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Michaelmas term, Week 12

Sect recruits on campus

Issue 5, Volume 54

Bang and my world was saved: Freshers’ Coop packs house

“Church of God” representatives approach students in Arts Building KASIA MYCHAJLOWYCZ INTERNATIONAL NEWS EDITOR The Church of God, a religious sect believing their leader to be the reincarnation of Christ, has made several attempts to recruit students on campus. This has raised questions regarding religious recruitment in College.

Church of God disciples approach students by claiming they are in Ireland to study English and need some help with a survey. Students are asked a series of questions, which cumulate in the student receiving a pamphlet promoting the sect.

A student approached by a disciple named Helen says “what she wanted was for me to meet her again to talk about her religion. She gave me her phone number on the back of the pamphlet, adding that I could help her learn English, a language she seemed to struggle with throughout our conversation. The conversation lasted almost half an hour by my estimate, and I left it a bit confused. I wished I hadn’t been distracted from my work by proselytizing, and had no desire to

CAOIMHE HANLEY COLLEGE NEWS EDITOR

universities when it comes to library Hours. The Royal College of Surgeons Library opens until 11pm during weekdays and until 10pm on Saturdays, Sunday and Bank Holidays; while the library in University College Dublin opens until 11pm on weekdays (and until 12 Midnight during exams) and until 9pm on Saturday and Sunday.

Speaking to Trinity News, Paul Dillon, President of RCSI Students’ Union,

Trinity College Students’ Union President Andrew Byrne has been approached by two separate groups of students from Dublin Business School who claim to have been exploited by their own college.

Byrne has been asked to represent these students, as DBS does not have a student representative body. The students are from India and Pakistan respectively and have approached Byrne after being asked to pay thousands of euros to repeat exams. The students, who at this point do not wish to be named for fear of retribution, do not come from wealthy families, and have come to what they believe is a “leading international business school” to study for postgraduate degrees in business/MBAs, paying up to ten thousand euros a year in the process.

The students involved have been asked to pay significant sums of money to repeat exams after failing one or two modules on their course.

Unless the students pay these fees, DBS are refusing to sign their visa extensions which allow the students to live and work in Ireland while in third-level education. According to Byrne, this effectively means DBS are receiving fees in return for visa extensions and so have a strong incentive to prevent students from obtaining their qualifications.

While Byrne, who has been in contact with DBS concerning the issue, notes that it is not yet clear whether the students in question had been given reasonable opportunity to repeat their exams before these measures were implemented, he is “extremely concerned and will be taking action if these students are being exploited”. He is also concerned that it appears that this is not the first time DBS have caused concern in the way they treat their students, noting that he has been made aware of previous complaints that have been made against the

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speak about my beliefs to a stranger.”

Helen explained the message of her church, using as visual aides a series of charts, graphs and illustrations. The religion believes that its founder, Ahnsanghong, who left the Seventh Day Adventist Church in 1964, is a reincarnation of Christ. “God the Mother” is celebrated as well as “God the Father”. According to the pamphlet,, the sect believes “as an earthly family is composed of physical parents (father and mother) and children (brothers and sisters), so the heavenly family consists of spiritual Parents (Father and Mother) and children (brothers and sisters).”

However, missionary work is forbidden on Trinity’s campus, according to Father Kieran Dunne, Head of the Chaplaincy Committee.“We spend a lot of time keeping an eye on • Continued page 2

The final performance of this year’s DU Players’ Freshers’ Coop last Saturday polished off a successful week for the Freshermen in which the Coop sold out its production run every night. Photo: David Adamson

Students campaign for 24hr library access CONOR SULLIVAN STAFF WRITER A new campaign, “Library Action” was launched last week, calling for extended Library opening hours, headed by Wayne Tobin, former Students’ Union two subject moderatorship convenor.

“Library Action” is calling for extended library hours at weekends and in the run up to the autumn Supplemental Examinations. At present

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the Library closes at 4pm on a Saturday with no Sunday or Bank Holiday openings, while during the summer the Library closes at 5pm during the week with no weekend openings.

While steps have been taken to extend library hours - the Students’ Union has gotten a commitment from the Library to introduce Sunday openings in this academic year, this has been stalled because the Library is seeking planning permission to install metal shutters around the Counter

DBS students exploited

Reserve area.

There are also questions surrounding funding for extended opening hours. At a recent Library Committee meeting, the Senior Lecturer, Prof. Colm Kearney gave a commitment to Students’ Union Education Officer Bartley Rock that he would bring the matter to the attention of the Executive Officers of College as soon as possible.

A sub-committee of the Library Committee, consisting of Union Officers

and Library Officials recently decided that the first priority was Sunday Openings (11am to 5pm) and the second priority was 8am openings on weekdays. For the Sunday openings, the Service Counters and the Counter Reserve would be closed. Trevor Peare, Keeper of Reader Services in the Library said, “The Library is presently in the process of acquiring the necessary screens to close off the service desk in the Berkeley Library.”

Trinity compares badly with other

tn2 Sophie Dahl talks books and modelling • Hugh McCafferty speaks to St Vincent Belfast Fashion week and Off the Rails Live • Christmas dinner made easy 10

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Sophie Da Catriona hl speaks to Gray

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Mills hits back at press

The Numbers Game

€7million

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Donatation made by the GSU acccording to their annual accounts

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Increase in recurrent grant wanted by GSU to fund a second sabbatical officer

150 Years Trinity is out of date by in its assumptions and working

CONOR SULLIVAN STAFF WRITER

practices, according to Dr. Eoin O’Dell, Fellow of the College and Chairman of Statutes review working party

“

He said, she said

”

“Better to keep your mouth shut and look stupid, than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Roderic Lyne, informing the Inaugaral Meeting of the College Historical Society of the principle he lives by.

“Bartley says the Students’ Union has been campaigning on this issue for many years, but we have still not got these longer hours, which tells us we need a new type of campaigning because the Union method is failing miserably. In my opinion, it stinks of cronyism.”

Wayne Tobin, organiser of “Library Action” “Making peace is a messy business; I have no apologies to offer on that score.”

John Major, speaking about the hard decisions he made as PM “Hopefully there will be some truthful journalists here, because there are very few left out there.”

Heather Mills, speaking at the University Philosophical Society

Heather Mills speaks to students in the Edmund Burke theathre, photographed before she asked for the photographers to leave the room. Photo: David Adamson

Former model and charity campaigner Heather Mills was presented with the Honorary Patronage of the University Philosophical Society last Wednesday in an interview in the Edmund Burke Lecture Theatre.

Speaking prior to her interview with Phil President Ruth Faller, she hit out at the assembled press, saying “hopefully there will be some truthful journalists here, because there are very few left out there”. She described her treatment at the hands of the UK media as worse than “a paedophile or murderer” for speaking her mind and telling the truth.

Over 200 students and dozens of journalists and photographers greeted Mills to the Edmund Burke Theatre in the Arts Building. Speaking before the interview, Senior Freshman Science student Orla Marnell said, “I’m looking forward to meeting the woman behind the publicity. I think it’s terrible that she has been tarred because her marriage went bad,” mirroring the feelings of

many of the audience.

Mills gave a wide-ranging talk, speaking about her charity work, her early childhood and her experience of losing her leg. Mills is a well-known activist, having worked for animal rights, landmine awareness and anti-poverty campaign groups. “As long as you have common sense in the University of Life, you can achieve anything” she said, describing her experience.

Mills is a vegan, and spoke about the benefits of such a lifestyle. She credited it as helping her in her recovery after losing her leg in a car accident. She said that livestock are the second biggest source of carbon emissions after human-based emissions and cited this as a reason to stop consumption of animalderived products, in addition to the health benefits of such a lifestyle.

Speaking about animal rights activists; she said she doesn’t condone their actions, but that she does understand the rationale behind their actions.

The former model did not speak about her 35 million pounds settlement with former Beatle Paul McCartney, which was reportedly agreed last January, in the course of her interview.

“College can no longer guarantee that ID cards and doors will function in three years.”

Bartley Rock, SU Education Officer, in a report on the College financial crisis “There is no opportunity for a positive financial outlook for College in the short to medium term. The current financial crisis will, without drastic remedial action, become increasingly serious.”

Bartley Rock

Clarifications and corrections Trinity News would like to clarify that in the article titled “Halo 3” in the Features section of the November 13th issue of the newspaper, the creation of the “Sonic the Hedgehog” computer game was misattributed to Sony. It was in fact created by Sega.

Editorial Staff Editor: Gearoid O’Rourke editor@trinitynews.ie Deputy Editor: David Molloy deped@trinitynews.ie Business Manager: Conor Sullivan buisness.manager@trinitynews.ie Copy Editor: Nick Beard copyeditor@trinitynews.ie Photographs: Martin McKenna photos@trinitynews.ie College News: Caoimhe Hanley collegenews@trinitynews.ie National News: Lauren Norton nationalnews@trinitynews.ie International News: Kasia Mychajlowycz internationalnews@trinitynews.ie News Features: Eimear Crowe newsfeatures@trinitynews.ie Society News: Sophie Davies socities@trinitynews.ie Features: Sam Hannaford features@trinitynews.ie Opinion: John Lavelle & Kevin Lynch opinionanddebate@trinitynews.ie World Review: Peter Doherty worldreview@trinitynews.ie Travel: Andrea Mulligan travel@trinitynews.ie Business: Danielle Ryan businessandcareers@trinitynews.ie Science: Sebastian Wiesmair science@trinitynews.ie College Sport: Jonathan Drennan collegesport@trinitynews.ie Sport Features: Connel McKenna sportfeatures@trinitynews.ie TN2 Editor: Catriona Gray Film: Conor O’Kelly Music: Carolyn Power Fashion: Ciaran Durkin Books: Paul Earlie Theatre: Polly Graham Art: Caroline O’Leary Edibles: Beth Armstrong Endnotes: Ailbhe Ni Mhaoileoin Website: Brian Henry

tn2@trinitynews.ie film@trinitynews.ie music@trinitynews.ie fashion@trinitynews.ie books@trinitynews.ie theatre@trinitynews.ie art@trinitynews.ie edibles@trinitynews.ie endnotes@trinitynews.ie webdesign@trinitynews.ie

Thanks to: Joey Facer; Pat Morey and College Security; Caoimhe and Sally-Ann in the Communications Office; Peter Henry; Fionn McLaughlin; Ed O’Riordan; Daithí Ó Malley; Nicholas Moustache; Daire Hickey; Daithi MacSithigh; Emer Graoke; David Adamson; Jenny Ryan; Rosscrea Express; and everyone in Midland Web Printing.

This publication is funded by a grant from DU Publications Committee.

Serious complaints about the content of this publication should be addressed to: The Editor, Trinity News, 6 Trinity College, Dublin 2.

This publication claims no special rights or privileges.

Scences at the Students’ Union-run Mystery Tour last week which included two Garda cautions, two cases of alcohol poisioning and an altercation with the Irish Defence Forces. Photos courtesy of Ed O’Riordan

Ambulances, fights and vomit DAVID MOLLOY DEPUTY EDITOR The Trinity mystery tour suffered a number of small upsets this year, with many students involved in alcoholrelated problems.

This year, the mystery trip consisted of close to 500 students on ten buses, and including travelling time lasted 12 hours. Two different venues were visited by the tour.

The first location turned out to be Cosmo Brown’s in Carlow, a popular nightclub attached to the Ritz Hotel on

Tullow Street, Carlow.

After the organisers managed to get all the students back on board their buses, the trip departed for its second venue, Langton’s Club in Kilkenny.

Student’s Union Entertainment Officer Ed O’Riordan told Trinity News that both locations were well received and that the evening was highly enjoyable. “Everyone had great craic, and I did too. Some people always get a bit carried away, but overall I think it was great success.”

There were, unfortunately, some regrettable occurences. Two students were cautioned by the Gardaí for

attempting to break into a hotel while intoxicated. Another two students were taken to St Luke’s General Hospital in Kilkenny, to receive treatment for alcohol poisoning.

There was also an incident involving Trinity students and a group of men who identified themselves as members of the Irish Army. Reportedly, these men started acting aggressively to a number of students while in the nightclub.

The Ents office had brought staff on the trip this year who operated as stewards, who attempted to diffuse the situation. Following a brief argument

with the stewards, the men left the venue.

Despite these events, O’Riordan said that the tour operator reported it as a relatively mild event by mystery tour standards. Apparently, the Dublin Institute of Technology had an ambulance on call at every venue they stopped at on their mystery tour. This ambulance was used on all occasions.

Last year’s mystery trip left a student behind who had fallen asleep in a field. After finding out where she was, the girl got a lift back to Dublin with a tour bus group. To date, there have been no reports of similar cases this year.

Church of God seeks Trinity members • Continued front page 1 virulent, cult-type things”, he said, even those running in the Christian vein.

“Hassling people in terms of religion is not supported by the Chaplaincy, or the Jewish or Muslim Societies.” Security is responsible for throwing out people like Helen, and Father Dunne said students should notify security if someone

attempts to recruit them on campus.

When contacted in relation to this article, Helen was anxious that it not be written. She did not want to bring attention to her activities at the College saying, “we are in trouble with security and the Christian Union.” She added that she had not been on College for a while, because “people are against us there”.

However, as late as last Friday representatives of the Church of God were working on campus. Speaking to Trinity News, second year English and Sociology student Emma Dorsey says that she was approached in College by another woman who was conducting the same “survey” last Friday, but told her that she wasn’t comfortable talking about her beliefs with strangers.

When approached about this article, Helen replied, “You don’t even know how big our church is,” she told me. “The church is very big, it is worldwide.” She added that she believed writing this article was “illegal”, and that “if you write this article, then we are against you”,asking, “Why do you want to make problems for me?”

collegenews@trinitynews.ie

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College in fatal funding crisis Report from SU Education Officer cites “no opportunity for a positive financial outlook for College” DEIRDRE LENNON STAFF WRITER Bartley Rock, Students’ Union Education Officer, presented a report detailing an impending financial crisis for Trinity to a Students’ Union Council meeting on Tuesday 13 November.

The report details the Recurrent Grant Allocation Model that has been implemented by the Higher Education Authority, which is charged with the job of allocating funds to the third level sector. Rock believes that due to the implementation of RGAM in 2007, Trinity is facing a financial crisis unless College rethinks its spending policies.

In his report, Rock outlines a bleak future for Trinity. He says, “There is no opportunity for a positive financial

outlook for College in the short to medium term. The current financial crisis will, without drastic remedial action, become increasingly serious”.

The report goes on to state that so severe is Trinity’s funding crisis that “College can no longer guarantee that ID cards and doors will function in three years.”

It is widely known that College faces a deficit of seven million euros for 2007, which includes the two million euros reduction of the Core Grant from the HEA. It is necessary to give this money back, as universities which have been overfunded according to RGAM will continue to have incremental grant cuts until the differences have been rectified.

RGAM itself issues each university with a core grant and takes

into account a number of factors such as student numbers, changes in inflation, and assigns a cost base for each student.

However, there has been no base price assigned per student or course set as of yet. This may lead to competition for resources and depending on the amount of resources that each university has and requires.

This system is partly based on the UK university-funding model. However, the UK model has significant differences in that it is a full funding model and regulates increases in student numbers from year to year.

There is the possibility that this model for the Irish third-level sector will be adjusted to become a funding model rather than an allocation one, but this may not happen for several years to come.

RGAM is replacing the previous system, Historical Resource Allocation Model, which was not adequate to provide for the needs of each university and did not account for increases in student numbers, in addition to the constantly changing needs of the college. These changes have been put in place with the agreement of the College administration.

Rock acknowledges that there are some merits attached to RGAM, such as its ability to provide more of a consistent approach to funding, more budget transparency and in its attempt to increase funding for university access programs.

Rock notes in his report that Trinity’s Academic Resource Allocation Model is used merely as a device for further financial stability, not for

Former Prime Minister visits the Hist AOIFE GRIFFIN STAFF WRITER The College Historical Society hosted its Inaugural Meeting of the 238th Session on Wednesday 21 November.

Guests included former British Prime Minister Sir John Major, his Deputy Martin Manseragh, former ambassador Sir Roderic Lyne and former Irish Ambassador to the UN Noel Dorr. Former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds was also invited, but was unable to attend due to illness. Reynolds was instead represented by his son Philip. Professor D.J. McConnell, President and Senior Fellow of the College, chaired the meeting.

Hist Auditor Timothy Smyth delivered his inaugural paper “Overcoming Conflict and the Legacy of History”, covering events leading up to the Downing Street Declaration of December 2003 and its important to the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

Major followed and gave the audience an honest and pragmatic insight to the events that both preceded and followed the Downing Street Declaration. It was, according to Major, when “paramilitaries on both sides realised Ireland was failing” that the time had come for something to be done. The emphasis of his delivery was on communication and discourse and how essential it is to conflict resolution, stating “you can not reach an agreement with someone you can not or will not talk to.”

Major referred to the peace process as “multi-dimensional chess.”

He recalls a definitive breakthrough in the moment when they realised that “the political parties would talk to the British

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The problem appears to stem from the under-regulation by the Government of the IT section of third level education. The universities, together with DIT are governed by the stringent controls of the Irish Universities Act of 1997, which provides “quality assurance” for its constituent colleges. This requires “the chief officer (of the college) to establish procedures for quality assurance aimed at improving the quality of

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Government, but they would not talk to each other.” Regarding any of his actions that may have caused controversy at the time, he said simply that “making peace is a messy business; I have no apologies to offer on that score”. Though he admitted that there “were many dark days”, he said also understood the violent acts of the parties throughout, each saving face in front of the other, understanding “blood and progress” as linked and that this form of progress “was the right one.”

Deputy Martin Manseragh spoke next and was quick to praise Major’s “initiative and ability to take bold steps”.

He emphasised how important the Downing Street Declaration was as a catalyst for the Ceasefire in 1994.

Deputy Manseragh spoke of his personal experience of the process and how “like Bunyan’s pilgrim”, those involved ‘suffered no discouragement’ and continuously followed the motif of “practise, patience, persistence”. He supported John Major’s appraisal of the situation by restating that “yes, peacemaking is messy; you do have to get your hands dirty”. He spoke of the importance of communication and sees the Peace Agreement “not as the end of history, but a beginning.”

Opening his speech, Roderic Lyne informed the audience of the principle he lives by, saying its “better to keep your mouth shut and look stupid than to open it and remove all doubt”. Lyne contextualized Major’s work on the peace process, reminding the audience that 1994 saw an internal split within the Conservative Party, the ratification of the Maastricht treaty and a war in Bosnia. He pointed out that John Major visited the North no less than thirteen times in the space of three years, “discovering a people who wanted

education and related services provided by the university(Section 35).” Institutes are required to have a Students’ Union to represent the needs of their students under these regulations.

However, ITs (with the exception of DIT), and private colleges like DBS are not required to abide by these regulations, raising the possibility for student exploitation considerably.

Byrne is planning to raise this issue with both the Equality Tribunal, and the National Council for Refugees.

expansive purposes. That RGAM is based on the same principles as the Academic Resource Allocation Model, ARAM, with funding being channelled into expanding universities, is a cause for concern.

Rock believes that “ARAM is not a tool for an expanding college (which Trinity needs to be if it is to secure more HEA funding), it is a mechanism of survival for an underfunded one”. Rock feels that “there is a disconnection between what a university feels is appropriate, and what funding [from RGAM] is appropriate.”

Quality Assurance is not mentioned at any point in the RGAM program. There are significant worries about Quality Assurance with regards to teaching and research for Trinity, with Rock stating “we are seeing a conscious attempt to reduce quality and increase

quantity (in universities).” In this report, the Union proposes an evaluation of College services and teaching, to ensure that the quality of teaching will not be affected as the HEA made it clear that student numbers will be a significant driver in the level of funding allocated.

It will be easier for Trinity to function under RGAM when College modularises, which is proposed to come into effect in 2009/2010. 2008 will bring further change, a proposed academic restructuring, and College due to divide itself into three faculties. It gives each faculty the opportunity to arrange a programme of well-organised and structured plans to work towards, increasing efficiency and extending ARAM’s influence in the network of schools.

College Health Centre statistics show good sexual health Figures compare favourably with national statistics LINDSEY BELL STAFF WRITER

John Major at the Hist where he spoke alongside Martin Manseragh and Albert Reynolds’ son Philip. Photo: Mark Kearney change, who crowded the streets to shake his hand and say “thank you for coming. Thank you for trying.”

Lyne praised both Major and former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds as two masters in the conflict resolution.

He felt Reynolds was a “pressure tactics man”, while Major’s rhetoric meant he could “send you to Hell in such a way you’d look forward to the journey”.Lyne mentioned the highly dangerous aspect of the conflict with both sides having the “psychology of a minority”, with Unionists being a minority on the island and Nationalists being a minority in the North. His conclusion was to praise to the Declaration itself and to explain that its success lies in the that that it is

“completely and utterly unreadableand of course, that’s the point of it!”

According to Dr. Noel Dorr, what made the Declaration powerful was that it operated within a new framework where “self-determination could take place simultaneously between the two sides”, seeing many past conflicts as arising from a failure to reassure the Unionists of their position. Dorr’s assessed both Major and Reynolds as “people who fit the needs of the time.”

Major, and Philip Reynolds, representing his father, were presented with the Historical Society’s award “for outstanding contribution to public discourse.”

According to the first issue of the College Health Centre’s eZine, sent to student’s on 19 November, 40% of visits to the Health Centre are for sexual health reasons and about one in ten Trinity students have been diagnosed with an STI during their college life.

However, Trinity students appear to be faring better than their counterparts on a national scale. While the Trinity Health Clinic is not able to provide exact statistics due to doctor-patient confidentiality, a source at the Health Centre gave a less dismal view than might be expected, suggesting that in the region of only four percent of students tested came back positive.

When viewed in comparison to the statistics given by the National Health Protection Surveillance Centre in their Annual Summary Report of 2004, Trinity students come off quite well. The 2004 report by the NHPSC stated that STIs in Ireland were up by twelve percent in 2004, compared with 2003. The most common STIs are ano-genital

warts, non-specific urethritus and chlamydia.

According to irishhealth.com, with regard to chlamydia, there has been a “three-fold increase in the number of new cases per year since 1993”.

The report points out that cases of chlamydia may be much higher than statistics suggest, given that in 70% of women and 50% of men, there are no symptoms.

Mirroring national statistics, chlamydia and ano-genital warts are the most common STIs seen by doctors at the College Health Centre. Chlamydia is caused by a bacterial infection. It’s passed on by having unprotected sex with someone who’s infected, by transferring the infection on fingers from genitals to eyes, or from a mother to a baby during birth. There are often no symptoms, yet it can lead to some serious complications, such as pelvic pain, difficulty during pregnancy or infertility in women.

If a student is concerned that they have had unsafe sex, the Sexual Health Clinic at Trinity provides full STI testing for free, with a charge of only ten euros for the courier of samples.

Progress in review of statutes CONOR SULLIVAN STAFF WRITER A working group established by Board to review the statutes that govern Trinity College has begun its work. Over the next few months the working group will examine all aspects of the statutes and try to modernise them and bring them up to date, as they were last reviewed in 1966.

The statutes “are in legal terms ...in a mess” says Dr. Eoin O’Dell, chair of

the working party, and fellow of the College. He feels there is “a significant disconnection between the reality of college and the university now and as described in the statutes” and that College is essentially “a century and a half out of date in it’s assumptions and working practices, as described in the statutes.”

The statutes are a constitution for the college. They define what College is and are superior to the College Calendar, Course Regulations, and any decisions made in Board Meetings. They

lay out what Scholarship and Fellowship is, the relations between college offices and so forth.

The working group set up to review the statutes was set up in October 2006 and has been having regular meetings since then, to which all Staff and Students are entitled to attend and contribute to. The working party has already produced drafts on the Chancellor, Visitors and the University Senate; and these are on the Working Party’s website at the website at the moment.

At present, the group are drafting statutes relating to the Library, the Fellows and the Scholars and in Hilary term the group will be drafting a new Statute on the College Community (which will be an entirely new statute) and on Board and Council.

The next meeting of the group will take place at 2:30pm Tuesday December 4 in the Arts Building, more information is available on the website for the working party. www.tcd.ie/local/statutes

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News Briefing GSU elects vice at EGM Gabriel McGee was elected Vice President of the Graduate Students Union at an Extraordinary General Meeting held on Tuesday 13 November.

McGee was runner up to present GSU President Alessio Frenda in last year’s GSU elections. This was a cause for concern for some within the GSU, and a member of the audience asked if his loss to Frenda would affect the workings of the Executive Committee, as had happened in the past. McGee replied “there are no hard feelings. It was a fair election, and after it, I was willing to go about my normal student career”.

McGee added that it was, in fact, Frenda that informed him of the opening for Vice President.

The new Vice President has been in Trinity for the past three years, studying for a Masters degree in Philosophy. As the Captain of the Dublin University Boat Club last year, McGee sat on the Boathouse Committee, along with various college committees. He credits these experiences with giving him an insight into the workings of College, and providing him with credibility enabling him to run for GSU Vice President. McGee stated his motive for running as being “the opportunity to give something back to the GSU.” Amid quorum issues, which delayed the start of the meeting by 45 minutes, as a minium of 35 GSU members were needed to validate the vote, McGee was elected, with 29 votes in favour, 1 against, and 5 abstentions.

Photo: Martin McKenna

Caoimhe Hanley

Nominations in for Dean Elections AOIFE GRIFFIN STAFF WRITER Nominations are in for the three new deanships, which are being created as part of college’s tri-faculty restructuring.

Nominations will be put to the ballot this week.

Professor Clive Williams is the only nominee for the Deanship of the Faculty of Engineering, Mathematics and Science. Professor Williams is currently the College’s Associate Professor in Biochemistry, a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, Director of the Bioresearch Ireland Centre and a member of The Royal Irish Academy.

The proposed Faculty of Health

Sciences also sees a single nomination with Professor Colm O’Morain being put forward. While it appears that Prof.

O’ Morain is suitable candidate, information on his credentials proved unattainable either through the college peoplefinder service or the communications office, who have failed to respond to inquiries regarding such information for over six days.

There are two nominees for the new Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. The candidates are Kevin Rockett, Head of the Drama, Film and Music School, and Michael Marsh, Professor of Comparative Political Behaviour and head of the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy.

Speaking to Trinity News, Professor Rockett says he “believes it is my broad experience of both the academic and the cultural that resulted in this nomination”. His qualifications range from being the inaugural head of the School of Drama, Film and Music, to introducing a BA in Film Studies to the College, which graduated its first students this year. Prof. Rockett has also been both “a director of the Project Arts Centre and a Chairman of the Irish Film Institute” during the establishment of the Irish Film Centre.

Professor Marsh has an established standing within the College, having joined as a junior lecturer in 1973 and worked his way up to, among other high-standing positions, “Five years as

the Head of a department which has established a very high international reputation.”

The tri-faculty system move is viewed as a positive one by all contesting nominees. Prof. Rockett explains that “the restructuring of College into three powerful faculties, whose Deans will be part of the Provost’s ‘cabinet’, will allow for school heads and student representatives through their membership of faculty executives and deans to play a central role in College policy, including the distribution of the budget. The decentralisation of financial and human resources’ expertise to faculty offices will bring these activities closer to schools.”

