Freshers’ Ball and the Back to the Future event in Powerscourt sold out.

Ents has been behind a number of sold-out and popular events over the course of the year, notably bringing back the ‘Notorious’ hip-hop night on a monthly basis.

Ents have also promoted student deals to festivals, for example the upcoming Life Festival, or the Metropolis festival in November which had a 15% discount.

There have been a couple of stand-out events organised during Cogan’s time in office. In particular, the Hogwarts Express at the end of November saw hundreds of students pack onto a train for a Harry Potter-themed mystery tour. The event was enormously wellreceived, and featured in

both national and international media.

Other staples of the Ents college year have proven successful.

RAG Week raised over €26,000 across 15 events.

Events like the annual Battle of the Bands are still ongoing. One of the most memorable Entsrelated incidents of the year came with the announcement of the Trinity Ball lineup, which took the form of a house party live-streamed on YouTube. The video came in for all manner of ridicule, although if the intention was to get people talking, the ploy worked. Either despite or as a result of the launch, the Ball sold out in record time. Headliners The Kooks, and acts like Stormzy, have engineered a level of enthusiasm for the Ball which is probably a good deal ahead of that in recent years.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Features

10

When Jacobin came to town Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin Magazine, talks to Sarah Taaffe-Maguire about Jacobin’s reach, 1916 commemorations, student journalism and how to do good socialism Sarah TaaffeMaguire Deputy features editor

I

N THE MIDST of March, right after Paddy’s day and as deadlines loom, it’s easy to forget that people are bothered about 1916. It should make you feel like we’re living in a cool part of time when Jacobin magazine decides it wants in on the action.

Not to be confused with the Jacobean era, Jacobin the magazine offers a socialist perspective on politics, economics and culture. Jacobin tries to “be old school Marxist, anti-poststructuralism and everything that's come out of Academia for the last 20/30 years”. In that vein of thinking, he hates to describe it as such, but editor, Bhaskar Sunkara says the name Jacobin is “a floating signifier” of radicalness, evoking The Black Jacobin of the Haitian revolution (though Jacobins were born out of Europe). The title and image, accompanied with the tagline “reason in revolt” is meant to denote “that socialist ideas are a kind of continuation of the enlightenment; a completion of the enlightenment.”

In an age of dying print, Jacobin has thrived both online and in physical form. Though Jacobin’s audience is “tipped in a more domestic direction” (mostly American), 45% of subscriptions are international. Indeed, the highest number of subscription per capita is in Athens, Greece.

Sunkara thinks the success is the Jacobin world view itself; “obviously we're putting forward perspectives that aren't in other places.” “We're just as interested in the results of you know what's happening in Greece, what's happening in Ireland as we are with domestic struggles.” America is covered as “the centre of world capitalism but we have no particular fetishisation of our national context.” Though you’d be wrong to think that Jacobin’s reach is confined to socialists “we are attracting a very large audience, close to 8000 and above unique visi-

tors every month and a little bit over half of them are in the US, and obviously… there’s not like half a million hard-core socialists in the United States.”

To Sunkara the success makes sense. Jacobin is intentionally accessible, yet presents ideas without dumbing them down. “In other words, you still might need to grapple with the ideas but you shouldn't have any terminological questions, you shouldn’t be grappling with the words, you should be grappling with the ideas.” Contributors are mostly academics, but “every piece is written and rewritten at the level of style and ordered in such a way that's more comprehensible.”

Unique to Jacobin are dedicated reading groups. Across the world participants pick a theme, read Jacobin articles related to it, meet up, and discuss. The Dublin Jacobin Reading Group on Facebook currently has 224 members.

Overall there are about 90 reading group, with close to 60 in the United States.

“Combined every single month in the United States alone if our average group is like roughly 30 people, you know, where we have close to 2000 people meeting at Jacobin reading groups every single month and I think that fills a real void”. You can’t help but feel the groups fit perfectly into Jacobin’s overall aim; they “don't want [people] to just engage with the publication as consumers of a product passively.” The groups can act as a kind of middle ground to allow people to ask “definitional questions about the socialist world view and interact with wider networks of people”. They serve as “mutual ground for people from different functions and traditions and groups to come and engage together.”

What’s the big deal about 1916?

Depending on your dedication to nationalism or interest

in Irish history likely you’re not too fussed with commemorating the Easter Rising.

Sunkara has “a good answer I should give you as a reporter and there's a bad answer” as to why Ireland is getting a special 1916 issue. Former Trinity News editor, Ronan Burtenshaw, guest edited the issue.

Simply, there was a group “of very enthusiastic Irish contributors” and desire to create a coherent Irish issue.

The better answer is, that in essence, Ireland is “a stand in for other examples across the world, so the failed national liberation movement”. Absent from official discussions is the desired legacy that didn’t result from the rising. The failure to establish “a robust stable welfare state, a labour party that was actually built in the interest of workers along the lines of other European countries” is not unique to Ireland.

it’s compelling then we’ll run it.” They cover a little over 1000 articles a year, so a lot of ground gets covered.

What about commemoration and the potential for toxic nationalism? Sunkara feels “Ireland has never been an imperialist power and in that case the nationalism there was generally less toxic in the international context.”

Jacobin’s making a big deal over the issue. The launch took place in Liberty Hall with talks from Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey, Donal Fallon, Robert Ballagh and Stephen Rea. The launch party is next Saturday evening in Jigsaw, there’ll be readings, performances, DJs, punch and a prize for the best Enda Kenny impression.

Doing socialism

Jacobin, coming from a socialist perspective, puts its theory into practice. “We keep a social democratic workplace, everyone’s paid, well, e v e r y o n e ’s paid basically Jacobin magazine flat decently editor Bhaskar Sunkara c o n s i d e r i n g our resources.

1916 is rep- There’s fixed limits on how resentative much everyone is expected of struggles to work.” When it comes to e l s e w h e r e ; spreading socialism, Sunkara “parallel failures is against shouting on street of, I think, post- corners without context. It’s colonial and national a more complex process. “If liberation movements in the you can't win social demoglobal south.” The issue is cratic demands and you can't about putting that aspect of win a majority for social deIreland in context. Though mocracy” then it doesn’t make “on the Marxist left if anything sense to yell at people. He we might overstate the social- advocates taking existing disist quality.” Internationally cussions and “existing activity Sunkara thinks the centenary in activist communities, the is “recognised as a day of na- struggles, and try to raise the tional struggle and liberation”, level of class consciousness in that the Irish are seen “being them.” His goal is “to establish on the right side of history for a whole coherent and visible opposing the British empire.” portion of American politics He admits there “might be an and opposition current of soover statement of how deep cialists.” the political roots of it went” The future is bright for the from those on the left. left, Sunkara thinks; it’s a speCommemorating 1916 cial moment in time. He reckmeans the pressure is upped ons there’s a “finite window to commemorate the cente- and the Sanders opportunity, nary of the Russian Revolu- the amount of work we might tion in 2017. Sunkara is going do in the next four or five to be careful, “we don't want months might be greater than our pieces to just be historical the amount of work we'll do re-enactments. We want them be able to do in the next four to have political takeaways.” or five years.” “Ten, fifteen Though basically he says “if years ago it was very easy to

encounter people who would actively defend the system… working class people would be ideologically defending the system.” Part of this has to do with emergence of Bernie Sanders as a candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He thinks Sanders may be the most popular politician today. “It’s less his label [a self-described socialist] that’s attractive to people at an ideological level... it’s the content behind his ideas”.

Sanders has provided the idea “that we are all facing similar hardship, and not only that, there is some sort of solution.” Sanders isn’t shy about saying who stands in the way of his solution: “He not only says vaguely the billionaire class, he names names, he names first names of people in the Walton family. I don't even do that and I’m a revolutionary socialist, I leave the first names out of it.” Leaving things to get worse, or thinking that the worse things gets, the better is a “vulture kind of theory of socialism” to Sunkara, “people are angry, we need to speak to that anger.”

Student Journalism

Many Jacobin contributors and core editorial board members came from the Young Democratic Socialists.

Involvement in student journalism helps to have “confidence and training, and more importantly you get a diverse group of people involved who otherwise wouldn't get involved and step up and take leadership roles at a campus level.” Sometimes you “won’t get the time or the chance to develop those abilities [in the workforce] and that's really what we need more than anything.” Student participation generally is needed: “We have a 74-year-old socialist who joined the young people’s socialist league in the late 1950s as our standard bearer, now I’m worried will we have a gap of about 20, 30 years in between generations.”

“

Internationally Sunkara thinks the centenary of the Rising is “recognised as a day of national struggle and liberation”, that the Irish are seen “being on the right side of history for opposing the British empire.” He admits there “might be an over statement of how deep the political roots of it went” from those on the left.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Features

11

TAP continues to open doors in the face of cuts The staff and students of the Trinity Access Programmes speak to James McGovern about the importance of the organisation to them and the wider college community James McGovern Contributing writer

D

URING THE LEAD up to the recent student union elections Stephen Carty, a candidate for TCDSU president, pledged ¤5,000 of his prospective salary towards Trinity Access Programmes (TAP). Lynn Ruane, who came through TAP as a mature student, is now coming to the end of her year as TCDSU President. Ruane’s predecessor, Domhnall McGlacken-Byrne, made TAP a centerpiece of his long-term strategic plan. This attention has followed significant funding cuts since the recession. However, despite this, TAP has managed to actually increase and diversify its activities to encourage students from low income backgrounds to attend Trinity.

Overview

In essence, TAP does two separate but connected jobs.

First, it reaches out to young adults from low income families in Dublin and around the country. For example, TAP’s Ronan Smith regularly runs tours of the college campus for secondary school students.

The organisation also sends out TAP ambassadors to Trinity-linked secondary schools around Dublin. They tell second-level pupils about their experiences, and encourage those who may not consider college a realistic destination to apply to third level. The organisation continues to extend its outreach through various mentoring programs and event days for prospective students around the country.

TAP’s second task is to support students at a socio-economic disadvantage once they get to college. The financial and cultural barriers to success do not go away once a student has made it onto Trinity’s books. Indeed, informing students of the various disadvantages they have faced due to their particular background is one of the methods TAP uses to buttress confidence.

A set of widely disseminated statistics compiled by the Higher Education Author-

ity (HEA) in their plan to increase participation in education reveals students from households where unskilled and semi-skilled workers are the norm are nearly five times less likely to attend higher education than students from households where skilled professionals are the norm. And a graphic shown at the recent TCDSU debate over a motion setting out the union’s opposition to a fees and loans system produced an even starker statistic: 99% of young adults aged 18-20 in Dublin 6 attend third-level education; the figure for Dublin 17 is 15%.

The 978 TAP students who are current undergraduates have come through one of two routes. Some have entered through the TAP one year foundation course - a course for mature students and young adults carried out in the environs of Trinity as preparation to attend college as an undergraduate proper.

The other route is through the Higher Education Access Route (HEAR), a government funded scheme permitting students at a socio-economic disadvantage to matriculate with reduced points and to receive support once in college.

in the fact the progression rate from first to second year for TAP students is 95%, and 90% of TAP students go on to finish their degree. Both figures are significantly higher than the college average. Lisa Keane, one of the handful of TAP’s full-time staff, is proud of those numbers. She focusses on students after they have entered Trinity, and has a particular interest in a program called Pathways to Law which aids students wishing pursue a career in law.

Coping with funding cuts

Positive experiences

One person who came through the foundation course as a mature student is the aforementioned Lynn Ruane. Ruane is ever-enthusiastic to speak about TAP which she sees as not just as a source of financial help but a community that allows students reach their full potential. She emphasises that while TAP smoothes students’ transition into their first year, it also “continues to support them till the day they get their degree”.

She considers TAP “the best access program in the country” and praises it for extending its outreach far beyond “the Trinity bubble” to working class Dublin. In her own case, TAP contributed financially to grinds she needed for maths which were “crucial” to her progressing through a

particular set of exams. Ruane also reinforced the value of TAP’s foundation course, which allowed her to reintegrate after having been “out of education for a while”.

Katie Shortall, a third year English literature and Film Studies student from Ballyfermot, came through the same route as Ruane, and is full of praise for the “incredible” full-time TAP officers.

Though having less than a dozen full time staff, TAP has utilised its students to further a continually diversifying set of outreach activities. One of these is an event next month

designed to visually highlight privilege that will occur on campus. Shortall speaks about the importance TAP had in clearing “disadvantages and obstacles” to her succeeding in college. Having initially been at a disadvantage because of her background she feels the effect of the foundation course was such she was almost “at an advantage coming into Trinity”.

Casey O’Callaghan is a first year General Science student from East Wall who, after studying a PLC course for a year, entered Trinity through the HEAR route. She has run for

the Access Officer position in TCDSU, essentially a position for TAP student representation in the union. O’Callaghan notes “a certain level of separation between students here in Trinity and students like myself”. She has benefitted from TAP’s financial, academic and emotional support and credits TAP as being one of the reasons “why I'm still in college doing as well as I am”.

The organisation is her “first point of contact” whenever she’s in a stressful situation.

TAP’s support networks with students like Shortall and O’Callaghan can be seen

TAP’s head of department is Cliona Hannon. She explains how TAP is largely funded by the Higher Education Authority (HEA), who transfer money into the college core grant. This funding is “allocated on the basis of student numbers within the target socio-economic groups entering the college” and is thus “ring-fenced” for this purpose.

A further 25% of TAP’s funding is raised through “working closely with Trinity Development & Alumni to develop our funding portfolio”.

Keane says the private funding is a big help. Part of her role involves ‘engaging with businesses’ who are interested in supporting the work of TAP. Law firms who participate in Pathways to Law, for example, offer bursaries to every student who comes through that program. They connect these students with networks and offer them “meaningful lawbased experiences”.

Asked about Stephen Carty’s proposed salary pledge Keane responded by noting it was positive that the union and those associated with it were “prioritising TAP” but added that those who want to offer the organisation support should focus on doing so in a practical way. She also praised former TCDSU President Domhnall McGlackenByrne for having done a “tremendous job” in relation to TAP. Among other measures, McGlacken-Byrne introduced the position of Access Officer

to the union.

In spite of the fact TAP has continued to diversify its outreach projects, cuts to the funding it receives from the HEA have had a noticeable impact. Keane says the “reductions come at a time when TAP student levels are increasing” and as a result the Student Assistance Fund (SAF) has significantly decreased in recent years. All TAP students are entitled to the SAF, a payment which has gone from being biannual to a one-off sum in the last three years. The payment most students received for 2015/16 was just ¤350. Keane feels the cuts have been “detrimental”. Lynn Ruane describes how every year students become more unsure about their bursaries.

And although it has not had an impact on her personally, Katie Shortall is aware of the cuts which have affected students such as Casey O’Callaghan.

Cliona Hannon lists some of the supports which TAP can no longer provide: “we used to have capacity to fund student accommodation for those in acute domestic circumstances.

We also were able to contribute more to those with children and to those with fees issues.” Hannon is nonetheless proud of the the opportunities TAP can provide in the face of cuts to HEA funding, concluding that TAP has “weathered the storms of the economic crisis well”.

Keane is adamant that despite the cuts, TAP has by no means become “a stagnant space”. She is visibly passionate about the work TAP and its 300 student ambassadors continue to do. More generally, Keane views TAP’s work as part of a “broader revolution” in overall access to education around Ireland. The benefits of this greater access are not just for the disadvantaged students, says Keane, but entire colleges also gain from the “wealth of experience” these students bring.

Photo by Aisling Crabbe

Walking the Camino - 115 kilometers, 4 days and 100 Trinity students Caoimhe Gordon explores the history and reveals secrets of participating in the popular pilgrimage Caoimhe Gordon Online features editor

“W

HEN I CLOSE my eyes, it feels like I’m in

Spain.”

This quote from a peregrino during a sun streaked break on the second day of walking illustrated the common conundrum of the Camino- it was far from the Spain familiar to many from our packageholiday filled youth. Instead, we had found ourselves somewhere in the Spanish nation with West of Ireland type scenery, an area disconnected from the “real” world of college assignments and wifi. In this new place, one could experience snow, sun and drizzle before noon and the task of walking 22km was suddenly considered a reasonably easy feat. During Reading Week, 100 Trinity students, divided into four different routes, began a quest to complete over 110km of the Camino while raising funds for VDP projects in Zambia.

The Camino de Santiago is not merely one route that leads to the tomb of St. James in Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain. Instead, there exists a large assortment of routes available that all lead to the same final destination.

The legend behind the beginning of such a pilgrimage can be attributed to St. James as it is often told that his remains were carried by boat from Jerusalem, with his final resting place now a place of rest and relaxation for the hundreds of thousands of peregrinos that complete the pilgrimage annually. Many participate in the Camino for religious reasons while others opt for the chance to experience something totally new. Some cycle, some trot along on horseback while most favour travelling by their own momentum- by simply placing one foot in front of the other until the Cathedral is in sight. The most popular route is the French route, which one group from

Trinity conquered. The other routes include the Portuguese, the Northern and last but definitely not least, the route which I participated in, the Spanish route (“Spoot.” )

Keeping on the right path

When discussing my experience with a pal over a cup of joe upon my return, she queried about the presence of adult guides. “Who showed you all where to go?” She exclaimed. “Ples” I replied. We didn’t need any outsiders to show us the way- that responsibility laid with our brilliant route leaders, three people on each route with the important information, tales of Caminos gone by and all the antiseptic wipes that one could wish for.

Their advice of how to reach the finish line victorious was simple: follow the shells. Like hapless Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we kept our eyes peeled for a bright yellow hue.

Instead of a brick road, our gaze focused on spray painted arrows and the iconic shells.

Spotting a shell or arrow after a period of feared aimless meandering was like reuniting with an old friend- all the memories of the good times came flooding back as one could carry on easily as before.

Many varying myths and legends exist about how the scallop shell became the unofficial symbol that accompanies every pilgrim’s journey to Santiago. Many believe that it acts as a metaphor with the lines marked in the shell and meeting at one centre point representing the reunion of all the routes in Santiago. Some tales attempt to link the shell with St. James’ final journey, including the story of how a storm hit the ship carrying the body of St. James. The body was lost but was found on the shore, unharmed but covered in sea shells. A similar story reveals the near drowning of a young man on horseback, again ending with his covering of shells after his miraculous survival.

“

In this new place, one could experience snow, sun and drizzle before noon and the task of walking 22km was suddenly considered a reasonably easy feat.

People who you may have creeped upon pre-Camino in the Facebook group are suddenly your constant companions who you share food and blister pads with

Walking the Camino is no trot down to the shops to get the messages. Yes, this is glaringly obvious. On the first day of walking, mere minutes into the four day journey that awaited us, a fellow pilgrim and I spotted a sign on a building ahead of us. “Dis Real” it declared proudly “20 metres.”

It grew apparent to us immediately that in 20 metres, dis became very very real. At the beginning of the Spanish route, we were greeted with an extremely steep hill.

Picture the scene: it’s your first day of walking, your bag is feeling heavier than your heart, it is dark and you are cursing yourself for not actually doing any practise hikes.