Valid ballots will be returned by 5 December 2007, with counting of the papers scheduled for the following day.

The new Faculty Deans will be supported by a Faculty Administrator, a Human Resources Officer and a Financial Advisor and will work closely with college administration and staff in order to ensure the highest levels of efficiency and responsibility within the College.

If nominees fail to secure a minimum quota of votes, the Provost may appoint a Dean from within the College or work with Faculty Executive Committee to appoint a Dean from outside the College.

Annual Children’s Research Centre lecture on adulthood Rising average marriage age in Ireland reflects “emerging adulthood” says American psychologist ADAM LARRAGHY STAFF WRITER

Students campaign for longer library opening hours

Photo: Martin McKenna

• Continued from page 1 says, “There would be an uproar if the hours were cut down during the week and if the library were shut down on weekends. It would be horrific for the students” and he continued to say that the resources are well used by students with many staying in until closing.

Speaking to Trinity News, Bartley Rock said “The Library is an absolutely central issue for students. As such, there has been a large push in recent years to transform its services. As for extended opening hours, this was especially highlighted last year. The Library is always a central part of any education related campaign that the SU runs as it’s an absolutely vital service.”

Students’ Union President Andrew Byrne reiterated this, saying the SU have gotten a commitment to

wider hours and that Sunday opening should be introduced during Hilary Term. He said “it would be wrong to say this has started now, the SU has been working on this for some time”.

“Extended library opening hours was one of the commitments in my manifesto and I’m determined to see it through,” Byrne continued.

Organiser Tobin hit out at this saying that he was “flabbergasted” at the response of Rock and believes the approach of the SU to this is entirely wrong. He said “Bartley says the SU has been campaigning on this issue for many years but we have still not got these longer hours, which tells we need a new type of campaigning because the SU method is failing miserably. In my opinion it stinks of cronyism. What we must do is speak to the students and get them on-board and involved so the

campaign is bigger and broader.

Commitments at meetings are no good unless they are followed up by a coordinated approach of action (like our campaign). These meetings are too bureaucratic. They are all talk no action.

It is delay after delay like the issue of the student centre.”

Regarding the issue of 24-hour opening, Rock said that it was a more complex issue what would require further discussion. He said, “If it can be done in other Universities it can be done here. It just requires hard work and campaigning. I have been involved in campaigning for many years and I am determined to get this service for fellow students. If it so complex why do postgraduates have 24hour access to the 1937 reading room? But as usual the rest of us must wait”.

United States psychologist Professor Jeffrey Arnett, giving the Trinity Children’s Research Centre’s annual lecture on the 14 November, spoke to Trinity staff and students on what he calls “Emerging Adulthood”.

According to Professor Arnett, the transition to adulthood (and its attendant responsibilities and roles such as employment, home ownership, and marriage) has been extended beyond the traditional ages of 18 or 21. Parents now support their adult children well into their 20’s, allowing them to pursue their own interests without financial worries.

Prof. Arnett, a Research Professor at Clark University in Massachusetts, sees “emerging adulthood” as “an age of possibilities, a period in which many different potential futures remain possible and personal freedom and exploration are higher for most people than at any other time”.

In Ireland this phenomenon

is reflected in the average marriage age, which has risen between 1996 and 2005 from 30 to 33 for a man and from 28 to 31 for a woman and also the increasing number of undergraduates entering postgraduate studies supported by their parents.

Professor Arnett also pointed to the increasing number of adult children living at home in Ireland, due in part to high house prices, but due also to postgraduate education.

Another aspect of “emerging adulthood” is the “boomerang generation”, adult children moving out of their family home, but later returning and continuing to seek their parents financial support.

Trinity’s Chair of Childhood Research and Director of the Children’s Research Centre Professor Sheila Greene said Ireland “need[s] to come to terms with the new social patterns brought about by this new and longer road to adulthood and change the traditional assumptions that we still hold about family, relationships, education and careers.”

Your View Do you think religious groups should be able to recruit on campus?

Compiled by Martin McKenna and Joey Facer

Joe McCaffrey

JS Maths & Economics It’s difficult to manage. With lots of religions, it’s difficult to make a qualitative decision about which to include and which to cut out. If the religion could be dangerous to students College should try to stop them from recruiting.

Oli North

SS English Studies I don’t see why not. I don’t think the authorities on campus should have a secular power-base. But they’re not going to be recruiting me.

Brian O’Beirne SF Law

Absolutely. I think it’s wrong to presume students won’t be able to make a sound decision. Like the College alcohol policy, it would reflect the assumption that students would not be able to make their own decisions.

Emily Reilly

SF English & Drama If every religion is allowed to then I guess so. I don’t think any should be excluded from the rule. They should all be allowed to recruit and everyone should be able to make up their minds.

Fern McCauley SS English and Drama I don’t know if it’s about recruiting. It depends on how they’re doing it. If it’s an abuse of trust or intrusive then it shouldn’t be allowed. So long as it is done in a safe way, everyone should be able to voice what they believe in.

collegenews@trinitynews.ie

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GSU under fire over donations

Bang and my world was saved:

JOHN CALLAGHAN

CAOIMHE HANLEY

STAFF WRITER

COLLEGE NEWS EDITOR The Graduate Students’ Union were questioned heavily about their donation of €20,000 to charity in a meeting of the Capitations Committee on Tuesday 20th November, amid allegations that the donations were against the principles of Capitations Committee funding.

The GSU representatives, President Alessio Frend and Treasurer Paul Laird, explained that the money was donated to two groups. €10000 was given to the Student Assistance Fund in a “one-off donation”. The remaining €10000 was used as a contribution to the Centre for Academic Practise and Learning, which will be used to set up an annual postgraduate teaching award.

The funds for these donations came from deposit accounts held by the GSU. According to Laird, “the Executive [of the GSU] decided that it was not appropriate for the GSU to be investing money allocated for the benefit of the postgraduate students and the deposit accounts have been closed.

Further explaining the GSU decision, Laird went on to say, “It was decided that rather than allowing spending to increase in an unsustainable matter, the money from these investments should be spent in a way that benefits postgraduate students.”

However, the opinion of the GSU was not shared by the rest of the committee. Joe O’Gorman, Honorary Treasurer of the dublin University Central Socities Committee, took issue with the GSU’s expenditure, stated that “the Capitations Committee is not of a charitable nature”. O’Gorman added that during the administration of Provost Mitchell, the CSC was approached with a proposal for a student counselling service, but were forced to decline to fund the service, as it was felt that charity work did not come under the auspices of the committee. O’Gorman went on to say that the CSC did not provide funding to the Trinity College Cancer Society, as it was essentially a charitable

organisation, but allowed the society to use the CSC’s facilities.

It was suggested that the GSU should have returned the funds to the Capitations Committee, given that the GSU was granted extra funds for two years in succession, on top of their annual grant by the Capitations Committee, as the Union claimed it was facing a funding shortage. The GSU was asked why this money was not used to plug the funding shortage rather than given away in a donation to charity, to which they failed to adequately respond.

The Capitations Committee questioned the GSU further on their donation of €20000 to charity when it emerged the GSU are seeking a larger recurrent grant from Capitations, claiming to need an increased annual income to fund a second sabbatical officer. The GSU requested that their funding be reweighted, and asked to receive €61734 rather than the €51764 that they were granted this year.

Speaking to Trinity News, Students’ Union President Andrew Byrne, who sits on the Capitations Committee, said, “there are a lot of issues with the GSU at present. There are questions as to how they represent their students, and how they use their capitations grant.”

The winner of the Law Society Maidens Debating Competition receives his prize from Prof. Gerry White, Dean of Students.

Photo courtesy of Darren Mooney

Success as VDP day helps raise over €6,000 NIAMH NIMHAOIN STAFF WRITER On 14 and 15 November, €6174 was raised by Trinity students for Dublin University St. Vincent de Paul Society, in what was one of the society’s most successful events ever.

Wednesday 14 was the annual St. Vincent de Paul day, with a range of fundraising activities organised including paint balling, a cake sale and a five-a-side football tournament. Fundraising continued on Thursday 15 with street collections. Proceeds from the events will go to facilitating Trinity VDP’s 22 student-run activities.

The two-day event was a “great success”, according to TCD VDP President, Niall Walsh. “There was a really great atmosphere between everyone who helped out and everyone who took part (despite the rain!) and I think that people will hopefully now be a little more aware of the Vincent De Paul in Trinity and hopefully get involved with some of our activities!”

Wednesday’s fundraising started off with cake sales in the Arts Building and the Hamilton Building, which alone raised over €2000.

Cakes donated by Avoca and Superquinn, Finglas were sold along

collegenews@trinitynews.ie

Norris helps champion Human Rights

with a range of homemade cakes baked by students.

Other daytime activities included a five-a-side soccer tournament in Botany Bay with sixteen teams participating, a rifle shoot in association with the Dublin University Rifle club and a Paintball Hut in Physics Square (however, because people were reluctant to sign up to be shot, rumour has it one unfortunate person was the sole victim for over two hours!).

On Wednesday evening, a table quiz was held in Doyle’s hosted by up and coming comedian Colm O’ Regan with the nostalgic theme of “Children of the 90’s”.Prizes included 90’s board games “Hungry Hippos” and “Buckaroo”, shopping vouchers, perfume, wine and gift sets, all donated by local shops. To win one of the spot prizes (a €100 shopping voucher) participants were given the challenge of being first back to Doyle’s with a Wispa, which is said to have led to a series of minor scuffles in a nearby Centra. After the table quiz, there was a night out in Beta Bar with three live bands. All proceeds from the door went to St. Vincent de Paul.

Thursday’s bucket collections, coordinated by Vinny O’ Mahoney and Nicole Byrne, raised the single greatest amount of money of the two

days. Students were invited to pick up buckets and tshirts in the Arts Building and to go collecting in the streets surrounding the College.

Approximately 55 students volunteered and over €2500 was raised. One collector encountered Brian O’ Driscoll who, apparently, had no change.

Although the society organises ongoing fundraising events, VDP Day is the primary fundraising event of the year. It facilitates the running of TCD VDP activities, which include soup runs for the homeless, homework and youth clubs, visiting the elderly and flat decorating. From the proceeds of this year’s event, a donation will also be made to the St. Vincent de Paul branch in Thigio, Kenya. The donation will be used to commission six beds made by local craftspeople for the town’s medical centre, which primarily works with victims of HIV and AIDS. The next society fundraiser will take place on the sixth of December, when VDP members joining with the Choral Society to go carol-singing at the Central Bank.

Students interested in volunteering can find more information at www.tcdvdp.org or www.tcdvdp.bebo.com.

The Homework and Drama Clubs are in particular need of volunteers.

Trinity Senator David Norris has called on all students of the college to get involved in the national campaign to protect human rights defenders throughout the world.

The campaign, named “Protect One, Empower a Thousand”, a joint effort of Frontline (the international foundation for the protection of human rights defenders) and The Body Shop Ireland, was launched on Monday 19 November in The Body Shop outlet on Grafton Street.

Senator Norris, who spoke at the launch, says “We have many extraordinarily courageous people, men and women, straight and gay, who are prepared to risk careers, comfort, and even their lives in order to highlight abuses in very undemocratic countries ranging from the Congo to Iran. It is extremely important that international public opinion supports them.”

He concluded by adding, “The fact that brutal regimes know that the outside world is aware of the names of particular individuals and the conditions under which they are held, sometimes has an inhibiting factor with regard to their ill treatment.”

Postcards highlighting the plights of specific human rights campaigners who are being harassed in six different countries around the world are available in The Body Shop outlets throughout Ireland. The campaign aims to accumulate as many signed postcards as possible, which will then be sent to the relevant authorities in the specified countries.

Highlighted campaigners include Mutabar Tadjibaeva, a woman’s rights defender from Uzbekistan. “She was arrested in October 2005 while on her way to Ireland to participate in the third Dublin Platform for human rights defenders and sentenced to eight years in prison on fabricated charges”, the Frontline source added. Since then, she has been repeatedly denied access to medical care, legal representation and family visitations.

Two new student publications launch Icarus, a literaty magazine, and Miscellany, a current affairs review, launched this week with a reception in the GMB.

JAMES CAULFIELD CONTRIBUTING WRITER On Friday 23 November, the first issue volume 58 of Icarus was launched in the Graduates’ Memorial Building. A presentation of the new Houlihan Prize was made by the Senior Lecturer in English, Gerald Dawe and the current Editor of Icarus, Brendan Guildea, to its first winner.

The Houlihan Prize, named after the prolific writer Con Houlihan, was awarded to Peter Grant, the author of “She Flips My Switch” (on page sixteen of the magazine), as it was deemed to have captured a mood and feeling peculiar to the day in a most original and prodigious manner akin to Houlihan himself.

Grant kindly indulged Mr Dawe’s request to read his piece aloud to the crowd.

Thereafter, the Editor highlighted a couple of things unique to the current issue. For instance, the email addresses of all the writers can be found at the back of the Trinity publication, so to facilitate the giving of feedback.

Those in attendance spent the remainder of the evening sipping wine in the University Philosophical Society Conversation Room and discussing the issue in depth.

Mr Ian Coulter and Ms Rosemary Rowley (having written in the Icarus of 1975 and 1967, respectively) were also present. They are among the first “Friends of Icarus”, yet another brand new initiative, intended to raise the profile and quality of Ireland’s foremost collection of student contemporary writings.

Look out for the issue around campus this week. You will probably not like it all, but it is well worth a read.

Also, you will get a free coffee/tea/ cappuccino/etc. when you present the magazine at Havana Tapas Bar on George’s Street... So grab one while you can.

Meanwhile, the year’s first issue of Trinity’s longest running student publication, Miscellany, was released last Monday. The Michaelmas issue featured articles including an interview with David Norris, the experiences of students spending a year abroad, and an

objection against the Arts Building, to name but a few. The launch night of the magazine was held on Wednesday 21 Novmber in Bowe’s Lounge and the atmosphere was increasingly jovial from the combination of good conversation and wine.

Begun in 1895, Miscellany has acted as a forum for Trinity students to discuss their sentiments on their college and world.

The publication was originally titled T.C.D.: A College Miscellany and covered all the news on and about campus. In more recent years, it has been specialised to opinion pieces and expositions which fall under the rough headings of society, culture, and politics. Judging by the interest the College community has shown in the latest issue, it is apparent students still value it as an opportunity to voice and hear opinions.

Miscellany is published once a term, and the next issue is due to be released in late February. Submissions are currently being accepted and should be sent to the editor at miscellanymagazine@gmail.com.

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Cross Campus DCU Roddy Doyle presents €5000 poetry prize Dublin City University student Francis Landao has scooped first prize in the first annual Metro Éireann Writing Award for immigrant poets and authors.

The talented student who is in the final year of his Masters in Marketing received a cash prize of €5000 for his poem “The Last Moabi”.

Booker Prize Winner Roddy Doyle judged a whole host of entrants. The competition aims to create new Irish writers, and is open to people with an immigrant background living in Ireland for at least two years.

“I’ve been writing since 1990, but I have only begun entering competitions. My ambition is to continue to develop my writing skills and use my talent to share my vision of the world with others”.

Francis has many achievements to his name. He received third prize in the French section of the 17th Annual Feile Filiochta/International Poetry Competition in 2005. He also won the Comortas Filiochta Eist, Fifth Annual Eist Poetry Competition.

Lauren Norton

QUEENS Dogs sniff out diabetes The Queen’s University of Belfast researchers are appealing for volunteers to help investigate whether dogs can reliably detect changes in their owner’s diabetic state.

According to Dr Deborah Wells, from the School of Psychology at Queen’s, “Anecdotal reports suggest that some dogs can perform early warning of hypoglycaemia by using their sense of smell to ‘sniff out’ if their owner’s blood sugar levels are dropping.”

“At present there are a couple of people in the UK trying to train dogs for hypoglycemia detection, but scientific study of this phenomenon is sorely lacking and in much need of investigation.”

“This study has the potential to be of enormous benefit to the medical profession.

Knowledge amassed from the study will be used to inform the development of electronic noninvasive alert systems for this disorder. These are systems that are able to detect either decreases or increases in blood sugar levels similar to an electronic nose.”

Dr Wells added: “The video footage will be analysed to see if dogs exhibit any changes in behaviour or show alertness. We will also examine how similar these experiences are between dogs, how reliable they are and whether or not the dogs react in the same way every time their owner experiences low blood sugar levels.”

John Fahy

Embryonic stem cell research poses ethical question for UCC LOUISE GLEESON UCC EXPRESS UCC is considering the possibility of creating embryos for the purpose of emerging stem cell research. The University Research Ethics Board is, at present, involved in a consultation process to determine the College's policy on the use of embryonic stem cells for research purposes.

To that end, the board have contacted the academic staff of UCC and provided them with four possible options with the aim of developing a

framework for the creation of such a policy.

A college spokesperson said: “There is, at present, a consultation process taking place, and in due course this is expected to result in a university policy on embryonic stem cell research."

Those deciding are faced with four choices, ranging from complete prohibition of the use of embryonic stem cells to creating embryos for research purposes. Other options include the use of surplus in-vitro fertilisation embryos plus imported embryos.

MEP Kathy Sinnott has mounted a campaign from Brussels to convince the UREB to ban the use of embryonic stem cells.

Ms Sinnott, who visited the college last Tuesday in an effort to step up her campaign, said an embryo is the beginning of human life and its destruction for the purpose of research is unethical.

Stem cell research has been a contentious issue since its inception.

Many scientists believe that through stem cell research, they may eventually find a cure for a large amount of ailments including Parkinson's disease,

diabetes and heart disease. to name but a few.

While stem cells can be found in areas other than the embryo, such as mucus membranes, it is believed that embryonic stem cells are the most flexible and therefore have a greatest potential for success, a claim that has yet to be proven.

Through the process of extracting stem cells from an embryo, it is destroyed, something that poses an ethical question for the college. At present, there is no legal prohibition on either the importation or creation of embryos for research purposes in

Ireland and as a result, the decision on their use within the college is entirely up to UCC. A representative from the Students-for-Life society said they were opposed to the creation or use of an embryo with the specific intent of destruction.

"We believe that an embryo is a living thing and to destroy that is wrong.

When you consider there are other ways of obtaining stem cells which have shown successful results, while research into embryonic stem cells has not, we do not understand why the use of adult stem cells is not sufficient."

UCC hosts United Nations diplomats, ministers and Bono JENNY MURRAY NEWS REPORTER The second meeting of the Hunger Task Force launched by the Irish Government in 2006 took place in University College Cork on Friday 16 November. The initiative aims to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty and hunger by 2015.

The Task Force was established to

examine how Ireland can help combat world hunger, particularly in Africa. In his speech, the U2 frontman Bono identified Ireland's “historic experience of famine” as the nation’s inspiration to help tackle global poverty.

The singer, who has become as famous for his aid work as his music, said Irish people around the world understood the need to eradicate hunger and poverty because of the country's famine experience.

"Ireland deserves real credit for setting

course for 0.7 (of Gross National Product (GDP) for Overseas Development Aid), and can leverage this moral leadership to spearhead global efforts on areas of deep concern for us as a nation."

The Task Force is made up of a number of national and international figures, including former Agriculture and Food Minister Joe Walsh, economist Jeffrey Sachs; Sheila Sisulu of the UN World Food Programme; Tom Arnold, CEO of Concern; Justin Kilcullen,

director of Trócaire and Professor Denis Lucey of UCC. Chairman Mr Walsh said: "We hope to produce a report that will not be afraid to challenge orthodoxies and to challenge not just ourselves but also our partners - both other development agencies and the developing countries themselves."

A further two meetings will take place, including one in Malawi, before the Task Force reports its findings in the summer of next year.

Employability of NUIG Arts Graduates increases Placement opportunities for arts and humanities: the new CONNECT program offers real-life experience and networking opportunities with employers at national level.

LAUREN NORTON NATIONAL NEWS EDITOR Seventeen new degree courses are to be showcased at the National University of Ireland Galway Open Day on Thursday 29 November alongside new efforts to forge links between national employers and undergraduates of the college.

With a radical departure from traditional Arts degrees, the new CONNECT Programme from the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Celtic Studies is offering seven new four-year degrees.

The CONNECT programmes are designed to increase the employability of graduates by developing distinctive

skills and creating connections with life beyond the campus.

During their final year of college, NUIG students will be immersed in their specialised field in a variety of efforts resembling those on offer in American universities. Opportunities include project-based work, educational placement in the community, portfolio preparation, creative practice, study abroad, service learning or placements within Non-Governmental Organisations. It is hoped this will increase employment prospects.

The seven new CONNECT degrees are: BA with Children’s Studies; BA with Creative Writing; BA with Film Studies; BA with Human Rights; BA

with Irish Studies; BA with Theatre and Performance; and BA with Women’s Studies.

Other new programmes from the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies are a BA in Mathematics and Education and two degrees offered entirely through Irish; BA Gaeilge agus Léann an Aistr0iúcháin and BA Riarachán Gnó. The Commerce, Engineering, Medicine and Science faculties are also expanding their catalogues in time for the Open Day – the College of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences will offer the first undergraduate podiatry programme available in the country, leading to a Bachelor of Science in Podiatry.

National University of Ireland, Galway. Photo: Phalinn Ooi

nationalnews@trinitynews.ie

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The Global Campus OXFORD UNION PREPARES FOR FASCISTS

Ivory Coast drug dealer suspect in Kercher murder MONIKA URBANSKI STAFF WRITER A fourth suspect in the Meredith Kercher murder investigation was arrested in Germany last Tuesday. According to The Times, the convicted drug dealer Rudy Hermann Guede, 20, who has joint Italian and Ivory Coast nationality, had been hunted by the police after his fingerprints had been found on a blood-soaked pillow in Meredith’s room and faeces recovered from the cottage lavatory matched his DNA. A photograph of the suspect was circulated to bars and shops in Perugia.

It had been suggested by the Italian police that Guede probably could still be in Italy because his profile on Facebook.com was last updated a few days

Kercher Case Timeline

earlier. Finally, as the Guardian reports, Italian police traced Guede in Germany through a friend who established Internet contact with him.

Through his IP address and a message from his Facebook account, which is no longer reachable, the detectives were able to narrow their search onto the city Mainz in Germany, where local police had already arrested the 20 yearold Ivory Coast native for travelling without a ticket. After his arrest by Interpol, Guede was directly transferred to Italy.

Rudy Hermann Guede, 20, is described by a member of his adoptive family in Italy as such: “Guede was a difficult type – spent a lot of money, told lies, and did not behave well.” His family had previously cut all ties with him because of his “rebellious” nature.

A video posted on the YouTube

August 2007: Meredith Kercher arrives in Italy as part of a year-long programme to study Italian. She was in her third year of a European Studies degree at Leeds University.

2 November: The 21 year-old is found dead in her bedroom in the city of Perugia with a deep cut to her throat. Her semi-naked body was hidden under a duvet.

website, entitled “Ciao, dearest ones, this is a gift from God. Tell me all and ask me anything”, shows Guede seemingly drunk or under the influence of drugs, ranting to the camera followed by a scary outburst: “Oh My God. I’m an extra-terra. I’m from alien earth who must be called human people. Oh Mamma. I’m a vampire, I’m Dracula.

I’m gonna suck your blood.”

Amanda Marie Knox, Meredith’s 20 year-old American flatmate, and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 24, are still in custody. According to the Guardian, the Congolese bar owner Lumumba “Patrick” Diya has been released from prison in Rome due to lack of evidence on the same day Guede was arrested.

The identification of a new suspect would change little for Knox and Sollecito.

The murder of the 21 year-old stu-

6 November: Meredith’s 20 yearold flatmate, Amanda Marie Knox, her24 yearold boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, as well as Congolese barman, Lumumba “Patrick” Diya , 38, are arrested

8 November: Amanda Marie Knox admits to being in the house the night Meredith died and confesses to having heard her die.

dent from London has appalled the public in Britain, Italy and the United States. At the time of writing, the Facebook group “Nobody should die in his/her Erasmus (Meredith Kercher RIP)” had 3031 members. Compared to 1297 members two weeks ago, the interest in Meredith’s death is still very high.

Now that a new suspect has been arrested, Nathan Raban, from Italy, wrote on the group’s message board: “Now, you can rest in peace, Meredith...

They found and arrested the third person, Roudy, today in Germany. May you watch over us like an heavenly angel....”.

A comment on Guede’s video on YouTube reads: “You should die the way you forced that poor girl to die.

You’re going to get caught and hope you live the rest of your life in extreme pain, you perverted animal.”

19 November: A known drug dealer, Rudy Hermann Guede 20, is named as the fourth suspect. His fingerprints and his DNA had been found at the crime scene.

20 November: Police arrest Hermann Guede, originally from Ivory Coast, after tracing his computer ID and a message he sent from his Facebook account.

Murder and gun play plague University of Chicago JUSTIN SINK REPORTER, CHICAGO MAROON Amadou Cisse, a 28-year-old graduate student in the chemistry department of the University of Chicago, was shot and killed Sunday night walking home to his apartment on Chicago’s South Side.

According to police, Cisse, a student from Senegal, was approached by a gunman at 1:26 a.m. and shot once in the chest. Witnesses in nearby apartment buildings heard the gunshot and, upon discovering Cisse lying on the sidewalk, called 911. Paramedics declared him dead at the scene.

The Chicago Police Department (CPD) has not yet released detailed information about the shooting, and witness accounts are unclear. A small-caliber gun was recovered in an alley close to Cisse’s apartment, but police could not yet connect the weapon to his death, nor could they confirm some accounts that the gunman fled in a dark-colored sedan. The initial investigation has focused on the possibility that the shooting may have occurred in the midst of a robbery, although Cisse’s wallet, keys, cell phone, and backpack were all on his person.

“We’ve got nothing really concrete,” said CPD Detective W. Golab, who is leading the investigation. “Wit-

nesses said there was a car, but we’re not sure if there’s a connection or not. At this point, I’ve basically been typing and just making calls notifying families.”

The University, at the urging of the CPD, is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer.

Police are also investigating the possibility that the shooting is linked to two other violent incidents Sunday night. At 12:33 a.m., a University staff member was chased down the 6000 block of South Woodlawn Avenue by a gunman who fired once in his direction.

Forty-five minutes later, two women were robbed outside the University Hospitals complex on East 57th Street between South Drexel and South Ellis Avenues by a man who said he was armed.

“They’re going to look at those two incidents to see if there’s any connection between the two incidents and the homicide,” said Rudy Nimocks, director of the U of C Police Department (UCPD).

Cisse had successfully completed his dissertation defense on November 1 and was expected to graduate at winter convocation on December 7. The University will award the degree posthumously, said Kim Goff-Crews, vice president and dean of students.

Cisse graduated from Bates Col-

internationalnews@trinitynews.ie

lege in 2001 with degrees in physics, mathematics, and chemistry after coming to the United States from Senegal to attend high school.