However then you share your feelings with whoever is in the vicinity and voila! An instant bond forms between you and the other person. People who you may have creeped upon pre-Camino in the Facebook group are suddenly your constant companions who you share food, accommodation, twenty four hours a day and blister pads with. Bless. 24 people joined forces to tackle the Spanish route and by the end of the trip, very strong friendships, as well as a nostalgic WhatsApp group, had formed. The same trend was echoed in other route groups.

United forces formed to create strategies to deal with current issues in our society, songs were sung, games were played. It is difficult to find an environment where it is easier to form friendships especially when one day essentially feels like three and private jokes are quickly formed and uttered constantly for the rest of the trip. Example: Who said that? (Yes, we were all thinking it but I wrote it.)

From despair to elation

In Charles Dicken’s epic novel “A Tale of Two Cities”, the reader is greeted with one of the best opening lines ever penned: “it was the best of times, it was the worst of

times.” Had old Charles ever found himself leaving a monastery/ hostel at half 6 in the morning, he may have written the very same thing. The Camino presents an eclectic mix of experiences from elation to despair as well as challenges and changes in plans.

We missed our train on the very first day and after frantically leaping from the wrong train, spent seven hours in the station waiting for the next one. However, we can now all laugh (maybe) as friendships were formed in the bleak fluorescent lighting. The accompanying soundtrack of the Spanish route included the guttural barks of many a guard dog, all locked safely behind gates. Until late one night after 37km, one dog wasn’t safely secured and decided to give chase. Even the most frustrating of incidents morph into hilarious anecdotes when recounted in the hostel that evening.

The good times naturally outweighed the bad. It is almost always a hyperbolic statement to warn that one is about to experience the best week of their lives but in this case, it was universally agreed upon that that was indeed the case. Ambling along

carefree with friends discussing deep thoughts while eating whatever you purchased from the supermercado that morning- as Lizzie McGuire once said “this is what dreams are made of.” From a glass of tinto to some “viscous shots”, refreshments were available for each and every peregrino during a quick break along the way as bars and cafes were always willing to offer a warm welcome to some weary walkers. Others favoured the ever dependable 50 cent carton of vino.

Reunion in Santiago

At the beginning of the pilgrimage, each participant is given a pilgrim passport which is stamped along the way in hostels and cafes. In order to earn the Compostela certificate in Santiago, it is necessary to have walked at least 100km or cycled at least 200km and to confirm that it was walked for religious or spiritual reasons. A certificate of welcome is issued in the case of cultural or non-religious/spiritual reasons. The feeling of entering Santiago and being deemed worthy of receiving the certificate is a euphoric one. The elegant cathedral dominates the simple plaza it stands in.

All four Trinity routes arrive before the mass at 12 and assemble before the cathedral, forming a jubilant scene-so jubilant in fact that a tourist asked if it was possible to take a picture of a few pilgrims as it had grabbed her attention.

Sitting in a pew at the mass, glancing around at the tired but exultant faces of my fellow pilgrims while listening to the soft Spanish tones of the priest was an incomprehensible feeling. The journey was incredibly over but I knew the effects of our epic journey would be exist for many moons more through the photos, the necessary oversharing, our fundraising efforts and the constantly told tales.

During the walk, fellow pilgrims and others encountered along the way greet each other with the simple statement “Buen Camino.” Intended to wish each other luck, it literally translates as good path.

These phrase, intrinsically linked with the journey, sums up the experience with ease.

It truly is a good path and definitely the best decision many of my fellow peregrinos, including myself, have made during their time in college.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Features

12

An education in fiction T HE MOST MEMORABLE authors are the ones who have a personality that shines through their prose.

The titles of my favourite childhood books have all blurred together with age - but I’ll never forget the mischievous tones of Roald Dahl, the shrewd whimsy of Terry Pratchett or the silken strangeness of Neil Gaiman.

You forget the words, but you remember the voice. It bursts out through the odd descriptions. It hides in the parentheses and footnotes. It’s a persona that the author creates for themselves, like a form of literary showmanship.

Cavan-born author Dave Rudden is a natural showman: when you have a booming stage voice, an electric presence and bristling red hair, it’s difficult to be demure. I met with him recently to discuss the launch of his debut novel Knights of the Borrowed Dark, and to chart the long and difficult process that led him to it.

The novel, which is geared towards a teenage audience, is the first of a fantasy trilogy published by Puffin Books. It centres on the story of Denizen Hardwick: a thirteen year old boy who is trying very hard to lead a normal life – but ends up in the centre of an ancient war between forces of spoken light and monstrous darkness.

As you do.

YA fiction

“I was always the child who wanted to find magic in the world,” Rudden explained, smiling. “But I was a very cynical kid, too. I became increasingly sceptical of the protagonists I saw in fantasy novels: the kids who gallantly accepted their destinies, who vanquished evil and escaped unharmed. That’s not what childhood is like.

“When you’re young, the world is an unexplored and scary place. I wanted to reflect that. I wanted monsters that were unpredictable and frightening, I wanted characters that were diverse. I wanted tragedy. I wanted true bravery – the kind that’s a conscious choice, not a character trait. I wanted Denizen to make these tough decisions even though he was frightened and confused and conflicted. I guess I was writing for the kind of child that I knew.”

Dave spent a chunk of his twenties teaching English

and Creative Writing to secondary school students, so he knows how to impress bored teenagers. “Teenagers are by far the toughest audience!” he laughed. “They won’t give you a second chance. They won’t read a boring book from cover to cover just because they know the author, or they’re feeling merciful.

“But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being critical.

In the classroom, as in writing, you have to learn how to hook your audience immediately: with your first line, your first page, your first chapter.

You must encourage them to keep going.

“It helps to acknowledge how difficult their situation is, too. Adolescence is tough.

It’s a period of massive transition. YA authors have a tendency to depict everyone as sympathetic and helpful to the protagonist, but that’s not what it’s like in reality. When you’re a teenager nobody ever has time to coach you through your decisions and changes.

Nobody seems to care. I wanted Denizen to live without a safety net.”

There is no chance of Denizen living with a safety net: Rudden prides himself on “being cruel to fictional children”, and it’s easy to see why.

A masterful aspect of Knights of the Borrowed Dark is that it is genuinely dark and frightening throughout, despite its witty and light-hearted narrative voice.

The plot

Denizen spends his childhood in a dismal and crumbling orphanage on the Irish coast, and is actually coping quite well until he is whisked away by a grim and dismissive stranger who answers none of his burning questions. From there he is plunged into the world of the Knights, and gradually learns of the terrifying sacrifices they make to keep the ever-encroaching darkness at bay.

The novel’s magnetic power comes from the intrigue of its villains: individual, surreal beings from the realm of the Tenebrae who slip into the human world through shadows.

Their exact nature and intentions differ from iteration to iteration. The only constant is that they are very, very angry.

The Clockwork Three are the central antagonists of the novel: they are vicious, petty and utterly terrifying. “I was trying to contrast that recent trend of intelligent, Machi-

avellian villains who want to be captured – Moriarty from Sherlock, for example, or Heath Ledger’s Joker,” Rudden explained. “See, it’s easy to circumvent someone with a complex motive. If an enemy’s sole intention is to hurt you… You can’t really stop them from doing so, can you?

There’s no plan to throw a spanner into.

“The Clockwork Three essentially form three aspects of a childhood bully. The first monster relies almost entirely on verbal abuse. The second relishes in physical torture.

The third is a scapegoat, a dumping-ground for all of the misery they’ve ever inflicted.

Because that’s at the heart of every bully, isn’t it? A child who has been tortured, who needs to take his pain out on other people.”

I asked Rudden about his favourite fictional antagonist.

“I think it must be Ambrose from The Kingkiller Chronicle. Again, he and Kvothe have a very petty rivalry– one that slowly escalates into something incredibly serious.”

Asked about the beginnings of his writing career, Rudden mentions fanfiction: the practise of writing original stories based on existing fictional universes. Fanfiction gets a lot of flak for the prevalence of poor writing and rampant sexualisation (see: Fifty Shades of Grey), but Rudden recognises it for the useful writing tool that it can be.

“The fanfiction community were always helpful with constructive criticism and encouragement. Fanfiction is like a starter tool for worldbuilding and language development. Worlds never appear fully formed, and neither does your distinct creative voice.

You slowly develop your own by sampling the worlds and voices of writers you admire.

Skill and originality will grow with time.

Coming of age

“Writing the first chapter of Knights of the Borrowed Dark as the thesis for my Master’s degree was the first time that I felt I was writing with a style that was uniquely mine. Now people tell me that they’re reading the book in my voice – that’s really nice to hear,” he laughed.

Rudden studied a BA in English in St. Patrick’s College, where he admittedly didn’t work very hard and “scraped a 2.2”.

“Look, college is a complete

Dearbháil Clarke speaks to author Dave Rudden about his new novel, Knights of the Borrowed Dark, and his experiences of college.

paradigm shift, especially when you’ve just come from a sheltered town in the countryside. If you’re the type of person who had a wide friend circle in secondary school, the sudden isolation is going to really hurt. If you’re the type of person who never quite fitted in, you’re going to have to make a huge effort to put yourself out there. I spent most of my undergraduate learning about friends and girlfriends and music and cooking things more complex than toast.

“It’s even tougher if you were struggling with your mental health through school – which I was. People tend to tell you that college will be easier, that you’ll flourish there, and you tend to believe them. But it isn’t that simple.

Your problems will follow you, because that’s what problems do.

“Often, the ‘fantastic time’ that everyone is having is just a veneer over their true feelings. Everyone feels lost and confused and frightened in their first year of college, but nobody likes to admit it. The word homesick becomes taboo. These feelings are so normal, and colleges need to start treating them as such.

“There are mental health facilities on campus, but they’re almost always overworked and difficult to access.

It’s pretty disheartening to be put on a six-week waiting list to see someone, when it takes so much bravery to contact them in the first place.

“Clearly the facilities we have in place in our colleges aren’t working well enough – the suicide rates on campuses are still increasing. There needs to be a massive conversation in Irish universities about what we can do to help students. Maybe a mandatory preparation course before college wouldn’t go amiss – so that you actually know what’s going to happen when you get to college, instead of being thrown in there blind.”

Rudden completed an MA in Creative Writing at UCD in 2013. Irish writer and winner of the 2014 Guardian First Book Award, Colin Barrett, is a graduate of the same course.

There is an ongoing public debate about whether or not an MA can improve the quality of your writing, and Rudden is wary of giving advice on such an individual matter: “The MA was a good idea for me personally. It helped me with a lot of the technical aspects of my writing: with navigating

the business end, with deadlines and self-discipline. But it depends completely on who you are and what you want out of the experience. Some people don’t need that.

“Look at it this way: publishers aren’t going to take a bad book just because you have a Master’s degree. But they’ll take a good book from anywhere at all.”

“When it came to finding a literary agent, I used a website called litrejections.com – optimistic name, right? The web-

started out with: the longing for secret heroes to be battling unseen evils somewhere, the desire to see the world in

Success

Rudden remains a teacher of creative writing and storytelling workshops around Ireland, which he thinks have distinct benefits: “Writing isn’t something that you can teach down to a fine art, but there are definitely some guidelines that people should know. Classes are good for getting rid of the mysticism around writing. It really is just a process of trial and error. I’m always happy to give my opinions, or to share things that have worked for me for other people to try.

“I’ll never forget one workshop at the Big Smoke Writing Factory, where I was asking a woman to elaborate on a plot problem she was having with her story.

Halfway through explaining herself, you could see something click into place in her brain, and she just started frantically scribbling on her notepad right then and there. It was great.

The rest of us were like, ‘Oh! It’s happening! It’s happening right now!’”

Towards the end of the interview, the obvious question to ask was how a debut novelist managed to secure a three-book deal with Puffin Books, with further publishers working on translations in Germany, France, Brazil, Russia, Turkey and Sweden – and rumours of a movie deal on top. Literary prowess and dedication aside, it’s quite an impressive feat.

Illustration by Dearbháil Clarke

site has an amazing database of literary agents from around the world. I researched them all and essentially started from the top down. I was rejected 24 times before I met my agent: the wonderful Clare Wallace. 12 rigorous manuscript revisions later – here we are!”

Rudden is the sort of man you can’t help but root for. He is consistently humble, genuine and as giddy as a child.

Knights of the Borrowed Dark awakens the sense of wonder which every bookworm

a new and brilliant way. This trilogy promises to be witty, exciting and utterly terrifying. It deserves every ounce of success it has garnered, and more.

Knights of the Borrowed Dark is now available in most major Irish bookstores. You can join the conversation on social media by using #KOTBD.

A roadmap to universal healthcare in Ireland Eóin Ó Murchú explores the alternatives to a two-tier healthcare system Eóin Ó Murchú Staff writer

I

F YOU DON’T know where you’re going, no road will take you there, or so goes the saying. In 1947 Noel Browne, Trinity graduate of medicine, was scuppered in his attempts as Minister for Health in implementing the Mother and Child Scheme, offering free healthcare to women and children up to the age of 16. This was taking place in the context of a broader construction of welfare statism in post-war Europe. Nye Bevan was already implementing his nationalisation of British hospitals in the NHS Act. The Catholic Church however, was resolute in its resistance to the introduction of socialised medicine or “communist interference”.

Ireland’s system from 1947 is still broadly recognisable today. In its modern form it is colloquially referred to as the two-tier system. An underfunded and understaffed service is provided for those that cannot afford private health insurance and hospitals creak under the financial pressure.

In primary care, the effects of the two-tiered system can be seen in the long waiting times public patients must, literally, suffer.

A prescription for Éire

In Ireland, 25% of the population are not covered for healthcare. Those who qualify for a medical card are subject to substandard treatment and torturous waiting times. Mark Murphy is a GP and public health lecturer in RCSI. “I think the issue of differential access to secondary care, through the intertwined public and private mix is the most important issue to tackle in the Irish health services. As a GP, I find the system barbaric. One person gets seen or operated on in 1 to 3 weeks.

For the next person, it takes 12 months, with definite harms to their health. It's cruel, inhumane and not a system I wish to work in, hence my desire to change it.”

Murphy also recalled the case one of his patients, who was referred for sciatica, a nerve pain that radiates from the back down the leg. If he had private insurance then he could have been seen within a few days. However, he now suffers from a permanent paralysis and limp in his leg because he wasn’t able to see an orthopaedic or neurosurgeon surgeon in time. The pain this caused is compounded by the stress a disability can put on a person’s ability to survive. The cost of this exacerbated condition will also far outweigh the costs involved were he to have seen a consultant in a timely manner. Dr. Murphy summarises: “As a result of the delays in the public system he now has chronic pain, a permanent weakness and is unable to work. Quite frankly it is inhumane that Ireland stands over a system which is so unfair and inequitable.”

The Dutch Road

The Netherlands’ health system is often seen to be a potential model for Ireland. It is a regulated, subsidised marketplace of competing private insurance plans. However, a 2011 article in the New England Journal of Medicine highlights the flaws of the Dutch system. It describes how the attempt to create quasi-market competition “produced high administrative costs and complexity.” Universal cover wasn’t totally achieved either, where some citizens would miss premium payments and consequently dropped from their coverage plan. And the branding of health care as

a commodity, to be traded, advertised, and customised “didn’t improve customer satisfaction and choice”. This is reinforced with polls finding that 65% of those insured had low or very low levels of trust in private plans.

Finally, contrary to freemarket belief, the introduction of markets brought with it heavy doses of bureaucracy.

The reality is that fragmented, multi-payer systems invariably require expensive administrative apparatuses. Health policy journalist and physician, Adam Gaffney, outlines that genuine universal health care must include the following four features: universal coverage, the elimination of financial impediments to care, comprehensive coverage, and access for all economic or demographic groups. This is difficult in systems with upper and lower tiers of coverage and in which a risk averse mentality encourages excluding certain individuals and treatments. Ultimately, health cannot be seen as a typical marketplace. It is not a bazaar one visits voluntarily but out of necessity, and often desperation. Medical information is given by patients at their most vulnerable. It is unsettling to think that this information could be weighed, analysed, and exploited by private insurers for the sake of profit.

An alternative

Speaking to Trinity News, Vijoleta Gordeljevic, a global health consultant and writer for the Huffington Post, discussed the various ways states can offer their citizens equitable healthcare. On the costs of changing to a single payer system, Gordeljevic describes how the “economies of scale allow for massive savings. This is due to the fact that you have

“

In 1947 Noel Browne, Trinity graduate of medicine, was scuppered in his attempts as Minister for Health in implementing the Mother and Child Scheme, offering free healthcare to women and children up to the age of 16.

a large pool of people paying into a system and exerting immense bargaining power over Big Pharma.”

The benefits of a singlesystem are manifold too: “Improved patient satisfaction is seen as quality of care is extended to all and out-of-pocket expenditure is reduced. This is possible through cost-sharing and a progressive taxation regime. For many years the British NHS has proven that this can go hand in hand with high quality care and happy health professionals.”

Gordeljevic remains unpersuaded by the arguments offered by pro-market advocates, such as greater choice for patients and hospitals becoming more cost-conscious.

“Most of the arguments encountered are based on weak evidence or bad ideology.

Costs can be controlled without extensive pricing, and patient satisfaction can be

improved with proper investment. There is a push to turn patients into customers, however healthcare is not an ordinary product. Health care is a human right and letting the free-market decide who gets it and at what price is violating that human right.”

Besides winning the argument, Gordeljevic believes there is more to the fight for universal healthcare: “I am convinced activism is essential. We cannot expect only health professionals to fight as health concerns all of us. I would say creating the political will for change is the most important factor. Financial costs will always be used as obstacle, but even developing countries are making great leaps forward in increasing coverage of their citizens.”

The contradiction of healthcare under market conditions becomes apparent when you

view the discontents of that system. By prioritising profit over the supply of just and equitable care, we participate in a system that perpetuates inequality. This should be concerning for all healthcare professionals who take seriously the notion of patient-centred care.

In the words of Aneurin Bevin, founder of the NHS: “Society becomes more wholesome, more sincere, and spiritually healthier if it knows that its citizens have at the back of their consciousness the knowledge that not only themselves, but all their fellows have access, when ill, to the best that medical skill can provide.”

It is this mantra that resonates with the Hippocratic Oath stronger than pitting patients and providers against each other in a rat-race for care and resources.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Features

13

Dig for

victory!

D. Joyce-Ahearne speaks to Rian Coulter, a founder of the NCAD Community Garden Farm, and residents of the Grangegorman Community Collective about urban gardens in Dublin city centre.

T

HE NCAD COMMUNITY Garden Farm was founded on a site which, according to former NCAD Students’ Union member and one of the garden’s founders, Rian Coulter, was “a complete cesspit of absolute urban hazards”. The garden, which is next door to the college, exists on a site which is owned by NCAD and which is part of the old Powers Distillery site on which the college is built.

The garden farm was set up by two Students’ Union members, Coulter and Fabian Strunden, and community gardener Tony Lowth. Coulter says that when faced with a huge abandoned lot in the city centre, it just made sense to “to put some sort of urban gardening or horticultural project into it because it was the most accessible, doable and also positive thing to do.”

Support from NCAD

Strunden, who served on the Union from June 2012 to June 2013, did the initial research into the possibility of the project and presented the proposal to NCAD’s senior management who, Coulter says, were “not so enthusiastic about such an ambitious proposal.” Coulter, who served on the following year’s Union, says that it was the involvement of Lowth in late 2013, and his taking responsibility for the project, that led to the college taking the proposal more seriously and giving it the go ahead. The onsite work began in March 2014.

Coulter has a background with the Green Party and An Taisce, while he says Strunden came to the project from more of “an art and design perspective”. It was Lowth, in particular, who wanted the project to be, in part, a “social outlet, particularly for disadvantaged people in the inner city.”

Though Coulter and Strunden were very enthusiastic about the project, he admits they had very little experience in the beginning: “It was kind of daunting but when you get down to it it’s not that difficult. It’s the oldest trick in the book. You put plants in the ground and they grow and you eat them.” The ease with which the basic skills needed to partake could be picked up meant that the founders’ shared desire for broad local community involvement was recognised from the beginning. With Lowth taking charge of the project, with help from Coulter and Strunden, the garden farm soon became a success: “It came to a stage where it was really impressive but no one knew about it or how to get at it.”

So, to promote the garden farm, Coulter and Strunden held an exhibition in NCAD in January 2015 called Growing Closer, which focused on how far the garden farm had come and where it could go next. They also realised the importance of bringing in new people within the college community to take on the project after they had graduated. The exhibit highlighted the “art and design potential of plants and farming, and the social outlet that it provides to people.” On the back of the exhibition, a diverse range of groups got involved from the Goethe Institute to Merchant’s Quay.

Coulter stresses the social and community role of the garden. The garden backs

onto Oliver Bond Street, a residential area of high density council accommodation. The area, Coulter says, has a “history of unemployment, poor social mobility and people’s engagement with third level education is often minimal.”

He sees the garden farm as a “modest conduit” for opening up NCAD to the local community and makes the point that the college needs to be “conscious of a very proximate community and the residential neighbourhood around us”.

Though he knows the garden farm “isn’t a panacea for that”, it does “encourage the college to be a lot more accessible and engaging and open to everybody.” The garden farm also gains from its NCAD status. The art and design heritage combined with the social ethos behind it means that the project is “not just a community garden but a social space absolutely and unreservedly open to everybody, actively seeking out variety of groups to collaborate with.”

While student involvement is irregular, the majority of people who consistently participate, says Coulter, have been from the wider Liberties community. Lowth’s maintenance of the garden farm sees it open every day and according to the NCAD website, it has become the “largest foodgrowing garden farm in Dublin City Centre”. The food produced is given to anyone who volunteers. The end product of the project is thus not ignored, giving people access to, what Coulter calls, “food with integrity” in which you can taste the difference and which doesn’t come with an excessive waste of packaging.

The NCAD garden farm has benefited from various channels. “The goodwill from people in Dublin is extraordinary,” says Coulter. “People in and around the Liberties area bring us things like compost and assist us in workshops.”

The garden farm has also been lucky enough in that, being under the auspices of the college, they have been able to progress without the intrusion of the bureaucracy of the city council. They are also the recipient of a Wave Change prize for young social entrepreneurs.

Rebuilding Grangegorman

On the other side of the city, another urban garden has not been as fortunate. The Grangegorman Community Collective, one of Dublin’s most prominent squats, social spaces and urban gardens was last month bulldozed by a company acting on behalf of receivers. Nearly everything that the collective had built was destroyed, including a wide range of raised beds growing an assortment of vegetables, flowers and herbs. The urban garden at the Grangegorman squat was a focal point of the community living there.

Joe, a new resident since the bulldozing of the original set up, sees the garden as an obvious addition to the site: “We have a big space, we want to use it and community gardens is the best way to go. And the food is good.”

Joe sees urban gardening and squatting as going together very naturally: “I think alternative lifestyle in a way has kind of brought the two things together. People don’t really trust where their food is com-

ing from these days, so that influence combined with people not really trusting the system in general I think is why the two sort of go hand-in-hand and why the ideologies work well together.”

The urban garden, like the community’s other projects, is a collective effort and one that relies on the sharing of information, tools and expertise: “People have done little pieces here and there. There’s one individual who’s actually going to uni and doing gardening and horticulture and conser-

vation work but I think it’s all kind of patchwork knowledge.

But coming together with everybody makes it well-rounded.”

The policy at the Grangegorman garden is that food is expensive and it should be free. The food grown on site, says Joe, is all organic: “Pesticides and shit, I don’t think you should be putting that in you. I guess that’s the policy behind [the garden]: organic and free food. Whoever wants to use it should be able to use it, that’s my take on things. If

people are hungry they should come here and take what they want.”

The bulldozers that destroyed the original plant beds left mounds of soil around the community’s grounds that still contained sown vegetables and, as a result, says Joe, “when we came back kale had pretty much taken over the piles of soil. So that’s the only food we’ve got now that’s survived.” The collective are currently making planting boxes and seed tents for propagation: “We’re pretty much get-

ting in the role of things again, trying to get on top of it and trying to make it work really.

And then once we do that we’ll be harvesting lots of things.

Potatoes, carrots, everything.”

Both the NCAD and the Grangegorman gardens are focal points for social action, and both have been well received by the local community. However, whereas the NCAD project has benefited from organised funding and has certain institutional privileges, the Grangegorman Community Collective pro-

ject (and their existence in general) has been vehemently opposed by the state and big money. Dublin’s urban gardens, it would appear, are a microcosm of larger questions currently being asked in the capital about culture, wealth and who is entitled to what the city has to offer.

Photos of Grangegorman by D Joyce-Ahearne

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Comment

Trinity Ball, the night where all the worst stereotypes about TCD are found to be true page .18

Power to the people? Reinstate 48 and Irish politics Just how useful could Article 48 be to Irish politics in the here and now?

Bláithín Sheil Online comment editor

Aaron Reen Staff writer

L

OOKING AT THE maelstrom that is our current legislature, the French Third Republic comes to mind. When it was established in the late nineteenth-century, our Gallic cousins were plagued by a lack of consensus amongst the republicans and the monarchists. It was a holy mess.

They reached a compromise, however; a temporary solution to a long term problem.

They established a temporary republic, a decision that ultimately changed the political landscape of the country.

Apparently the people realised that a democratic republic was, in fact, a better deal.

This republican ideal, of a country ruled for and by the people, was just that; ideal.

The people began to realise that they shouldn’t have to pay one-tenth of their wages to a lord who already had enough money, nor should they be obliged to profess a certain religion because the lord or prince or whatever of their area said so, and that they too should have the equal chance to better themselves by the fruits of their labour. The idea of a democracy became very attractive.

However, what happens when the democracy begins to falter? Or when a country is so diverse in its political colours, that no majority can be established? Or what about a country that doesn’t even know what it wants anymore? Those who were banished in previous elections, march victoriously in the next. “Red-line” and “key” issues for voters are not reflected by the selection of elected candidates. We look set up for yet another disappointment.

Put bluntly, what is going on?

Paradox

Returning to Ireland, a rather strange paradox arose after the introduction of the Eighth Amendment in 1983, which entrenches the statutory prohibition of abortion at constitutional level. There followed a series of referenda in the 1990s that proceeded to protect the right to travel to access abortion, and the

right to information about the services available abroad.

The constitution is quite literally saying, “you can do it, just not here, thanks.” In light of the public appeal to have the 8th repealed, the fundamental inconsistency of these provisions have finally been brought to light.

If the current extensive campaign cannot push politicians to actually let the people decide for themselves on the matter, seeing as it was the people who made the initial decision all those years ago, then it is hard to see the point of democracy. The public are screaming for a choice about choice. But the government must be on our side in order to hold any sort of referendum. If they don’t agree, despite the fact that they are elected and paid to represent us, then we can kiss goodbye to the notion of change.

We celebrate the success of the Marriage Equality referendum, but this met very little tangible opposition from within. The no vote was, in political terms, an unrepresented minority.

Failure

Those on the inside are no longer on our side. We elect our parliament to represent us and our interests, but when they fail to do just this, the most we can do is wait until the next election and not vote them back in again. But for some reason we seem to vote the same people in anyway. Logic.

Moreover, you may send a TD to Leinster House with a mandate, and they may genuinely want to vouch for, but once the party whip comes into play, they are quite powerless and your worries are disregarded. The party whip is central to Irish Politics, and Article 48 may very well serve to dilute that domination.

It is frustrating to be faced with the same choice every time we go to the ballot box.

Do we vote for the new radical who took up politics post2008, and take a risk on their capabilities, or do we choose the one who has consistently done a mediocre job, nothing special, but nothing disastrous? Or maybe we should vote the bad ones back in – they said they’re sorry, so obviously they won’t do it again.

But once we vote them in, there is no accountability.

Where is the justice in that?

Reinstate 48

When presented with an election which seems to have been ineffective in terms of

forming a government, and establishment parties who appear unable to place the national interest above their own, it’s only natural to question how we do politics.

It’s equally understandable, given the centenary saturation we’re experiencing at the moment, to look to historical precedent for answers. The Reinstate 48 Campaign – a drive to see the restoration of Article 48 of the 1922 Constitution, which “provide[d] for the Initiation by the people of proposals for laws and constitutional amendments … on the petition of no less than seventy thousand voters on the register’’, is perhaps the best example of this fact.

However, to transplant a piece of legislation from the formation of the state to the present requires a basic understanding of its history – something which is lacking in some respects. The first thing to remember is that the 1922 constitution was introduced at a time of intense political discontent. The Anglo-Irish Treaty had just been negotiated and the Free State was dealt a hand by David Lloyd George that would lead to civil war. Michael Collins, who both negotiated the treaty and was chairperson of the committee tasked with drafting the constitution, could see the stresses within Irish public affairs and sought to create a document which could bring the anti-treatyites on side.

The idea was, as J. J. Lee says, to create a “republican constitution” that could quickly resolve contentious issues like partition, treaty ports and the oath of allegiance. It was not so much, to use the Reinstate 48 slogan, “Power to the people”, as it was “Keep the people together”!

Now I know Ireland in the 1920s was a bastion of progress and all, but Article 48 did not mean our ancestors were more involved or invested in the democratic process. At best they were on par with us. This much can be said because, let alone the fact that Cumann na nGaedheal enjoyed effective ownership of the Dáil (simpler times, Enda!), Article 48 was never used in practice.

There was, in fact, only one effort to bring it to bear.

This came in the wake of the 1927 election in which 44 Fianna Fáil candidates were elected. Their leader, Éamon de Valera, faced a considerable headache as he and his party had resolved not to take

their seats. They had done so on account of the oath of allegiance to the British monarch and commonwealth which all incoming TDs were required to take.

W

HEN THE DÁIL was convened on 27 June, the “Soldiers of Destiny” held firm on not taking the oath. They then staged a daring attempt to enter the debating chamber, only to find they were locked out (destiny denied, I suppose).

De Valera took some flak for his theatrics and “aware of the possible damage to Fianna Fáil”, to quote Dermot Keogh, he invoked Article 48. This led to a campaign to collect 75,000 signatures in order to remove the oath from the constitution. In response, then Taoiseach W. T. Cosgrave pulled Articles 47 (which dealt with rights of plebiscite) and 48 on grounds of protecting the national interest from subversion.

This was a genuine fear in light of Fianna Fáil’s increasing presence on the public stage, but Cosgrave must also have wanted to keep the other side out. As the Wu-Tang Clan eloquently put it, “You best protect ya neck.”

De Valera’s campaign was

not, as the Reinstate 48 website would have us believe, about “direct democracy”.

This was a rather cynical attempt by a backpedalling politician to remove one of the barriers to his party assuming the reins of power. It was not about the people assuming ownership of their political system; it was about de Valera mobilising them to affirm his command over their political system.

It is not unfair to describe de Valera’s 1927 power play as cynical. Indeed, Fianna Fáil did not, with the Long Fellow at the helm, champion Article 48 upon forming government in 1932. What’s more, when the chance came for de Valera to make an influential stamp on the constitutional domain i.e. the adoption of Bunreacht na hÉireann in 1937, he did not resurrect Articles 47 and 48. We want our maidens happy but politically disengaged, or something like that.

So those of us who are sick of the current governmental malaise and turn to Reinstate 48 for solace are presented with some historical difficulties. Article 48 was introduced with very specific circumstances in mind. They were the deep fissures emerging in the fledgling Free State and not, of course, the predic-

aments of a post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. More importantly, the principles it enshrined were never applied, not once.

Even when de Valera sought to put Article 48 into practice, he did so to get the Fianna Fáil party and not the voice of the everyday citizen into Leinster House.

This is not to discredit the Reinstate 48 movement. If you were to read Article 48 with no knowledge of its origins, you might be forgiven for thinking it belonged to the constitution of one of our much envied Scandinavian neighbours. It’s a brilliantly idealistic and, in many respects, practical expression of social democracy. In essence, we could bypass poorly acted-upon party manifestos and place the issues we want addressed on the floor of the Dáil debating chamber.

However, we cannot look to precedent to apply it. We must refashion it, if it is to be re-introduced, to suit our needs, in our time. The rosetinted glasses simply aren’t going to work.

Conclusion

Article 48 will not solve all of our problems, not least politically. We will still be at the mercy of those occupying opposition and particularly government benches. The power

to turn any petition arising from Article 48 into law will, after all, require their ratification.

However, in terms of initiating legislation, we would no longer be on the outside looking in. The business of the Dáil would be ours to dictate.

Perhaps the interests of the public would be better dealt with if, in a very direct way, we could have them included the Ceann Comhairle’s agenda.

All this would have, of course, to go hand in hand with a cultural shift in how we do politics. We need public representatives prepared to place the wellbeing of the state over that of their party’s polling figures or indeed, their political survival.

Hopefully, the re-introduction of Article 48, which has, at its most basic level, the national interest at heart, would bring about this change.

You’d have to say it’s worth a shot. It has a strong chance of succeeding.

Of course, it could fail.

Even so, we’ll have evaluated our position and attempted to move forward. And this is a positive step. Because if we simply flag issues and do not make an effort to solve them, we’re not moving forward at all.

Pinkwashing co-opts LGBTQ progress to bolster the establishment While the Yes vote was a victory for the LGBTQ community in Ireland, it is being used to entrench many other forms of oppression Rory O’Neill Staff writer

I

T IS APPROACHING a year since Ireland became the first country to legalise marriage between people of the same gender via referendum. Speaking in Dublin Castle after the result was announced, Enda Kenny declared, “All people will now have an equal future to look forward to”, while congratulating Ireland for its “pioneering leadership.”

Earlier in the campaign, he had predicted that a Yes vote would “obliterate the remaining barriers of prejudice” in this country.

Undoubtedly, the Yes vote was a victory for the LGBTQ community in Ireland and a major blow to the right-wing Catholic establishment that has oppressed so many since the foundation of the state.

However, the narrative being peddled by the establishment parties, typified by Kenny’s words, is a dangerous one. It reduces the entirety of LGBTQ oppression to a simple ballot paper and promises an end to it with the stroke of a pen. The reality is a much more stubborn, deep-rooted division in society in which the political establishment is complicit.

The point of this article is not to diminish the significance of the Yes vote, or to be churlish about any step forward that is short of full liberation. Rather it is to argue that we should not do a disservice to people who still suffer from oppression and

marginalisation on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity by talking about Ireland as a pioneer of queer rights and liberal values. Nor should we allow establishment parties and politicians with no history of standing with queers to politick their way into being perceived as champions of LGBTQ people.

Pinkwashing

The narrative about liberal Ireland constructed around the Yes vote is classic “pinkwashing” – the use of LGBTQ rights to paper over and hide uncomfortable realities.

Pinkwashing is a criticism most commonly applied to Israel in the way it very consciously and publicly uses its position on LGBTQ rights to present itself as a modern, inclusive, democratic society.

This is in spite of, and indeed purposely to combat, its perception as an apartheid state in the eyes of many who consider themselves as supporters of the Palestinian people, who are systematically oppressed and excluded by the Israeli state.

Pinkwashing obscures the reality of a society and writes the experience of oppressed people out of public discourse. Ireland may not be an apartheid state but there were elements of pinkwashing clearly identifiable during the referendum campaign.

During the month of May 2015, Ireland’s streets were covered with posters bearing slogans such as “Let’s Make Everybody Equal” and “Equality for Everybody”. We have to question the constitution of this “everybody” when asylum seekers remain

trapped in the nightmare of direct provision and Ireland’s homelessness crisis continues to spiral out of control.

The referendum campaign was an opportunity for Ireland’s centrist and right wing parties to lay claim to a hollow, formal equality which extended only to certain groups insofar as it was politically convenient for them.

Masking racism

The outgoing government, and the parties likely to constitute the next one, have no track record of treating all civilians equally. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil presided over decades of homophobic and misogynistic legislation.

These parties spent years in coalition with the Catholic Church constructing a deeply repressive ideological and

state apparatus. It is insulting, therefore, to credit the establishment parties with advancing the cause of equality when they have ruled a homophobic, racist and misogynistic state for decades.

The political establishment’s newfound concern for equality is clearly framed by whose equality is politically advantageous for them to champion. Only last week,

actor and member of the Traveller community John Connors appeared on the Late Late Show and eviscerated Ryan Tubridy for his denial of the racism that exists against Travellers in Ireland.

As recently as last December Fine Gael councillor Josepha Madigan published a leaflet in which she argued that building Traveller accommodation in south Dublin would be “a waste of valuable resources”. In 2013 Fianna Fáil Councillor Seán McEniff said that Travellers should leave in isolation from settled people. He was supported by his Fine Gael colleague Eugene Dolan who went on record as saying, “They can be sent to Spike Island for all I care.”

Anti-Traveller racism runs deep in Ireland, and for years the establishment parties have exploited it and pandered to it in local areas. In addition, the policies pursued by successive governments have done nothing to ensure that Travellers have access to decent accommodation and Travellers remain among the most marginalised communities in the state. It is risible for the liberal political and media establishment to speak of progress and equality in Ireland while we systematically exclude and oppress swathes of our people.

Continuing oppression

Illustration by Naoise Dolan

Claims of major progress in the sphere of LGBTQ equality are particularly grating to members of that community who still face oppression and exclusion on a daily basis.

Much has been made of the Transgender Recognition Bill enacted into law last year,

which grants legal recognition to gender identity based on self-declaration. The new law, for example, excludes non-binary people, intersex people and any trans people under the age of 18 from the right to self-declare their gender identity. 16 and 17 year olds can only have their trans identity legally recognised with a court order and testimony from a qualified medical practitioner. There are still no provisions at all to recognise the identities of any trans people under the age of 16 in any form.

The most obvious reply to this line of criticism is that it does a disservice to the cause for LGBTQ liberation if progress is simply met with cynicism. It goes without saying that any step forward in legal rights for the queer community is welcome. But we must be wary of self-congratulatory narratives about progress when many queer people are still being left behind.