“He wasn’t one of those kids that had everything. He didn’t even have a laptop, and he was just working and doing everything he could to help pay for tuition,” O’Connell said.

O’Connell questioned the University’s safety procedures. “I have automatic lights, a gate, but if we don’t have help with security from the University’s side of things, it’s hard to get it right,” O’Connell said. “When you’ve got security issues, you expect it to help expedite things through the red tape.”

At the meeting and in a subsequent e-mail from President Robert Zimmer, administrators outlined a number of steps the University will take in response to the shooting.

Two additional vans will be immediately added to the SafeRide late night van service in an effort to reduce time spent waiting for the shuttles to arrive, and police bicycle patrols of campus and the surrounding area will begin on Tuesday.

In the long term, the UCPD plans to permanently double the police presence between midnight and 8 a.m. with the addition of between 12 and 15 new patrol units. Furthermore, the UCPD will open a temporary substation south

of campus until the transition to the new headquarters is completed.

“As always, we’re concerned about safety across campus, but we’re particularly concerned about south campus,” Goff-Crews said at the meeting. Cisse’s murder is the first of a U of C student in over 30 years.

The University is also weighing the possibility of installing security cameras in public spots of the campus and surrounding area.

“Cameras raise issues; they also have benefits,” said Hank Webber, vice president for community and government affairs, at the meeting. “And we will be working with you [students].”

The shootings also prompted the first implementation of the University’s cAlert system, which notified students, faculty, and staff by phone and text message around 11:30 a.m. Monday of the incident. Some questioned the lag between the shooting and the alert being sent out.

“There’s always a difficult balance here,” Webber said in a phone interview.

“You want to have the facts right; you evaluate the nature of the threat. Some people believed that we needed to notify people quickly, but we were best off notifying people in the morning when we had a better sense of the facts.”

Chicago Maroon Editor-in-Chief Kat Glass contributed to this report.

Far right groups have called for a campaign targeting students who demonstrate against Nick Griffin and David Irving’s appearances at the Oxford Union in two weeks time.

Anti-fascist and student groups claim that students could be attacked on the day of the free speech forum in eighth week, and an Oxford student blogger has been sent death threats by neo-Nazi groups on the Internet.

Blogs on fascist websites have called for supporters to congregate in Oxford during the debate and to challenge protesters.

One blogger on fascist website ‘Survive or Die 14’ issued “a call to all right minded British patriots,” saying, “Plans have been made by every scum group in the area and around the country to try and disrupt this event. The brainless bullies of the left along with the self interested from various ‘minority’ groups will all descend on the town on that day in an attempt to stifle free speech.

“It is time that UK Nationalists showed these filthy vermin that we will not bow to threats of violence and bully boy tactics. In my own opinion we should be there on the 26th, not to stoop to the level of the scum by committing acts of violence.”

Steven Altman-Richer, co-President of the Oxford University Jewish Society, said this was a clear indication of plans to intimidate student groups.

“We feel that this shows an actualised threat that fascist supporters will descend on Oxford for Irving and Griffin’s talk, therefore putting the safety of Oxford students at risk,” he said. “We are extremely concerned…not just for the safety of the Jewish community but for all minorities and all students.”

Sabby Dhula, co-ordinator of the national group Unite Against Fascism, also said that students were in danger and called on the Union to cancel the forum.

“We are very concerned for the safety of students, staff and all at Oxford University. A Neo-Nazi group is threatening to attack those who oppose the Oxford Union debate with the BNP.” “The BNP is participating in a supposed civilised debate at Oxford, in order to give itself the sheen of legitimacy, when its stated aim of an all white Britain would only be achievable through violence, and its members have criminal convictions for violence and racism. We therefore call on the Oxford Union to stop lending legitimacy to fascism and withdraw these invites immediately,” she said.

Duncan Money, a second-year from Balliol, said that he had received death threats after criticising fascist groups in an internet blog, and described those planning disruption at the Union as “complete nutters.”

“I have received hundreds of threats from fascist groups,” he said. “My family has been threatened, my friends have been threatened and I’ve been threatened. On one occasion someone rang my home phone in the middle of night and said they would cut my throat. I have received hundreds of threats from members of the BNP and far right groups.”

Several groups have organized protests against appearances by Nick Griffin and David Irving. Wadham College Students’ Union is to protest in conjunction with members of student group ‘Make Oxford Just Initiative’, as well as members of the Jewish Society and the Islamic Society.

Thames Valley Police have advised people not to attend the Union on the evening of the debate if they are not permitted to attend the forum.

They are currently liaising with the Oxford Union and protest groups in preparation for the event.

Oxford Union President Luke Tryl confirmed that there would be increased security measures in place, and announced his intention to hold a poll in conjunction with the Union’s termly elections to judge support among members for the invitations.

Michael Sweeney, Cherwell 24

CHICAGO STUDENT SPEAKS OUT The shooting of Amadou Cisse was a tragedy, as well as a nasty wake-up call to the University of Chicago community. The fact is, it’s easy to imagine oneself talking back to the wrong person, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this crime reminded us all of that.

However, it is important not to miss the forest for the trees in this situation: on the same night that Mr. Cisse was murdered, two more U. of C. students were victims of an armed robbery, and a staff member was shot at, only four blocks away. Last year, a spate of sexual assaults was considered so troubling that the University advised female students to refrain from walking around the neighbourhood alone after dark. This is despite the fact that Hyde Park, the neighbourhood in which the University of Chicago is located, is one of the safest, most heavily policed areas in Chicago’s South Side, and that crime rates have been dropping here for decades.

Much of this is a result of the privilege – both socio-economic and racial – of University-affiliated people. By my count, the Tribune (Chicago’s newspaper of record) has published eleven articles in the day and a half after his murder about Mr. Cisse’s murder, but just one about “Another South Side slaying,” which occurred the next day.

The fact is that violence in the South Side (a majority Black community, an ugly relic of legally-mandated segregation) is acceptable, as long as it does not involve people deemed newsworthy. The University of Chicago is going to have a hard time convincing prospective students, and their parents, that Hyde Park is a safe place to attend school, even with the help of the massive University of Chicago Police Department and any number of pro-safety programs in effect.

The feeling of being unsafe in my own community is deeply unsettling, but it can’t be dealt with by increased policing and fear. One of the strengths of the University is its setting; we cannot insulate ourselves from the problems of our community, or pretend that they do not apply to us because we can go home for Thanksgiving break.

Philip Underwood, 2nd year University of Chicago student

TRINITY NEWS

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Michaelmas term, Week 12

NewsFeature

Mental Health week: one step on the long road to de-stigmatising mental illness With 1 in 6 people suffering from depression in Ireland, Trinity News investigates what is being done in Ireland to address the issue of mental health.

UNA GEARY STAFF WRITER Mental Health Week kicked off in college on Monday 19 November and was marked by a number of events.

Stands located in the Arts Building and in the Hamilton Building were manned by yellow-shirted volunteers and provided an array of leaflets on mental illnesses and services available to treat them.

Each day the focus was on one particular aspect of the general issue of mental health – Monday’s focus was depression, Tuesday’s was mental ill health (psychosis, self-harm, schizophrenia), Wednesday’s was positive mental health and Thursday’s was eating disorders. The variety of events scheduled began with a depression awareness workshop on Monday offered by the Student Counselling Service. On Wednesday, Dublin University Yoga Society provided a free yoga class in Regent’s House. On Thursday, the Student Counselling Service ran a relaxation techniques workshop.

The week finished up on Friday with another free yoga class in Regent’s House.

According to Trinity College’s Students’ Union Welfare Officer Úna Faulkner, “The primary purpose of the week is to raise awareness about mental health and mental health-related problems. The fact that 1 in 13 Irish students suffers from depression and 1 in 30 people have an eating disorder

highlights how common such illnesses are. Therefore, the main aim of the week is to promote, in an inoffensive and sensitive manner, the services that are already available in College for the sufferers of mental health-related problems, as well as promote the services that are available outside Trinity”.

She also stressed the importance of reducing the stigma attached to mental ill health so that more people will seek help.

Amongst the services offered by the Student Counselling Service are Niteline, one to one counselling, on-line counselling and Student 2 Student.

Niteline (1800 793 793) is a confidential and anonymous service open from Thursdays to Sundays from 9pm to 2.30am. It is run by volunteers from Trinity College, University College Dublin, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and National College of Art and Design who must undergo a screening and training programme based on the Samaritans’ model before taking any calls.

One to one counselling is provided by counsellors or clinical psychologists or psychotherapists, who are there to listen to and discuss with students any personal issues they might have. To make an appointment, the number to call is 01 8961407, or alternatively, you can drop into their offices on 199-200 Pearse St. Online counselling affords an even greater degree of anonymity. Students can contribute to discussion boards at www.trinitymentalhealth.com or send a message to a counsellor and get a

response. For those who would prefer to talk to a fellow student, the Student 2 Student programme is a free and confidential service set up with this aim in mind. To avail of the service, simply go to www.tcd.ie/Student/peer_support and click on a photograph of a coordinator to send them a message.

They will arrange an informal meeting with you which will allow them to match you with a suitable peer supporter.

The two main obstacles standing in the path of good mental health care in Ireland are the social stigma associated with “mental problems” and a lack of funding. Both issues urgently need to be addressed and rectified, given that the problem of mental ill health is so widespread and its effects so devastating. It is estimated that at some point in their lives one in every five women and one in every ten men will suffer from depression. This illness was recently reported in a paper published in The Lancet medical journal to have a greater health impact on sufferers than some chronic physical illnesses such as diabetes. This finding is supported by the Lundbeck Mental Health Barometer, on which depression is ranked as the third most disruptive illness in Ireland ahead of cancer, Parkinson’s disease and heart disease.

There are a variety of ways of successfully treating mental illnesses.

One of the most popular is cognitive behavioural therapy, which has been shown to be as effective as drugs in the short term and to have longer-lasting effects. It revolves around the notion

that the way we feel is influenced by our cognitions – the way we think about things. Patients are encouraged to behave in ways that challenge negative thinking. The British government has recognised the economic value of this kind of treatment. Considering that forty percent of people claiming incapacity benefit in the UK suffer from depression or anxiety disorders, it is in the government’s interest to provide therapy for these people. The cost of therapy is roughly equivalent to the cost of the incapacity benefit and the loss of tax on earnings. No loss is sustained and the benefits will be quickly reaped when these people return to the workforce. In 2010, the British National Health Service will be spending six times more than it does at present on psychological therapy and will employ 3500 therapists.

The Irish government could do with taking a leaf out of their book. The standard of mental health care in Ireland was described as “shameful” and “seriously out of step with international practice” by Amnesty International in their report “Mental Illness, The Neglected Quarter”. The Minister of Health at the time, Micheal Martin, openly admitted that mental health care has been sorely neglected.

“Historically it is a well-known fact going back over 30 or 40 years that Irish mental health services did not get the kind of treatment that they should have got in terms of investment.” However, not much seems to be being done about it. Mental Health Ireland pointed out that the share of the health budget devoted to mental illness has almost halved in the past two decades.

Evidently Trinity College services also suffer from lack of funding. Faulkner highlighted that, while only around five percent of the student population avail of the services, they are used to capacity.

This small percentage could be taken to mean that Trinity students have an extraordinarily high level of positive

Above: The stresses of a fulltime degree program causes severe mental stress for many students. 1 in every 13 students suffers from depression. Right: The mental health week team get on top of things.

Photos: Eimear Groarke and David Adamson

mental health, or, what is more likely, that the social stigma is deterring people from taking that first step of seeking help. Only one quarter of people with depression/anxiety disorders get treatment. A health survey found that two thirds of Irish people would be embarrassed to talk about their depression to their friends. Eightyseven percent of sufferers feel there is a social stigma attached to the illness.

This attitude must be eradicated in society.

Amnesty International maintains that “everyone has the right to the highest attainable standard of mental health”. People are denying

themselves a basic human right in being “too embarrassed” to seek treatment for mental ill health – treatment which could revolutionise their lives, without even resorting to pills.

Mental Health Week is one small step on the long road to changing people’s attitudes. Hopefully it will make students think for even a few minutes about the issue and of people in their lives who may be suffering in silence. It doesn’t have to be that way though underfunded, the services are there. This is the most important message to take away from Mental Health Week.

Mental Health facts

Services

Depression is ranked as the third most disruptive illness in Ireland ahead of cancer, Parkinson’s disease and heart disease.

Niteline: A confidential and anonymous phone service run by students, for students. Phone: (1800 793 793), Thursday – Sunday from 9 pm to 2.30 am.

1 in 6 people suffer from depression/anxiety.

1 in 13 Irish students suffer from depression.

1 in 30 people have an eating disorder.

According to consultant psychiatrist at the Mater Hospital, Professor Patricia Casey, “it is estimated that 400000 people suffer from depression in Ireland.”

Just over 200 clinical psychologists are working in the mental health sector this number needs to be doubled.

Student Counselling Service: To make an appointment, call 01 8961407, or drop into their offices on 199-200 Pearse St. On-line counselling service: www.trinitymentalhealth.com

The share of non-capital funds for health services going to mental health has declined from 12% of the total in 1985 to less than 7% in 2004, in contrast with other areas of the health service.

Student 2 Student Network: for those who wish to talk to a fellow student, go to www.tcd.ie/Student/peer_support

The number of teenagers seeking counselling for depression and self-harm in Dublin increased by 25% last year.

SU Welfare Officer Úna Faulkner welfare@tcdsu.org, (01) 6468437

newsfeatures@trinitynews.ie

TRINITY NEWS

Michaelmas term, Week 12

SocietyNews

DUPA heads to Temple Bar in it’s first exhibition MUIRIS WOULFE CONTRIBUTING WRITER On Thursday 6 December, the Dublin University Photographic Association will be holding their first major end-of-term photography exhibition of the current college year.

It will begin at 19.30 and continue until late.

The venue is in the heart of the city’s cultural quarter in the plush surroundings of Filmbase’s function room, situated on Temple Bar’s Curved Street. This location allows both students and the numerous tourists who pass through the area each day to appreciate DUPA members’ photographic skills.

Attendance is open to everyone, both members and non-members alike and the good news is it’s free of charge. The exhibition will not only be about photos, as it will also be a social evening where you can partake of our wine and hors d’œuvres while mingling with the expected large crowd.

This exhibition follows on from a tremendous start to the DUPA year. The introductory lecture was followed by a number of other lectures outlining how to make the best use of your camera in order to take more appealing photos. These lectures ran concurrently with numerous darkroom classes where members could learn how to turn their

unprocessed film into negatives and turn these negatives into prints. Of course members always have access to the two darkrooms and can use the supplied chemicals free of charge throughout the year, even during the summer months. In addition, DUPA organises a monthly event where the society’s experts offer suggestions on ways to potentially improve your photos.

DUPA is not just about sitting around learning photography skills. There is also a social and practical side to the society. On Sunday 4 November, the first day trip of the year was to the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, offering members a chance to take interesting photos of nature while practicing the skills they acquired in the lectures. This trip was followed by a number of lunchtime walks around Trinity, snapping the sights and the daily occurrences of college life.

And DUPA doesn’t just take photos in Ireland! A trip abroad will be organised later in the year, following on from our wonderful trip to Berlin last year. Watch the Dublin University Central Societies Committee calendar for details.

All these events culminate in the display of members’ photos at the exhibition. This exhibition is going to be very relaxed and open to all kinds of submissions, both old and new. Digital and film prints are all accept-

Society Diary diary@trinitynews.ie

A selection of chemicals and equipment for processing photos. Photo: Will Luo able, but digital photos must be printed for display. If you use film and can print it yourself, perhaps after attending one of the darkroom classes, you may be in with a chance of winning a €100 voucher from Dublin Camera Exchange. The prize will be offered for the best black and white hand printed portrait photo of size 10”×8” or smaller and will be judged by a member of Dublin Camera Exchange.

DUPA members shouldn’t forget that they can buy discounted film and photographic paper from the committee room any Wednesday between 12.00 and 12.30. The committee is situated in Room One of the Atrium at the end of the corridor on the ground floor. Members can also avail of competitive discounts from John Gunn Photography on Wexford Street and Conn’s Cameras on Clarendon Street. So students have no excuse not to submit their snaps!

If you’re ready to hand in your masterpiece or masterpieces, just pop in to the committee room at the times mentioned above. If you can’t make it during those times, drop your photos into the DUPA mailbox at the entrance to the Atrium beside the Bank of Ireland. Alternatively attend one of the myriad DUPA events throughout the remainder of the term, all advertised on the CSC calendar, where you can also hand in your work.

Last year’s event was considered one of the best exhibitions ever held by DUPA and an even bigger and better exhibition is planned for this year.

So if you want a memorable evening free of charge with no obligation to submit photos, why not come along with your friends and join us in Filmbase on Thursday 6 December at 7.30pm.

Check out the DUPA website at http://societies.csc.tcd.ie/~dupa/

Black Holes and more in Mathsoc GAVIN BEATTY CONTRIBUTING WRITER Last week, Dublin University Mathematical Society had Nobel Prize winner, Prof. Gerardus Hooft speak to a completely packed Schrödinger Theatre. Having a theoretical physicist talk to you about black holes and say something interesting (and avoiding “they’re neat!”) is worth sitting in the aisles

for. Lectures and tutorials on Maths (including areas like theoretical physics and real computer science) are what the society is really all about. We have talks every week interspersed with social events at sane intervals.

If you wanted to listen to they guy who verified the proof of last year’s Fields Medal winner, the Trinity graduate now working on string theory in the States, Nobel Prize winners or the “purple time” guy, then Mathsoc has given you those speakers. After Christ-

mas, our big international speakers arrive. Put simply, there’s a whole lot more to come!

Christmas time also means our annual party, now moved to Radio City. The last two years in The Village have given us Wet Love pounding their famous gui-tar solo and the Ghostbusters theme through the sound system; the alternative progressive punk musings of our favourite floppy-haired German physicist and Trinity Fellow, Stefan Hutzler and the intentionally renowned scratchy

beats of DJ Brain Cancer. We now have a proper DJ, of course – one happily familiar to you all, actually...

Come celebrate your lack of regard for continuous assessment by going to the Mathsoc Christmas Party in Radio City, off the quays, on 4 December, tickets €5 or at the door €7. Complete your Jordan Happy Animal Matrix.

IN THE SPOTLIGHT: DU Filmmakers Auditor: Pierce Conran, Senior Sophister Film Studies Membership: 250 Established: 1986 (formerly Video Society) Aims of the society: To encourage students from all levels of experience to make films and see their own work at their very own premiere on the big screen in the Sugar Club.

Any student in the College has the opportunity to get involved in filmmaking, whether their interests lie in writing, directing, designing, acting, editing, camerawork, costumes, make-up or producing.

Facts and figures: Nothing notable so far, but in 1992 to 1993, they did have a dispute with the Central Societies Committee; grudgingly accepting their generous loan of £3000 over two years to help them replace out of date equipment.

Regular Events: There are film premieres at the Sugar Club at the end of every term; these nights include live acts and DJs. Filmmakers have guest speakers and film screenings throughout the year. And of course a lot of filmmaking!

Plan for 2007/2008: Like with any society, it is to encourage students to be involved. Get as many people making as many films as possible, as well as having some great nights out.

Greatest moment in society history: Last year’s “I Want to Score” event was certainly the most memorable event in recent Filmmakers’ history. Organized in conjunction with Trinity Arts Festival, student films were accompanied by live music provided by different Trinity societies (including Dublin University Jazz Society, Dublin University Orchestral Society and Trinity College dublin Afro-Caribbean

Society), as well as a number of individual college-based bands. In addition catering was provided by the Dublin University Food and Drink Society. It was a great collective effort and a hugely successful night.

Website: It doesn’t take long to read the whole of the website, but this is a good thing. It is updated regularly and the next upcoming event listed at all times whilst browsing the site. Even better is the link to past films this society has helped make and a direct link to their youtube channel.

This is a society reliant on you, the student, getting involved and contacting them to make films, but it’s hard to see how it could work any other way. They seem to be keen to help all the up and coming film makers out there, so why not get involved?

What to look forward to: A repeat of last year’s “I Want to Score” success.

Some great guest speakers. Lots of films!

Amnesty Int. Christmas greetings cards SEÁN O’DRISCOLL CONTRIBUTING WRITER At Dublin University Amnesty International, we are actively campaigning on behalf of Amnesty International Irish Section.

We have a stand every week in the Arts Building concentrating on an urgent action of the moment or an ongoing human rights issue, where we get you to sign and send letters to the relevant government department

societynews@trinitynews.ie

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or embassy. We also have more personal letter writing sessions to a cause of your choice.

Although we haven’t had a lot of events this term, we have many in the pipeline for 2008 and for the Christmas period. We are having a talk on Thursday 29 November on the continuing crisis in Burma with a guest speaker from Burma Action Ireland. See posters or check www.csc.tcd.ie/~amnesty/ or DU Amnesty International on Facebook.

We are also doing our usual holiday period greeting card campaign. We will be hav-

ing a table quiz/Christmas Party in Cassidy’s on Westmoreland Street on Tuesday 4 December at 8pm, feel free to come along to try and win some prizes, including drinks vouchers for the George!

Throughout the year, we will be focusing on different campaigns. We will be taking part in Rainbow Week, as well as International Women’s Day, to name two upcoming events.

Each year, Amnesty International invites you to send messages of support and sol-

idarity to victims of human rights violations.

With our greeting card campaign, we provide you with the cases and you send the message.

The Greetings Card Campaign allows Amnesty members to make a difference on a personal level. It makes illegally held prisoners feel like they are not alone, however tough it may be. Visit the Amnesty Irish Section website at www.amnesty.ie for more information.

Tuesday 27th November Food and Drink Society: Guinness Storehouse Tour & Tasting 4.45-7pm. €4, from Arts Building.

Capoeira: Classes 5-6.30pm in Regent House, €3.

Trinity Arts Workshop: Life Drawing 7-9pm. €4, materials supplied. 191 Pearse St. Metaphysical: Metaphysical Weekly Paper 7.30-9pm.

“Law, Legitimacy and the Luger”, a paper by Rory Traynor. Room 5012, Arts Building Japanese: Kendo class 8-9.30pm. No experience required, €20 per term. Held in the Ancillary Hall Wednesday 28th November Yoga: Classes 1-2pm. Suitable for everyone, Room 50, Atrium.

Trinity Arts Workshop: Pottery and Ceramics 6-9pm, €4 for 90 minute session, materials and instruction provided, Goldsmith Hall Trinity Saint Vincent de Paul Society: Trinity Club 69pm, a club for young adults with intellectual disabilities. Volunteer for the evening, meet at Front Arch.

Orchestral: Michaelmas Term Concert, Christchurch Cathedral 8pm. Tickets €5.

Traditional Irish Music: Traditional Music Session 9:00pm, Cassidy’s on Westmoreland Thursday 29th November Falun Dafa: Exercise Classes 7-9pm, Room 50, Atrium. No experience necessary.

The Phil: Maidens final, GMB, 7.30pm.

Trinity Arts Workshop: Life Drawing Classes, €4 for 2 hours, materials and instruction supplied, 7-9pm, 191 Pearse Street.

Afro Caribbean: Hip Hop Dance Class 7-8pm, Fitness studio, level 3, Sports Centre, all levels welcome!

Choral Society: Handel’s Messiah Concert, Exam Hall 8:00-10.30pm.

Friday 30th November Trnity Arts Workshop: Life Drawing in natural light, 10.30am-1.30pm, 91 Pearse Street.

Yoga: Classes 2-3pm, suitable for beginners and more advanced, Regent House.

Capoeira: Classes 4-5.30pm in Regent House, €3.

Afro-Caribbean: Drumming Classes in Regent House. Learn the art of Djembe drumming from West Africa, 6-7pm.

Dance Society: Classes, Regent House, 7.30-9.30pm.

Saturday 1st December DUISS: Dalkey Castle tour, leaves Front Gate, 10.30am Trinity Arts Workshop: Pottery and Ceramics classes 10am-11.30am, 12.30-2pm, €4/class, Goldsmith Hall.

Monday 3rd December Trinity Saint Vincent de Paul Society: Homeless Day Centre 10.00am-4pm. Help us out at the for 2 hours at the Homeless Day Centre, Bow Street, Dublin 7.

Yoga: Classes 5.30-7pm, suitable for beginners and more advanced, Regent House.

Traditional Irish Music: Beginner Bodhran Lessons(6-7pm) and Trad Irish Guitar(8-9pm), €5/hour, room 2B, Goldsmith Hall Tuesday 4th December Yoga: Classes 1-2pm. Suitable for beginners and more advanced, Room 50, Atrium.

Capoeira: Classes 5-6.30pm in Regent House, €3.

Trnity Arts Workshop: Pottery and Ceramics, 6-9pm, €4 per 90minute session, Goldsmith Hall.

Falun Dafa: Exercise Classes 7-9pm, Room 50, Atrium. No experience necessary.

Gender Equality: The Full Monty Screening! 7pm in the Swift Theatre. All welcome!

Amnesty: Christmas table quiz (see feature).

Mathsoc: Christmas party (see feature).

Wednesday 5th December Yoga: Classes 1-2pm. Room 50, Atrium.

Trnity Arts Workshop: Pottery and Ceramics, 6-9pm, €4 for each 90minute session, Goldsmith Hall.

Trinity Saint Vincent de Paul Society: Trinity Club, a club for young adults with intellectual disabilities.

Volunteer at 6pm, meeting at Front Arch.

Traditional Irish Music: Traditional Music Session, Cassidy’s Pub, Westmoreland Street, 9pm Thursday 6th December Yoga: Classes 5.30-7pm, suitable for beginners and more advanced, Regent House.

Trinity FM: Thursday night Live stream session 610pm, tune in on 97.3 Falun Dafa: Exercise Classes 7-9pm, Room 50, Atrium. No experience necessary.

Trinity Arts Workshop: Life Drawing Classes, €4 for 2 hours, materials and instruction supplied, 7-9pm, 191 Pearse Street.

Geographical: Christmas Party, Gingerman, 7pm.

Friday 7th December Capoeira: Classes 5-6.30pm in Regent House, €3.

Afro-Caribbean: Drumming Classes in Regent House, 6-7pm.

Trinity Arts Workshop: Pottery and Ceramics, 6-9pm, €4 /90 min session, Goldsmith Hall.

Microbiology: Christmas Party, 7pm MacTurcaills.

TRINITY NEWS

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Michaelmas term, Week 12

CycleAmerica

Trinity cross-continental cyclists (from Left to right) Brian McDermott, Kevin Hillier and Alan Gray with Brandon, Dan, Luke and Hugo. Photo: Martin McKenna

A two-wheeled continental crossing SIOBHAN MCCAULEY DEPUTY FEATURES EDITOR Two hemispheres, two continents, four major mountain ranges, eleven of the most dangerous countries in the world, the Atacama desert, sixteen thousand miles and just under nine months to do it all. This is the feat that faces two Trinity graduates and one Trinity student: Alan Gray, Kevin Hillier and Brian McDermott respectively, as they embark on a gruelling cycling expedition from Alaska to Argentina next June in the hopes of raising a minimum of €200,000 for Dublin-based charity Aidlink.