While there are still queers abused in the streets, while there are still trans people forced to live with an incorrect legal identity, while we still send women overseas to access abortion, this is not a country to be proud of. While we allow our establishment to claim equality as part of their political legacy, we reproduce a narrative that papers over and obscures the appalling realities of inequality and oppression in Ireland.

We can only build a movement that challenges and defeats oppression when we recognise the full extent of it and how deep it runs.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Comment

15

The political passivity of the Trinity Left Deputy editor William Foley asks why, with such an actively left wing student body, is Trinity today much less acitvely political than it was in previous decades

William Foley Deputy editor

L

EON TROTSKY ONCE said of the writer Dobrolyubov that his satire would remain relevant “as long as it was considered a social merit to preach the rudiments of a cheap liberalism”. In College the dynamics of social popularity are often driven by exactly this type of posturing. Those who can calibrate most precisely the scales of political offence, and who can condemn with the most strident outrage the slightest imbalance in the weighing, will receive the most plaudits in their social sphere, the most retweets and likes, the most applause in the debating chamber. But this replacement of action with sanctified abstraction is politically useless.Theorising about what we should do is futile if we never actually do anything. And yet this is not perceived as a problem by most self-identifying leftists in College.

Trinity is a classic example of a community whose selfimage is skewed by a minority which controls the discourse and therefore controls collective self-representation. Our student body is perceived as being strikingly liberal, but in fact there is a silent majority which is moderate or even conservative in its politics and outlook. The average reader of this newspaper might be surprised to discover that this claim is true. But that’s because they have selfsorted into the vocal minority

whose liberal politics constitute the dominant ideology on campus.

Understanding why this is so entails understanding the class character of Trinity students. This university sits atop an education system in which the most important determinant of achievement is social class (see issue 5 of this year, p6). So the vast majority of students that come here will be drawn from the middle or upper classes. And so it is logical that the political interests of most Trinity students will represent their class interests. In this light, it is unsurprising then to discover that, according to polling conducted by Trinity News during the SU elections, Fine Gael is overwhelmingly the most popular party in college (see issue 6 of this year, p7). Every bourgeoisie has its liberal wing though - the Social Democrats and the Green Party are all far more popular among Trinity students than among the general population. And it is the kind of students who support them who constitute the ideologically dominant minority which we may well call “Trinity society”. It is these left-leaning types who are active in societies, who write for college media, who speak in the GMB, and who make up the SU’s class reps and bureaucracy.

Why Trinity society is made up of the more liberal elements of the middle and upper class, and not their more conservative counterparts is a more difficult question. Perhaps rightwing students are simply content to get their degrees and get their jobs without feeling the need to engage in political critique, confident of their majority status and the security of their interests in Irish society as a whole.

Self-described and anarchists

socialists

Still, you don’t choose who you are born to: it’s not where you are coming from but where you’re going that matters. And there are many self-described socialists, anarchists, and Marxists in Trinity. I commend all of them for swimming against

the current and their class conditioning. But because of their circumstances, this minority within a minority, while avowedly left of centre, are still essentially liberal in their practice. These student are cut off from daily interaction with the working class, adrift in a sea of middle class economic interests, embedded in a campus culture wholly infiltrated by the corporate world, and served by a politically apathetic SU (the current and outgoing president being the brilliant exception in this regard).

Thus, even if they are socialist or anarchist by allegiance, they are not engaged in the kind of concrete action which practically rather than abstractly seeks to disrupt the conventions, and even the laws, of Irish capitalism, nor do they see the importance of being involved in this way. In fact, they are often likely to recoil at the prospect of extraparliamentary activity. In other words. these leftists are in practice liberals, even if they are in theory more radical than the majority within Trinity society.

For most leftists stuck in this position, their passivity is understandable, especially in the context of the historically weak Irish left.

But in an important minority of cases, such liberalism in practice is actually a product of pernicious snobbery and political insecurity. Some self-described socialists and anarchists confine themselves almost entirely to the policing of language, and the promulgation within all the institutions of Trinity society of a brand of political correctness imported wholesale via the internet from America. Now political correctness is, in fact, a good thing and it has limited but important benefits for traditionally oppressed groups. The celebration of difference and the forthright condemnation of bigoted language and behaviour has made Trinity a much safer space for discriminatedagainst minorities than Irish society at large. But political correctness is also an essentially liberal project: it fails to address the actual structural causes of inequality and

discrimination in capitalist society. At best it ameliorates them by covering them up It is revealing that this brand of leftist never talks about class. This is because when we have anything more than a superficial discussion about class it becomes clear that the problems that we face in our society require much more than simply cleaning up our language. It is objectively true that most people in our society will earn drastically less than a small wealthy elite because of the family they were born into.

It is a fact that most will have to submit to the undemocratic, and often authoritarian, employer-employee relationship. That Trinity students generally won’t experience poverty, and will be spared the worst of the market’s autocracy, explains the Trinity left’s solipsistic tendency towards the substitution of the subjective for the objective.

This tendency is understandable when the more oppressive aspects of class society impress themselves only lightly on your lived experience. But the implicit prescription to eschew practical politics and tend to our own garden, pruning problematic terms and practices from our vocabulary and behaviour, amounts to nothing less than an abandonment of politics.

Need for connection to the working class

Without action, political talk is just pretension. Socialist politics needs to be connected to real movements of oppressed people in general and to the social majority in society: the working class.

Many Trinity liberals are dismissive of the water charges campaign, but this aloof attitude is a product of isolation from the struggles of this social majority. Any socialist who has gone door-to-door in a housing estate will know the strong opposition most ordinary households feel towards the charges. They would realise too the importance of building a campaign against the water charges, not only because it is a regressive austerity tax, but also because it offers the opportunity to develop the basis for a mass

Life as an Irish Traveller in Trinity Patrick McDonagh Contributing writer

M

Y OWN LIFE as a Traveller is not perhaps a typical one. I qualify that statement, as there is no such thing as a typical life for an Irish Traveller, considering how diverse the group actually is. I, personally, grew up in a house and attended primary and secondary school and in that sense would be indistinguishable from most non-travellers. However, in that sense alone I differed a great deal from my family.

My grandparents are barely literate, my parents have no educational qualifications and I am the only one of my siblings to complete A-levels.

In another way, I differed a great deal to many of the people I went to school with.

Strangely, for someone in Northern Ireland, I did not readily identify with either the Nationalist or Unionist Community; rather, I was first-most a Traveller and all else second.

Some people would find it odd, that for someone who has lived in a house for all his life, that I would readily identify as an Irish Traveller, a phrase that by definition would imply a nomadic existence. This speaks, however, of a misunderstanding, as being a Traveller is being part of a separate ethnic group that one has to be born into. It relates to being part of a large extended family with cultural ideas often different from the general population. Whether you live in a house or trailer is immaterial.

Alienation

My first day in Trinity Halls, at the beginning of first year, was a day which vividly echoes in my mind a year and a half later. Roughly half an hour after I was dropped off, two of the new flatmates began to discuss how awful it would be to have a Traveller as a flatmate, unaware that one was sitting right beside

them. One of them dropped out some days later. The other found out I was one and apologised, and we became friends afterwards.

It was a tacit remainder all the same of the low opinion of my background that is held by many, though thankfully not all, of the settled community. Though indicative perhaps of a generalisation, it is one that had been reinforced by reading or watching any media depiction of Irish Travellers, which are often offensive and ill-informed.

Coming to Trinity, I had a fear I would be ostracised because of my background. This fear was accentuated by a determination on my part not to lie about my background if it ever came up, and a realisation of how generally unpopular Irish Travellers are in Ireland.

With this underlying fear, Trinity in some ways confirmed my views. On a regular basis as I walk through the arts block I overhear negative comments on the topic of Travellers. Normally these comments would refer to “Gypsies” or “Knackers”, and their apparent involvement in crimes such as stealing. On numerous occasions since coming to Trinity I have heard people use those words as a jokey insult to their friends for taking something, most memorably in the living room of the apartment I was living in at Halls.

On Facebook, following a horrible and vicious knife attack on a security guard at the Milltown Luas stop, one individual decided to inform the Halls page that it was most certainly these Gypsy lads who were apparently always there. Needless to say, his accusation was groundless. He apologised on Facebook and made a donation to Pavee Point after I decided to report the matter to College.

My decision to report the matter was ultimately due to a frustration at my experiences to that point. Settled people claim they often feel alienated by the Travelling People; rarely do they admit that the feeling can run both

working class movement, which should be the goal of all socialists. A boycott of the charge, and the protests, street meetings, and disruption of meter installations that go along with it, is crucial for developing solidarity, boosting confidence and self-belief, and instilling the experience of organisation and a tradition of resistance.

As such, any leftist who is properly orientated towards genuine struggle would realise the significance of the water charges campaign. Only someone who was entirely abstracted from real political movements could think that the mere trading of liberal platitudes serves a purpose.

Such political quiescence is, however, a relatively new phenomenon in Trinity. There is a long history of genuine socialist activity on this campus. And the past few years have have seen the rise of the radical left in Ireland in the form of the AAA/ PBPA and other anti-austerity groups. Some students will react to this in a genuine way and be inspired into action.

Others will need to figure out if they hold their own views merely for the sake of display, or whether the type of political purity which they fetishise is a more worthy target of the squawky condemnation that they specialise in than the real movements which they criticise.

Ultimately, talking about political change is pointless without actually doing anything about it. At best the genre of politics pursued by most on the Trinity left has limited and diminishing benefits. At worst, in a minority of cases, it is hypocritical and off-putting, and a testament to the type of social benefits to be derived in this college from political pretension.

There can be no politics without practical action. As Karl Marx said, the point is not just to interpret the world, but to change it.

“

Without action, political talk is just pretension.

Socialist politics needs to be connected to real movements of oppressed people in general and to the social majority in society: the working class. Many Trinity liberals are dismissive of the water charges campaign, but this aloof attitude is a product of isolation from the struggles of this social majority. Any socialist who has gone door-to-door in a housing estate will know the strong opposition most ordinary households feel towards the charges.

Patrick McDonagh writes about his Trinity experience as a member of the travelling community. ways.

Demonisation

Now I will be the first to admit that some Irish Travellers do in fact deserve and earn the opprobrium of society as a whole. There is a criminal element within the community – but it is a small group. Reports by several Garda Commissioners in the Republic have often shown that even in areas with large Travelling populations, they do not in fact commit most of the crimes.

From my perspective as Traveller, the vast majority of all crime, minor or serious, is carried out by non-Travellers.

Yet I don’t assume that every Settled person I meet is going to rob or murder me. As with Settled people, the vast majority of Travellers are not involved in criminal activity, but the actions of those who are involved are used to tarnish the whole community.

This perception makes it difficult sometimes to be a Traveller in Ireland, and often it is infuriating.

However it must be said, I have had positive experiences as well. Most of my friends are aware of my background, and this hasn’t affected our friendships in the slightest way. Trinity itself has been very supportive as well towards me, treating me as an ethnic minority.

The latter point must be emphasised as in Northern Ireland, where I am from, I am an ethnic minority, yet whenever I cross an invisible line between Tyrone and Monaghan I magically transform into a social group member. Though the distinction may not seem important to some, it is important all the same. Personally I see myself as being part as an ethnic minority. One cannot become or stop being a Traveller; you are born one.

Furthermore, it allows legal protection, which is sadly normally missing in the South of Ireland. Too often there are reports of politicians promising Travellerfree areas to electorates and the infamous case of the Gar-

da placing young Traveller children on the Pulse system.

Overcoming prejudice

Given this, I have still felt comfortable expressing my identity within Trinity. At the end of last term, I gave a short talk with a fellow Traveller in college on our experiences and it was well received by those present.

On the whole, my experiences have been mixed. Positive in that those who know me have never made an issue of my background and occasionally have shown some interest in it and asked me questions. It has never hindered my work. On the contrary, it acts as a sort of motivation to do better. It’s not so much to prove Travellers can be intelligent, it’s not that at all; rather, it’s a desire to be the best I can and to overcome prejudice.

There has also been the negative side; it is not a pleasant to overhear racist comments on the matter. In Irish society, it is often still seen as acceptable to make those kind of comments without rebuke. It can be frustrating to deal with and has on occasion left me feeling alienated from my fellow students.

My aim in writing this article was to improve awareness.

Most people are unaware that there are Irish Travellers in Trinity and many don’t believe that they could get in.

I for one came in through direct entry, yet others have came in as mature students or through access programs.

Currently there are four students in college who identify openly as Irish Travellers. It may be higher as some Travellers may not have felt comfortably to identify as such due to public perceptions of us.

Settled people should recognise that Travellers are not a homogeneous group with identical views, or all part of the same family, but accept that Travellers do see themselves differently from the main population. Being a Traveller is not a lifestyle choice but rather an integral part of our identity.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Comment

16

The fashion issue: on the “incompatibility” of Islam People who do not understand belief systems that are different to their own are the problem.

Stacey Wrenn Contributing writer

“I

SLAM IS I N C O M PA T I B L E with Western values,” “They don’t even dress like us, we cannot expect them to settle into our society.” The wearing of the hijab, the burqa, and other items of clothing traditionally associated with Islam has become an increasingly contentious talking point amongst those who wish to criticise the religion.

Of course these items are not what they really have a problem with, for if someone’s dress sense was considered a valid reason to exclude them and others like them from our society, then all the goths in Ireland would have been ghettoised years ago. Their real problem is that Islam as a religion has a long history and unique principles that would require will, patience, and understanding to learn about – qualities that the far right are not renowned for having.

But this is not a perception solely confined to the farright movements we see growing in Central Europe; the idea of “dressing modestly” as is prescribed in the Qu’ran is now a divider amongst the left everywhere.

Many of the same women who campaign for repealing the eight amendment, for the woman’s right to choose, ignore the fact that the wearing of the hijab is often a choice – a choice of deep spiritual meaning and comfort. Yes, in certain regimes women are obligated to cover themselves, and we should not condone the enforcement of beliefs on anyone – but is this not what we are doing in Europe when we ban the hijab? Are we not enforcing our own beliefs and personal prejudices on women when we see our views as less encumbering?

Hijabi fashion

After attending the Muslim Student Association’s World Hijab Day talk on 9 February, I realised that many of the conventional views on the wearing of the hijab are misconceptions (imagine how much you can learn by simply listening to someone who knows what they are talking about!)

There is the media-driven

fear that it is about hiding the woman from the public eye, that she is seen as a purely sexual object that will distract men from being devout – but by assuming that this is the one true reason, you yourself are sexually objectifying her.

One student at the talk said she wore it as it made her feel closer to Allah, that she found it comforting, the exact opposite to what people say her beliefs are.

Another argument is that it is a backwards tradition that doesn’t fit into modern society. Hulya Aslan and her huge online presence would beg to differ. Editor of the Turkish hijabi fashion magazine lâ, she wants to prove to both Muslims and non-Muslims that Islam and fashion are compatible, that they always have been and will continue to be so in this digital age.

With over 30,000 readers a month, Âlâ is normalising the wearing of the headscarf in public in a country with a very jagged history of secularisation. Women were banned from wearing the hijab and other coverings when the Turkish state was founded in 1923. Restrictions only tightened in the 1990s, with a female member of office being prevented from taking her pledge in 1999 for choosing to wear a headscarf.

This was what we are beginning to see in Europe with the suggested ban in public buildings in the United Kingdom and the current ban on all coverings in France.

Since the election of the AKP party (Justice and Development Party, whose founder Erdoğan has been president since 2014) in 2002, young Muslim women in Turkey have been allowed to follow their faith and display it in public spaces after years of bans and repression.

The followers of this new fashion are typically middle class, as this freedom of religious expression opened up pathways to careers in industry and service that they were previously prevented from entering due to discrimination, and they have the wealth and the confidence to be creative with their style.

That is not to say that all Muslim women agree with these developments – some believe it detracts from the religious reasons for dress codes, but their main problem appears to be the overwhelming issue of consumerism. It is so intrinsic

to our everyday lives that we do not notice how invasive the fashion industry can truly be, and perhaps that is why the media is so adamant on condemning Islamic dress: it eats away at their life-source, advertising.

There is one thing that the forgotten majority agree on, however: they do not find the covering of their hair oppressive. To them it is the same as simply wearing a pair of shoes, or a top.

Western culture

We assume, often haphazardly, that “Western culture” and “Western ideals” (which themselves cannot exist as there are not enough unifying factors to suggest so) are the best option.

But are they? Is a culture that has but a handful of female leaders the feminist ideal? Is a culture where hate speech has become synonymous with free speech really what those who came before fought for? The Western world can be just as oppressive if not more so at times than is suggested of the Middle East, with concerns around LGBTQ+ rights and a new wave of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe on a high.

That’s not to mention the high, incredibly specific expectations set for young girls; to be curvy but have a waist so small that extra holes have to be put in your belt, to be tall but still wear heels and walk flawlessly in them, to have an oval face and perfectly high and symmetrical cheekbones even if it means drawing them on.

Why do we not criticise female students in the Arts block for hiding themselves behind oversized jumpers?

Why don’t we tell them that they don’t need to dress that way and they should liberate themselves from such restrictions? The easy answer is, anything can be deemed liberating nowadays if a Westerner does it. Every performance by Beyoncé is hailed as a step forward, while exactly what we are stepping towards remains a mystery.

Slacktivism

There is a habit amongst anti-hijabis at the moment of taking photos from Iran prerevolution, showing women hardly distinguishable from an American prom queen, and posting them on Facebook, lamenting these days of freedom with proclamations such as “Don’t forget what

you had! Liberation is an option!”

There is nothing liberating about having one style of dress taken from you and another being imposed in its place. A Westernised Cultural Revolution isn’t all that different. The hypocrisy is blatant and yet few seem to

fully realise it.

The poor turnout, no more than two dozen in total, at MSA’s World Hijab Day talk shows that the atmosphere of so-called activism in Trinity couldn’t be further away from the truth. It is clear that the future leaders and budding UN Ambassadors would

rather spend their free time stealing a few glasses of free wine at a joke debating event.

The head covering is not the problem, Islamic literature and its history is not the problem. People are. People who do not understand belief systems that are different to their own are the problem.

Why the Yes to USI camapign lost in UCD Former auditor of the L&H Eoin MacLachlan outlines why UCD students chose to remain disaffiliated from the Union of Students in Ireland.

Eoin MacLachlan Contributing writer

T

HE REJECTION OF USI by UCD students was primarily due to a rushed and ineffective Yes to USI campaign, a product of hubris and ineptitude. Announced only two weeks prior to the UCDSU elections, they were arrogant in thinking that a fortnight was a sufficient period of time for them to convince thousands of students to part with their money, and they went about it in a disorganised manner.

Almost three in four UCD voters (74%) decided to remain outside the national union.

The campaign to rejoin USI took place side by side with the lacklustre SU election season, where only one of the sabbatical positions, Campaigns & Communications, was contested.

Poor communication of information, disorganisation and shortsightedness doomed the Yes side to an embarrassing result. The process to call a referendum in UCD requires some 900 signatures. The Yes side did not even manage to match their vote on the day with that initial signature requirement.

Despite the trouncing at the polls, the campaign to reaffiliate had an important

strategic advantage in this contest. It was thought that the reaffiliation referendum wouldn’t take place until next year, as UCDSU are required to hold a referendum on the issue every four years.

Instead, some students took it upon themselves to gather the necessary signatures to initiate the referendum process early.

At the time of announcement, there was no campaign apparatus to lobby students to remain outside USI. Given this, one would assume that No to USI would have been hampered by the need to play catch up with the efforts of the opposing side. This seemed to be no impediment to their work, with a group of students quickly coming together to deny Yes to USI the result they wanted. While no formal structure seems to have evolved in the No camp, a number of prominent students were involved, such as Megan Fanning (former UCDSU presidential candidate and founder of the UCD Economics Society) and Fionnán Long (former treasurer of UCD’s Law Society).

Rushed campaign

The primary mistake of Yes to USI was the rushed nature of the campaign. They were accused by the No camp of bypassing UCDSU and its elected representatives. The Yes side have argued that they were simply following the procedures required to initiate a referendum.

Nonetheless, the sudden

emergence of the campaign, with only two weeks to go, left them vulnerable to claims that the operation was a power grab, taking advantage of the unpreparedness of their opposition.

I believe this didn’t sit well with many students, who were unhappy at the prospect of having a referendum unfairly foisted upon them.

Irrespective of the merits of joining, many students’ reaction was to automatically vote no in retaliation to what felt like manipulation.

The rushed nature of the campaign had further negative implications for Yes to USI. It made it much more difficult to communicate the advantages that they claimed USI offers. It was said that UCD is unable to contribute to national policy development, with bodies such as the HEA or SUSI. No to USI countered these claims with references to initiatives like the recent collaboration between the UCD, TCD and DIT student unions on the “What’s in the Pill?” campaign. This project saw the three unions and the Ana Liffey Drug Project work together on the issue of harm reduction from drugs.

No to USI also highlighted the successful voter registration drive by the UCDSU last year for the Same Sex Marriage Referendum, alleging that it registered a higher proportion of the students in UCD than USI managed across their constituent bodies. This proved to be untrue, sparking claims of misrepresentations and falsehoods from USI,

which continue to this week, with USI President Kevin Donoghue stating that the No side “essentially made up” a number of figures.

While No to USI rescinded this particular claim, the two sides bickered over a number of others, such as the progress made on USI reforms which were promised three years ago following UCD’s disaffiliation.

Descent into spats

I am uncertain which side was correct about each point. However, the No to USI Facebook page descended into spats between representatives from each side, including a number of elected USI officials. This spectacle confirmed to many students that they hadn’t the necessary information to make a decision. While both campaigns came across poorly from the exchanges, it fed into another No to USI claim that USI officials were illegitimately intervening in the process. The UCDSU’s rules prevent sitting UCD sabbatical officers and outside officials from taking part in the process.

Yes to USI impaired their own ability to explain the more subtle policy work they do on a national level with their unexpected campaign.

A longer run-in period would have allowed them to articulate the work they do on a daily basis. This strategic blunder allowed them to be characterised as ineffective.

Without time to make students aware of the work they do, No to USI were

“

The perennial problem of apathy in relation to student politics has been especially acute.

Yes to USI needed to excite students and engage them with the benefits USI has to offer.

Instead, they rushed through a referendum, bickered online and failed to provide reasons to vote Yes in a process which felt like an opportunistic power grab.

able to point to USI’s lack of presence in the national debate in the lead up to the election to call for lower fees for students. The relentless rise of fees over the last number of years is no doubt a function of the economic decline in Ireland, but it was easily portrayed as being assisted by the ineptness of USI. It was Yes to USI who needed the time to communicate the benefits they bring, and they gave themselves the absolute minimum time possible to do that, only two weeks.

Yes to USI were thus doubly hurt on the issue of time. They were unable to have the more nuanced debate they needed and were cast as undemocratic and opportunistic. No to USI were able to point to a number of eye-catching issues, such as the financial contribution UCD students would have to make to the national union. As Ireland’s largest university, the financial contribution required for USI, between student fees and the cost of sending a delegation to USI Congress, is north of ¤100,000. This was an accessible argument, tangible in a manner in which the vague claims of Yes to USI simply weren’t.

In a rushed campaign with little time for detail, the ambiguous benefit of a seat at the table in national policy formation loses out to a striking financial cost.

This was one of the primary considerations in the campaign to leave three years ago, when I was a first year

student, and it remained so this time.

Student apathy

This year has not been a good one for UCDSU. It began with the controversial election of Marcus O’Halloran as SU President, following revelations concerning his Facebook activity. He had liked a page, the content of which would conservatively be called sexist.

The recent campaign season has been dull, with only one position contested, that of Campaigns & Communications.

For this reason, the perennial problem of apathy in relation to student politics has been especially acute.

Yes to USI needed to excite students and engage them with the benefits USI has to offer. Instead, they rushed through a referendum, bickered online and failed to provide reasons to vote Yes in a process which felt like an opportunistic power grab.

Additionally, while I say this anecdotally, their organisation felt light on the ground in comparison to the No to USI team, who had far less time to prepare.

Unsurprisingly, the referendum was an embarrassing rout with USI and Yes to USI unable to do anything but claim that mistruths were told and that it was unfair. At best this failure may serve as a blueprint on how not to approach this process again in a number of years.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Comment

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Why I won’t be celebrating the Easter Rising Focusing on the Easter Rising gives us a blinkered view of history and betrays the unfinished cause of social revolution.

Caoimhe Brennan Staff writer

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AM NOT against the celebration of the Rising, as it certainly was an important event in our history. I am, however, against how the Rising is being celebrated. It, ultimately, was a small event, involving no more than 1,500 people.

It did not change the living conditions of Irish people, and it did not move Ireland towards independence, the first being a key part of a rebellion.

Where is my TV drama about the land war, where Irish people finally won the right to the land they were farming on? Where were the countrywide celebrations during the lockout, when Irish workers stood up against their exploitation and demanded equality?

The focus on the Rising could be because it cemented the power of the upper middle class in a free Ireland.

It marked the turning point of an Irish nationalism that, unlike home rule, made republican Ireland a Catholic state with Catholic values.

Those that may have supported home rule and been Protestant were left a minority. Women, who were marked as equal citizens under the proclamation, still could not have equal rights to their children until 1964.

Marital rape was not defined as a crime until 1990.

Even to the present day, the state ignores survivors of symphysiotomy, a practice that was preferred in Ireland to a Caesarean section due to religious ideology and

involved girls as young as 14 having their pelvis severed.

The UN found this practice to be torture: cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Patients were operated on without their consent. The state still refuses to recognise these women, who live with physically and mental complications to this day.

The records are, against the order of an EU court, due to be shredded this week.

As with any chapter in history, when reflecting and celebrating it from a modern perspective, it is important to remember that it is written from the winners’ perspective, and this perspective is not always true to life. The Easter Rising centenary is being very publicly celebrated as the turning point for Irish independence. The Easter Rising was not, in fact the turning point for Irish Independence, and is something that we, as a nation, need to examine closely instead of romanticise.

The Rising certainly changed the course of history for our country, but not in a positive way.

A key aspect of any revolution (and the Rising was a single, wasteful and bloody moment in our struggle for independence) is the social revolution that comes with it. The Rising was used rather maliciously to change public opinion, at a huge cost, and not to change the structure of society. The Irish Republican Army was created from this failed Rising.

Irish Independence was won after the War of Independence, and became law when the Anglo Irish Treaty was signed. The War of Independence was the key event that pushed Britain to release Ireland.

The guerrilla warfare tactics

used by the IRA in the war of independence involved content by the Irish as a whole to support these tactics. IRA gunmen were housed and fed by the common people, they were supported by their communities, and in that way the Irish people as a majority gave consent for what was unfolding.

Romanticising

The Anglo-Irish treaty was a surrender, not a treaty. How could Irish solicitors expect to compete at a negotiation table with Lloyd George, the man who had just emerged the victor of World War I and had just negotiated, in the international theatre, the Versailles Treaty, ending a war with the most powerful countries of the time?

The Irish, in comparison, were split in two by divided loyalties to Eamon de Valera (who declined to attend, yet gave those that did signature power). If Ireland had not signed the treaty, Lloyd George would have invaded Ireland (with a highly trained, combat experienced army) by twelve o’clock the next day. The IRA had enough ammunition to last for two more weeks at best. There was no decision to be made.

The social issues faced

by Ireland in the 20th century, inflicted on our most vulnerable, are what we should be reflecting on, not mourning an imagined “revolution” of “poets and scholars”. These issues were directly as a result of the power change in Ireland after the Rising.

It is also important to remember that the Rising was the beginning of a new era of Irish violence, an era that is still alive today with the continuity IRA and that bred a whole era a terrorism.

This is where romanticising what happened is dangerous, not because it might spark a whole new era of the IRA (I think the likelihood of this is quite slim) but because it might lead us to forget the past that is unpleasant to remember. This part of the past is as much ours as the glorious and it is our duty to remember it.

The Rising was not a revolution. A revolution is

for the people and of the people, and the Rising was a conspiracy. The proclamation of independence was entirely created by the seven signatories. It was never discussed by the IRB, the volunteers or the citizens’ army and most knew nothing about it until it was read out.

While it certainly was a progressive doctrine for its time, it was actually much less so than the IRB Proclamation of 1867 which promised a republic with “absolute liberty of conscience and the complete separation of separation of church and state”. This is a direct contrast to the strong catholic identity of 1916 republicans, an identity that then eventually lead to the acknowledgement of the “special relationship” between church and state in our constitution.

T

HE PEOPLE WHO fought and died in the Rising were a small minority of a larger society that was accepting of the peaceful and political tactics of the home rule party, who to this point had been the largest political movement towards independence. There were Irish deaths on both sides of the conflict, and this is something that we need to address. Ireland is excellent at being blind and deaf to the parts of history we would

“

The social issues faced by Ireland in the 20th century, inflicted on our most vulnerable, are what we should be reflecting on, not mourning an imagined “revolution” of “poets and scholars” rather not remember.

A romantic and false view of the Rising is both historically inaccurate and dangerous, and the true path of an Irish revolution that lasted much longer, and was what we should really be celebrating as Irish history.

Forgotten struggles

Why is such reverence held for the Rising when events such as the Dublin Lockout actually effected British will to keep ahold of Ireland, and involved many more people?

The Easter Rising as the birth of a nation is an attractive narrative. It allows the story to be told in a clean way – Sinn Fein’s landslide victory in 1918, the war of

windependence where a small nation valiantly fought for their freedom, and the formation of the free state, with a slight blip with the civil war.

In celebrating the Rising as a single event, and not a small event in a larger struggle, a picture is painted of Ireland where the people, cowed and stupid, don’t fight for independence and rather go along with British Rule, laugh at Pearse reading the proclamation, and suddenly turn the other way after the Rising leaders are killed.

The Irish had been fighting for independence long before this. Home Rule, championed by Parnell, who believed strictly in peaceful and political means (although he did allude to supporting dissident violence when it benefited him). Parnell brought the issue of Home Rule into British Politics for the first time in a serious sense in 1885-1886, and it was due to come into legislation a year after the first world war broke out, when it was put on hold indefinitely.

Home Rule would have given Ireland a parliament, and seats would still be held

by Irish MPs. The whole island of Ireland would remain together, or at worst the north would contain 4 counties, which would ensure economic collapse and later absorption into Ireland.

Ireland’s independence would be in line with Canada, as a guarantee that Britain could not exert any more control over Ireland’s parliament despite the small distance between them. Eventually, Ireland would receive full independence from Britain.

Ireland had been fighting for its independence since British rule abolished the parliament in Dublin and long before. Ireland had also been fighting for social justice, and the Dublin Lockout, organised by James Connolly was a workers’ revolution in a city (and indeed country) that had the worst slums in Europe, the worst poverty and a working poor that were completely expendable.

The Rising did not concern itself with the social problems in Ireland, and James Connolly, who was famously executed while tied to a chair as he was so wounded, only joined the Irish Citizens’ Army to those revolting as he feared the social aspect of the revolution was not being dealt with.

Blood sacrifice is an important theme that appears in the Rising, and one of the more controversial sides to Patrick Pearse. It is hard to ignore the fact that Easter week was very deliberately chosen as the date for the Rising, with an equation of the patriot with Christ in Pearse’s writings.

Even before their defeat, the Rising was being called a sacrifice rather than a defeat.

In the proclamation itself Pearse talks about how the “children” of the nation must be prepared to “sacrifice themselves for the common good”.

Fundamentalism

It is much discussed whether those that planned

the Rising thought it could actually be a success. It is hard to imagine that the leaders would deliberately lead their men to a certain death, but they must have understood the superiority of the British Military.

It is quite clear that they understood the odds of success, and also understood how powerful a symbol holding the Rising on Easter Monday would be. If the Germans had appeared in support, it is likely that the outcome would have been quite different, and maybe the social aspects of the Rising would have occurred.

It is also quite clear that the formation of free Ireland would have been quite different, and so too perhaps our loyalties in the second world war.

Holding the Rising during Easter would draw an incredible parallel between the sacrifice of the men who took place and the rebirth of Irish nationalism stronger and purer then before. It would inspire a type of nationalism that could be justified on behalf of the Irish people without it being their collective wish. This blood sacrifice allows for fundamentalism in Irish nations that is potent for terrorism. It gives people permission to act against the collective wish of a society to “sacrifice themselves” for a greater good that they perceive, but that may not actually be the greater good.

When I look back at Irish history in the 20th century, it is impossible to ignore the awful things that occurred such as symphysiotomy, the Magdalen laundries, the covered up abuse of the Catholic church, the children’s homes, the mass grave in a septic tank, the banking crisis and the criminals that got away with it.

I do not believe the Rising directly caused this, as much as I do not believe the Rising caused independence; both of these statements would be untrue. However, the Rising was the beginning of an Ireland that valued the upper middle class above all else, that valued the power of the Catholic church above all else. It was a Rising without social revolution and it achieved nothing for the people that needed help the most.

The Rising was a single event. It certainly inspired people to fight in the war of independence, but these people were inspired to fight anyway; they had been waiting for the right moment for hundreds of years, and they most certainly would have gone ahead without the Rising having taken place.

The real tangible step in Irish independence was the success of home rule, and how it almost occurred. The next was the landslide win by Sinn Féin and the creation of the Dáil.

I do believe the Rising needs to be celebrated, but it also needs to be examined and placed in context. I am proud to be Irish, and I am proud of what my people overcame against great adversity. But I am not proud of the Rising.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Comment

18

Trinity Ball, the night where all college stereotypes hold true It may be a fun night, but Trinity Ball is an overpriced mess with an unheard-of line-up, writes Sophie Donnelly Sophie Donnelly Staff writer

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“Elite” universities have a narrow vision of the world Many “elite” institutions recruit from a narrow range of class backgrounds and give students a blinkered perspective on their future prospects, argues Alice Whelan.

Alice Whelan Contributing editor

U

N I V E R S I T Y LEAGUE TABLES which are published by many major newspapers, or conducted by specific research bodies, give us an insight into what universities might be seen as “elite”. I was very privileged, and worked very hard, to be in a position to accept a place at the London School of Economics where I subsequently spent a year studying. The LSE would be considered in the category of “elite” by many and consistently ranks in the top ten in the world for many subjects.

My decision to leave was incredibly difficult but I, as did an unhealthy proportion of my peers, found the atmosphere stifling. I was very lucky to have the option to leave, as many students (particularly international ones) remain due to financial pressure, or the fact that many people ask incredulously “Why would you leave?”

After all, elite universities like the LSE hand you a Curriculum Vitae that will open all the career opportunities in the world to make as much money as you want. They give you an education that is “research driven”, teaching you “critical thinking” that will have employers courting you in droves. So why are students there so miserable?

By the end of my time there I was quite desensitised to people having nervous breakdowns or popping caffeine pills, and the many, many people around me who were on antidepressants or selfmedicating with substances.

Of the people I knew, they attributed their depression to the environment of the university that left us with no room to breathe.

Who does this system serve best, the students or the profits and rankings of the University? What kind of graduates does this system produce, who then are in huge positions of power in the legal, economic and political sectors predominantly?

Important outcomes

Of course, students everywhere face similar challenges, but elite universities have worryingly high levels of anxiety, perfectionism and depression. Many believe that it is not the case that universities have a responsibility to create a comfortable and more relaxed environment, but I certainly do not believe that the strain placed on students is conducive to producing well-rounded, empathetic and self assured individuals.

Rather, the pressure or narrow academic focus of these universities might lean towards turning these already high-achieving school leavers

into highly strung, risk averse graduates, who have spent probably a large amount of their formative years in the elite bubble.

I believed that a degree from an elite university would help me to help other people in better ways. William Deresiewicz, author of “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life” and former Yale professor, states in his New Republic article “Don’t send Your Kid to the Ivy League” that “our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious timid and lost with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose’,.

As I witnessed, “look behind the seamless well adjustment, and what you find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety and depression.”

This might paint quite a damning picture of what students at elite universities are like. I met many talented, kind, ambitious and inspiring people in my time there, and I continue to be inspired by such students at Trinity.

Elite universities have access to the best pool of academically capable students in the world, the cream of the crop, and they are able through rigorous admissions processes to select their chosen array of students. It is unsurprising that these people wish to achieve highly and have successful careers. Deresiewicz also writes that the “irony is that elite students are told they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing the same few career paths.”

Is our society best-placed funnelling the top tier of academically capable students into largely finance, legal, or top paying technology jobs? The focus at LSE was on the finance sector, with many students seeking a career in investment banking.

There were constant banking “networking” events and a huge presence of the banks on campus in terms of promotion drives, and some students’ studies were being funded by banks such as Goldman Sachs.

As a student of Anthropology and Law even I was advised not to worry by the careers department: there were anthropology graduates working at Goldman. I attended countless careers and networking events at the LSE, which gradually made me feel like I would be stupid to want to work in the NGO sector or social policy. These jobs were sneered at by some of my peers, because as a graduate of an elite university, the primary expectation is that you will earn a lot of money in a top job and this is what success is, that is how maximum output is reached.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that many capable graduates do choose the se-

curity of the concrete internships and vacation schemes of top commercial law firms and banks over the often unpaid and unpredictable sector of more social-developmentorientated positions. The university education then becomes little more than a training ground for such positions of power, leaving less room for the “critical thinking skills” students are taught to be put into practice in sectors where they might well be needed. Instead, many of the top graduates simply go into the top-paying, most secure jobs in similar sectors.

Class

It is probably going to surprise precisely no-one when I say that most of the students at elite universities are from middle to upper class backgrounds. This is also an issue at Trinity which has the lowest number of students in receipt of student grants of any college in Ireland.