Hillier and Gray, who both graduated from Trinity recently with Bachelors in Business Studies came up with this ambitious idea when they were meagre third years. When asked about their inspiration for the trip, Gray replies that he had always wanted to undertake a major physical challenge of this sort when finished college, while Hillier makes an offhand reference to The Motorcycle Diaries – a recent film adaptation of Che Guevara’s travels across South America on a motor bike. After contemplating various routes including the trans-Asian option or biking from Cape Town to Cairo, the boys decided that the Alaska-Argentinian route, which spans for a grand total of 16,000 miles, was to be the ultimate challenge. Given that the earth’s circumference is just 24,000 miles, it is clear that the boys’ expedition is to be no mere trifle. Soon afterwards, McDermott was willingly recruited and the Pan American Cycle Test (P.A.C.T) trio was complete.

First things first however. Before the cycling could get underway, there were some major decisions to be made, the most pressing of which concerned which charity was to benefit from the proceeds of their adventure. McDermott had previously done some fundraising for Aidlink while in school in Blackrock and was aware of its projects in some of the world’s most underdeveloped regions. Founded in 1982, Aidlink is a non-denominational, non-governmental organization, with the slogan ‘third world development through partnership’, partnership being the operative word. Aidlink channels funds raised through community based initiatives already present in these underdeveloped regions, focusing on the support of small to medium sized long-term community development projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America. These projects are in the areas of health, education and training including adult literacy, care of street children, rural development/agriculture, construction and water provision among others. Community participation in all stages of the project cycle is encouraged to give a strong sense of ownership and to guarantee the sustainability of the project.

The boys are working in close collaboration

with the Chief Executive of Aidlink, Anne Cleary in determining which specific projects are to receive the funds raised. The three core projects which they have selected are based in Kenya. The boys maintain a strong connection with Kenya and Africa in general, as Hillier was brought up in Kenya, while McDermott was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in Zambia. The projects they have chosen as beneficiaries are aimed primarily at helping Kenyan children. The first of their choice is orchestrated in collaboration with the Kisumu Apostolate Programmes (K.U.A.P Pandipieri) and is aimed at educating street children in Kisumu.

The second project they have chosen to support is run in conjunction with the Girl Child Network and is geared towards improving women’s educational rights and the facilities for them within schools in general. The third project they have chosen is run in collaboration with a group called MSPCA, who with the support of the Diocese of Lodwar in Northern Kenya have been working for the last eight years on a range of projects in the agriculture, water provision, primary healthcare and primary education sectors in the Turkana province.

The appeal of the Aidlink charity for the boys lies not only in its strong African connection, (70% of Aidlink’s funds go to Kenya and Uganda) but also in the fact that it is the natives themselves who are involved with the implementation of these community development projects. As the boys quite succinctly put it, it is ‘Kenyans doing it for Kenyans’. In other words with the help of the Aidlink program, native people are building communities in both a physical and literal sense – in taking part in the actual construction of amenities, they are also constructing a sense of propriety and pride, which will inevitably lead them to value such amenities all the more. The point is that these are not short term projects put in place by anonymous charities. Aidlink is more about ‘sustainability than relief’ asserts Gray.

Listening to the boys talking animatedly about their chosen projects, it is quite apparent that they have done their research.

And so the conversation turns to cycling. The Panamerican expedition is due to begin inside the Arctic Circle at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska on June 20th 2008, where temperatures could be anywhere between minus five and plus five degrees Celcius .

So far, the only one it seems who will be there to see the trio off, is McDermott’s older brother Niall, who has volunteered to drive the back-up car for the duration of the entire nine months! Weather aside, the start of their journey will be tough. Due to the extreme northern positioning of Alaska, there can often be more than twenty hours of daylight per day in the summer time – such lack of darkness is likely to disrupt the boys’ body clocks and subsequent sleeping patterns. In addition to this, for the first 500 miles, the boys have to cycle

the length of Dalton Highway – the main supply route for the Prudhoe Bay oilfields – which is basically a dirt road in the heart of grizzly bear territory, and by no means bicycle friendly terrain.

Togged out in winter cycling gear which is somewhat similar to a wetsuit, the trio will be carrying their equipment (which will be sponsored by the Outdoor Adventure Store on Henry Street) – tents, rations, first aid kits – on panniers, which are steel frames attached to the back of their bikes.

In addition to such provisions, they will be equipped with a can of Bear Spray each, which is similar to pepper spray only much more potent, just in case they happen to encounter any grizzly predators along the way. This arduous first part of the journey, which will ‘make men of them’ as they put it themselves, is only redeemed by the fact that it is, if nothing else, the scenic route. When crossing the Brookes Range mountain range in Alaska the boys will literally be surrounded by some of the world’s finest alpine landscape.

Once they have left Alaska and moved into Canada, the weather will pick up and the summer climate will begin to kick in. Their next major stop is Vancouver, where they are due to arrive by the end of July, a month into their travels. From there it is into US territory once again as they hit Seattle, then onto San Francisco and finally San Diego just over four weeks later at the end of August, all things going to plan. Mexico is next on the agenda as the trio plan to make its way down the Baja California Peninsula towards La Paz. From there they get a ferry to Mazatlan in Mexico, and continue south along the Pacific coast through the heart of the central Americas glancing Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and eventually arriving in Santiago, Panama at the beginning of November 2008. Next stop: Columbia.

In order to cross from Central to South America, the boys must take a ferry from Colón in Panama to Cartagena in Columbia. Consistently ranked among the most dangerous countries in the world, Columbia is notorious for its illicit drug production, kidnappings, and high murder rate.

Before they leave Ireland in fact, the boys have been advised to take self-defense lessons. Crime aside however, the boys’ trip through Columbia is likely to bring with it other obstacles. November in Columbia is one of the wettest months of the year, and marks the end of a long rainy season. As luck would have it of course, it is precisely November when the boys are due to arrive. While in Columbia, the trio will also encounter the Andes for the first time meaning that much of their journey will involve wet, mountainous terrain.

Cumbersome enough as this may seem, there remains yet more to the Columbian saga. Because November falls in the low season, there tends to be less policing on the roads in general, which means that it is not a particularly safe time to travel,

especially when on a bicycle.

After Columbia, it is on to Ecuador, back out to the Pacific coast and down into Peru where the boys will spend Christmas Day. Chile follows Peru, and brings with it the Atacama Desert otherwise known as the driest place on earth. Due to extreme temperatures generally ranging between 37 and 40 degrees Celcius, the boys will not be able to cycle between the hours of 11am and 3pm each day. This will inevitably make it more difficult to adhere to their daily target of eighty miles.

As their trip draws to a close in January 2008, the boys aim to reach Argentina. As a general rule, the climate there is predominantly temperate with extremes ranging from subtropical in the north to subpolar in the far south. In Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of the country, temperatures become increasingly colder, falling to freezing point. It is there, just outside the Antarctic Circle, in a place called Ushuaia – allegedly the world’s most southern city - that the boys will finish their marathon cycle at the beginning of March 2008.

Having travelled the equivalent of two thirds of the earth’s circumference on just two wheels, their expedition will be complete. Finito.

Still however there remains the question of funds to be addressed. In this respect, the boys have strategically lined up four pretty sizeable events over the coming seven months. The first of these is a fashion show which is to be held both in London and Dublin after Christmas in association with a Kenyan fashion label ‘Lalesso’ which has just recently been signed to Topshop, and which uses only Kenyan fabrics.

The second fundraiser is a gig which is to be held in February/March in Dublin and which is to feature The Coronas, an up-and-coming four-piece Rock/Indie/Alternative band from Terenure. The third fundraiser is to be an eighty mile cycling marathon which will feature Transition Year students from eight different Dublin schools. Each participating student must raise a minimum of €1000 in order to qualify for participation. The final fundraiser before the trio embark for Alaska is a formal Farewell Ball which is to be held some time in March/April and is open to anybody who wishes to attend.

In addition to the events listed above, the boys also intend to host a ‘Leg with the Lads’ fundraising campaign during the course of their actual expedition, whereby anybody who is interested in cycling a leg of the trip with the boys (a leg being the equivalent of 1000 miles or two weeks) can do so, on condition that they first raise €2000 for Aidlink. There are thirteen different legs to choose from, which altogether span the length of the Americas.

For more information about the particulars of the expedition and ways in which you can get involved, see the official website at www.pacycletest.com

features@trinitynews.ie

TRINITY NEWS

Michaelmas term, Week 12

P11

PrisonFootball

Cells, guards, and football John Lavelle and Jonathan Drennan take a walk through Mountjoy with the St Vincent de Paul Society, to see how the society’s regular trips to the prison work- and how good the inmates are at football.

JOHN LAVELLE & JONATHAN DRENNAN STAFF WRITERS Two prisoners have been murdered in Mountjoy Jail in the past fifteen months – one stabbed to death, the other strangled as he slept. There have been several more serious assaults and suicides. More than half of the 500 or so inmates are addicted to heroin.

Inmates excrete into metal buckets, emptying and washing them themselves. (In-cell sanitation was removed from the prison in 1939, as the Department of Justice felt prisoners were using too much water.) Mountjoy houses about 100 more than its capacity and men regularly sleep on cell floors.

It’s difficult, then, to enter Mountjoy without preconceptions.

Every three weeks the Trinity St Vincent de Paul Society makes the trek over the Liffey to play a six-a-side football game against “The Joy’s” finest.

The matches give the inmates welcome respite from the monotony of life on the inside. They also give students a rare insight into lives far removed from their own. Anxious to see beyond the tired stereotypes of Prison Break and Porridge, I make the journey with them.

The security checks that greet me and the nine other Trinity players on entering Mountjoy are surprisingly lax for a medium-security prison. We don’t pass through a metal detector or x-ray

and are not made surrender our mobile phones. Not a sniffer-dog to be seen.

Certainly, no suggestion of a cavity search.

So perhaps it’s little wonder that Mountjoy is so overrun with drugs.

According to the Governor, John Lonergan, about 250 of the prison’s inmates take heroin. The jail dispenses more methadone to heroin addicts than any clinic in the country, and about 40 prisoners are being treated for heroin addiction in the prison’s health centre.

Mountjoy’s Victorian design and city-centre location are partly blamed for the large amount of drugs entering the prison. Packets of heroin are thrown over Mountjoy’s walls from the adjacent Phibsboro streets and while some are intercepted, most are not. The shortage of drug treatment facilities and prison guards to search visitors also contribute to the problem.

As we make our way tentatively through D-wing towards the courtyard, accompanied by a single guard in an illfitting tracksuit, I’m struck by the relative freedom prisoners seem to enjoy. Instead of being confined to their cells, they walk around the wing freely.

“Hello ladies,” says one. “Any phones on you lads?” enquires another. It is difficult to feel threatened – their comments are more like football terrace banter than genuine aggression.

There is no mandatory dress-code in Mountjoy – Lacoste tracksuits rather than orange boiler suits are the order of the day. The latest trends in runners are

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features@trinitynews.ie

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all on show. My battered, year-old Umbros don’t compare favourably.

It’s impossible not to notice the sheer age of the place. Mountjoy was originally built as a military prison in 1850 and has changed little since. The wing is laid out in austere, Dickensian style, with beige paint adorning its near crumbling walls. Iron bars line the front of tightly packed rows of cells.

The smell is striking as a prisoner walks by us with a silver, metal bucket.

Mountjoy is the only prison in the country with no in-cell sanitation, and prisoners are still required to “slop out” every day.

This practice has been criticised as unhygienic and inhumane by prison watchdogs but will continue until a new “super-prison”, at Thornton Hall in North Dublin, is completed and Mountjoy is shut for good. The new facility hopes to combine kinder living conditions with stricter security arrangements.

Our dressing room for the evening is the prison gym. Four treadmills, two rowing machines, two cycling machines, free weights and weight machines – not bad for 500 people.

Slightly hesitant, we make our way out into the courtyard of D-wing. Fortyfoot high walls surround the schoolyard-esque pitch. The barbed wire fence along the top is strewn with plastic footballs, the forgotten victims of over-zealous shooting during the prisoners’ daily kick-abouts.

About a hundred inmates stand

The smell is striking as a prisoner walks by us with a silver, metal bucket.

Mountjoy is the only prison in the country with no in-cell sanitation, and prisoners are still required to “slop out” every day.

”

crowded around watching with just two or three guards standing idly among them. There are no snipers in the turrets – this is a long way from Fox River Penitentiary.

We begin the game apprehensively. The atmosphere is intimidating and the prisoners are going in hard for every loose ball. They’re physical but not unfair, and most of them were obviously keen footballers in their previous lives. We surrender a couple of early goals before settling into the game and pulling them back to twoall.

With no referee to keep an eye on things, decisions are more art than science. Late in the first half, an inmate takes a long-range shot which appears to hit the “post” painted on the wall.

When the prisoners start to celebrate, we appeal that it wasn’t in. One of them turns to us and shouts “Prison rules!”

The goal stands.

As the game goes on the crowd really starts to get into it. When the prisoners score, they go wild. When we mess up, they go wild. Their taunts are good-natured, and some are even quite funny. Some of the spectators chant Amhrán na bhFiann at us. It seems the Trinity-west-Brit stereotype is alive and well.

One of the Trinity players is thin with black, curly hair and whenever he touches the ball, the prisoners react with cries of “Go on Screech!” Armed robbers and burglars are big Saved by the Bell fans, apparently. Another one

of our lads has highlights in his hair and he is the object of many mockhomosexual “oooh”s from the crowd over the course of the game. But sure, it’s no more than Sol Campbell gets at White Hart Lane.

As the game goes on, it gets more competitive. We hold them at six-all until ten minutes to go, with our keeper pulling off some superb saves to keep us in the game. But in the last few minutes, fatigue sets in and we ultimately lose 106. It’s a spirited performance and we are pleasantly surprised to be applauded by the spectators as we leave the pitch.

It’s strange to think that these are the same people you read about in newspapers. People who hold up post offices and sell drugs to kids.

As we make our way out of the jail, the prison officers thank us. I’m surprised at the amicable relationship they seem to enjoy with the inmates.

Guards and prisoners are on first name terms and share friendly jokes, although I wonder if my brief insight gives the full picture. It’s difficult to assess prison life from just an hour on the inside.

By a bizarre coincidence, I return home that night to find that classic of the prison genre, Mean Machine, on television. It’s as cliché-ridden as they come, with Vinnie Jones playing a footballer-turned-convict who leads a prison football team to a predictable victory against the prison guards. Given my new-found experience, I have to say that sometimes fact is far more surprising than fiction.

TRINITY NEWS

P12

Michaelmas term, Week 12

InProfile

Stripper, amputee, princess, pariah Heather Mills visited Trinity on Wednesday to speak about her remarkable journey from an uneducated, working-class Geordie to a Beatle’s glamorous wife EMILY MONK STAFF WRITER Newspapers say she is pushing her exhusband Sir Paul McCartney for a £100 million divorce settlement. Yet on Wednesday night at the University Philosophical Society, Heather Mills claimed the world’s rich are either “snobby or stingy”.

It cannot be denied that Mills has had an almost unbelievably hard life.

She was born in January 1968 to a soldier “who thought he was a reincarnation of Richard Wagner”, and a mentally and physically abused mother, who after nine years abandoned her and her siblings to the care of their father. When he was later imprisoned, the three children moved to London to live with their mother and her second husband who “merely mentally abused her, at least it wasn’t physical this time”.

It was then that Mills remembers she first associated “having money with escape” and consequently “became obsessed” with getting rich, after her mother used to promise that “when she had enough money she would leave”.

After running away from home as a teenager, rarely attending school where she was a self-confessed loner, she alleged she was homeless (a charge denied by both parents) and assumed a number of different jobs.

While coping with the death of her mother in 1990, aged just 21, Mills

“

moved to Slovenia, then part of wartorn Yugoslavia. She talks of the memory with fervour and a strange kind of self-deprecation, recalling being “just a Geordie girl” working on the front lines, witnessing horrific first hand experience of land mines. It was these scenes which later led Mills to support and become a patron of the Adopt-A-Minefield charity, something which is still “closest to [her] heart.”

There in Slovenia she began her modelling career, apparently “to raise money for refugees”.Before she knew it, she “had taken off her clothes” and glamour shots were published internationally in a “sex manual” (she has stressed specifically: “not pornography”) called Sex Games.

Three years later, Mills found herself with an arist Italian boyfriend outside Kensington Palace in London. A wrong step on to the road resulted in a collision with a police motorbike and the loss of her leg, a cracked pelvis, crushed ribs and a punctured lung where she famously remembers “worrying about her new trainer lying on the other side of the road”.

During her time in hospital, she let reporters into her room and sold her story, climbed out of the window to see friends, as well as contracting many infections. After months of recovering, it was her “vegan” diet whilst in hospital in America which eventually cured her.

For the last fourteen years, Mills has stayed loyal to “veganism” and has

A wrong step on to the road resulted in a collision with a police motorbike and the loss of her leg, a cracked pelvis, crushed ribs and a punctured lung

”

S Evelyn Tent

since become patron for Vegetarians International Voice for Animals, the recipient of her 2007 Dancing with the Stars fees. She has made a career as an activist for the aforementioned charities and the fruits of her labour, whatever your opinion of her as a person, can only be described as substantial.

Years of her hassling Heads of has resulted in the banning of imports of cat and dog fur from China in 27 different countries. To date, over 27000 amputees have been donated limbs, 21 million square meters of landmines have been cleared and thousands of amputees and people with diabilites have been inspired by her keep-going attitude. Impressive for just “one woman who really believes”.

Mills advised the audience at the Phil that anything can be done with a great team and enough belief. In spite of her achievements she warns that there are prices to pay; Mills claims we “live in a very sad media culture” where the public are “patronised” by being told “lies” by “some idiot” who thinks we want to hear “the worst.”

In 2002 Heather Mills, glamour model, activist, working class “uneducated Geordie” married Sir Paul McCartney, British national hero, musical genius, multi-millionaire, having met at an awards ceremony two and a half years previously. A year later, she gave birth to their daughter, Beatrice Milly.

It would appear that no one is good enough for such legends, but not

ome people really just have too much money. After managing to get around the draconian measures in relation to cake sales, Players have apparently amassed a small fortune from sales and fundraising for their Freshers' Co-op. Those guys and dolls really do know how to have some fun, so much fun that Evelyn has been told their party cost more than the entire play with some dosh still left over for fun and frolics at some future date.

Meanwhile, the oh so clever Graduate Students’ Union decided it would be wise to bankrupt their poor organisation in order to give 10,000 euros to charity. Oh how wonderfully smart. Apparently Uncle Joe and the Treasurers Office weren’t too impress with this sort of goodwill to their fellow men. I do so admire the balls on those GSU guys though - they followed up this ten thousand euro revelation with a request to the College for extra funding. One bystander described them as something akin to the Titanic - everyone can see the iceberg coming but nobody turned the boat around.

I hear the JCR are also splashing out an amazing 2,000 euros on their Christmas party so the ever-attractive and popular Sam Chapatte will have his pick of first years. The Phil are getting in on the act here though so those JCR kids better watch out. The GMB

since Yoko Ono, with the possible exception of Victoria Beckham, has a woman been held in such opprobrium for being the wrong woman to marry the right man.

Thus began the torrent of media criticism that has “nearly driven [her] to suicide”,“put [their] child in danger” and “cost several lives” when sponsors of her charity work have pulled out as a result.

After all her good-doing, the mass of hatred from the media seems slightly unfair, yet can there be smoke without fire? Within her autobiography, Out on a Limb (first published in Europe in 1995, all proceeds went to charity) there are several contradictions and inconsistencies against her reported life. She has since been accused of lying, most famously for calling 999 “an unnecessary number of times” as well as claiming physical abuse by McCartney which was later proved untrue.

Mills openly admits that her highprofile marriage has helped her in her efforts and that she is “lucky enough to have a platform” from which to get attention.

She is a self-proclaimed “woman that has an opinion and puts fear in men that want control”, and blames this fact for most of her “bad press” and the consequent animosity.

When obtaining results, she says “it is not about how many people like you… I want to die knowing at least I did what I could”.

sharks will strip them to the bone in seconds.

And our dear President Mr. Byrne had his pick of queens at the USI's Pink Training event in Cork. The loveable Andrew returned from the trip a breathless and heavily marked man. Who is this cad that's put such awful marks on our Andrew? Darling, I hope the pain is not distracting you from your work.

And it seems a mystery man came to the rescue of Boobs Faller quite recently too.

Boobs was being held to ransom for a student card by the College Gestapo and her Christmas Tour to Thailand seemed in doubt. That was until a mystery gentlemen swooped in and declared that he couldn't bear to see Boobs miss out. He footed the bill and reinstated Roman-style patronage to Trinity. One wonders who this mystery man is? Guess on a postcard to the usual address.

Poor old Tim (no sense of humour) Symth had his moment of crowning glory when fellow Tory John Major popped in for a quick chat just last week and there were grown-up hacks aplenty to record the historical moment. I do wonder though why the Irish press thought that the the lady with one leg had so much more to say than the man whose application to become a bus conductor was rejected ?

Smyth too was just a bit perplexed how

Headlines “Heather Mills takes on the Rich at Dublin Debate Speech” -Access Hollywood, Los Angleles, 22nd November 2007 “Meet Heather Mills, honorary philosopher” -Belfast Telegraph,United Kingdom, 21st November 2007 “Heather Mills McCartney denounces rich as snobby, stingy “ -Associated Press (syndicated worldwide), 22nd November 2007 “Heather Mills made Paris Hilton cry over animal abuse” Heather Mills has boasted to horrified students at Dublin’s Trinity College about the time she made Paris Hilton cry (out of her wonky eye), and also used the opportunity to brand all rich people “snobby and stingy.”

-Holy Moly, UK, 23rd November 2007

I managed to announce Major’s arrival on these fair shores before he had a chance.

Perhaps your committee is a bit leaky? Oh darling, I know all… but don't you worry your little head, you'll have a lot of work to do now that your committee have begun complaining of such a hefty work load.

Those wonderfully attractive engineering boys went on tour recently. This time there wasn't any of their infamous game “hide the log” but instead one enthusiastic member of the group decided to run naked around a church. I wouldn't mind but I didn't even manage to catch a glimpse – oh the disappointment.

At a recent dinner party, some of Evelyn's dear friends had a lot to say about the potential candidates for Provost. It seems one really is making a name for themselves, but may just be about to find out they're not as popular among their peers as they might think they are. Oh that sounds terribly cryptic but perhaps it’s too soon to gave anything away.

And speaking of elections – darling, one wonders if good old Uncle Joe will have any contenders for the position of Honorary Treasurer of the CSC this year. Remember what happened to the last person who tried that? Lets just say it was messy. Until next time dearies... E

opinionandanalysis@trinitynews.ie

TRINITY NEWS

Michaelmas term, Week 12

P13

Opinion&Analysis

The Church’s shameful attitude to homosexuality

Varsity Talk

Prejudice and discrimination against gay people is contrary to Christian values

DARREN MCCALLIG CHURCH OF IRELAND CHAPLAIN

A

rchbishop Desmond Tutu says that the Church's attitude towards gays and lesbians makes him ashamed to be an Anglican.

As the new Anglican Chaplain here on campus, I have to agree with him. But, I am not just ashamed, I am also angry.

I am angry that the Christian Church, for almost as long as it has existed, has been directly responsible for evils and injustices committed against homosexuals. The most terrible atrocities have been perpetrated on homosexuals by the Church, or in the name of the Church, or as in Nazi Germany, with the tacit connivance of the Church. Yet with a handful of notable exceptions, there is not a

glimmer of repentance. Instead all we get is an arrogant and unintelligent reaffirmation of bigotry. Rather than being proponents of equality and justice, the Church continues to supply the ideology which undergirds much of the prejudice against gay people.

And if you think I am exaggerating, consider some recent examples. Earlier this year, Stormont junior minister Ian Paisley Jnr told Hot Press magazine: “I am pretty repulsed by gay and lesbianism. I think it is wrong.” When challenged about his offensive comments, he refused to apologise.

Also this year, the Polish President Lech Kaczynski refused to withdraw remarks he made in Dublin at the Forum on Europe

attacking gay culture as a threat to the survival of the human race. We also have the example of Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, who called gay relations “an aberration unknown even in animal relationships”.

Is it then, any wonder that a recent survey from Gay Community News (June 2007) found that only half of gay men and lesbians in Ireland are out as gay at work? Or that the President, Mary McAleese, had to draw attention to the link between suicide and the bullying of gay people at an international conference on suicide prevention?

As institutions which, notwithstanding recent events, still command a good deal of influence and respect, the various churches could be instruments for good in this situation. However, most appear unwilling to tackle discrimination and prejudice and others hide behind their interpretation of certain biblical texts. But, just how plausible is it to uncritically apply texts from thousands of years ago to the world of today?

It is true that the Old Testament condemns homosexuality. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis is often cited and in the book Leviticus, the death penalty is prescribed for those caught in a homosexual act. However, two points need to be made. Firstly, the Sodom story in Genesis concerns gang rape, not a loving relationship, and its primitive morality (for example, when Lot offers his daughters to be raped instead of the men) means we can hardly take the text as a straightforward ethical guide.

Similarly, while Leviticus includes homosexuality in its list of “abominations'” we must also note that it condemns a number of activities (lending money for interest, shaving the beard, weaving two kinds of cloth together) which scarcely worry us today.

Similar considerations apply to the New Testament. When Paul mentions homosexual behaviour in his various letters, it is highly

unlikely that he had in mind the concept of an equal same-sex partnership, but rather homosexual prostitution and pederasty, which were the most visible kind of homosexual practice in his own society. Also, it is clear from his letter to the Romans, which mentions men and women “exchanging” homosexual sex, that Paul, like other Jewish and early Christian writers, believed homosexuality was a free and perverse choice, whereas we now understand that for gay people, homosexuality is a discovery, not a decision.

This last point is picked up Desmond Tutu, when he argues that, for him, persecution of people because of their sexual orientation is every bit as unjust as apartheid.

“This is a matter of ordinary justice. We struggled against apartheid in South Africa, supported by people the world over, because black people were being blamed and made to suffer for something we could do nothing about – our very skins. It is the same with sexual orientation. It is a given.

I could not have fought against the discrimination of apartheid and not also fight against the discrimination which homosexuals endure, even in our churches and faith groups. And I am proud that in South Africa, when we won the chance to build our own new constitution, the human rights of all have been explicitly enshrined in our laws. My hope is that, one day, this will be the case all over the world and that all will have equal rights.”

Tutu goes on, “For me, this struggle is a seamless rope. Opposing apartheid was a matter of justice. Opposing discrimination against women is a matter of justice.

Opposing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is a matter of justice. It is also a matter of love. Every human being is precious. We are all, all of us, part of God’s family. We all must be allowed to love each other with honour.”

I couldn’t agree more.

The highs and lows of a Trinity College Arts degree An Arts degree won’t help you get a job, but the two-hour coffee breaks make it all worthwhile CATHERINE HIGGINS CONTRIBUTING WRITER

S

o there you are, enjoying your Arts Building Café coffee, meandering towards the lecture hall, not quite sure until the moment you pull your pen from your bag and are sitting in the back row that you will definitely attend your lecture. Isn’t making it on to college on time a job in itself?