Something which I believe exacerbates income and class gaps in elite universities in the UK is the personal statement system, and the similar system in the US where your school and extracurriculars are revealed. It is no longer enough to be academically driven, you must also demonstrate achievements in other areas. Your hobbies, awards and work experience must make up a statement to wow the admissions team. It is difficult for students from lower income brackets to afford to do impressive extra-curricular activities or obtain work placements, and many of the fee-paying schools in England offer far more assistance to students in writing the personal statement.

There are some benefits to the personal statement in that it requires one to be able to articulate interest in the subject, but I believe greater class anonymity is warranted.

Ross Douthat, in his article in the New York Times, writes that this “holistic” approach to admissions has two consequences for the US. “It enforces what looks suspiciously like de facto discrimination against Asian applicants with high SAT scores, while disadvantaging talented kids — often white and working class and geographically dispersed — who don’t grow up in elite enclaves with parents and friends who understand the system. The result is an upper class that looks superficially like America, but mostly reproduces the previous generation’s elite.”

At the LSE I was suddenly surrounded by incredibly wealthy people from all around the world. As someone who went to a community school, I found this quite a culture shock initially. I did not have a problem integrating, but it saddens me that the opportunities and resources at an elite universities fingertips are granted to such a narrow section of society.

It is also troubling that many of these people will never have any need to mix with anyone from lower class brackets. How could they then possibly hope to relate to the desires and needs of that class, with they are paradoxically told they should do in the liberal educational framework they are operating within?

W

E CONDUCTED A social research project in one of our modules, specifically examining whether the mix of students at LSE could be described as a “cosmopolitan” community in terms of the diverse nationalities. What we found was that it was akin to what Steven Vertovec and Robert Cohen (2002) have termed an “elite project”. Yes, there are students from many nationalities and ethnicities, but they are products of similar education systems, and the vast majority the children of the elite, making the environments of these universities very homogenous as opposed to being “melting pots” or hotbeds of conflicting ideologies.

This is perhaps counterproductive to the kind of innovation we need in many sectors if we want lawyers, politicians and social policies that don’t merely reflect the dominant ideology and work to preserve the position of the upper class.

My experiences were mixed, and I took the best crack at that year that I could.

I was active in societies, mentored prospective law students from lower-income backgrounds, did legal work experience, and partied hard.

The motto of the LSE students union was “Work Hard, Play Hard”, which I took very literally. I worked myself very hard and always achieved good grades. It may have been a form of self-medication for some students, although this is probably a factor at all universities. But certainly going out helped me to get through the year there. It was normal for me to spend 6 to­8 hours in the library and then go out.

I found this to be unsustainable eventually.

Intensity

There is a common myth that these types of institutions do not facilitate going out or other activities, which I found not to be the case.

However, the constant workload and competitive atmosphere means that time as a resource must constantly be maximised. Even time devoted to relaxing must be spent efficiently relaxing.

This intensity leads to a lot of isolation and limited selfexploration time for students in the sense that there is no time to make mistakes. It also quite unfortunately means that students may come to value themselves entirely

on grades and base their self­ -worth around academic achievements. In the US this has been noted at high school level in the increased use of Adderall and other study drugs as well as the phenomenon of the “Silicon Valley Suicides”, where students from the most affluent high schools in the US – seen as paths to Ivy League schools – experience high rates of depression, anxiety and suicide.

Julie Lythcott­Haims is a former dean of freshmen at Stanford and wrote a book after leaving the position entitled “How to Raise an Adult”.

She speaks in her Ted Talk, “Throw Out the Checklisted Childhood”, of the need for better parenting and educational responses to the increased rates of suicide. In her ten years as dean, she speaks on how each year each group was “more and more accomplished than the last” and “great at being told what to do”, but “less and less familiar with themselves”. She also notes the huge rise in mental health illnesses. She describes in her book how these accomplished students “would sit on my couch holding their fragile, brittle parts together, resigned to the fact that this outwardly successful situation was their miserable life.”

Students at elite universities are consistently told they are better than other students and are entitled to success because of their achievements.

The exclusivity and door­ opening aspect of my degree was emphasised to me from day one. But unfortunately, the narrow vision of what success constitutes is having severe consequences for the mental wellbeing of students.

I found the anthropology learning experience and department to be absolutely fantastic and enriching, and will certainly never see the world in the same way again.

But ultimately I found the atmosphere quite oppressive, and this was worsened by the fact that so many other students also hated it.

Trinity maintains a very good academic reputation but still allows its students to take a less intense approach toward studies at undergraduate level and instead get engaged in the many activities around campus. I have enjoyed being part of many society activities at Trinity, not just because they will benefit my CV, but because I actually enjoy them, and in the process have gained far more life experience. Students at Trinity are in my experience far happier and tend to be more grounded, though Trinity is also largely the preserve of the upper and middle classes.

I believe that serious reflection on the system of elite education needs to happen if we wish to both have academic work that is of a high quality and students, graduates and employees who are happier and more fulfilled.

T’S THAT TIME of year again. Hilary Term is drawing to a close, The Pav makes that inexplicable annual transformation from scaldy last-resort predrinks location to the most alluring place on earth, and many thoughts begin to turn to the night of April 15th – Trinity Ball. At this time of year the comment sections of your beloved student newspapers also tend to pile up with think-pieces hating on the hallowed institution of the Ball. And this article shall add to that not-insignificant pile.

Yet it is not for no reason that Trinity Ball provokes so much discussion among the student body, and (admittedly) generates so much ire within these pages. For Trinity students as a whole, and the staff of Trinity News in particular, are a cantankerous and contrarian old lot, who are prone to complain at the best of things.

And don’t get me wrong, I love a good whinge as much as the next person. But I also firmly believe that an annual gripe about the Ball is probably a good thing – not to diminish the gargantuan work done by the Ents Officer in organising what is objectively an incredible event, but to highlight a lot of the questionable behaviour and exploitative practices that underlie the party we know and love.

Hands tied

First off – for another year, the horrendously imbalanced relationship with MCD Productions endures. The Irishbased concert promoter has tight control of the line-up of the Ball, and the purse strings of Trinity punters, for at least four more years. Sole responsibility for the booking of acts for the Ball falls to the corporation, which fills the line-up with a list of signed artists and bands that it hopes will make the big-times in years to come. Effectively, Trinity Ball is used as a testing ground for young “talent”, with Trinity Ents held in a proverbial stranglehold by MCD. Each year the Ents Officer’s input into booking acts takes the form of a “suggestion list”, the contents of which are unsurprisingly not made public.

Despite Katie Cogan’s claims that the house-heavy line-up brings a genre that is “close to [her] heart” to the fore, I am somewhat doubtful that MCD’s abilities to read the inner workings of Cogan’s heart are as great as their ability to predict future industry profit margins.

It seems Cogan’s hands are tied by the strict contract with the promoters. The only real opportunity for the outgoing Ents Officer to make her mark on the Ball lineup is through a Battle of the Bands competition, the objective of which is paradoxically to open the Main Stage with an amateur band even more unknown than the socalled “famous” acts that follow.

The line-up

I make no claims to be the most discerning or invested music buff. My music taste veers erratically from the cliché to the downright bizarre (see my “Recently Played” playlist: George Ezra, Shania Twain, and the soundtrack from “The Prince of Egypt” all feature). So I would readily admit that perhaps I am not the most au fait with the hottest acts.

But that said, I would count myself among the vast cohort of students who take a good interest in the charts, who are up for having a great night at the Ball seeing artists whose names we actually recognise.

So it shouldn’t be that every year students such as myself look ahead to the line-up announcement with an attitude of disinterested resignation.

With the release of the 2016 acts, Katie Cogan boasted that “the line-up is insane, there is something for everyone”. After a quick cursory glance, I concluded that the “something” for me that Cogan was referring to must be Trinitones, because

they were the only act on the poster that I had heard of.

I can be forgiven for having to be reminded who The Kooks are, given that their most well-known song “She Moves in Her Own Way” was released in June 2006. And it wasn’t even in the “Top 10 Songs of the Summer” of 2006. Vying for the top spot in that illustrious list were Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” (a perennial favourite) and “Promiscuous” by Nelly Furtado, feat. Timbaland. That’s right. The last time The Kooks were big, Nelly Furtado was still relevant. Dammit, the last time The Kooks were big I was nine years old, and being taught how to dance by Shakira while on our family holiday in CentreParcs.

Anyway, I digress. I know that there is very little that we can collectively do to change the structures controlling what artists play Trinity Ball.

What is baffling is the fundamental contradiction in students’ outlooks, the ideological blindspot that surrounds the running of the Ball.

The cost

I find myself asking why it is that, for instance, the introduction of a marketing aspect to the role of SU Communications Officer last year prompted so much fraught hand-wringing and soulsearching among our leftist student body, who are then more than happy to proffer up a sweet crisp ¤80 to the faceless profiteering MCD suits, without batting an eyelid?

Which brings me on to another aspect of the Ball that I take issue with: its eye-watering cost. On top of the fact that the price of a ticket far exceeds the daily minimum wage, one has to take into account the price of clothes, booze, taxis to and from College… the list goes on. For a girl, at least, a new black tie outfit is seen as almost obligatory. And with some students opting for make-up and hair to be done professionally on the day, you do feel the pressure to “measure up” aesthetically, and by extension, financially.

Last year was my first Trinity Ball, and I easily spent upwards of two hundred euro in total on the occasion. I anticipate this year’s Ball will add up to roughly the same. I have a part-time job, and parents who were good enough to help me out with the cost, but certainly not all students are as lucky as I am. If you don’t have at least ¤150 to burn, then no, Cinderella, you shan’t go to the Ball.

For those who are already struggling with under academic and financial pressures, asking parents for money or taking up more work hours to the detriment of study, to fund the spiralling costs demanded by the Ball may simply not be an option. The continuation of needlessly extravagant pressures of Trinity Ball is untenable for many students, and pressures to part with vast amounts of money for the sake of one night out on our own college campus should certainly be addressed.

Ultimately, Trinity Ball embodies the best and worst of the Trinity experience. It is undeniably cool, trumpeted as Europe’s biggest private party, an experience that no other college students in this country (or perhaps in the world) get to have at the end of every year.

Yet it is also when Trinity reaches peak “Trinity Wanker”, adopting an attitude of upper-class snobbishness and self-congratulatory indulgence, as typified by the spectacle of the launch/gaff party.

A party so cool that people (gasp!) smoked indoors, failed sabbat candidates circulated like lost sheep, and all of us uninvited plebs watched on YouTube as a guy in a scarf danced alone to DUDJ for four hours.

Such are the harmful, hapless, hatful and hilarious contradictions of the Ball.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Op-ed

19

In defense of the Catholic Church with regard to mental health, spirituality and faith Coman Brady

Contributing writer

T

HE CATHOLIC CHURCH is probably one of the most controversial institutions in modern day Ireland.

This is, in fairness, for very understandable reasons concerning the failings of the leadership of the Catholic Church in the past especially concerning the handling of the child sex abuse scandals and the cases of the Magdalene laundries. But I believe that the criticism of the Catholic Church has gone too far.

It is time for it to stop and for Irish society to acknowledge the many positives this institution can offer. For me there are three dimensions to the Catholic Church in Ireland.

There is the socio-political voice with strong opinions on various social issues. Personally I believe this is increasingly making people more disillusioned and becoming less open to actively engaging with this religion. Secondly, there is the inspirational community of Catholics who go out in to society and look after the most vulnerable, oppressed and secluded members of society. Fr. Peter Mc Verry would be an example of this tremendous work with the homeless. I could write countless articles about this dimension of the Catholic Church in Ireland but for today I will concentrate on the third aspect. This is the community of people who come together to celebrate their faith in a deeper meaning to life and I am talking about those who pray, go to church, go to confession, etc.

Right now Irish society is experiencing a ‘’tsunami’’ of mental health problems.

There is no doubt in my

mind that this is intertwined with the declining number of people in Ireland who are engaging less with religion. I would like to argue that faith and religion can contribute enormously to positive mental health. I would even go further to say it can help the young people struggling with mental health difficulties today and this is rarely acknowledged or offered as a possible solution.

I am passionate about these two issues as my one personal story is connected to mental health and the Catholic Church. I grew up in a devout Catholic family. We prayed, went to mass and were involved in the community parish. Looking back now it was almost an idyllic childhood.

Heaven I would say. But lingering behind all this was that a very close member of my family suffers from a severe form of bipolar disorder.

This affected me negatively for obvious reasons. For example this member of my family has been hospitalised at least ten times in my life. I am so thankful that this person is of a strong faith as God knows what could have happened if not.

This leads to me on to the issue of stigma. We often hear in the Irish media about the ‘’dark old days’’ in the mid 1900’s where it is fair to say that Ireland had a overtly powerful influence from teh Catholic Church. This was a time period where women in particular were oppressed and I totally agree with this.

But I think it is honestly laughable to praise the modernity of Ireland for its perceived inclusion. Claims are made like; ‘’Modern Ireland has entered a new age of openness in the recent years’’ or ‘’Ireland has come

out of the shadows from it’s dark past’’. The stigma my family endured was shameful to say the least in relation to our struggles with this member of our family whom we love so much. Recall how this is in Celtic Tiger Ireland and Recessionary Ireland.

This is not the dark days of the 1960s. I remember, for example, how on the bus home from school as a young ten year old, another of my peers was mocking the local ‘’mental institution’’. He referred to this place as full of ‘’crazy people’’ or ‘’nutjobs’’ or ‘’psychos’’. My own family member had recently been discharged from this ‘’mental institution’’ full of ‘’psychos’’.

I will never forget the pain inside I felt. Stigma is just an unfortunate trait of societies.

We have members who are excluded from our own Irish society today, the Traveller community for example.

As I started to grow older in to my teen years I began to growingly turn away from my Catholic upbringing. It was unpopular and uncool to go to mass on Sunday so I was more than happy to leave this ritual in the past. I would also say that I began to become a follower of a new religion as I entered my mid teens with the influence of the wider media having a very strong influence on my own personal beliefs. This was the religion of atheism of course.

Atheism also has a ‘’pope’’ like figure who is charming, intelligent and a great debater. This would be Richard Dawkins. I read his book ‘’The God Delusion’’’ and was utterly enthralled by his aruments of pure reason. But underneath all this I would say I was not truly happy. I had this lingering feeling of emptiness or purposefullness

that many have felt who turn away from their faith.

Currently Ireland is having an outpouring of people sharing their own struggles in relation to mental health. I have followed this stream of stories and I am so happy and relieved to see this happen. I look up to heroes such as Bressie, Donal Walsh or Conor Cusack who have spoken out about their very own struggles or have tried to reach out to people in our community who may be struggling with mental health difficulties. According to a comprehensive study by the RCSI, 1 in 5 young adults are struggling with a mental health difficulty. Ireland also has some of the highes rates of suicides in Europe. For example we are second highest after Lithuania among under 19s according to The European Child Safety Alliance.

Finding a solution

We all acknowledge this is a problem and thankfully we have found some practical solutions to dealing with your mental health. We are told to talk about our problems or to exercise. We are advised to find a new hobby or join a local community group.

We are also advised to visit a GP or a councillor. But we are never told that a form of spirituality might help. This is because anti-Catholicism is the only accepted form of prejudice in modern Ireland.

It is politically incorrect to be a practising Catholic. The benefits and positives that this religion can provide are rarely highlighted in the mainstream media.

Personally, I believe all religions are the essentially the same thing. I just happen to be a Catholic in Ireland. For the small amount of knowl-

edge I have on history, I understand that all societies in the history of humanity have had a form of religion. From my own personal experience, I have found religious people to be very happy, generous and strong individuals.

There are many studies that enhance my claim. Some say that it is the God aspect that helps while others claim that it is the community aspect.

I quite frankly don’t care. I just believe that we should embrace and cherish the Catholic Church in Ireland with a healthy scepticism.

Karl Marx, the father of communism, once said that, ‘’Religion is the opium of the people’’. He was of course stating this as a criticism but I do believe it is true. If we lose the the Catholic Church in Ireland and religion in the Western world, what will replace them?

With the encouragement of my sister, I have recently become re-engaged with the faith of my youth, This was because I never felt truly happy as an un-practising Catholic or agnostic. I have began to go to mass every Sunday and also to pray. I can also state that I have never been happier in my recent life. Some would say this is coincidental but I have to disagree. If you are a staunch atheist and you are truly happy, I am happy.

My advice to any young person who is currently struggling with their mental health and have not yet found a solution, is to try again with the faith of their youth/family. Try praying, try going to church, try meeting a faith based group or even try listening to the inspirational radio staion Spirit Radio. There is absolutely nothing you have to lose.

NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR 2015

Step up from the table and be heard Having a seat at the table means nothing when you’re placed down the end, away from the whispers and decisions of those who control what you get. After a year where he appeared as stage dressing for the launch of the strategic plan, and brought the provost into the GMB to speak to students directly, the least former SU president Domhnall McGlacken-Byrne could hope for were that his good deeds would not go unpunished.

However as we learnt this month, the appeal from TCDSU against controversial and unfair new student charges has failed. McGlacken-Byrne reached a compromise with college on the fees surrounding sitting exams, but that was all the leeway they were willing to give. Students starting next year will be paying higher registration fees, higher sports centre charges, and be facing higher punitive fees than those in final year were when they began their studies.

Soon after this decision was revealed to the student body, tacit praise for the provost filled twitter. He had attended the TCDSU activism festival, which featured Hozier and the former Icelandic prime minister as speakers. An event which he no doubt attended because of his deep interest in protest and activist culture, and not just because it was an event attended by some bigger names than you’d get at a branch meeting or that it was organised by an SU president with a national media profile. What does it mean that the leader of our university attends such an event but takes so little from the message?

In the meantime, we’ve seen the growth of groups who have been prepared to organise, grow and take action.

Students Against Fees has already spread from Trinity and branches in other third level institutions such as DCU are developing. They are protesting in solidarity with staff, galvanising support for those affected in other ways by cuts to education.

The group has been courted by both TCDSU and the USI but has managed to remain its own entity, which is for the best. But the problem with union inactivity doesn’t start or end with our SU or the USI. The GSU in College has informed Trinity News that they are compiling a report on the feedback from graduates working as teaching assistants. When the GSU was established decades ago, one of its first actions was to threaten a strike unless pay and conditions for TAs was improved upon. Where is this desire for direct action now? How has it managed to evaporate from the cobbles of Trinity?

We might be ending a year of having an outspoken fiery SU president, but when the status quo returns and it is seen as more sensible to take a seat at the table in the provost’s house rather than upturn it, students will need someone to stand in the square and take action.

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Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

SciTech

The animalistic science of Donald Trump’s political success

Katarzyna Siewierska SciTech Editor

Una Harty analyses Trump’s tricks that make him the crowd whisperer he has become, and helped him become the Republican frontrunner for the American presidency

FIELD TEST opens at Science Gallery Dublin

preference votes, the highest of any candidate in the election.

SCIENCE GALLERY DUBLIN’S new exhibition FIELD TEST - radical adventures in future farming is now open. The exhibition is curated by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy.

The center was founded

by Cathrine Kramer and Zack Denfeld in 2010. It is a group of artists who examine the biotechnologies and biodiversity of human food systems.

The exhibition explores various aspects of the future of farming, locally and globally, through art, technology and science. The lab that accompanies the exhibition is called LOCI

Walk like the animals

Una Harty Senior reporter

H

ITLER ONCE SAID, “Make the lie big, make it simple, and keep saying it and eventually, they will believe it.” If we reflect this method of persuasion onto one of Donald Trump’s infamously basic and vague answers to questions he’s been asked during the course of the US Presidential campaign, we can see he follows a strikingly similar pattern. Trump’s fourth grade level of speech insults the complexities of politics and the issues which concern the most powerful nation in the world, yet he still topped the polls for the majority of the Super Tuesday states and currently stands with 678 primaries as opposed to 423 for competitor Cruz and 143 for Kasich. Should we be concerned with the tactics of Trump or is he just resorting to science to sail him through these turbulent times?

Let us make a parallel between the US Presidential Candidacy race and the animal kingdom. Alike the prides of lions or the troop of monkeys, the upcoming leaders are heirs to the throne, per se - the silverback of the gorillas is eventually overthrown by his son. This is also evident in American politics - the large political families which have dominated the polls such as the Clintons and the Bushes reflect this tradition stemming from evolutionary development amongst us mammals. We also see this in Irish politics with the Healy-Rae dynasty storming the 2016 Election with Michael HealyRae obtaining over 20,000 1st

In fact, we can reflect the techniques seen in the animal kingdom on Donald Trump’s style, explaining his success rate. By summarising his personality we can see he’s ambitious, adjusted, sociable and bold. Similarly, the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, observed the dominant wolf amongst his pack to be “curling its lips to show teeth, and it takes first choice in food and space.” Wilson also described the rhesus monkey as one who “keeps his head and tail up, walks in a deliberate, ‘regal’ manner while casually staring at others...maintain height above his rivals. When challenged he stares hard at the opponent with mouth open— signalling aggression, not surprise— and sometimes slaps the ground with open palms to signal his readiness to attack.” In the jungle that is the televised debate, Trump triumphs, calling upon his rhesus monkey manner and wolf wise ways in order to make him stand out against the rest – he’s fierce, assertive and uses strong hand gestures and facial expression whilst speaking.

If one analyses the geography of Trumpism, there appears no particular patterns which outline a particular demographic of his followers. An article by the New York Times outlines how he shares support from traditionally Democratic and Republican counties, how there are Trump-supporting counties with both very high and very low of African-American proportionality – he’s doing well North and South, liberal and conservative, rural and suburban. He’s appealing to the masses via his simply constructed answers, his confident manner and his cheeky charisma.

The ‘broken speech’ technique which Trump adopts may also be the key to his success. Linguists and researchers have stated that it appeals to people due to its unrehearsed style and hence shows Trump in a more honest, more trustworthy light.

Past Presidential candidates

Science in Brief

Illustration via Flickr/DonkeyHotey

“

Probably Trump’s most utilised tool is the ended his sentences with buzzwords such as “problem”, “root cause”, “dead”, “harm” and “injured”.

He also has the habit of referencing people thanking him, which assures the listener that people do think he’s

doing a good job.

were also assessed in their vocabulary and their grammatical level. While Obama apparently speaks at a tenth grade level of vocabulary, Bill Clinton supposedly only spoke at an eighth grade level. Abraham Lincoln’s grammatical level came in at an eleventh grade whilst George W. Bush resulted in the lowest grammatical level of fifth grade of all the assessed leaders.

Linguistical study

Trump’s fragmented answers to questions reflect upon natural conversational style which allows him to appear as a more relatable candidate as he speaks as in everyday life. Trump wilfully disregards the fact that he knows his words shall be picked apart and analysed and most likely, used against him. In fact, he rejoices in this. If one examines closely one of Trump’s typical one minute answers, it contains an astonishing 220 words. Of these words, 172 words or 78% were only a single syllable in length. 17% were two syllables long, and only four words had three syllables, three of which were the same word. And two words had four syllables; “California”, which he had to use for the purpose of the answer and, “temporary”, which he swallowed as soon as he had spoken it. Rarely does he use complex sentences or independent clauses, and he favours the second person a lot of the time which adds to the urgency of his message, directing his speech at listeners,

demanding them to “look”, “watch” and “see”.

Probably Trump’s most utilised tool is the ended his sentences with buzzwords such as “problem”, “root cause”, “dead”, “harm” and “injured”.

He deliberately rearranges a sentence awkwardly so that he can end it on one of his favoured buzzwords. He also has the habit of referencing people thanking him, which assures the listener that people do think he’s doing a good job.

Donald Trump is skilled, but he’s not well-informed and he is aware of that. But that doesn’t hinder upon his salesman tactics, because the best salesman should be able to sell you a television without knowing the first thing about TVs. For Trump, it isn’t the product that he’s selling that matters, it’s the voters.

He’s profiting from the fact that for years politicians have been speaking with verbose language while seemingly not changing any policies or making any progress. To return to Hitler’s quote; “Make the lie big” - Trump certainly filled this criterion when he infamously stated that Muslims should be banned from America. “Make it simple” - Trump achieves this through his skilful use of language. “Keep saying it” - Trump’s repetitive nature ensures this box is ticked. “And eventually they will believe it” – his position as frontrunner for the Republican candidacy justifies this.

Whether we wish to admit it or not, the blond businessman

Food Lab, located just outside the Science Gallery, where visitors can taste foods that satisfy attributes of the food system that is important to them. The exhibition probably raises more questions than it answers, but as all exhibitions, it contains many imaginative pieces that address issues and challenges farming may face in the future. In the duration of the exhibition, the science gallery events team have organised many interesting talks and workshops that can be booked online through the Science Gallery Dublin website.

CERN’s LHC preliminary data hints the existence of a new particle MANY RECENT NEWS reports discuss “the bump” in the data collected from the ATLAS and CMS detectors from proton-proton collisions in the large hadron collider (LHC) at CERN. Where is this “the bump” and what does it mean?

The bump is observed on the diphoton mass spectrum at around 750 GeV, i.e. a graph showing the number of events, in this case the number diphotons produced, versus mass of the diphoton, where a diphoton is a pair of identical photons. A bump means that there is an excess of pairs of photons produced in the proton-proton collision.

The preliminary results from the ATLAS detector from the recent 13TeV collisions, the black dots, show the bump sitting on a background predicted by the standard model, red line. When this background is subtracted, the bump remains. This is a signature of a new particle and in this case this particle would be expected to be boson, six times more heavy than the Higgs boson. At the moment, the data is not sufficient to announce a discovery, as this intriguing bump is very small and not statistically significant.

Many of the so called “beyond the standard

model” theoretical particle physicists get excited by such “new particle” news.

This is because after the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012, the standard model of particle physics, i.e. our best theory of fundamental particles and all fundamental forces in the universe, except gravity, was complete. This is a brilliant theory and works extremely well, however it does not account for all phenomena which means that it is not the ultimate theory.

One of the favourites in the extension of the standard model is supersymmetry, so supersymmetry theorists are patiently waiting for a particle predicted by their new theory to be discovered.

LHC is now running more experiments and hopefully the data will tell whether “the bump” is just a fluke or a sign of a new boson.

Then if the new particle is there and if it turns out to be a supersymmetry boson, it will be another important discovery in particle physics worthy of a Nobel Prize in Physics. For now we must sit, wait and keep our fingers crossed for the engineers and experimentalists in CERN, so that the experiment runs without serious problems.

TCD Astrophysicist leads the building of the first LOFAR station in Ireland Conor O’Mara Deputy scitech editor

O

N THE 16TH January , Professor in Astrophysics Peter Gallagher obtained €1.4 million in funding for the Irish Low Frequency Array (ILOFAR) from Science Foundation Ireland. Prof. Gallagher leads an Irish LOFAR consortium, a collection of universities and institutes of technology that join an international network of radio telescopes that is currently operational called LOFAR. He obtained his BSc (Hons) in mathematics and physics and his MSc in optoelectronics and image processing from University College Dublin.

He completed his PhD in solar physics from Queen’s University Belfast. He later spent time in USA working at the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California and at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Physics at Trinity College Dublin.

LOFAR is a cutting-edge international network of radio telescopes spanning all over Europe and consisting of over 50 nodes. Ireland will become the furthest west country to join the €200 million international programme, which is already running in Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, the UK

and France. Instead of imaging in the optical wavelengths which we can see, or in the infrared region of the spectrum which is common practice too, the LOFAR network will study deep space using radio waves. Upon the addition of the Irish node to the current network, LOFAR’s view of the universe will drastically increase. Ireland will extend the range of the telescope quite significantly because the Irish node will increase the baseline to 1,900 km, the distance between Birr and the most easterly node in Lazy, Poland.

The larger the baseline the better the results you get, just like how the larger the aperture the better the image from the telescope. Prof Peter Gallagher comments on the magnitude of the announcement saying, “The Irish node is a major expansion, and the telescope’s sensitivity will be improved as well.” The big advantage of radio astronomy is that it works at any time and no matter what the weather. At this wavelength the brightness of stars will be diminished, and scientists will obtain new views of exploding stars, detect previously unknown planets, and enable scientists to study the early Universe after the Big Bang.

The location of the I-LOFAR to be built in Birr, Co.Offaly was of no coincidence. Birr Castle has a special place in Irish astronomical history. The castle’s renowned tradition in science dates all the way back to

the nineteenth century, when the 3rd Earl of Rosse, William Parsons built the ‘Great Leviathan Telescope’ in 1845.

The Earl studied mathematics at Trinity College and went on to become an astronomer.

The ‘Great Leviathan Telescope’ was the largest telescope in the world from its construction until 1917 when the Hooker Telescope was built in California. It was a tremendous achievement for Parsons as he had to invent many of the techniques he used for constructing the Leviathan, both because its size was without precedent and the earlier telescope builders had guarded their secrets or simply failed to publish their methods. It had a whopping 1.8 metre aperture and a focal length of 6 metres. Using this incredible device Parsons discovered that several nebulae had a spiral structure.

“Maintaining the astronomical heritage at Birr is important”, says Terry Moseley president of the Irish Astronomical Association. Along with the great scientific legacy of the castle, the site is large, flat and is in a low Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) environment, all accumulating to make it a suitable location for the I-LOFAR project. The construction of the Irish node of the world’s largest radio telescope will commence towards the end of the summer of this year.

For many of the Ireland based astrophysicists, I-LO-

FAR will be a great asset for their research. Solar science, cosmology, the search for exoplanets and the study of black holes are the topics of research. For Prof. Tom Ray of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), who teaches the Junior Freshman course in astrophysics in Trinity, the telescope will provide him the images of jets of particles expelled by young stars at the lowest frequencies ever recorded. Dr Eamon O’Gorman will be able to use LOFAR to

observe and study exoplanets in orbit around distant stars.

The most exciting thing about I-LOFAR is that it gives Ireland its first internationally recognised astronomical research centre. As Ireland missed the boat with the CERN programme, the recent news regarding LOFAR is the sort of proactive action of SFI to invest large sums of money for pure scientific research, which is good to see. Ireland is still currently not a member of CERN. However, there is a

growing lobby for Ireland to join, because of the scientific and commercial benefits it would bring and that is what LOFAR is also about. This is why Irish membership doesn’t just help our astronomers, but will contribute to Ireland emerging as a key player in international research and development. According to LOFAR’s Irish website its mission is “to contribute to Ireland’s continued growth and development as a society – one that has an active and informed

interest and involvement and involvement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” If this is what LOFAR will bring, then we should all be pretty excited. I cannot wait to see the glorious images of “the Milky Way and stars during the day” that Prof.

Gallagher promises to take once the telescope is functioning.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

SciTech

21

British scientists awarded ‘The Brain Prize’ for discovering how memories form The research of Tim Bliss, Graham Collingridge and Richard Morris has opened up a new understanding of memories and remembering Anna Aleshko Contributing writer

W

HETHER THEY ARE traumatic or incredibly pleasant, our memories of our experiences in the past help to shape us who we are and what we believe in. We use our memories to remember to carry out tasks in our daily lives, whether important or menial. We will remember to pay the bill, bring in that book we borrowed from a friend months ago or to get milk on the way home. As the exams approach, we shall be stretching our memories to remember facts and figures so that we can regurgitate them onto paper and answer an exam question. But have you ever paused to wonder about the processes that occur inside your brain that allow memories of your experiences to be made?

Three British scientists, whose separate discoveries combined have led to significant breakthroughs in our understanding of how memories are formed, have been awarded the ‘Nobel Prize’ of neuroscience. Tim Bliss, Graham Collingridge and Richard Morris have will share the lucrative €1 million Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize (or The Brain Prize as it is more commonly

referred to as) for establishing the long held theory that memories are formed by strengthening the connections and communications between neurons.

Neurons were first described by Heinrich Wilhelm Waldeyer in the 19th century.

They are cells that process and transmit information by communicating with each other via junctions called synapses. It was first believed that memories form as a result of new neuron formation. The theory that memories may in fact be formed instead by the strengthening the connections between existing neurons was first proposed by Santiago Ramon y Cajal way back in 1894.

However, the technology and techniques required to prove this were simply not available at the time and would remain unavailable until well into the 20th century.

Brain stimulation

When you experience an event you are exposed to a number of stimuli. For example, reading this newspaper, you can feel the newspaper in your hands, perhaps even smell the ink, see the words and pictures that are printed on it. At this exact time, the neurons inside your brain are firing off to begin the process of forming a new memory.

Later on in the day, you will be able to recall the fact that you read this newspaper because a process called Long-Term

Potential (LTP) has occurred inside your brain.

LTP is a phenomenon when the signal transmission between two neurons is strengthened in response to a stimulus, allowing a new memory to be consolidated. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s, that Tim Bliss and Terje Lomo would begin to find evidence to support Cajal’s theory when they discovered LTP. By experimenting on rabbits, they identified a set of synapses in the region of the brain that’s most important for memories, the hippocampus. They found that these synapses could be permanently strengthened when given the right kind of electrical stimulation.

Professor Graham Collingridge built up on the work carried out by Bliss and Lomo by discovering the presence of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors in the nerve cells that have to be activated in order to start the process of LTP. His discovery of these receptors helped to further understand the process of LTP at a molecular level. It was Professor Richard Morris who showed definitively LTP’s importance for the ability to be able to learn and remember by giving rats special drugs that inhibited NMDA receptors and, as a result, LTP. With the loss of LTP function, rats were not able to learn to navigate their way around a maze. This experiment demonstrated that LTP

From left to right: Graham Collingridge, Richard Morris, Tim Bliss

is an important process for memory.

Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Foundation is a non-profit organization that’s awarding The Brain Prize that the three researchers are receiving. It was founded in 2011 by the Lundbeck Foundation with the aim to ‘promote interest in brain research and its outcomes, to encourage and reward outstanding brain research’. Since its establishment, the prize has become known as the ‘Nobel Prize’ of neuroscience. In 2015, the Brain Prize was awarded to Karel Svoboda, David Tank, Winfried Denk and Arthur Konnerth for “the invention, refinement and use of two photon microscopy to provide

detailed, dynamic images of activity in individual nerve cells, dendrites and synapses” which has contributed to the study of the development of brain circuitry. The prize was awarded at the Royal Library, the Black Diamond, in Copenhagen.

Europe centric

The prize does have one limitation though. Although a person of any nationality can be nominated for the prize, the research for which they are nominated must have been carried out in Europe or collaborated with researchers in Europe. One may argue that this unfairly overlooks the research carried out by scientists that are located on other

continents that do not have any connection to researchers in Europe.

Knowing the process behind how memories are made does have pharmaceutical benefits and doesn’t only satisfy a curiosity. Understanding how memories are formed and processed/stored could lead to the development of pharmaceutical drugs that would help treat memory loss that is a major characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease while a cure is being found, as pointed out

by Professor Morris “We now have sufficient understanding to look very seriously at ways in which we might be able to improve memory or alleviate some of the memory problems that happen in the early

stages of neurodegenerative diseases”.

If this has somewhat satisfied whatever curiosity you may have had about memories when you began reading this article you may need a new topic to ponder on. Why not wonder about what you would do with your €333,333.33 share of the prize? Buying an electric car with some of it is the plan of Professor Bliss, “As for the rest, I haven’t the slightest idea.”

Zika virus prompts new debate on abortion restrictions in Brazil Carol O’Brien discusses the heated debate on abortion laws in Brazil since the outbreak of the Zika virus.

Carol O’Brien

Staff writer

T

HE WORLD HEALTH Organisation recently declared the current outbreak of Zika virus a global public health emergency. The virus has taken hold in a number of Latin American countries, and its link to birth defects has prompted fear among many.

Now, a group of pro-choice campaigners are planning to take their case for abortion reform all the way to the Brazilian Supreme Court.

The symptoms of the Zika virus include a relatively mild fever and a rash, with only one infected person in five displaying any symptoms at all.

However, the consequences are much more serious for pregnant woman, where infection is thought to affect the development of the foetus and cause microcephaly; an underdeveloped head and brain. Babies who are born with microcephaly are often faced with significant health problems, including hearing and vision problems, as well as intellectual disability.

The Zika virus outbreak began in Brazil in May 2015, with the country’s north eastern region worst affected. The virus has since spread across Latin America to over 30 countries, prompting heated debates about reproductive rights, contraception and abortion. Many governments in the affected countries have issued statements encouraging women to delay getting pregnant. They have however, come under criticism for subsequently not doing enough to improve access to information about both the virus and contraception. Their platitudes suggest an ignorance of the reality facing many women: that they cannot choose the circumstances under which they become pregnant. In Brazil, ensuring that women have access to adequate reproductive healthcare is a challenge. Most pregnancies are unplanned. Poverty, sexual violence and inadequate medical care all influence the issue.

Contraception is not widely available in some parts of the country, and religious groups can exert a strong influence.

As the Zika virus spreads rapidly across the continent, so too does the conversation about reproductive rights.

Most of Latin America has strict laws regarding abortion.

The spectrum ranges from illegal in all circumstances in

the strict El Salvador (where even a miscarriage can result in accusations of murder), to permissible in French Guiana and Puerto Rico. Similarly to Ireland, Brazil’s constitution guarantees the right to life.

As a result, abortion is illegal except in the cases of rape, where the life of the mother is endangered and the particular foetal abnormality of anencephaly, a condition more extreme than microcephaly, where a major portion of the brain and skull is missing.

Debora Diniz is a prominent figure in the campaign to relax abortion restrictions.

She is a Brazilian anthropologist and professor of Law at the University of Brasília. She is also co founder of Anis, a Brazilian Institute of Bioethics, who are planning to bring a case to the Supreme Court to allow pregnant women who have contracted the Zika virus to obtain abortions. Anis were also involved in the 2012 decision to permit abortion in the case of anencephaly. Pro-life groups have accused the campaigners of exploiting the situation, but Diniz sees the Zika epidemic as a unique opportunity to look at Brazil’s inequality and reproductive rights.