Enjoy these days of freedom while you can. Quit moaning about the demands of your Sophister years. What demands? You just read a few books and make your tutor suffer your banal opinions on AfroCaribbean literature or the history of postcolonial theory. Opinions devised, no doubt, on a Monday afternoon after a heavy yet unexpected Sunday night drinking session.

Never again will you have a time in your life when someone else will foot the bill (parents, the bank) for you to read interesting books, drink every night and shop every day.

(Well, Grafton Street is just so close isn’t it?)

All too soon, you will be scouring the jobs section of The Irish Times, wondering why you chose to study something you enjoy

as opposed to something that might actually get you a job. To these people I suggest you join the Facebook group “I picked a major I like and one day will probably be living in a box.”

You are not alone. Thousands of us have a passion for the arts or maybe just a desire to read for four years, just so long as one doesn’t have to attend labs at 9am every day. (Could the Timetables Office please be advised that the optimal thinking time is around 1pm, not first thing in the morning or anytime on a Friday?)

The sort of freedom that a Trinity arts degree allows makes for a very enjoyable four years, the best years of your life, perhaps, but does it really help you get the job of your dreams? After graduation (and probably some sort of post college travel pat on the back, like four months in Thailand) your parents will no longer support you.

It’s that dreaded time, time to get a job.

You don’t mind working you cry, but “I’m not going to take just any job. What was the point of all my hard work if I’m just going to do something that anyone could do?” Ah, the first stage – denial and the belief that having a degree now makes you better than “just anyone”, when really just about everyone has a degree.

opinionandanalysis@trinitynews.ie

After a few months, the realisation that you are not qualified for the jobs you want because you lack experience sinks in. You have now begun to have some cash flow issues, so you change your tune a little. “I will do a random job for a few months while I look for something better and then go travelling. Again.”

While you continue to look for jobs that have nothing to do with your degree or area of interest, your non-Arts degree friends will think you’re a bum if you continue to get up at noon while they bustle towards the Luas on their way to their new job at KPMG. “Three years training contract and I can spend my second year abroad.” Even you yourself will claim you just want to start making money.

This is of course, is true. You just don’t want to actually work for it. This is not your fault, you’re not used to working, not real work anyway. I know we all have a lot of reading, research and studying for exams but it’s you calling the shots, deciding when to start work, when to finish and when to eat lunch.

That is all about to change when you enter the workforce. You will have to feign interest in things that make you feel physically ill, spreadsheets, turnover,

lunchtime discussions of who should win X Factor. You will have to spend most of your day in an office staring at a computer screen, dreaming of the two hour coffee breaks you used to have which turned in to an evening misspent in the Pavilion Bar. All the while you watch the clock on your computer screen change more slowly than you thought possible.

I have searched for the job that expects one hour of my attention each day, where the boss does not mind if I prefer not to attend and where I have only to hand in a project once every three months; I have not found it.

I am beginning to fear it does not exist. I feel I may have been duped. Maybe if they told us the cold hard truth, that leaving school at eighteen and getting the much needed experience every company wants would have served us better, fewer people would be standing on the ramp smoking and drinking coffee right now. But what a shame that would be. Think of all the Pav/Palace Fridays and the Balls.

So university may not actually help you get a job anymore, but it is a great way to spend four years. Just make sure you sign up for weekly job opportunity emails now.

You might as well get ahead of the crowd.

Meghan Brown

Business leader will help Trinity compete

T

he recent Sunday Times Higher Education Supplement ranks Trinity as 53rd in the world, up 25 places on last year’s rankings. This is a great achievement, as so many here in Trinity have declared. But how can we advance even further?

What are the universities in the top ten such as Harvard and Yale doing to merit their places at the top? How does a university go from great to excellent?

The answer is simple: excellence demands money.

The top universities have it, we don’t. For Trinity to run efficiently and effectively, certain aspects of governing must be changed, with the hiring of a business-oriented leader as number one. The notion that academics must be governed by academics is absurd: Trinity in the present day entails far more than just teaching and scholarship, and so needs to be managed in a professional manner.

Some look back to nineteenth century Trinity as a “Golden Age” where the college community was solely devoted to teaching, learning, and scholarship. However, no such model existed. Universities, even our great Trinity, have always been influenced by outside forces such as politics, society, culture, and economy.

The only thing that has changed is the magnitude of what universities now encompass. Although College has always provided accommodation, food, and other amenities, this is now happening on a large scale. All of these functions take more than just an academic to run.

The university is a huge bureaucracy yet is still organised and run like a trade craftsmen’s guild.

The way forward is through the appointment of a business figure to run the College as a dual partnership in conjunction with the head of the university. Our atmosphere, tradition, and the prosperous student life we now enjoy would not be lost but, on the contrary, would be enhanced. Harvard did not get to number one by cutting its roots and traditions; nor should we.

What Trinity needs is a strong leader capable of applying corporate business principles to college administration. With the expansion of student services and increased enrolment numbers, Trinity is pressurised into coming up with enough funds to supply the masses.

Government funding alone just doesn’t suffice. We have less than half of the funds of comparable institutions in the EU and Unites States. This figure needs to be able to court potential investors, retain fiscal stability and deal with areas of university administration that have nothing to do with academia. This would increase the competitiveness of the university, cut out unnecessary spending and move us forward as a world recognised institution.

The University’s main focus has shifted from undergraduate teaching to commercial operations. No longer is Trinity just a place for educating next generation’s youth, but a sprawling higher-level institution determined to make a name for itself on the world stage of academia.

University is a place for creative and independent thought but relies heavily on finance to do this. These two opposing streams can be easily reconciled with the hiring of a non-academic as a dual leader. As Michael Milliken, a former Wall Street trader once said, “higher education is a trillion dollar business run by amateurs.”

Take the former Buttery Bar for example. The bar was operating in the red for a number of years before it was eventually closed. If College were not a protected environment, like the real world governed by market forces, the bar would have closed long ago.

A University, of course, should be an autonomous entity furthering the advancement of scholarship and knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Trinity need not debate the primary function of the university – education.

However, today’s universities are run on funding more than ever and without that, Trinity’s research mills wouldn’t run.

Universities perform best at their main function education. Activities peripheral to the main focus of university do not need a Trinity professor but someone who has business principles in mind. When it comes to securing endowments or alumni money, would the job not be better off contracted out to a professional who is highly experienced in that field?

Let us leave education to the academics but allow our university to be managed by a skilled businessman.

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Opinion&Analysis Face Off with Joey Facer

Tis the season to buy presents, send cards and hit the two euros shop hard for student-friendly tinsel, jingle bells and too many chocolates. Hurrah! At this early stage, doesn’t Christmas sound great? When working in a shop on Grafton Street last year, we had our Christmas meeting at the end of October. Mariah Carey told us “All I Want for Christmas is You” innumerable times while our managers wore bells and showed us the Christmas stock as we ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the festivity of it all. I left the shop a couple of hours later bouncing, full of the joys of the season.

Or did I? I’m fairly certain I did, but also uncomfortably aware that my good feeling had evaporated long before December set in. The excitement of the Christmas-themed merchandise was soon turned into pretty desperate sales techniques to push it before the usual stock (“I know your Grandmother is arthiritic, but every girl likes a pink glitter-angel!”) in order to hit sales targets, before panic at having to sell it before the day itself set in, and afterwards the disillusionment of it languishing in a sale pile for a few months, before the bins got all the pretty shiney things.

Christmas in my own family home was always a massive deal. It was the only time the whole family managed to be at home together for any length of time, and the tree stood in place of the television as the focal point of our living room for a few months, garishly decked out in all its childishly excessive raiments.

Advent calendars, tinsel, lights, heck, a neon Santa on our front lawn. Back when they were considered cool by your friends and not evidence of a complete lack of taste and the height of embarassment.

But the central quality to Christmas, and I do not think I am alone here, was always gifts. Big and small, plentiful, stacked under the tree, and in stockings, and even on the tree, these were the focal point of the day.

Stockings before lunch, tree presents at lunch and undertree presents after lunch, give, give, give, give give: this was our Christmas. Only this invariably feels far more like take, take, take, take, take in action.

The season is beginning to feel cloying to me; it’s no longer a time of year I feel excited by. It is not a time to be purified by the goodwill amongst men, but rather a time to indulge in society’s favourite fetish: consuming.

In abstaining this year from the traditional gift-laden family Christmas, I am hoping to rebuild the day to my own mould. More decorations, more friends, more talking, more cards, more Church and less presents. We are all in agreement that whilst buying for your loved ones is undoubtedly one of the more wonderful pleasures of life, the Christmas shopping experience is more likely to bear resemblence to a frightened rabbit caught in the Christmas lights, frantically crossing names off lists and a with a week to go sighing “it’ll have to do” as once again Uncle Joseph receives socks because you “just have to get him something”.

In addition seasonal cards seem to have gone off the radar in College. In school, it was considered the height of rudeness not to give at least half the people in your class greetings cards, whereas in College I doubt many of us send a single one. Well, here is your opportunity to reach out to humanity: take homeaddresses of your closest friends and write a real Christmas card, one that doesn’t just say “Dear X, [massproduced greeting here], Love X”, but one that really indicates that at this time of peace on earth you are thinking and extending the arm of friendship to your fellow College students.

Is this all sounding a little American to you? Brace yourselves. People like myself professing to be Christian the rest of the year should probably get thee to the Church, or at least to the appropriate Bible text and steep themselves in the reason we celebrate this season at all. This is a short paragraph, as I am keen to not assume that everyone these days who celebrates Xmas does so on behalf of Jesus, however I do highlight my own hypocrisy and I am quite certain to not be alone in this negligence.

The culture of shopping, of acquision, is quite a repulsive one in many respects. Last year, I was alarmed at the vast sums of money forked out by all generations for all manner of triviality, often without a great deal of care (typical scenario: “I need to get a present for my fiancée. Can you pick me out something around the €100 mark?”) I don’t wish to be a nag (although always succumb to being one, alas): this culture is not without its attractions. I’m thinking The Devil Wears Prada, early scenes (a montage of some of the most exquisite things I’ve ever seen on screen) as well as late (“everyone wants to be us”, said by the Editor in Chief of the magazine earlier reported to have been reponsible for “selling people things they don’t need”). In our social climate, it is easy to succumb to the culture of Me, the worship of the Shop of Pretty Things, the Oooh I’d Love One of Them moments. But if you think about it, shouldn’t we try our very best at this particular time of year to think about something else?

I don’t seek to move mountains, but I do implore you this year: if you must buy, buy with a conscience and

Hundreds of school children from around the country atteneded debating workshops in University Philosophical Society last Friday.The competition, sponsored by AIB, aims to raise the profile of debating by taking it outside the university setting. Photo: Rachel Kennedy

USI needs all of its students to get involved After a turbulent few months for the Union of Students in Ireland, new President Hamidreza Khodabakhshi outlines the priorities for the Irish student movement

HAMID KHODABAKHSHI USI PRESIDENT

As head of the national student movement, my goal is to persuade Trinity students to take part in Union of Students in Ireland campaigns. Campaigns for improved third-level facilities. Campaigns for fairer funding of student supports and welfare serves. Campaigns for equal treatment for all sections of society.

I believe that equal opportunities in education go hand in hand with equal opportunities in society at large.

Trinity College is active in many national USI campaigns, but the Irish student movement will be further strengthened if I can persuade you, the student reading this article, to become more involved in our work.

USI has never been more important than it is right now, as a democratic lobby group to put across the student voice and compensate for (what would otherwise be) the underrepresentation of students’ views in the Daíl and in college management. Make no mistake – the political positions with which students are commonly associated are in danger of being “under-listened to.”

Democracy simply doesn’t work properly when political positions are underrepresented. As citizens, it is ultimately our job to make our democracy work. Think of USI as an equalising force. A strong USI ensures

that, whether talking about third-level, or areas such as health and human rights, students’ positions are taken into account by ministers and college heads.

The Provost of Trinity College, Dr John Hegarty, is among the seven heads of universities who are lobbying ministers for the reintroduction of tuition fees. The presidents have already scheduled meetings with senior politicians who may well call the shots in the next government. These include Brian Cowen and Micheál Martin, as reported in the Irish Times.

Support for free fees stands at 73% among the general public, according to a recent poll. But the general public, unlike the university presidents, are not securing meetings with ministers to lobby for their position.

Fortunately counter-lobbying is taking place, led by USI. We are putting students’ categorical opposition to fees directly to ministers during regular meetings. Your Union is making the playing field more level.

Unlike the university presidents, USI’s goal is rather to democratise – not to marketise – access to college. The greater the number of students who are actively involved in USI nationally and through their Students’ Union on campus, the greater becomes our

ability to offset the overrepresentation of pro-fees lobbyists.

We can maintain free fees for the next generation while we continue to form a massmembership alliance. If it came to it, I sincerely hope you would be willing to pursue peaceful direct action to defend free education.

USI has assembled a cross-party coalition of supportive TDs to maintain the momentum behind implementation of the Student Support Bill. This legislation will partially overhaul the grants system and go some way towards lessening delays to grant payments.

Last month, outside Leinster House, I shared a speaking platform with likeminded TDs. On behalf of USI’s 250000 members, I urged ministers to cross the finish line that we – the national student movement and our supporters in the Dail – have successfully led them to.

At no stage has the Government been in a hurry legislate on student grants. One can only presume that Ministers (most of whom attended college decades ago) had forgotten what it is like to live from month to month, totally dependent on grant payments to be issued on time. USI hasn’t forgotten. I have

personally reminded ministers that grant delays are important and must be resolved.

The Student Support Bill will not centralise the grants system, but will streamline processing and lay the groundwork for a subsequent centralisation. So next time the Student Movement hits the streets for a grants demonstration, I urge you to march alongside your fellow students as we urge Ministers to cross the finish line of Grants Reform, Phase One. I believe that every student has a stake in creating a society in which the potential of every individual is fully realised.

Overcoming underrepresentation is a question of more than just representing students as students. Some of the underrepresentation that plagues young people in our society affects certain groups more than others: be it Students with Disabilities, individuals from low income backgrounds, or lesbian, gay and transgender students. Regardless of one’s income background, or whether one forms part of a majority, everyone has the right to fully benefit from a free education. I believe this can only happen under conditions of equality and acceptance.

Next year, USI will step up pressure on the Government to stop discriminating against lesbian and gay people who are denied equal access to marriage. Legal recognition for same-sex relationships has the support of 84% of the public. Yet the LGBT community is one group at constant risk of being politically marginalised. While I am president, USI will continue to ally with organisations placing pressure on the Government to implement a strong Civil Union Bill – and to do so on schedule. This is a stepping stone to widening access to marriage.

If you support a strong Civil Union Bill, then please, become actively involved in USI and help us to campaign.

It’s about what you can do to strengthen your national union.

Hamidreza Khodabakhshi is President of the Union of Students in Ireland. He was elected to the position last month after the resignation of Richie Morrisroe.

opinionandanalysis@trinitynews.ie

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Issue 5, Volume 54 Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 6 Trinity College, Dublin 2 www.trinitynews.ie

Religion in Trinity The news that a religious sect was recruiting on campus was a suprise to many at Trinity News. It also prompted us to consider the role religion plays, and the role it should play, at university.

Trinity College has an active and vibrant Christian Union, and the good work done by the society is not to be diminished by the following argument. However, if we are to accept that every student has a freedom to choose their religion, and that every student has a freedom to practise their religion, we may also find ourselves embracing some worrying theologies.

The cult of Scientology has been much maligned in the popular press, however, should such a group establish in Trinity, it would be discriminatory to disallow the members to practise and recruit on campus, given that the College welcomes Christians to its chapel and in its societies. The sect recruiting on campus now, should its numbers reach sufficient levels, would have a strong case for funding similar to religious organisations such as Dublin University St Vincent De Paul and the Dublin University Christian Union.

In the climate of political suspicion surrounding religion, however, we may no longer wish to be so inclusive. The appellation “cult” is a social one: for believers, there is no difference theoretically between Christianity or Islam and the more “specialist” cults surrounding shady figures selling books and ideas to newcomers.

However, as Sam Harris argues in The End of Faith, “when beliefs are extremely common we call them ‘religious’; otherwise they are likely to be called ‘mad’, ‘psychotic’ or ‘delusional’”.In an age of acceptance, where do we draw the line? If we seek to ban one sect, why not ban the “cult” that is Christianity?

Trinity must see that this is an all or nothing situation. It is time to call for a secular College. The Protestant/Catholic divide that plagued the university and allowed bishops to preclude Catholics from matriculating until the 1970s ought to have been reason enough to ban all religion from the campus. Whilst religion itself is undoubtedly for most a positive experience, and forms an important part of the lives of many, if we encourage some religions in College we must encompass all in our acceptance or else face the charge of prejudice.

Religion may impact on our personal lives immeasurably, but university is a place of study and academic pursuit, first and foremost.

When the study of students is threatened by the imposition of a proscriptive cult, we must recognise the inessential nature of theology to our academic careers and make a decision once and for all.

The dream of an accessible and useful Library A group on campus is campaigning for an undergraduate 24-hour library. Currently, Trinity falls short of its “sister” Colleges, Oxford and Cambridge, in not offering such a service. With studying contained between the hours of 9am-10pm Monday to Friday, and curtailed of a Saturday to 9:30-4, Trinity is definitely lacking on this academic front.

Particularly around exam time, the library hours ought to be greatly extended. The current limited access seeks to prescribe for students the times when they ought to be working, and is simply not in keeping with the ethos of university as a place of individual work and individual work patterning. If we are to be enjoined to manage our study, we should not be denied access to books.

The College may inisist on the lack of feasability in this venture.

However, it has already been accomplished with the Graduate Library in Front Square being open 24 hours a day. Particularly around exam time, Undergraduates arguably have a greater need for 24/7 access to books, or simply a quiet place to study, than researchbased Postgraduate students.

If the cost is too high, the College might want to interrogate its aims. Although Trinity’s academic performance has been improving in the league tables, it is still far below the standard set up at its foundation in 1592. The University must recall that its central function is, or ought to be, to educate, and to inspire and foster a thirst for academic pursuit. If students are to be turfed out of the library at 10pm, whilst graduates may remain immersed in their study at all hours, this sends a strong message of priority where studying is concerned.

If Trinity seeks to pitch itself as an academic equal to Oxford and Cambridge, it needs to prioritise the academic: longer library hours is one of the easiest amendments to make on this quest.

letters@trinitynews.ie

International Students need more than a one hour tour Sir- According to the Times Higher Education Supplement, Trinity College Dublin is currently ranked as the 53rd best university in the world, up from number 78 in last year’s rankings. One of the criteria used to evaluate Trinity is the amount of international students enrolled and Trinity can be proud that it can internationally compete as one of the most diverse colleges in the world. However, with one of the core aims of the College‘s Strategic Plan being a commitment to increase the amounts of international students attending Trinity (most recently reaffirmed at the College Board meeting of 26 September), Trinity College needs to make it a priority to not only attract international students, but to help them acclimatise to life in Ireland.

Currently the only opportunity prospective international students have to preview Trinity is the one hour tour of the College grounds offered by a current student. These students are not introduced to people in their

future course or allowed to attend a lecture.

When I visited during the beginning of the Trinity term before my Junior Freshman year, I had to query at three offices before I was given permission to walk into the Berkeley Library!

As the International Students’ Officer, I have met countless international students who felt as if they were simply thrown into the deep end of college life without a proper understanding of what living in Ireland as a Trinity student would entail. As wonderful as the cultural orientation and “Feeling @ Home in TCD” programmes are (yet another one of the greatly underappreciated services that Student Counselling Service offers despite complaints by uninformed students that “what does the Counselling Service actually do for students?”), there is a need for a shadowing programme where potential international students can visit Trinity for a day, attend lectures, visit the library and really understand what a day in their lives

as students would entail. If this can be done with second level students in the Trinity Access Programme Shadowing Day, why not for second level students from other countries? Another great idea would be a buddy programme where international students would have the opportunity to be paired up with a current student so that, upon arrival, they would have someone to guide them through the ins and outs Trinity is understandably proud of its diversity, but before the College can focus on attracting more international students, it must first improve its internal structure of teaching international students about Trinity and helping them to adapt once here.

Yours etc, Nick Beard Students’ Union International Students’ Officer

Mental Health is not an issue to forget Sir- I write to you concerning last week’s Students’ Union campaign, Mental Health Week (Week Seven, Michaelmas term, 19-23 November). Despite the campaign being over, it is important to remember that mental health is not an issue that should be forgotten about or ignored. Mental health and mental health related problems have for many years been stigmatised and misunderstood by the Irish people as a whole. Thankfully though, more funding has been invested by the Health Service Executive and the government in creating awareness around mental health-related issues. The pur-

pose of last week’s campaign was to also create awareness about the issue of mental health in Ireland, but in particular, the mental health-related concerns of those attending college. The shocking statistics that 1 in 13 Irish students suffer from depression and 1 in 30 suffer from an eating disorder is an issue that cannot be ignored. Additionally Ireland has the fifth highest suicide rate in Europe with most of those who commit suicide being young males between the ages 15 -34, which is the age bracket that the majority of students in Ireland fall into to. Mental Health Week not only highlighted

these statistics, but the campaign also promoted the services that are already available and accessible to students in Trinity College if they wish to use them (such as the Counselling Service and the Health Centre).

It is important to remember to help is out there, no one should have to suffer in silence.

Yours etc, Úna Faulkner, Students’ Union Welfare Officer welfare@tcdsu.org

Impressing politicians at a cost to our noses Sir- They say that our sense of smell is strongest with regards to memory. Odours from over the years stay with us through our life, our mother’s scent from when we are an infant, the tang of our first girlfriend’s perfume or the smell of the brandy butter which smothers our Christmas pudding every year. My question is what will be the smell that I remember most from my time studying in Trinity College? Will it be the crisp smell of old parchment from the Long Library?

Or maybe…. More than likely it will be the overpowering stench of fertilizer that greets me when I walk through the new gate on Pearse Street. The bare patch of soil across from the Lloyd Institute smells like anyone who bought

the Student Special in the Ham-Café couldn’t quite make it to the bathrooms before voiding their bowels.

So why does our college smell like the portaloos at some music festival? Why have the powers that be seen fit to crown the success of the new gym and nanotechnology centre with the most potent manure this side of the Botany department? Well the rumour is that our blessed Taoiseach will be cutting the ribbon on the CRANN in the New Year and we must have some crann of our own fit to impress. The size of the saplings planted, however, pale in comparison to those on Griffith Avenue so this suffering of ours seems futile. Of course by the

time Bertie comes round we’ll probably be cited by the UN for manufacturing a chemical weapon. Surely they could have found weaker manure or perhaps an animal without a penchant for Indian food to supply it? In hindsight I suppose it’s nice to know the worth of the student’s and staff’s comfort when juxtaposed with the college’s first impression on some lad from Drumcondra. At least with an aroma this potent, I’ll have something to remember the College by.

Yours etc., Patrick Kelly SS Science

‘57: A Dublin love affair I fell in love with Dublin in five minutes. The affair lasted four years. I have only returned three times in a quarter of a century, but the ache remains.

My four years were dominated by a personal coterie, the barmen of O’Neills and Davy Byrne’s, Professor Theodore William Moody, and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, in that order.

We also had a “skip” in number two but, since I was not upper-class enough to treat him as “below stairs”, he ran us both ragged with boozy excuses for not arriving until late and not lifting a cup when he did. As if for repayment of our tolerance he did offer one concession, which turned out to be pretty academic giving his timekeeping, that should either of us ever place an item of female clothing in a prominent position behind the door, then he would return much, much later, “surr”, to clear the breakfast things.

I was totally unprepared for Trinity in 1957. At home the local curate approached my parents and told them in shocked tones that it was not the Catholic university, and I gratefully awarded my mother an alpha-plus for rather surprisingly retorting that neither were Cambridge, Liverpool or Bristol. So that lad from a Merseyside Christian Brothers’ college crossed the Irish Sea in an unstabilised “Princess Maud” and thought he was going to die, all alone, on a foreign shore.

Life was never the same again for this grammar school boy. He had been on the farm and he had seen Paree. On my grant of £52 a term I could live like a prince for seven weeks – and travel, buy books, have afternoon tea on Sunday in one of the big hotels (cost 3/6d and as many dishes of cucumber sandwiches as we

could respectfully eat), and get an Ivy League suit tailored by a “little man” in D’Olier Street, and tip Larry at Christmas.

Trinity at that time was a happy, very happy, hunting ground of public school chappies, who must have done something quite unspeakable during their Oxbridge interviews, necessitating their decamping to the very next best thing. In my particular circle there was only one other source of bemused interest like myself – and he had attended a London Jewish comprehensive, and went on to become one of the best auditors that the Hist ever had.

My own modest furrow was to be ploughed in Trinity News, eventually reaching the dizzy heights of editor and chairman. Society secretaries beat a path to the door and the College postman got a hernia delivering goldedged invitations to inaugurals and embossed cards declaring who would be “at home for cocktails”. There was an elegance there that can never be replaced by the telephone call of the 80s.

I covered the first Trinity Ball actually to be held in College, in 1959, when steel bands and fairy lights turned Front Square into a sort of intellectual Disneyland. (It was on this occasion that I finally realised how remote from reality were the Provost and Junior Dean, when Larry and other skips were hastily recruited into chastity patrols.)

After the Ball was over, we would pack into cars to go to Co. Wicklow, climb the sugarloaf in dinner jacket and ball gown through peat bog, to see the sun rise over Wales. Lord!

Did I once have the energy for that?

When I see my contemporaries today, either in the flesh or on screen, the memories stir: such names as Terry Brady, Nickolai Tolstoy,

Ralph Bates, Johanna van Gyseghem, Mike Longley, Michael Bogdanov, the Rev William Oddie – so many of whom “made it” through DU Players. It was a good intake, but probably no better than Trinity had in the past nor would have in the future. We cannot guarantee that things will not change, but then again we cannot guarantee that such changes will bring improvement.

My most recent visit to Dublin at the time of writing was in November 1985. That most gracious of hotels, The Hibernian, was no more.

Jury’s had been transplanted from College Green to Ballsbridge in name only. O’Neill’s was full of cement dust and bare wires, though the world’s most efficient bar staff carried on as normal.

The Long Room, where I would sit alone for ages, reading back copies of The Times on Gladstone’s funeral – just me, the Book of Kells, the Guinness harp and the dead Gladstone – is now a bullet proofed, supervised, credit carded business with it’s entrance “at the wrong end”.

But worse was yet to come. I was refused entry (albeit politely) to the new library! Entreaties, “distance travelled”, a graduate’s tie, past financial contributions to this bibliographical Versailles – all came to nought. Without a reader’s pass, it was more than his job was worth, “surr”.

But I still love you, Dublin, and I always will. And who knows? One day that premature and slightly morbid student desire to select a retirement home on either Dalkey or Howth Hill may well come true.