Adding anencephaly to the list of permissible circumstances for abortion occurred in 2012, with the Supreme Court stating that ”in the case of the anencephalic, a potential life does not exist” while still making it clear that “abortion is a crime against life.”

Microcephaly is much less severe than anencephaly, so such a ruling does not necessarily indicate much hope for the pro-choice campaigners.

Anencephalic babies are often stillborn, though in rare cases can survive outside the womb for a short time, but they never gain consciousness. In contrast, babies who are born with microcephaly do survive after birth. Their expected lifespan of varies alot, depending on the severity of the condition. Microcephaly is usually not diagnosed until close to the end of the pregnancy, at which time abortion becomes even more controversial. Because of this, campaigners say that abortion should be open to all women infected with the Zika virus.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, has even weighed in on the debate, although he made no specific reference to abortion. In February, he criticised the response of many Latin American governments, reminding them that “uphold-

ing human rights is essential to an effective public health response and this requires... access to comprehensive and affordable quality sexual and reproductive health services and information”. Amnesty International then too released a report in March, which focused on women and girls’ lack of access to sexual and reproductive health care in Latin America. They stated that the Zika virus “bring into stark focus the harmful gender stereotypes and prejudices that persist in the region as a whole regarding the reproductive role of women.”

On the other side of the divide, some organisations are calling on the government to strengthen penalties for abortion. Time magazine reported in February that one member of Brazil’s lower house of parliament, Anderson Ferreira, had drafted a law proposing to increase penalties for women and their doctors carrying out abortions to a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. In a move that surprised many, the Pope even spoke about contraception and the Zika virus in a recent interview. In a carefully worded but vague admission, he said that preventing pregnancy was “the lesser of two evils” while still maintaining, of course, that abortion “is a crime, an absolute evil.” Some have been quick to interpret his words as a sanction of the use of contraception.

Regardless of the outcome of the Supreme Court challenge on abortion, Brazil faces a difficult task in trying to control the Zika virus. Already in the midst of economic, social and political turbulence, they now have a public health emergency to deal with. An estimated 1.4 million people in Brazil are infected and over 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly have been reported, a stark rise from around 150 cases per year prior to the outbreak. As we await developments in vaccines, and critically, conclusive scientific proof that the Zika virus actually causes microcephaly, it’s time for the government to step up to the task of providing comprehensive family planning and reproductive healthcare for women.

Illustration by Mubashir Sultan

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

UCD School of Mathematics and Statistics

www.ucd.ie/mathstat

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Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

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Sport

Trinity Fencing win their ninth consecutive intervarsities trophy Fearghal Donaghy

Contributor

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ARLY ON THE morning of the 5th of March, Dublin University Fencing Club gathered at the Campanile, ready to contest the 62nd Irish Intervarsity Championships. The weekend would prove a successful one, heralding the club’s 39th victory in the competition’s history and ninth successive win.

DUFC’s team of fencers and supporters made their way to Maynooth for the first day of the competition to compete in Men’s Épée, Women’s Foil, and Men’s Sabre. Following a rousing speech from Club Captain Seán Healy and a chorus of cheers from the Trinity contingent, the competition was underway.

Strong Start

Men’s Épée started the weekend on a high note, racking up three early

victories against UCD, UCC, and UU. Unfortunately for DUFC, the team narrowly conceded two 5-4 matches to DCU and to eventual winners in that event, Queen’s Belfast.

However, the performances of MÉ captain Maxton Milner and Ross Byrne were unmatched as the two fencers placed first and second respectively in the individual rankings. With the help of teammates Cornelius Tan and James Bryant, they secured second place following two 5-0 victories over NUIM and NUIG that afternoon.

Captain Seán Healy led Men’s Sabre to victory alongside fellow sabreurs Tadhg Garton, Colm Kelleher, and Matthew Coalter. Despite some strong opposition from DkIT and UCD, the team won each of their eight matches, a second consecutive clean sweep for Seán, Tadhg, and Colm, whose efforts won this same event at last year’s Intervarsities.

At the close of the intervarsities, DUFC finished with thirtyfour match victories, beating closest competitors UCD by a ten match margin

The Women’s Foil team, comprising captain Crystal Percival and sisters Rachel and Ellen Thomas, fought through a superb string of victories against Queen’s Belfast, UCC, UU, and NUIG. This streak came to an end, however, as a mere three points in the last bout of their final match granted rivals UCD the victory. The team finished in second place in this event and Crystal earned the rank of number one women’s foilist of the competition.

Continued Success

DUFC entered the second day of the competition with a narrow lead of seventeen matches to UCD’s fourteen.

With everything to play for, the Women’s Épée, Men’s Foil, and Women’s Sabre teams took to the piste.

Despite strong DCU and NUIG Women’s Épée sides, DUFC beat every one of their five opposing teams.

WÉ captain Camille Boelt

National Equestrian Intervarsities 2016 Octavia Van Smirren

Contributor

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HE DUBLIN UNIVERSITY Equestrian Club had a very successful weekend at an incredibly competitive National Equestrian Intervarsities, competing against universities from all over the country. This year the event was organised by Dublin City University, and held at Killossery Lodge Stud’s great facilities. The event was also generously sponsored by Shires Equestrian, Dressage Ireland, Jack Doylre and Camilla Speirs eventing.

All team members put in stellar performances and this really showed in our results.

In the showjumping 3 of our riders, Sean Cassidy, Ciara Torpey and Atalanta Purce all went through to the second round, with Ciara and Atalanta riding beautifully to ensure that they both scored the highest on their respective horses, and so progressed to the semi final, guaranteeing a top 6 placing for both of them. Ciara finished 6th after a testing round, and Atalanta finished in a well deserved 3rd place! In the hotly contested team competition for showjumping, the Trinity trio of Sean Cassidy, Atalanta

Purce and visiting student Emily Torres came 2nd overall.

In the team dressage, Rebecca Andrews, Joanna Tottenham and Katie Dunphy produced a beautifully synchronised and skilfully ridden test to secure 6th place, while in the individual competition, Octavia van Smirren made it to the semi finals and secured 4th place.

Our Prix Caprilli team, of Sarah Fisher, William Armstrong and Jagoda Lipczynska, and individual rider Julia Mandel, although they did not come away with a placing, all rode lovely and accurate tests. These results combined secured DUEC 6th place overall at the championships, a result that we were incredibly proud of considering the immensely high standard of riding over the competition as a whole!

Most importantly though, there was an incredibly good sense of camaraderie over the 3 nights and 2 days of the competition, and some performances that really promise well for the future of the club.

Hindsgaul ranked third and Lucy Johnson did not drop a single bout throughout the day, earning her the position of top ranked women’s épéeist.

Camille and Lucy, alongside teammates Sophie McGowan and Shauna Caffrey, earned a convincing victory, conceding no more than two bouts in any match.

Killian Hanlon captained Men’s Foil through yet another clean sweep for DUFC. Neither he nor Irish Junior number one Phillip Cripwell dropped a single one of their collective twenty-five bouts, earning them second and first place respectively in the individual rankings. With the support of Graham Nevin and Fearghal Donaghy, Men’s Foil succeeded in retaining the trophy that Killian, Phillip, and Graham themselves won last year.

Ladies’ Captain Olivia Murray, Ragnheiður Guðjónsdóttir, Emily Nolan,

The weekend would prove a successful one, heralding the club’s 39th victory in the competition’s history and ninth successive win

and Evie Clarke all offered fantastic performances in Women’s Sabre. Despite some stiff competition from UCD towards the end of the day, the team won each of their six matches, three of which were won 5-0. In addition, Olivia placed first in the WS individual rankings.

At the close of the intervarsities, DUFC finished with thirty-four match victories, beating closest competitors UCD by a ten match margin and earning Trinity the Frank Russell Cup for the ninth year running. The club also won four out of six weapon trophies and topped five out of six individual ranking tables. Another successful intervarsities reaffirms the status of Dublin University Fencing Club as a stronghold of Irish fencing.

Trinity News | Wednesday 23 March

Sport

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Trinity Fencing win their ninth consecutive intervarsities trophy p.23

Step into spring yoga Megan Kuster Contributor

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PRING IS IN THE air!

If you’ve got spring fever coming up to final essays and exams, doing some yoga can help you to tune out and get focused.

Practising regular yoga, develops a healthy body and mind, so you’ll be ready to enjoy the summer adventures waiting just around the corner.

Introducing Ashtanga

There are a multitude of different styles of yoga out there, from Bikram to Antigravity, purist to hot yoga, the choice often leaving beginners more in a knot than when they actually reach the classes. Of all the options, the Ashtanga yoga system is unique because it develops strength, stamina, and flexibility in people, combining a modern style of gymnastic exercises and stretching with breathing work and ancient yoga philosophy. Hence, Ashtanga yoga, while not a sport, often holds great appeal to athletes and fitness fans.

There are three groups of sequences in the Ashtanga system. The Primary Series (Yoga Chikitsa) detoxifies and aligns the body. The Intermediate Series (Nadi Shodhana) purifies the nervous system by opening and clearing the energy channels. The Advanced Series A, B, C and D (Sthira Bhaga) integrate the strength and grace of the practice, requiring higher levels of flexibility and humility.

Internal Focus

Trinity athletes peak at Mountain Running Varsities

Aaron Matheson Reen Staff Writer

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HE TRANQUIL WATERS of Glendalough’s upper lake belied the intense battle which took place on nearby Camaderry Mountain Sunday last as Trinity athletes sought to become Irish Colleges Mountain Running Champions for 2016. The college has a strong tradition in this discipline, drawing upon interested athletes from the Dublin University Harriers and

Athletics Club (DUHAC) and Dublin University Orienteers (DUO). This ensured a fine representation of 3 women and 7 men from the college.

The three highest-placed athletes from each university scored. Depending on their position they were awarded a specific number of points which, in turn, decided where their team placed on the leaderboard. The race itself began beside the lake and was run up to the summit of Camaderry Mountain and back down the same route. This translates to 8.5 kilometers with a 500 meter difference in elevation. The incline was expectedly tough with the Irish Mountain

Running Association using a slightly more challenging route than previous years on account of the firm conditions underfoot. Trinity athletes assumed the lead early on but were set back somewhat by a wrong turn. This unfortunate bunch dug in, however, and made up some lost headway on a decent which allowed for some explosive (and slightly terrifying) running.

The stunning Wicklow scenery reflected what was a stellar day out for Trinity.

Indeed, our athletes claimed top honours in both the men and women’s events.

Clare McCarthy showed her mountain running pedigree to finish first amongst the

ladies. Aisling Ahern dispelled injury concerns and came in second with DUHAC captain Laura Brennan rounding up a strong team performance from Trinity’s women. In the men’s race, Mael Lambert, hampered not by his detour, placed fourth overall. Christoph Rohrmeier, an experienced orienteer, followed him closely with Conor Brennan completing our scoring trio.

All those involved from Trinity would like to thank the Irish Mountain Running Association for organising what was a very enjoyable event. They also wish to acknowledge the stern opposition provided by other

colleges who, in some cases, made mammoth journeys to compete. Finally, it should be stressed that many of our athletes were completing in this competition (and indeed, discipline) for the first time. This suggests Trinity’s successes can be replicated whenever and wherever they take to hills again!

sports psychologist known for his work with pro-golfer Padráig Harrington, and attributed with leading the golfer to world success, teaches that negative thoughts can lead to negative results.

Having seen how golfers were prone to self-doubt and nervousness, his work has primarily been in the field of understanding the mind and figuring out how to control it.

He describes the difference in mentality when playing an important golf game, and just practicing, emphasising the importance of having your mind in the right place.

The rate of mistakes in a game of golf is quite high, and player’s performance therefore depends on how well they deal with and accept those mistakes. Rotella argues that most people are not naturally able to cope with these stresses, that it must be learned. Most golf players work with a professional on focusing their mind and getting their emotions in the right place in order to play the game to the best of their ability.

largest causes of failure in sport. His advice? Go out and practice the part of the game that you fear the most, to build up your confidence.

Essentially this translates as saying that the only way to overcome fear is to tackle it head on, so that it no longer becomes a fear. If you do something enough, it won’t be so scary. As the notorious Conor McGregor once said, “Ritual is another word for fear, manifested in a different way.” Rotella recommends only focusing on the positive, shutting out any bad thoughts or images from your head.

On race day pressure comes from all angles (yourself, your coach, yourself, your peers, yourself ). You may be tired from the training and balancing it with studies or a job and a social life can mean early morning runs, or late night sessions, and compromising your sleep.

Then there are the minor factors of timing your meal correctly and managing your water intake. Performance is not only a question of physical ability and preparation, it is also influenced by these numerous variables and obstacles that you encounter both pre and during the race.

The athlete to come out on top is the one who who deals effectively with these changing factors.

To put it simply, everyone is competing under the same conditions. If it is windy for you, it is windy for everyone.

The personal variables only influence you. While you might be dealing with a bit of dehydration, the person next to you might have problems breathing in the cold air, however the podium does not take this into account. When you are racing, you are hurting, but so is everybody else. It’s a matter of concentration, of grinning and bearing it, of getting your “tough” on. The tough ones are the ones who set personal bests, the ones who finish their first ever 5k, the ones who win.

In a war with only two soldiers, yourself and your head, the days where you triumph are to be savoured.

Relish the golden moments when you feel like you have conquered the world, bask in their glory, and never forget that euphoria but sometimes it just is not your day. Something, be it injury, fatigue, depletion, or just your mentality gets the better of you. In the moments you would rather forget, you

Ashtanga yoga is breathing process that helps people tap into the true vision of yoga, what’s known as ‘chitta vritti nirodah’, translated from Sanskrit as ‘calming the fluctuations of the mind’. But this is not some esoteric and unattainable goal; it’s readily available just by dropping down and looking inside.

On a practical level, the breathing process develops a deep and even breath, bringing a sense of calm and steadiness. The breath is cultivated as the source of movement into and out of each yoga pose, or asana as the poses are traditionally called.

Through this steady breath each yoga pose becomes an expression of gentle internal strength. However, this calm mind and strong body doesn’t come from sitting around talking. Talk is cheap. Regular, ideally daily, effort and hard work are required.

The traditional way of learning Ashtanga yoga is ‘Mysore style’, named after the southern Indian city where the Shri K. Pattabhi

Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute is based. In ‘Mysore’ classes, the student is taught a sequence of postures through one-onone instruction. The correct movements, breathing, and other aspects of the practice are learned gradually, in a stepby-step process accessible to anyone. This method allows each student time to practice and memorize what they have learned before adding more.

Students are able to practice independently and at their own pace while surrounded by the energy and inspiration of other students in the room.

Mysore style is the best way to learn Ashtanga yoga as memorising the postures allows people to focus internally, which is the real goal of yoga!

An Ancient Tradition

Traditional Ashtanga Yoga is founded on the concept of ‘parampara’, a term meaning direct, experiential knowledge passed in succession from teacher to student. ‘Parampara’ literally means ‘an uninterrupted succession’ and denotes the direct and unbroken transmission of knowledge from teacher to student.

Traditional Ashtanga Yoga is founded on ‘parampara’ and a commitment to its established instruction.

It is important to have a traditional teacher when learning this system. A qualified teacher with direct experience of using the practice can pass on hardearned knowledge to students in a safe and steady way, supporting them in their progress as they face the deep mental and physical challenges everyone confronts when looking internally.

Gillian Mooney, an Authorized Level 2 teacher - one of a small number of Ashtanga yoga teachers worldwide to have received the official Level 2 Authorization to teach, is the owner and director of Ashtanga Yoga Ireland and has spent many years studying at the source of this ancient practice, the Shri K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute in Mysore, India. As the only full time teacher in Ireland qualified to teach both the Primary and Intermediate series, she is passionate about imparting the purity and simplicity of Ashtanga Yoga in a way that makes it accessible to everyone, from complete beginners to experienced people.

Staying fit through yoga challenges you physically and mentally, helping you to realise that you are capable of so much more than you think.

Ideally, the strength, stamina and flexibility cultivated in the yoga room are taken off the mat and into the world.

Get into Ashtanga yoga and get ready to take those final exams and assignments head on!

Exercising fear Bláithín Sheil Online Comment Editor

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O QUOTE THE fastest American Marathoner of all time, Ryan Hall, (2:04:58, and don’t forget it), “you learn more from your failures than from your successes.” But before success or failure, comes fear. Sport is arguably, the perfect medium to experience and confront both fear and failure, learn to cope with the adversities each presents and no doubt, toughen you up.

Fear of the unknown

Fear is a fundamental aspect of sport as before every competition we are dealing with the unknown and the unknown obliges you to deal with fear. To progress, you have to do what you have not done before. You have to hurt more than you hurt last week.

You must be willing to get uncomfortable.

In life, challenges come in

all forms and sport provides you with the opportunity to practise tapping into that ‘ s o m e t h i n gmore’.

I’m not talking about physical capacity here, I am referring to the ability to grit it out.

Speaking of mental toughness in an interview with the Irish Examiner recently, Lizzie Lee, an Irish Marathoner with the Olympic Qualifying standard, emphasised its importance as being almost equal to the physical endurance, “you could have all the training done but if you let in the gremlins on race day, you’re not going to finish with the time you want.”

There is only so much physical preparation you can do for a competition, inevitably there comes a stage during your race where you think “uh-oh, I don’t feel so good.”

It is that this precise moment that the real competition begins.

Performance at training in relaxed conditions surrounded by friends and coaches, is a lot easier than producing a performance on D-Day. And this is where mental toughness comes in, this is where the greats separate from the rest.

Dr. Bob Rotella, a leading

The mind-set of champions

According to Rotella, fear and doubt are two of the

can actually reap many more benefits than from success.

It is the moments where we don’t quite succeed in being tough that in fact, make you tougher. Learning to lose is one of the best life skills.

Being a good sport

The beauty of life lessons is that they are interchangeable, you learn one thing in one situation, and it will stand to you in another, totally unrelated area of your life.

The way you compose yourself through the tough moments in sport will invariably stand to you in your personal and professional life. The more you lose, the more you win.

The first rule of Sporting 101 is that the road is not straight, and that failure is part of the journey. It is the way in which you deal with failures, as much as how you deal with successes that shape the athlete and person you evolve into. Its simple logic, really. We are the sum of our experiences, and tough sweat is the elixir of success.

Sports make you a “tough” one. You learn self-confidence that can’t be bought. Your “noexcuses” outlook applies to your life. This explains why some of the most successful

people in the world also happen to be athletes. Once you establish a good routine, the rest comes naturally.

A friend once told me, you have to have bad races to have good ones. He was disappointed with his performance and I struggled to find the right thing to say. Luckily my input was not necessary, as he was accustomed to the idea of dissatisfaction, and knew how to deal with it. I was more uncomfortable with his disappointment than he was.

Those words have stuck, it is the nugget of wisdom that speaks the loudest to me.

Learning to lose is, one of the most important life lessons and skills one can have. Gruelling races or matches, the scars of which you bear for days or even weeks, are character building and defining in a person’s development. “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same”, wrote Rudyard Kipling, “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it”.

Sport sets you up with the chance for this encounter, the rest is up to you.