By Anthony Gynn, editor of Trinity News Michaelmas term 1959. From Filibuster issue 3, Trinity term 1986. Compiled by Peter Henry

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WorldReview

The brutality of subjugation KEVIN BRESLIN DEPUTY WORLD REVIEW EDITOR

Clockwise from the top: The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites; life goes on in Balata refugee camp, a place which holds over twenty thousand Palestinian refugees in the West Bank; a fortified Israeli house in east Jerusalem; some Israeli soldiers patrolling the perimeters of a settlement; and part of the wall that divides Israel and the West Bank.

It is one thing to read about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in the papers, quite another to experience it first hand. I had been to Israel before spending the whole time in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and it had amazed me how cocooned off from the occupation normal Israelis are on a day to day basis. Everybody that talks about it does so in an abstract manner, as if it was happening somewhere else. It is very easy to get sucked into the mentality that it is an issue for the politicians to decide and to ignore it, something most Israelis are quite good at but a week in the occupied territories is an altogether different experience, forgetting the occupation is a luxury the Palestinians can’t afford, it dominates every aspect of daily life in a way that has to be experienced to be believed.

How fast we passed the separation wall each morning depended on the attitude of the soldier on duty. One day we would be waved through immediately, another day our Palestinian tour guide was told to leave the bus and pass through the gate for Palestinians, an action that served no other function than to humiliate and degrade him.

Palestinians with the Jerusalem visa can legally work in the city but with the overall plan being the eventual expulsion of all Palestinians from the city and to make it the unified Jewish capital, day to day life is not so simple. To get to work for 9am, traders and shop owners will queue up at the checkpoint from as early as 3am, getting through the checkpoint takes up to 4 hours. When I was there one morning I saw a soldier shut down one of the gates and make everyone that had been queuing, move to the other queue, no reason was given. Another day I saw a soldier who wasn’t more than 18 smile dismissively and shake his head at an old Palestinian man who was showing his valid Jerusalem permit, again no reason was given.

One of the Palestinians I met in Ramallah said it was like opening the door of your house every morning and being punched in the face. After a while you get used to being punched in the face until one day you open the door and someone merely slaps you, you’re so overjoyed at not being punched that you convince yourself that life is improving.

We visited Balata refugee camp in Nablus and were taken on a guided tour by resident peace activist Ala Mohamed. The camps inhabitants were primarily Palestinians who had been expelled from their homes in Jaffa near Tel Aviv and have been living there for over 40 years. Israelis raid the camp almost daily and the bullet holes in the wall are a testament to the violence that goes on, I found several empty shell casings littered throughout the camp. As we walked down the narrow alleys people started to come out of their homes and tell us stories of Israeli atrocities. We were told that to avoid being hit by snipers they often use children as human shields, breaking every international law in the process. When they find the person they are looking for they often shot him

on the spot, if they don’t find him they might destroy a home or arbitrarily knock over a shrine.

At the checkpoint in Nablus we queued with about 200 college students coming home from class for over 2 hours. We were packed in like sardines, women and children were being crushed by the sheer number of people trying to get through, everyone was sweating because of the heat, people were anxious and irritable. We were told that it was normal to wait in line for up to 2 hours each way for a journey that used to take 10 minutes. Past the railings and barbed wire Israeli soldiers laughed a joked with each other, smoked cigarettes and played with mobile phones.

In Hebron, Israeli settlers have been moved by the government into the apartment blocks towering over a Palestinian market below. They throw rubbish from their houses out of the window onto the street below while soldiers sit back and watch. Stall owners worked together to build a wire mesh over all the stalls as protection so when you look up all you see are plastic bags, empty bottles and old newspapers etc. To circumvent this, I was shocked to discover that some settlers are now throwing paint.

The tension and hatred on both sides was palpable and the incident served to convince me that a true and meaningful peace is actually impossible. There are over 530 check points in the west bank but only 30 on the border to Israel. This means that there are over 500 Israeli checkpoints within the occupied territories themselves. The purpose of this is to separate and isolate towns and communities, to make communication, trade or any sort of normal civil or economic society next to impossible.

We drove from Bethlehem to Ramallah one of the mornings with no problem. Later that afternoon on the same road on the way back to the hotel, Israeli soldiers were manning a previously unoccupied tower and were checking all cars as they passed. The traffic was now backed up almost a kilometer and it took over an hour to pass. Our guide told us we were lucky because oftentimes they will simply shut off the road and cars will have to find other more difficult ways of getting around. If asked, soldiers say it is for “security” reasons.

All these seemingly arbitrary actions serve the function of keeping the population on tenderhooks and living in constant fear to the extent that people become so concerned with small things like being allowed to go to work in the morning that bigger issues of social justice and independence are no longer a priority. If there is no routine and people don’t know what to expect then merely earning a living becomes your overriding concern.

The Israeli occupation, far from stopping the growth of militancy in the West Bank, merely perpetuates the hatred and sense of injustice most Palestinians feel. People are hopeless; they have nothing to bargain with, no coherent leadership and no prospects for the future.

For many the dreams of some sort of meaningful independence died with Arafat and now most people look no further than tomorrow.

The Khmer Rouge trial: Too little too late ROBERT BRESLIN CONTRIBUTING WRITER When the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia in 1979, it ended one of the century’s most brutal and barbaric regimes, the Khmer Rouge. Out of a population of six million, an estimated 1.5 million died in the killing fields from famine, disease or violence.

Almost 30 years later, the legacy of Pol Pot still permeates the whole country.

Cambodia has not healed properly because there has never been a state-led reconciliation effort. The reason for this is that many politicians currently in power have links to that grim past and fear of what may be uncovered has led successive governments to avoid dealing conclusively with the issue.

The recent arrest of Mr Ieng Sary along with his wife gives some hope to the special court set up with UN assistance to prosecute those responsible for these atrocities. Mr Sary was the public face of the Khmer Rouge during its

reign and was an architect of the horrific genocide that took place. The tribunal also has cases against Kaing Guek Eav (“Duch”), who ran the infamous S-21 prison at the formerly Tuol Sleng High School and Nuon Chea, who had been Head of Ideology. The trial will be held before a panel of three Cambodian and two foreign judges.

Proceedings may be complicated by the amnesty given to Sary in 1996 when he turned himself in. At the time, Pol Pot and some other die-hard fanatics still enjoyed their freedom in the re-

mote jungles of Northwest Cambodia, where a combination of tough terrain and a lack of political will meant they had gone unpunished. Pol Pot died free in 1998 and enjoyed a lavish burial. The authorities hope Mr Sary and the others do not enjoy such a dignified ending.

The capital city, Phnom Penh, remains an unreconstructed testament to the horrors of war. The infamous Toul Sleng Prison, where only twelve prisoners from 17000 survived, is now open to tourists who are guided through the torture chambers by men who used to

work there. Known murderers can live next door to the families of their victims; no one has ever been held accountable, which is why this tribunal is so important to many citizens.

The tragedy has never ended for Cambodia. It merely dissipated. Those in command faded into the jungle, leaving a country unrecognisable from its form a decade earlier. The punishment exacted on those who stand trial, if convictions are achieved, will never amount to retribution for all that was lost, but the hope remains that it can reconcile

an embattled population to its tragic past with the stated goal of healing and renewal. Putting this tragedy in perspective is just one of the challenges facing this impoverished country and in tackling this and all other problems, what’s most needed is a genuine political will.

If this tribunal is not run simultaneously with social rejuvenation projects, then the impact of any positives achieved from its end will be lost on the ordinary Cambodian citizen struggling to eat or feed a family.

worldreview@trinitynews.ie

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WorldTravel Hidden Germany: Exploring Weimar MICHAEL CARROLL CONTRIBUTING WRITER In the head, we all have our own Germany. These Germanies are, of course, distinct, yet they will, in all likelihood, have much in common.

Leather jackets, stern faces, fat sausages.

When the Germans themselves characterize their land, it is with the epithet “land of poets and thinkers” that they do so: “Land der Dichter und der Denker”. It certainly sounds more interesting than “Land of saints and scholars” (despite the psychological insight that useful dichotomy expresses), so I headed over to investigate.

Weimar is famous in Germany, though perhaps not elsewhere, as the home of Goethe, Schiller and lesser poets at the height of German Classicism in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. It is in the former East German state of Thuringia (Thüringen), a central region of forests, hills and mists. The train journey from Frankfurt takes two and half hours and that is the best airport to fly to. The train costs 50 euros, however, so the bus is worth considering. Also, local trains, though much slower, have more reasonably-priced tickets and take very interesting routes across the landscape.

Either way, keep your eyes fixed on the scenery as you move towards Weimar.

The playwright and poet Friedrich Schiller was only 45 when he died. He had risen to fame with his first play, Die Raüber and its revolutionary ideas had gained him a certain notoriety. As with most artists, though, it did not help his bank balance and he spent many long hours at his desk in the house in which he spent his last three years. The house survives and the interior has been preserved in the manner of the time. It is unimposing and pretty and fits in nicely with the architecture of the town.

There are many narrow streets and alleys, tiny shops, with wooden house frames and baroque ornateness. Weimar is particularly beautiful in the snow and this is regularly the case in the winter months. It is a rare occasion that there isn’t an artistic festival of some sort

going on and dotted around the various city squares are markets and marquees where you can buy beer and sausages.

Most of the good hostels don’t seem to be on the internet, so it’s best to search around if you have time. A number of them can be found on the other side of the town centre from the train station (the south side). German hostels are not generally cheap, but you shouldn’t pay more than €20 a night.

The Anna Amalia library is very famous; it holds 850000 books; some of them are rare. It is named in honour of the Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, a patron of culture at the time of Goethe and Schiller. There was a great fire in the library in 2004 which had tragic consequences when 50000 books were destroyed; in a place like Weimar, that is tragic indeed.

The most beautiful part of Weimar, in summer and winter, is the park by the river Ilm. It is only a ten minute walk from the main square, but you wouldn’t know. Here, surrounded by trees, is the Goethe’s Summerhouse. Through trees, he could see the house of the aristocratic Charlotte von Stein at the edge of the park, and he could make out when the lights in her quarters were on. The exact nature of their relationship was unclear, but is thought to have been in no way physical. After ten years in Weimar, he left her without a word and went off on his Italian expedition.

Goethe’s relations with women were interesting. He seems to have never committed to marriage so as not to sacrifice his creativity; it was more stimulating to move on and leave things undone.

In much German writing, we come across a contrast between the Bürger (citizen/townsperson) and the Dichter (poet/artist). It is analysed particularly intensely by such twentieth century writers as Mann and Hesse. The artist is a misunderstood outsider who doesn’t fit in with the mores of the many; he sulks while they swill beer and slap each other’s thighs. Perhaps this is why the Greeks held such a fascination for German men of culture: they could dream of a society where they too could feel integrated and respected. Weimar is strange in this regard; rarely has patron-

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age of the arts been so strong, yet the pretty little trivial squares and the beer tents don’t quite fit. The Germans are essentially a race of peasants.

This is borne out more strongly by the massive medieval castle of Wartburg, which overlooks the lovely town of Eisenach (birthplace of J.S. Bach).

This castle is truly massive and, apart from the town beneath, the landscape it looks over is wild and out of the way: “Where the fox and hare say ‘good night’ to each other”, as the Germans say. Eisenach is not far from Weimar and this time a local train is recommended. Much of the castle’s interior is decorated with tapestries and stained glass, and, judging by the scenes, these German feudal lords revelled in their beer-swilling, peasant culture. Martin Luther spent some time protected in Wartburg as he translated the New Testament to German for his beloved common-folk.

Another site worth seeing is the Buchenwald concentration camp on the outskirts of Weimar. It was built on a forest where Goethe used to stroll and visiting it is a chilling experience. The irony of its location, just outside Germany’s city of culture, has been picked up on by many.

The Russian Orthodox Church in Weimar’s Historic Cemetery. Photo: Adam Lederer

In general, the rugged, fairy tale landscape of this region seems in some way to belie the fact that it has been home to many of Germany’s most distinguished citizens. As well as Goethe and Schiller, Bach, Wagner, Herder, Nietzsche (during his madness), Hummel, Gropius and Kandinsksy all lived in Weimar at some stage. Luther studied at Erfurt, capital of Thuringia. Frege, Schopenhauer and Marx were all connected in some way with Jena University. Leipzig, only 70 miles away in the neighbouring state of Saxony, is another pivot of German culture (it is a great spot for a proper night out too), and Goethe, Lessing, Nietzsche, Heisenberg, Wagner and current Chancellor Merkel all studied or worked there.

This period of German history and culture has ended and much of it seems ridiculously alien. It is strange that from such a hilly, forested area of farmers and simple townspeople much of the course of much European history was determined and influenced. Perhaps it was precisely thanks to these contrasts.

Though a trip to this area feels like an exploration of a forgotten part of Germany’s landscape and history, by the end, you come to realise how crucial a part it really is.

The grimy side of Inter-railing DAVID KEARNEY CONTRIBUTING WRITERS I awoke at 3am to find a man staring at me through the dark.

His eyes met mine exactly. After returning his intent gaze for five seconds, he turned and ran. I checked my rucksack: it was still there. I went back to sleep.

Until this point, it had been a strange train journey. Now, it was even odder. It was also a very international train journey.

We were seated in a Romanian carriage on a Hungarian train, next to the Slovenian dining car, passing through Croatia on the way to Italy. The train was filthy. We had already moved compartment twice because the layer of dirt was so eminently visible. However, this was the least of our worries on a train journey filled with strange and unwelcome happenings. After a drunken night in Budapest, the five of us spent the following day wandering around a shopping centre in a state of hungover disarray. Then we had to run half a mile up Baross Ucta to Keleti Station, only to just make the train, and not for the first time on the holiday, either. The fun had only just begun.

What then followed was certainly a journey of many risks. The first one encountered was eating dinner. Perhaps the emptiness of this “restaurant” car should have sent alarm bells ringing, but instead a meal was foolishly consumed. The

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dining car was a hotspot for germ cultivation; there was grime on the windows, tablecloths, chairs, waitresses.

And as if to promote the image of unsanitary practises, the staff openly smoked at the table beside their only customers for the night (that was us). I was served tea in a rather quaint, once white, soup bowl. My dining partner enjoyed translucent chicken, and some sort of yellow mush advertised as “French fries”. I attempted to enjoy the view of dusk setting in across the continent, but the windows were rendered unusable by perhaps decades of grime not cleaned away. I passed on a bottle of Coke after discovering that it was over three months out of date.

Retiring to one of the least dirty compartments for the night, the peaceful sleep we all desired was not to be forthcoming. The international character of this journey brought with it an army of associated passport checks. It would seem that the European Union is a rather distant concept, as every detail of our maroon documents were scrutinised and digested. I once dared to ask for a stamp for nostalgic purposes.

I would have received a more welcoming response had I pulled out a gun and declared the country mine.

The highlight of the night, if you could call it that, came at the small Slovenian border town of Dobova. At first, I found myself of the belief that there was some sort of border guard convention taking place on the small platform, going on the number of capped and leather-bound persons standing there. Instead most watched as some colleagues entrained to

carry out the usual formalities. Forty-five minutes later, we were still there.

On a trip to the rather insalubrious bathroom in the next carriage, I found the connecting door braced by some more pleasant guard-friends. In said carriage, one of their associates with a gun almost as large as I was could be found standing on a stepladder, searching a detached roof panel with a flash-lamp. The luggage racks and spaces under the seats were being heavily scrutinised also. Nearby a fellow passenger was surrounded by yet more patrolmen.

The whole carriage was eerily silent. Suddenly another guard appeared and, taking a hint from the malicious look I received from the other side of the connecting door, I returned to my compartment immediately and did no further investigation. Soon after, the train finally departed, affording one last brief view of the convention on the platform. A man was standing, handcuffed in a centre of a ring of guards, the contents of his luggage strewn about the platform.

The next morning, our temporary home drew into Venice’s Santa Lucia station, now devoid of its delectable dining car, removed sometime during the previous night, perhaps returned to the raging fires of hell. The Grand Canal was bustling wildly with vaporetti and gondolas, and the mystery of this unique city lay beyond, calling out to be explored: by foot.

A drop of rain fell from the sky, and as the shower took full force, a train’s worth of dirt washed slowly away.

I know what you’re thinking. Manchester - seriously? Yes, Manchester and yes, it’s worth a visit.

This old industrial city has seen a real regeneration in the last few years and it’s fast becoming one of the UK’s coolest cities.

A great starting point for any visit to Manchester is a trip to The Lowry. The Lowry is actually in Salford, the city which adjoins Manchester. As a visitor, you won’t see the difference, but Mancunians and Salfordians certainly do. As the name suggests, this gallery contains a huge collection of the paintings of LS Lowry who painted pictures of city life in the industrial districts of Northern England.

Featuring his famous “matchstick men”, Lowry’s was a distinctive style of painting which was uniquely northern and will give you an instant insight into the city’s smoggy past. The Lowry also contains an impressive auditorium which attracts touring plays, operas and comedians.

Manchester also has a number of other excellent museums and galleries and in most cases entry is free of charge. The Manchester Art Gallery, housed in an imposing neo-classical building, boasts around 25000 pieces of art, while the Urbis is an exhibition centre focussing on urban life. If travelling with children (or just someone a bit childish), you should probably check out Manchester Museum’s collection of mummies, creepy crawlies and skeletons.

Anyone brought up on costume drama may be interested to hear that Manchester is well placed for visiting some of England’s most beautiful stately homes. Chatsworth, the home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, is a fantastic place. Its plush furnishings and vast rooms will make you wish you were born into a different time and, in the case of most of us, a different class. It is still inhabited, so keep an eye out for the family photos- there’s always the option of marrying the heir apparent. A train will bring you straight to Chatsworth from Manchester. One stately home, which gets a disproportionate amount of attention these days, is Lyme Park in Stockport. In 1995, it took the leading role of Pemberley, Mr Darcy’s home, in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and since then has welcomed a constant stream of Austen enthusiasts. Happily it looks exactly the same in real life as it did on the television, so you can spend some time flouncing about pretending to be Elizabeth/Darcy to the bewildered amusement of the kindly old National Trust ladies.

A crucial part of any city break is a city’s shopping potential. Indicative of the new prosperity to be found in Manchester is the fact that many of the big London department stores have now opened branches in the city. There’s a House of Fraser, a Harvey Nichols and a Selfridges all located close together in the city centre. However, no examination of Manchester shopping could be complete without a mention of the bizarre but brilliant Trafford Centre. This gaudy monstrosity is as close to Las Vegas as a shopping centre could get.

It’s absolutely enormous and looks like a cross between the Vatican and a football stadium. If you’re not sufficiently overwhelmed by the shop-filled part, make your way to the food court. The main eating area is designed to look like the deck of a cruise-ship and seems roughly the same size. And alongside runs a “street” of restaurants which range from things that look like Chinese temples to New Orleans town houses. I found myself wandering in confused awe and asking why anyone would ever decide to build such a thing. That said, it’s totally worth a look.

Even though it doesn’t exactly grab my attention, I understand you cannot write about Manchester without mentioning sport. Football is practically a religion in the city. Devoted Manchester United fans should make their way to Old Trafford (located on Sir Matt Busby Way), where you can take a tour of the stadium that Bobby Charleton dubbed the “Theatre of Dreams”.And if all that talk of physical exertion inspires you to get active, head for the Salford Watersports Centre nearby.

You can fly Dublin to Manchester with Ryan air for less than €50 if you travel in January. Try www.hostelworld.com for a good selection of hostels in Manchester. Lowest prices are between €25 and €30 a night and tend to be cheaper midweek.

Andrea Mulligan

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Business&Careers

A new era in Financial Services The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive aims to make cross-border trading easier and more accessible. How exactly does it work?

AISLING DENG CONTRIBUTING WRITER The year 1989 was a momentous year, the beginning and end of many things.

My first gasp of air, pulsating heart beat, cry of awe and sight of light... but elsewhere at the International Landmark Festival, Berlin took main stage out shone the rest of the acts. The city planted its feet firmly on the groud marking that year as its territory and finishing the eighties history with a flourish .With bricks cascading down the disintegrating barrier, both east and west disappeared into the dust of history, leaving the view and field clear.

The Berlin wall came down.

Like the invisible border; between fantasy and reality, the visible barrier, the Gaza strip separating Israel and Palestine and the mythical boundary, between loike north and south Dublin roysh; these divides create voids in relationships and networks; literally and metaphorically.

A shift to the left or right, north or south, hot or cold makes a world of difference. On a road trip, as the mile counter flickers, so do languages, dialects, cultures, customs, and laws in various shades ranging the spectrum of seasoned leaves and petals. But what

holds us together is the web, the vein that spreads its network across seas, channels, forests, deserts and binds us together even despite resistance and sets down our roots; communication: one of the necessities of society. Be it through art, literature, music or movement, it is crucial to our societies. Without it we are nothing; just bodies separate and unresponsive. In the study of human nature, especially in business and economics, communication is the core factor of its universe.

As of 1 November 2007, the most significant piece of financial services legislation agreed in recent times was implemented and is another landmark move aimed to break the barriers somewhat; creating a single market that may shake or shape the future of business in Europe and indeed the world: The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive.

It is hoped that this new directive will make cross-border sales simpler and cheaper- leading to a more efficient era of trading, entertaining the mentality of turning the EU market into the most competitive and dynamic knowledge economy in the world.

MiFID relates to both Investment Firms and Credit Institutions when providing investment services, replacing the Investment Services Directive. In general, the MiFID now covers most, if not

all firms currently susceptible to the ISD, as well as some that currently aren’t. This includes: investment banks; portfolio managers, stockbrokers and broker dealers, corporate finance firms, futures and option firms as well as some commodities firms.

MiFID is probably the most prodigious part of legislation introduced under the “Lamfalussy” procedure of 2006. It is part of three other “Lamfalussy Directives” - the Prospectus Directive, the Market Abuse Directive and the Transparency Directive. It still honours the principles of the EU “passport” introduced by the Investment Services Directive whilst also presenting the concept of “maximum harmonization”, which places more emphasis on home state supervision, a change from the previous EU financial service legislation providing the crucial means for a level playing field in the European market.

This new directive is a European Union law which provides a balanced regulatory regime for investment services across the 30 member states of the European Economic Area (the 27 member states of the European Union plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein). The main objectives of the Directive are to increase competition and consumer protection in investment services across the board. The major difference is that it ex-

tends the coverage of the old ISD regime and introduces new and more extensive requirements to which firms have to adapt to, especially in relation to their business and internal organisation conduct reflecting the changes in financial services and markets. MiFID comprises two levels of European legislation. “Level 1”, the Directive itself adopted in 2004 and a secondary “Level 2” legislation, which makes provision for its requirements to be supplemented.

The key aspects of MiFID are; authorization, regulation and pass-porting, client categorisation, client order handling, pre-trade transparency, post-trade transparency, best execution and systematic internaliser. This will allow banks and new trading platforms to compete with established stock exchanges, breaking the monotony monopoly that many countries comfortable thrive in, now forcing them to compete for business. The passports will lend to easier inter-trading within the EU, with the approval of the national regulator.

Trading bodies have greater responsibility in ensuring that their level of execution to their clients is high. As 40-50% of all trading was off-exchange trades, in a clever move, the MiFID will force offexchange traders to publish their prices, thus rationalizing bids and offers for potential buyers.

The ABN-AMRO bank headquarters, Amsterdam.

This development has set the business world brilliantly ablaze, but will we, the consumers, actually feel the shockwaves from the mosh pit or will we look on forlornly at the barrier beside the bouncers? What use is it if it’s not practical to the public? Will it have a wider scale domino effect on relations within the EU and maybe beyond? Is this the radical reformation revolution we’ve been waiting for? Or are we just delud-

ing ourselves, hoping for a miracle?

As the EU are kept up all night to deal with their baby- their newborn directive, to tentatively tease out the tedious details, pacifying carks and conflicts, it may not seem like a gigantic leap for mankind, but it’s a baby step, a critical step in the right direction. It’s laying down good, solid foundations, building and paving the way for a bigger, better, bolder act.

Where the medicines are made OPEC Countries to switch from Dollar

Ireland has become a key global location for this multi-million dollar industry

LUKE MAISHAM CONTRIBUTING WRITER

DANIELLE RYAN BUSINESS & CAREERS EDITOR Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has admitted that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Companies members have been expressing an interest in converting their cash reserves to a currency other than the American dollar, which he called a “worthless piece of paper” at the end of a summit of OPEC heads of state held in Riyadh on Sunday 18 November. Ahmadinejad blamed George Bush’s policies for the dollar’s rapid decline in value over the past year.

“They get our oil and give us a worthless piece of paper”, he told reporters. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez also urged other OPEC nations to reject the imperialism of the dollar and the negative effect that it has been having on other nations. The depreciating dollar has recently pushed the price of a barrel up to nearly US$100, but Iran and Venezuela both currently have antagonistic relationships with the United States, which would indicate that their proposal might also be politically motivated.

The value of the dollar has been heading downward since the start of the Bush administration over seven years ago and most Americans haven’t really

been paying much attention to it until now, after their summers of paying double the price they’d expect for lunch all over Europe. There are many opinions about what the dollar’s decline means for us in Europe and for Americans themselves, but the fact is that America is living far beyond its means.

At the end of the Clinton administration, the United States could boast a balanced budget and a surplus. Now, however, the government is piling up national debt at an alarming rate (the current deficit stands at US$9 trillion.) after President Bush cut taxes and launched and continues to pour money into a war that is showing no sign of an end.

It’s hard to know what to believe about the plunging value of the dollar. We’re hearing so many opposing opinions; don’t worry it doesn’t mean much, it’ll only mean something if it continues depreciating rapidly, it’s just what America needs, it’ll bounce back, it’s the end for America!

However, United States Energy Secretary Sam Bodman says the United States is not worried about the debate over whether or not OPEC should seek a different currency with which to price oil, but we all know that something is not quite right in America when Jay-Z starts flashing euros instead of dollars in his videos.

A conservative estimate places the investment by the overseas pharmaceutical industry in Ireland at US$12billion.

This huge investment means the options for science graduates are wider than ever before. Ireland has become a key global location for this multi-million dollar industry, thanks in part to the favourable corporate taxes in this country.

There are now 83 pharmaceuticals facilities here, with thirteen of the top fifteen companies in the world having operations in Ireland. Ireland is now one of the largest exporters of pharmaceuticals globally, with €36 billion of pharmachem products exported in 2004 composing almost 45% of our total exports.

The success of the pharmaceutical cluster in Ireland depends on the strong education system here to supply the necessary labour skills; that is, graduate students, particularly of science and engineering related degrees.

There’s good news for anyone planning a career in the pharmaceuticals and biopharmaceuticals sector: The

industry is still growing here, with the recent recruitment drive for the Wyeth Newbridge plant which plans to open a research and development facility by 2009, enlargement of the Wyeth Biopharma plant in Clondalkin, Dublin (one of the largest integrated bio-manufacturing plants in the world) and the new Genzyme-owned pharmaceutical company in Waterford. Already employment by this industry has grown twenty-fold, from less than 2000 people in 1973 when Ireland joined the (European) Common Market. The sector now employs 24500 people directly, with a similar number providing services to it.

In just the last seven years, job growth in this sector has averaged at 1400 annually.

Christine O’Connor, a Trinity student in Senior Freshman Natural Sciences, took part in the 2007 student placement program at Wyeth Biopharma. She commented “There’s such diversity in the types of jobs within a pharmaceutical company and with all the new scientific developments occurring all the time, there are always new opportunities”. She went on to describe a career in the pharmaceutical industry as “so exciting!”

“Wyeth has exciting careers for

graduates at our new Biopharmaceutical and Vaccines campus at Grange Castle”, commented a senior director at the Wyeth Biotech facility in Grange Castle.

These multinational companies offer a secure, interesting and friendly workplace. James Thompson, an employee at Vistakon Limerick described some of the perks of working for an American Multinational: “We get free gym membership, free five a side football and all our sports and social activities are subsidised. I also get to visit our sister plant in the United Stats a lot”.

A passion for pharmaceuticals, a can-do attitude and an ability to thrive in a changing environment are just a few of the qualities that recruiters look for, according to Elaine Boyd, Director of Human Resources at Schering Plough.

Pat McCarthy, HR Director at LEO Pharma, said “The ongoing expansion of the sector and the arrival of new firms such as Centocor, Amgen and Genzyme provide plenty of opportunities for candidates.

There is a lot of scope for career progression, with [Quality Control] analysts, for example, often moving on to become laboratory supervisors or managers.”

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Science&Technology

Tech Specs John O’Reilly

AMAZON KINDLE Don’t judge an e-book reader by it’s cover

Invasion of the killer Hornets?

KERENSA SLADE STAFF WRITER The title reads like a 70's horror film, but according to Baroness Masham of Ilton this could be a real threat to the British Isles. This month, the Baroness asked the House of Lords "whether there has been a recent increase in the number of hornets coming into the south of England from Europe, either as a result of climate change or in imported wood; and whether the sting of such hornets is a significant risk to health and safety”. She decided to raise the issue following the death of the sonin-law of a close friend who died after stepping on and receiving a sting from a hornet. Given the debate in England, could this be a looming problem for Ireland?

In Britain in 2004, 843 people sought medical help after receiving an insect sting compared to 369 in the year before and eight people died as a result of a reaction to a sting that year, whereas in the preceding few years, an average of two deaths were recorded per year. These figures appear to show

that serious health problems associated with insect stings are becoming more common. However, it is not currently clear whether this is because in total, more people are being stung or if the occurrence of severe allergy to insect venom is on the rise, as it is with other allergies. Corresponding figures for Ireland are not available, in fact according to the Green party website ‘Currently, there is no systematic collection of data on allergies, their impact on health and the costs incurred by Irish patients.’

However, given the relative populations of Ireland and the UK it seems likely that only one death from anaphylaxis related to an insect sting happens every few years across the whole of Ireland.

An increase in the number of hornets could have economical implications too. Global warming has allowed the spread of a particularly vicious hornet species from Asia to the South of France. Earlier this year, The Telegraph reported that a handful of these hornets can destroy a honey-bee nest of 30000 insects in just a few hours. As a result France has had to import huge volumes of honey this year to keep up with demand. Ireland is home to 22000 bee

colonies, managed by two thousand beekeepers. If these Asian hornets were to spread further north through Europe, the consequences could be disastrous for companies that profit through Irish honey-making.

Addressing the proposed health and safety issue, Lord Rooker from the department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs explained that since 1992, only 32 of the 124 instances of fatal anaphylaxis have been due to insect venom.

He concluded that “it can be serious, but an incredibly small number of people are affected." Allergic reactions occur when the body produces an antibody which provokes an immune response to a protein found in food, pollen or venom, instead of targeting bacteria or other harmful substances. Anaphylaxis is an extreme form of such an allergic response and is caused by the release of a large quantity of chemicals including histamines into the bloodstream. This causes symptoms such as swelling of the throat and mouth and hives on the skin.

The treatment for anaphylactic shock is a shot of adrenaline administered from an auto-injector commonly called an epipen. In most countries, such treat-

Hornet numbers have been increasing in Britain in recent years, resulting in increased risks for small numbers of people who suffer from allergies.

Photo courtesy of Steen Heilesen.

ment is regulated by prescription.

So is the hornet population of the British Isles increasing? Stuart Hine, the manager of the insect identification service at the Natural History Museum in London, assured radio listeners that whilst there had been an increase in the number of hornets in Britain over the last few years, this was not due to an influx in hornets from the continent, rather that native species are thriving.

Hine went on to say that traditionally the hornet has lived in rural areas and since they are not aggressive, human contact has been minimal. Milder winters mean that the population of hornets is growing and without enough countryside to accommodate them, nests are increasingly being discovered in suburbia. This, in turn, means that simply the chance of encountering a hornet is higher in average for the population instead of this being a problem of migration of hornet species.

However, it is difficult to see how further deaths from insect stings may be prevented. Given the rarity of death by insect sting, it remains to be seen if European governments will respond to reports of increasing insect populations.

Dead bug stuns the scientific world SEBASTIAN WIESMAIER SCIENCE EDITOR

Compare these for size! Image courtesy: BBC online

science@trinitynews.ie

Do you like cars? Suppose if you do, you’d go for the fancy ones with eight cylinders and a big exhaust pipe, or so.

Well, imagine a bit smaller, like a Smart possibly. Still like it? Good. Add some big claws and eight podes, the supersized version of spiderlegs roughly. A giant scorpion, two and a half metres long? The claws being 46cm long? Cutting you in half? I got you!

Ok, ok, it’s extinct for a while now but scientists around Dr Simon Braddy, a paleontologist from University of Bristol, have found a complete fossil of one of those 46cm-claws in Prüm, Germany. They were able to relate that back to other, smaller fossils and infer the size of the complete beast. Even Shaquille O’Neal would have been stunned. To reinforce that: at 2.5 metres, it is the biggest insect that has ever lived on Earth. It’s from the class Eurypterida (sea scorpions) which are believed to be

the extinct aquatic ancestors of today’s scorpions and possibly spider-like insects (arachnids).

The area it was found used to be a massive river delta comparable to what the Nile’s delta in Egypt is today. You have an environment of fresh or brackish water there, little streams meandering around, banks of river sediment, a rather dynamic setting that allows organisms to be buried comparably quickly and therefore be sealed off from the decaying influence of oxygen. The bed of sediments it was found in currently lies ten metres below the surface and is accessible via outcrops that form steep cliffs.

Around 400 million years ago, this part of land was located in an area where we would find Central Africa today. The hot climates was not helped by the fact that the sport used to be part of a supercontinent called Gondwana.

Surrounded by tremendous amounts of land, the area where our scorpion lived had an extreme continental climate and therefore very warm water. One theory

suggests that this, along with the high oxygen content of the atmosphere at that time, is responsible for the size of the beast. Others suggest an ‘arms race’ between prey and predator as the claws are that massive. Probably, all these factors played together to various degrees.

The bug would have had to live underwater. The claw shows scientists the thickness of its outer shell to be rather thin compared to the size of the animal. That means its shell would have had to be massive to be able to support it on land and therefore physically excludes this. They would have eaten mostly fish. However, as their prey grew armor on their outer bodies the scorpion’s claws had to become bigger as well. On an even lovelier note, they also ate each other – cannibalism was common, as Braddy said, and might have been another factor that this species could grow so big.

An arms race is usually not single-sided.

That’s what happened to our fellows here. Large fish with jaws and teeth eventually wiped them out.

Amazon has released it’s own branded e-book reader, the Kindle, a device they are hoping to do for books what the iPod did for music, namely allow you to lug your bookshelf around in your pocket. Forgoing the sleek design cues of the iPod and instead opting for a more retro (ugly) design, the Kindle’s function is intended to win the hearts of adopters.

The e-book reader is not a new idea and electronics giant Sony has entered the foray themselves with the imaginatively named Sony Reader. Both Amazon and Sony use a new screen technology called e-ink in their devices which is the closest electronic medium to regular paper and works by arranging real ink particles with an electric field.

The Kindle is essentially a screen for reading text, and this electronic paper display does an excellent job of this.

The reason for using this over a laptop is its screen and portability. At 10.3 ounces and the size of a paperback, the Kindle is highly mobile and it’s screen reduces the strain usually associated with reading from a regular lcd.

The Kindle uniquely forgoes the need for a computer, instead delivering all content to the device wirelessly over the same 3G network that mobile phones use. This enables Wikipedia to be referenced during reading and also offers rudimentary internet browsing. It’s $399 price tag brings with it unlimited wireless usage so there are no monthly bills to worry about.

As the internets largest retailer, and with physical books being one of its core offerings, Amazon needs to tread carefully with this new product. After being in development for three years, they are now confident they have it sussed; initial reaction shows strong support, with the Kindle selling out just hours after going on sale.

Ultimately, the success this product will have depends on how it performs at replacing the physical book.

From a college user’s perspective, if this is to become mainstream it could lend to a welcome reduction in backache arising from the transportation of college literature.

Lecture notes could be delivered seamlessly by subscribing to a feed, and all books and journals could be with you at all times.Wikipedia and internet access are perfect compliments; a perfect college companion.

For the moment, the Kindle is only available in the United States, and Amazon hasn’t revealed its plans for other countries; early signs point to a successful product offering, so expect to read more about this in the future.

BitTorrent Digest English Pigs Squeal on OiNK’s Operations Elite torrent tracker OiNK.cd was recently raided and forced to shut down after almost three years of copyright infringement. This came as an annoying blow to its fanatic community and was seen as a major win for the music industry.

OiNK was an invite only tracker with a membership of around 180000; its emphasis was on extremely high quality music torrents and the site managed to prerelease 60 major album in 2007 alone. It’s reputation as “one of the world's largest and most meticulously maintained online music repositories” put it in high regard by both regular users and artists alike, and as such, its former members included some music professionals.

Another popular tracker, Demonoid.com, has also put on hold its operations as of late under pressure from the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

This has helped push mininova.org, yet another torrent tracker, into the top 50 most visited sites on the internet, putting it up among YouTube and Wikipedia in terms of popularity, quite an achievement for a site whose activities are by-andlarge illegal. Demonoid is expected to resume operations in the not-so-distant future, so aspiring pirates can rest easy.

Dutch ISP Leaseweb, previously a safe haven for many of the current torrent trackers, has very recently been forced to issue notices to offending torrent sites ordering them to move to new providers. This leaves torrent trackers with very few alternatives but where there is demand there will be supply, especially in the borderless free state that is the internet. The Netherlands looks nice this time of year.

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Breaking down borders CONNEL MCKENNA SPORT FEATURES EDITOR Almost a week after its passing, Sean O’Connor is unmistakably a man still greatly enthused by the tremendous success of Rally Ireland 2007, the groundbreaking event which he, alongside fellow promoter Ronan Morgan, Chief Executive David Marren and others, has initiated, organised and promoted through to its realisation over four historic days in mid-November. “Would you like me to shoot from the hip or have you any questions you’d like to ask?” he immediately enquires, filling me with the sense that this is one discussion which will not in any way resemble drawing blood from a stone. It is a sense which ultimately proves to be well-placed – I have the questions, but whether I did or not would soon prove unimportant, as Mr. O’Connor needed no invitation to enlighten me as to just how roaring a success he felt the first Rally Ireland was.

Given what he had to tell me, it was hard to blame him.

“It’s just been a huge success story”, he exclaims, “I really feel it has changed Irish sport”. The event which he believes has had so profound an effect has its origins in a joint initiative between the Irish government and Northern Ireland Events, the programme having been put into motion before the reformation of the Assembly earlier this year. O’Connor and Ronan Morgan were commissioned by this partnership to carry out a feasibility study into the possibilty of an Irish rally gaining inclusion in the World Rally Championship.

O’Connor’s previous position within the highest level of rallying had been as manager of Marlboro’s sponsorship of WRC teams, most recently with Marcus Gronholm’s Peugeot team, while Morgan has been heavily involved with the management of Rally Wales UK for a number of years.

He is also an ex co-driver –“we felt there was a good blend of skills there”, O’Connor tells me.

“We didn’t expect them to come to us with a huge cheque”, he admits, but in the aftermath of the study’s findings that is exactly what Peter Hain, thenSecretary of State for the North, and John O’Donaghue, then-Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism in the Republic, did.

With successful pilot runs in 2005 and 2006, the Irish pitch to the WRC was approved and Rally Ireland was included on the 2007 calendar. Never mind the event itself, the bid was evidently something that O’Connor took huge pride in being a part of. “We had a unique story to tell. I have to be careful with my words here, but our bid encompassed two seperate political countries or jurisdictions. In that manner, it was unique.”

He refers to the joint initiative as “a great example of social cohesion”, and indeed, he has some interesting insights to offer on this aspect of Rally Ireland’s success. “Both Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley sent letters of support in 2005 before the formation of the Assembly in the north,” he informs me. Mr. Paisley’s public tone, in particular, has taken on an altogether more diplomatic quality since his becoming First Minister in the North, but it comes as a pleasant surprise to hear that the Democratic Unionist Party leader privately supported an all-island venture two years previously. “I spoke with [Junior First Minister] Ian Paisley Jr. and [DUP MLA and Minister for Culture, Arts and Leisure] Edwin Poots in Sligo”, he goes on, “and they both displayed a full acceptance that an allisland approach is the way forward in these matters. For them even to cross the border on official business like this is a big step. This is why I say that Rally Ireland has helped to break down borders.” His sense of pride and achievement is also apparent when he talks of the wider team behind the bid.

“I’m a great believer in the importance of psychology in sport. A driver won’t succeed unless he believes he can.

Likewise, we had to convince our people that our bid was the best. [In bidding] we were up against South Africa, Australia, Poland.....sometimes the hardest part is convincing Irish people to believe that we are good enough, but we managed it.”

Aside from the obvious prestige, though, what were the incentives for putting such effort into pursuing a place on the WRC calendar? Boosting the economy through tourism? As I am fast learning, Rally Ireland was a “no-expense spared” production. “Tourism is the direct effect. Then you have the indirect effects. Showcasing the country’s scenery, boosting an economically disadvantaged area of the country – these things were considered”. That area of course, is the northwest. The twenty stages, beginning with an opening showpiece at Stormont, just outside of Belfast in County Down, then took in Leitrim, Roscommon, Cavan, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Donegal and Sligo, but this was no designed act of charity – “The feasibility study suggested that area of the country to be the best suited to rallying”, he tells me.

The entire event, O’Connor proclaims, has “surpassed all of our expectations”, and he informs me that he believes this will be reflected in the revenue that will have been accrued from its staging. Prior to Rally Ireland, a University of Ulster study estimated that the economy stood to benefit to the tune of 46 million euros as a result of it, but O’Connor believes this figure will prove too modest. “The University of Ulster research was very thorough, but with that figure, it hasn’t even taken into account

Michaelmas term, Week 12

Trinity News speaks to Rally Ireland Promoter Sean O’Connor about the great success of an historic event for Irish sport.

the revenue we will gain from our corporate hospitality, which was huge in scale”. I ask him if he believes the cost of this will be outweighed. “Yes. I think we’ll see that when the figures become more concrete over the next few weeks”. Then, of course, there is the fact that Rally Ireland has aspirations to become a regular fixture in Ireland’s sporting calendar. “We’re back in 2009, we’re pencilled in for that. The Ryder Cup was a one-off; at the moment, Rally Ireland is a bi-annual event, although ultimately we are seeking annual staging in the WRC”.

With this not yet certain, he at this point states confidently and assertively “We’ve proved we are good enough. That is the most important thing”. The words are spoken by O’Connor with a conviction that resonates.

He illustrates impressively to me that this assertion has sound grounding in what he has seen and heard at first hand over the last few weeks. Ill-advisedly I’m now thinking, I hadn’t made the effort to travel to the northwest (or even to Belfast, my home city) to take in any of the action and relied on television coverage instead. He sets the scene for me. “Rally provides a very different sporting spectacle. We had 200000 spectators in the northwest. The K-Club can’t cater for that many people. Neither can Croke Park. The terrific co-operation between the Gardai and the Police Service of Northern Ireland ensured that the transportation of people following the stages was as smooth as possible.

There was not one fatality over the course of the event. At one point on the Sunday, there was a fourteen-mile tailback in Sligo, from Mullaghmore to Grange.” Yet this situation had been prepared for, with overpreparation seemingly preferred to fine margins that may have left things to chance. “We had 3000 voluntary marshals working for us, which was 1000 in excess of what our original estimate suggested we would require, but we didn’t turn anyone away.

Some had actually travelled from overseas – at their own expense – to volunteer. I met one guy, a doctor, who had travelled from Australia”. As a man well-versed in the facilities of the WRC tour on a world scale, O’Connor placed an emphasis on Ireland not providing a sub-standard service to the visiting teams and media. One of his favourite aspects of Rally Ireland’s production, he admitted, was the quality and availability of the service park (akin to pits in F1) provided in Sligo. Clearly he saw it a huge improvement on facilities provided at other WRC events. The drivers were given first class treatment also. “We had 62 helicopters in operation over the four days. Every driver was flown from the Stormont stage to Sligo. This is beyond the norm for the WRC.” This level of groundwork was

rewarded with the plaudits O’Connor tells me the Rally was receiving at every hand’s turn, as well as the fantastic rerception it got from the public. The volume of spectators alone portrays this, but I am regaled with snippets of his experiences at the scene. “You go to places like Turkey and China and there is no real enthusiasm for the event, but [Rally Ireland] couldn’t have been any different. There were so many Finnish and French flags among the crowd. The reception from vistors wasoverwhelming, and the enthusiasm of the local people for it was great. Events like ours create confidence that we can stage first-class sporting events outside of Dublin and Belfast.”

Of the Belfast stage, though, at Stormont, O’Connor speaks with a distinct reverence. “It was just spectacular. The transformation of Stormont’s grounds was really unbelievable. That stage presented a great image of Belfast”. Piero Sodano, the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile observer for Rally Ireland, was quoted as saying that the Stormont stage had been the “best-ever start” to a WRC round, while FIA President Max Moseley was said to be hugely impressed.

“With that and the Mullaghmore stage”, O’Connor continues, “we had two stages screened live [by RTÉ] on terrestrial television. Again that is unique for the WRC. In many ways the media were slow to catch onto the scale and importance of this event, but RTÉ backed it really well.

The Stormont stage on the Thursday night attracted 276000 viewers. The average for the Premiership League on Saturday prime-time is 190000, so they were delighted.”

The special stage at Mullaghmore provided Rally Ireland’s finale, and O’Connor was plainly very satisfied with its effectiveness. “The setting was spectacular. I mean, you have the Atlantic, Cassiebawn Castle, Benbulben…members of the French media couldn’t believe it and one Italian photographer told me he could probably retire on the photographs he had taken!”

Another man who will doubtlessly still be living off the adrenalin produced

by Rally Ireland is Eddie Jordan. The former F1 team owner had been very vocal in his support for the event from the earliest days of its conception, and in February, was appointed chairman of its board of directors. Jordan is one of the most charismatic sporting and business figures in Ireland and I wanted to get a feel for what it was like to work alongside him.

“Fantastic”, was the appraisal. “He’s incredibly energetic, and he sees the big picture. [Rally Ireland] is about presenting a picture postcard of Ireland – Eddie understands that better than most. And of course, he could also call Max Moseley or even Bertie Ahern or Tony Blair,

simply because he is Eddie Jordan”. Jordan was deputised by Trevor Ringland, ex-Ireland rugby international player and Chairman of the “One Small Step” antisectarian organisation. O’Connor describes him as being “hugely helpful and very experienced in dealing with crosscommunity initiatives.”

The inaugural Rally Ireland was won for Citroen by Frenchman Sebastien Loeb, who is now within touching distance of a fourth consective World Rally Championship. He became the first recipient of the “Hands Across the Divide” trophy, which is based on the statue of the same name which stands on Craigavon bridge. The Irish challenge was fronted by Gareth McHale, who steered his Ford Focus to a points finish in eighth. O’Connor is keen to stress the importance of talent development in Ireland over the next few years in order to supplement Rally Ireland’s success.

“The money has to be put into it. It’s vital that we have Irish drivers competing for Rallies if the public’s interest is to be sustained beyond the next few years. As well as Gareth, young Chris Meeke was unfortunate to suffer technical problems.

He was actually lying in fourth after the Stormont stage”. Meeke and McHale are just two of the young drivers in this country whom O’Connor believes are “good enough,” given the necessary investment, to challenge the best in the field consistently.

Turning an eye to the future, sustainability is a key issue for O’Connor, and not simply in terms of capturing the public’s imagination. As an ex-Senator and the grandson of Sean Lemass, his is a background steeped in politics, and also one that is strong on environmental issues. Given his involvement with the “Tidy Towns” and “Green Schools” initiatives, it is not surprising that a stated objective of the Rally Ireland project is that it will become the world’s first carbon neutral motorsport event by 2010.

How realistic is this aim, though?

“Well I’m very hopeful that all cars within the WRC will run on bio-fuel by next year. I’m also on the FIA’s marketing committee and there’s actually unbelievable support for this within the FIA and WRC. There is an economic incentive for this in that the people – the fans – want to see it, so it will boost the product’s image.

The future looks promising then, for Rally Ireland and the WRC. If Sean O’Connor can continue to enjoy future Rally Irelands the way he has done this, then things will be going well. Any further reflections Sean, I ask, on the first of hopefully many? “Not really”. To my surprise, it seems we have managed between us to satiate his boundless fervor for the topic. Almost. “I suppose I can’t stress enough that it was the people – the people made this work.”

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Michaelmas term, Week 12

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Recordbreaker Healy is classy but curious talent CONNEL MCKENNA SPORT FEATURES EDITOR It is high time David Healy quit the irritable game of deception he has enjoyed playing on us for so long. Fans of Northern Ireland won’t care much, but Healy continues to convince the rest of us that he is something he is not. The problem is that we cannot seem to make up our minds on what he actually is. Classy goalscoring genius or middling journeyman striker? Healy plays both parts with aplomb.

The Killyleagh man does not, though, confuse us in the way that Filippo Inzaghi often has. Inzaghi, a man who was roundly sniggered at so poor was his technique during his first Italy training session; a man who was memorably branded by Sir Alex Ferguson as having been “born offside”, is barely a footballer, but is undeniably a goalscorer extraordinaire. Time and again you will watch Inzaghi, convinced entirely of his utter ineptitude; time and again he will confound you with a poacher’s finish or two at the crucial moments in games. Just ask a Liverpool fan.

Healy, though, prefers a different method in confounding opinion. Watch him in action for his club side in England and you’ll have seen the middling journeyman, a hard-working player capable of an elegant touch and the odd goal, but little more. Take that impression into a viewing of a match involving Northern Ireland, though, and you’ll soon be forced into a drastic re-evaluation of the striker’s merits For his international side, Healy is seemingly a different animal - brilliantly purposeful, incisively productive when in possession of the ball in any area of the pitch and supremely dangerous anywhere within 30 yards of goal. Really the distinction between his club and country performance level is that clear. The last twelve months of Healy’s career provide a damning case in point.

For Northern Ireland his showings have shifted up a level from the eye-catchingly impressive, to the quite honestly astounding, while his performances at club level have chugged along at the same comparatively meandering pace as always.

With a brilliant goal against Denmark at Windsor Park last Saturday, Healy broke Davor Suker’s European qualifying record by scoring his thirteenth goal of the campaign. That a player representing a team as limited as Northern Ireland can achieve this is frankly astonishing, but then Healy has long since made a habit of astonishing us whenever he pulls on that green jersey. The goal against the Danes was his 33rd in 60 appearances for Northern Ireland, a phenomenal ratio at this elevated level of the game.

Modern strikers such as Ronaldo, Ruud van Nistelrooy, David Trezeguet and Thierry Henry have altered the definition of relentless goalscoring in recent times – a strike rate of two goals in every three games now better represents the elite strikers, with the more clichéd standard often quoted in the 80’s and 90’s, of a goal in every two games being quite easily bettered by the world’s best.

At international level, though, the goal in every two games (a strike rate of 0.5) measurement still applies as the benchmark for extraordinary

sportfeatures@trinitynews.ie

scoring feats. Internationals, unless they throw up an obvious miss-match, tend to be more tactical affairs than the average club game, while players may be forced to play in a different system than they are used to at club level and will play alongside a greatly altered set of team mates. These are just some of the factors which contribute to making a strike rate of above 0.5 so difficult to sustain in this arena, even for the world’s best.

Following a fruitless appearance in Gran Canaria against Spain, Healy’s strike rate for Northern Ireland today stands at 0.54 goals per game.

Allow me to put this into some context by comparing Healy’s rate to that of the two other leading modern international marksmen on these islands, Michael Owen and our own Robbie Keane. Owen has to date scored 40 goals in 88 international appearances for England; a strike rate of 0.45 goals per game, while Keane has plundered 32 goals in 78 international appearances for Ireland, a rate of 0.41 goals per game. Put simply, Healy has outgunned his more illustrious peers over an extensive period of time and he has achieved this despite playing for a side of significantly less standing during his time than either England or the Republic of Ireland.

Playing for a side like Northern Ireland, Healy is not afforded the luxury of participating in games in which his side are overwhelmingly superior to the opposition (in fact, in most games, they are probably inferior), and where the chances can be expected to arrive in a steady stream. Peter Crouch, for example, has boosted his admittedly impressive England haul (14 goals in 24 games) with goals against comparatively weak opposition such as Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Andorra and Estonia, but Healy’s position is not so fortunate.

Given his place of birth, a strike rate of 0.25 would be a feat in itself, never mind double that. Robbie Keane could also do with inheriting Healy’s knack of scoring in competitive games when it matters.

Only four of the North’s seventeen goals in qualifying did not have Healy’s name attached.

A statistical look at Healy’s scoring exploits at club level, though, does not invite the same admiration. With 43 goals in 136 appearances for Preston North End, where he got his first taste of consistent first-team football, Healy’s return was a more modest 0.32 goals per game. This dropped to 0.26 goals per game during his three year spell with Leeds United in 2004, with the only mitigating factor being that he was sometimes curiously positioned on the right side of midfield once Denis Wise took over at Elland Road.

With these clubs, Healy was participating in the second tier of English football, and in sides that were challenging at the upper end of the table as often as they were not. It would be inaccurate also to suggest that his return suffered because his teammates at club level were of significantly lesser ability than those whose service he enjoys at international level, with Northern Ireland’s squad over the last decade being comprised largely of players who play outside of England’s top flight.

In that top flight, meanwhile, the men consigned by Healy to the shade at international level have reversed this trend. At Tottenham Robbie Keane has recorded a strike rate of 0.42 goals per game over the past five seasons, while Micahel

Owen’s seven years at Liverpool – where he showed his best form before being curtailed badly by injuries at Real Madrid and Newcastle – were completed with a rate of 0.55 goals per game. Now, at last a Premiership player, Healy’s career with Fulham has got off to an unspectacular start, with three goals in his first thirteen appearances.

Evidently while plain statistics commend Healy at international level, they conspire against him at club level. So how are we to judge his abilities? Well, viewing a highlights reel of his record breaking exploits during this qualifying campaign is a good way to start, for Healy has not been the flash-in the-pan benefactor of numerous tap-ins, penalties and deflections. What you will see with your own eyes cannot credibly be considered as being deceptive, for with his goals for Northern Ireland, particularly over the last twelve months, Healy has consistently shown himself to be a striker of international class, which by default, renders him a striker of Premiership class. Of the thirteen goals in qualifying, only one (away to Iceland) was from a penalty kick, while there has been a conspicuous lack of deflections or tap-ins. These goals serve notice of an impressive striking repertoire, by turns being the opportunist, clinical, and often spectacular and inspired.

The two hat-tricks for example, scored at home to Spain and away to Liechtenstein, could not have been more contrasting.

Away in Vaduz, Healy three times slotted the ball past an onrushing goalkeeper with unerring composure. The goal he scored against Latvia in Belfast depicted also that Healy is not a man to get flustered when he can see the whites of the ‘keeper’s eyes. In the memorable 3-2 victory over Spain at Windsor Park, Healy first produced an athletic finish with his back to goal before a reworking of what is known as the “Sheringham Corner” hauled Northern Ireland level for a second time.

The finish to this training ground move requires tremendous technique, with the striker being required to whip home a ball delivered at pace from a position beyond the near post and while running at a parallel to the goal line.

On this occasion, Healy’s strike was textbook

in its execution and he then contrived to match it with a brilliantly measured lob for the winner. He nipped in for poacher’s near post finishes versus Sweden and Liechtenstein at home while his other goal in each of these fixtures was spectacularly struck from beyond eighteen yards. Then, of course, there was the beautifully angled chip over Thomas Sorensen that secured the record and a final home qualifying victory. Did he mean it? With Healy there can be no doubt that he did – this man is as unlikely to score accidentally as he is to look to cross from inside the box.

The reality is that there by now should be no question mark over David Healy’s ability, but rather one over why, at 28, he has so far been able to come anywhere near to fulfilling it in England.

His Premiership career, though, is still a fledgling one and there is absolutely no reason why he can’t, with a little time, settle into the company of the big boys and start to convince the Premiership fan in the manner in which he has long since convinced anyone who takes in his international progress.

He is in the form of his life, and if it doesn’t happen now, it probably never will, which would be an almighty shame. With this qualifying campaign now history, Healy must focus on doing himself justice across the Irish Sea. The game of pretence has gone on long enough.

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Michaelmas term, Week 12

SportingLegends

Ready and able Eoin Fleck, Deputy College Sport Editor speaks to Jamie Heaslip about his career with Leinster and just missing out on the World Cup selection.

J

amie Heaslip has long been one Irish rugby’s most exciting prospects. He talks about his career to date and explains his hunger for success with both Leinster and Ireland.

The life of a professional sportsman is not dissimilar to a roller-coaster. Professional sport moves fast. One minute you’re untouchable, the flavour of the month, the next you’re past it, old news. Jamie Heaslip, at the age of 23, has had his fair share of ‘‘ups and downs”, whether it’s being nominated for International Rugby Board U21s World Player of the year or falling at the final selection hurdle for the 2007 World Cup. We meet on a cold, grey Thursday afternoon the day before he departs with Leinster on their illfated trip to Toulouse. He arrives under Front Gate wearing a camouflaged hoody, jeans and a smile that’s instantly engaging. His imposing figure contradicts his laidback swagger. Fresh from a morning spent modelling for Bank of Ireland’s new calendar, he laughs at the suggestion of a career change!

Heaslip’s father, Richard, a former captain in the Irish Army was working for the UN in Israel when he was born. The family soon returned home and he recalls that with the help of his two older brothers rugby was a “natural progression” .The rugby voyage commenced in Naas Rugby Club at the age of eight and continued through Newbridge College. While attending the County Kildare School he enjoyed two years of Junior Cup and Senior Cup experience.

“I remember my first year of Juniors, we lost in the final to Blackrock. It gave me a taste of things. That was really when I first noticed my massive competitive streak. I realised I just didn’t like losing!”

Once he completed his Leaving Certificate, he found himself in Dublin City University, where he studied Medical Engineering. At the same time, he joined Trinity Rugby Club, following in his brother Richards footsteps.

“I remember coming to Trinity and the setup and coaches we had were just brilliant.”

His involvement with the Irish U19s and, to date, his only serious injury (fractured eye-socket) disrupted his involvement with Trinity U20s. However, Heaslip, under the guidance of Director of Rugby Tony Smeeth and Ray Ward, was fast-tracked to the Senior team the following season.

He spent four years in total with Trinity before turning professional.

While in Trinity colours, the Kildare man guided the College from Division Three to Division One, including achieving “the double” by winning the Allied Irish Bank Cup

“ ” To be honest, the only people I listen to when it comes to rugby are the coaches and the players. After that, everyone else is a supporter.

and Division Two in the same year.

While playing with Trinity, he represented Ireland U21s in the 2004 IRB U21s World Cup held in Scotland. Ireland surprised everyone by reaching the final where they eventually lost to New Zealand. They recorded early defeats over Tonga and Argentina before upsetting both France and Australia. Heaslip recalls the team’s lack of awareness of their achievement, ‘‘we didn’t really realise what was going on. All my friends were doing the J1 thing that summer, so they really didn’t have a clue either. It wasn’t until I got home, I realised all the hype and media attention surrounding us.”

The tournament itself was something of a career changing experience for Heaslip. He was deservedly nominated for the IRB U21 World Player of the Year alongside New Zealand’s Luke McAllister and Jerome Kaino (eventual winner).

“That was a weird one, Tony Smeeth was actually the first person to tell me. I remember coming in for Trinity training on a Tuesday night and a couple of the lads were saying ‘well done’ and I didn’t know what they were talking about. Tony came up to me just as we were going out on the pitch and he said something like ‘Congratulations, Jamie’. I said to Tony, what’s going on here and he told me. I still thought it was a big joke until I got home that evening and it was on the nine o’clock news.

Safe to say, I went out that night!”

He proudly remembers going over to the ceremony and sitting beside Gordon D’Arcy, who was also there after being nominated for IRB World Player of the year. Heaslip’s

career path could have turned out very differently had he accepted the newly appointed Ulster Coach Mark McCall’s offer of a professional contract. In the end, difficulties arose when trying to transfer his studies and he chose to finish his degree in Dublin.

The next year, as a result of his finals, his rugby career stalled somewhat.

“I remember playing a game for Trinity in College Park and we went up to the Pavilion Bar after. New Zealand were playing the Barbarians and Jerome Kaino ended up getting man of the match. It was a hugely frustrating time. I felt I wasn’t getting my shot. People were saying ‘You’ll get your chance’, but I’m slightly impatient when it comes to things like that!”

Ironically his chance came later that year in 2005. Victor Costello, Leinster’s stalwart at Number Eight for close to a decade, announced his retirement. Heaslip’s opportunity coincided with the arrival of Michael Cheika and David Knox. He cites their appointment as a positive influence and a new start.

“I had always thought Southern Hemisphere coaches went by the motto of ‘if he’s good enough, he’s old enough’ and it happened in both myself and Rob Kearney’s case.”

Although Cheika started Eric Miller in the first Celtic League game under his reign, Heaslip was unleashed just after half-time and hasn’t looked back since. He has started every game he’s been available, with the exception of four games due to injury. Amazingly after only three seasons with the Irish province, he is closing in on his 60th cap. Whilst his barnstorming runs and ability to break the gain-line catch the eye, it’s his soft-hands and support play that make him such an integral part of the star-studded team. His capacity to off-load in the tackle compliments Leinster’s continuity and attacking game plan.

He feels the Leinster pack are a better all-around unit as a result of summer signings Shane Jennings, Leo Cullen and Ollie le Roux. He brushes off the claims that the Leinster forwards are a soft-touch.

“The slack we get is unbelievable at times. To be honest, the only people I listen to when it comes to rugby are the coaches and the players. After that, everyone else is a supporter.”

He’s thoroughly enjoying his time with Leinster. In his three years with the province, he’s seen their fan base literally multiply. “People from Kildare and Kilkenny are all coming in to see the game, which is fantastic.

The RDS is a great venue, it’s easy to get too and everybody seems to really like it. I think the lowest attendance Leinster have had this year was 15000.”

He was widely regarded as

Heaslip’s bests Best Trainer : Drico is definitely the best trainer. I’ve never seen somebo dy so driven. Luke (Fitzgerald) isn’t too far behind him. He’s always staying behind doing extra stuff.

Funniest Nickname: We’re calling Rob Kearney ‘Boiler’. He’s the vainest person I know. On the Argentinean tour he kept on trying to burst a spot on his neck. It ended up getting infected and he couldn’t play in the first test. Eddie O’Sulliva n came up with the nickname and I suppose it’s stuck!

Least Intelligent: Stan Wright’s a bit for the fairies. God bless him!

Hard Man: Shane Jennings. That guy would put his head where people wouldn’t put their foot!

Ladies Man: Gary Brown seems to know every girl there is going!

Funniest: Ronnie McCormack and Brian Blaney are as thick as thieves especially when they’re together.

Ireland’s best player in the 2006 Churchill Cup and his consistent stand out performances for Leinster last season earned him an international call up for the autumn internationals. He eventually made his debut against the Pacific Islands and had the honour of being the 1000th player to wear the green of Ireland.

“Words can’t describe getting capped, I was delighted to be given the chance. Once you get the first, you want the second because you don’t want to be a one cap wonder and then you want your tenth etc.”

Just as his international career seemed to be taking off, he was the unfortunate/fortunate omission from the recent World Cup Squad. He smiles and says, “I had people coming up to me saying I could have dodged a bullet, but in my heart I wanted to be in that squad”. He was arguably the surprise exclusion from the squad and he himself admits he didn’t see it coming. “When Eddie (O’Sullivan) came to my room the day he announced the squad and told me I wasn’t in, I was gutted, absolutely gutted”. I ask him, did O’Sullivan give him reasons? He simply replies “He gave me reasons, but to be honest, once you hear you’re not in, you just shut off and get out of there.”

He recalls D’Arcy ringing him while he was driving back to Naas.

“He told me how he had been in my exact position four years ago. Like

myself, he was cut right at the end. He came back the following year and won Six Nations Player of the Tournament and was nominated for IRB World Player of the Year. He told me to keep my head down and just do my thing.”

He admits he found it hard watching the team play in France, saying “if anything, you’re rooting for them, but you’re over critical.”

On a positive note, the disaster of the early exit means positions are now up for grabs. Heaslip agrees and states, “All I can do is play well for Leinster. They can’t keep ignoring you if you’re performing.”

He thoroughly enjoys the professional aspect to the game, highlighting that “you’d do this job even if you weren’t getting paid!”

At 6’3 and weighing 109kg, Heaslip resembles something of a human wrecking machine on the pitch. However, off the field, he’s fairly blasé towards rugby. He admits he’s a big fan of his X-box 360.When it comes to match day routines, as long as he gets a good night’s sleep, he’s ready to go.

This season could prove to be a crucial period in his young career. An exciting new era is dawning in Irish rugby and Heaslip wants to be a part of it. While there are plenty of hurdles ahead of him, you get the feeling he’s finished with waiting around.

collegesport@trinitynews.ie

TRINITY NEWS

Michaelmas term, Week 12

CollegeSport

Oarsman, pugilist, doctor and war hero

Touchdowns in Trinity WITH

Mick Leahy was the type of man who wouldn’t let the loss of a limb hinder his sporting ability, writes Peter Henry.

PETER HENRY CONTRIBUTING WRITER Oarsman, pugilist, doctor and war hero: Michael Patrick Leahy was a Trinity man who distinguished himself in his sporting endeavours and remains a model of sportsmanship today, 100 years after he wore the Trinity badge in competition.

Leahy, best known as “Mick” to his contemporaries, came up to Trinity in 1899 to read for a Medicine degree. Introduced to rowing by Bram Stoker of Dracula fame, Leahy was lucky to join the Boat Club during one of its healthiest periods. The Dublin University Rowing Club and Dublin University Boat Club had amalgamated in 1898 and moved from Ringsend to placid Islandbridge, where the new boat house and grandstand were built.

Stories of the bad old days were still fresh in the rowers’ minds, and Leahy tells us of the “choppy sea water, with planks, dead rats, and flotsam and jetsam of all kinds” his forbears had to contend with. The flat-calm water of Islandbridge took Trinity’s rowing men in a positive direction and sights were set on Henley again, which had not been won since DU Rowing Club were successful in the Wyfold Challenge Cup back in 1881.

One of the famous rowing men of the time came to Dublin to coach Leahy and Trinity’s best in 1903. Cambridge man Rudolph Lehmann was determined to see the Trinity crew succeed, and some tough training preceded a hopeful trip to Henley Royal Regatta.

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In 1903, the men in black and white travelled to England, hoping to take both the Ladies’ Plate and the Thames Cup at Henley Royal. Magdalen College Oxford beat the gallant Dublin oarsmen by just three feet in the Ladies’ final. Leahy recalls that one of his own men was so exhausted after the morning final that he had to be doped with brandy for the Thames final that afternoon! Nonetheless, the nine friends beat Kingston Rowing Club to lift the prize: a Henley victory repeated only once since, when the Ladies’ Plate was won in 1977.

Leahy’s humorous prose shows that he appreciated the coming together of Boat Club men over a few drinks, as he recounts the night of the Henley win: “Dear old Andy Jameson sent us a crate of champagne, and that night we didn’t know much of what happened on earth. I do remember Arthur McNeight and I determined to put out all the lights in Henley High Street.

We had nearly completed our mission when the Henley police got into action, but we got the two last lights out, leaving the street in darkness, and then ran. I have painful recollections of scaling a high wall studded with glass, which removed the seat of my trousers and a large portion of my tail. Arthur, the long-legged devil, escaped unhurt.”

Familiar to anyone who puts effort into sport in College, Leahy’s academic progress wasn’t helped by his dedication to the greater cause of sporting glory.

He passed his half-MB examination on the fourth effort and remembers gleefully the Professor of Anatomy delivering the news: “Leahy, I congratulate

you!” said Professor Cunningham.

“You’ve displayed the maximum of ability. You got through on the minimum of marks. You got one mark more than was necessary.”

After taking the lead as Captain of the Boat Club in 1904, the talented Leahy turned his attention to boxing.

Boxing in College was in its infancy during Leahy’s time, and was overseen by the Dublin University Gymnastic and Lawn Tennis Club.

Mick, his brother Eugene, and a band of Trinity men were Ireland’s top fighters of the time. Leahy himself was the most successful, beating all comers to take Trinity’s heavyweight championship in 1905 and 1906 and the Irish amateur heavyweight champion in 1908 and 1909. He represented Ireland against Scotland in 1913.

Leahy joined the Royal Army Medical Corp after taking his MB in 1906. He had his leg blown off while serving in Flanders in September 1914.

Captain Leahy, as he was by then, was taken prisoner and remained captive until the following July.

A missing leg and a war experience like Leahy’s would mark most people’s retirement from sport. His friend and rowing coach Professor Ernest Julian had been killed in Gallipoli, and he undoubtedly lost many other close friends during the Great War. But Leahy’s sporting nature was unhurt, and he was back in the ring in 1917. He beat Sergeant Norfolk, also lacking a leg, in a charity match which helped raise funds for boxing equipment for troops still serving in France.

He is remembered in the RAMC

as the army champion heavyweight boxer who trained at Millbank and, “pivoting round on his artificial leg, he met the onslaught of all comers, giving a good deal more than he received”.

He never forgot his rowing roots, and had managed to row for Leander after the war. Trinity returned to Henley in 1923, trying again for the Ladies’ and the Thames, which were won in the end by Trinity Oxford and Trinity Cambridge respectively.

Leahy, by then raised to the rank of Major, was delighted to see his successors back at Henle and wrote a long letter of encouragement to the oarsmen, to be published in the College weekly, TCD: A College Miscelleny.

Henley was a regular destination for Leahy. He was there in 1934 and 1946, urging on the men in black and white as they lost in final of the Ladies’ both years to Jesus College, Cambridge.

He returned in 1953 to commemorate the glory of 1903, sculling the famous course in his old zephyr, recalling old crewmates, such as Jack Langrishe, who had since died.

Leahy died in December 1965 at Bramley in England. His recollection of rowing through Dublin city brings a smile to today’s oarsmen, and exemplifies his attitude to life and sport.

Dublin’s undesirables have not changed their ways: Leahy says they, then as now, “lined the bridges and dropped anything from pebbles to brickbats on us as we shot the bridges”.

But, says Mick, “life is fun, and that was great fun”.

CONOR O’SHEA

Whispers of an American football team have been floating about Trinity for years. Many students have had an interest in the sport, be it playing Madden with friends, watching Any Given Sunday or following the sport passionately, missing that Monday 9 o’clock lecture because the Cowboys went into overtime against the 49ers! It was in October of this year that students finally said “we’ve been waiting too long, now is the time!”

American football in Trinity College was born.

From humble beginnings at the now legendary inaugural meeting upstairs in Doyle’s, the Trinity College Thunderbolts have developed substantially to become the fastest growing club in Trinity. The original 25 pioneers forged a club whose main objective is to create and encourage active involvement in the sport, both playing and supporting their team.

On this small island, there are nearly twelve full-contact 11-aside American Football teams. Spreading from Limerick to Belfast and from Galway to Cork. With squads of over forty on each team, add the coaching and support staff that the sport requires, and you have yourself an All Ireland American Football League which has been in existence for over 30 years. I haven’t even mentioned the Irish Flag League, which has over 30 teams and the numerous development teams who play eighta-side full-kit football. What this equates to is relatively unknown yet well established and active sport, which you just wouldn’t have thought existed here.

Trinity will join the University of Limerick Vikings and the Dublin City University Saints to become the third full-contact college football team in Ireland. University College Dublin, University College Cork, Cork Institute of Technology, as well as some smaller colleges have active Flag Football (a non-contact version of the sport, much like Tag Rugby) teams who play in the Irish Flag Football Association. In Dublin the sport is huge, with the Dragons, Rebels, Mustangs, Outlaws and Dublin City University playing in the full contact Irish American Football League. Trinity College shall join the league and become the keystone of American football in the Dublin. Due to the location of the College in the heart of the city, the sight of football being played on campus grounds shall no doubt turn heads and spark even more interest in this great sport.

Of course it’s not all about the bruising physical endurance, it’s also about the social enjoyment of following the National Football League. Sunday nights out in the Woolshed Bar watching the game on the big screen while enjoying some of the cheapest beer in Dublin has become the bastion of Thunderbolt entertainment and a reward for the weekend’s tough training. Come the first week in February, the now legendary Woolshed Superbowl Party will take place, and the craic will only be mighty!

Under the tutelage of Head Coach Darrin O’Toole, the Thunderbolts train every weekend and also have technical sessions mid-week to introduce new recruits to the sport. The Thunderbolts are currently playing in the IFFA Flag League along with nearly 30 teams from around the country. Keep an eye out for them playing in College Park in the coming weeks!

Anyone with interest in joining Dublin University American Football can find out more information by visiting the official club website at http://thunderbolts.infernohost.net

Win one of 4 pairs of tickets to the official Kings of Leon aftershow!

Having sold over 2 million albums, global rockstars Kings of Leon will perform a DJ set at their Official Aftershow Party at the Tivoli on Wednesday, November 28th.

Jared Followill will return to the decks after a storming set at the Corona Choice event last july.

Guests of the popular music series Corona Choice have seen many profile artists from classic and new age bands brace the decks during the events over the summer of 2007.The American rocker is said to be geared up for another legendary performance at the Tivoli on Nov 28th.

To win a pair of tickets email competition@trinitynews.ie with the answer to the following question:

“What was the name of the Kings of Leons’ first studio album?”

Competition entries must be recieved by 5pm Tuesday Nov 27th

collegesport@trinitynews.ie

TRINITY NEWS

P24

Michaelmas term, Week 12

CollegeSport

The Team DU BOXING CLUB 57kg

Ronan Downey

60kg

Keith Florea

63.5kg

Oisin Hannigan

67kg

Robert O’Kirwan

67kg

Patrick McCullough

71kg

Ronan O’Brien

71kg

John Murtagh

75kg

Cathal Kennedy

81kg

Sam Chappatte

81kg

Stephen Kirk

86kg

Ian Doyle

91kg

Neil Rafter

Photo: Martin McKenna

The brawl in the Hall Chappatte restores Trinity pride as they host the Irish Junior Intervarsity Boxing Championship JONATHAN DRENNAN COLLEGE SPORT EDITOR 52 male boxers, 3 female boxers and a bevy of vocal supporters from 10 Colleges across Ireland completed the cast for the 2007 Irish Junior Intervarsity Championship held in Trinity’s Ancillary Hall. Normally the scene of sedate sports such as fencing and trampolining, the spartan facility instead became filled with the slap of skipping ropes and the thud of fighters hitting their trainer’s pads before their bouts. The schedule was intense, as soon as the referee had raised the hand of a victorious boxer; he was calling for new fighters to enter the ring. Elderly boxing aficionados paced the circumference of the ring watching their prodigies from Carlow to Cork, while an expectant audience roared for their favoured fighter. In a few hours, the new sports hall had become a hotbed for some of the best collegiate boxing talent Ireland has to offer.

In terms of collegiate boxing, this competition is one of the most intriguing. Aimed specifically at boxers who have had less than 5 fights at University level, it has the potential to place a raw

inexperienced fighter against a seasoned club veteran, often with explosive results.

On Friday, despite incredibly brave showings, Trinity’s boxers suffered three rapid defeats at the hands of experienced opponents. One of the lightest fighters in the competition, Ronan Downey had only been boxing for little over a week when he fought an experienced campaigner from DIT Colm Kavanagh. Showing tremendous heart, Downey remained the aggressor throughout, being beaten by superior reach. In the 60kg category, Keith Florea, a late addition to the team was beaten soundly by UCC’s Joseph Jameson in his debut fight. In the light-welterweight division, Trinity’s Oisin Hannigan was fortunate to get a bye directly into the final where he fought UCD’s Barra O’Fianail. In an extremely tight contest, Hannigan boxed immaculately but unfortunately was judged to have lost on points. At 67 kg, Robert O’Kirwan won his quarter final against Ronan Wall from IT Carlow in his debut fight convincingly. However, in his semifinal he came up short, losing to DIT’s Brian Daly despite being the aggressor throughout the contest. History ap-

peared to repeat itself in the 71 kg competition, with Trinity boxer Ronan O’Brien beaten in the semi-final James Corcoran of IT Carlow who went on to win the whole competition.

In the 75kg category, Trinity’s Cathal Kennedy managed to beat DIT’s Keith Fahy to progress into the semi-finals of the competition, despite never competing competitively before the Junior Intervarsities.

However, Kennedy’s plight in the tournament seemed to serve as a symbol of Trinity’s experience in this competition. Endearingly brave and willing, but frequently hurt by wily opponents who made their experience count. In his semi-final bout, Kennedy fought UCD’s John Lawlor losing after receiving a brutal eye injury that will see him out of the boxing ring for quite some time.

Campaigning at 86kg, Ian Doyle endured a torrid time from Shane Griffen of IT Tralee. Forced to subject himself to shed some unwanted extra weight at the last minute, Doyle suffered. He was caught cold by Griffen in the first round and the referee moved in quickly to end the fight.

Moving on to the heavy weights, Neil Rafter restored a lot of Trinity

pride by just being beaten at the semifinal stage. After disposing of a portly IT Carlow opponent Neil Gunning, Rafter met John Tague from Letterkenny IT in the penultimate hurdle. Despite having to endure Tague’s gamesmanship that left Rafter having to wait 20 long minutes before his fight, he boxed admirably. Using a stiff jab to frustrate Tague, Rafter was extremely unlucky to be on the wrong side of a split decision that was awarded to the Letterkenny man.

Alongside the main competition there was also a parallel tournament with Trinity boxers competing with varied success. Patrick McCullough, John Murtagh and Stephen Kirk all boxed for DUBC in the 67, 71 and 81 kg categories respectively. McCullough emerged triumphant beating DIT’s Neil Renahan in a fight that went the distance. Using superior stamina and strength, McCullough won a unanimous decision that managed to help boost the morale within the somewhat downhearted Trinity camp.

Receiving a bye into the 81 kg semi-final, Sam Chappatte carried most of Trinity’s hopes on his shoulders as he stepped through the ropes for his bout

against Rory O’Reilly from UCC. Thwarting a potentially dangerous opponent with a well-timed jab and superior footwork. Chappatte advanced into the final to face Jacques Noire from IT Carlow.

In a tight contest, Chappatte eventually found his rhythm in the last two rounds, peppering his opponent with well-timed shots to the head and the body. After a dominant final round, Chappatte won the fight and the title helping to restore Trinity pride and his unbeaten record.

After three days of exhausting boxing, for both the spectator and competitor, DUBC can be incredibly proud of their showing in the Junior Intervarsity Championships. The sheer feat of organising so many fighters and bouts in such a small venue deserves credit.

However, this event was primarily about the boxers themselves and every single competitor emerged with credit.

While Chappatte deservedly took the title in an exhibition of counter-attacking boxing, the remaining Trinity boxers’ performances will serve to encourage the already swelling membership list of one of the most popular sports clubs in college.

MAN OF THE MATCH Sam Chappatte In such an unpredictable tournament, Chappatte remained a comforting fighter to watch. He never looked in danger of losing a bout over two days. Winning the Junior Irish Intervarsity Championship, he managed to earn the hosts some silverware for their valiant efforts. He manages to align aggression and skill, while retaining a clear head that seemingly refuses to panic when he is caught by the odd shot. A boxer who endears himself to both the neutral and the partisan spectator, Chappatte is a pleasure to watch with sharp footwork and well-placed scientific shots.

Against both O’Reilly and Noire in his semi-final and final contests, Chappatte very rarely looked in serious trouble. Despite only being a second year in College, Chappatte has earned the responsibility of ViceCaptain of the club, an opportunity he will undoubtedly relish over the coming year.

Ladies’ Basketball open Sports’ Hall account with a win TCD: DIT:

60 39

LISA O’CONNOR STAFF WRITER The Dublin University Ladies’ Basketball Team is one of the strongest the college has seen in many years. Led by co-captains Lisa O’Connor and Ruth O’Donoghue, the club boasts a talented squad including experienced seniors, an American shooting guard, three underage internationals, and fresher’s with All-Ireland winning experience, who

have played for many clubs such as Killester, Mercy and Meteors. The team has a new coach, Pedro Morais of Portugal, who brings a wealth of experience and enthusiasm to the club.

Trinity‘s first ladies basketball match in the new sports centre was always going to be a special occasion.

After years of playing in Luce, the senior members of the squad were excited for a change, while the 8 Freshers were just plain excited! New coach Pedro Morais was thrilled to be part of the first match in the new sports centre, and insisted on getting a team photo!

Going into the game TCD had

won one match and lost two, the most recent a closely fought encounter with a young UCD side. So the team was looking to get back on track after the disappointing loss to UCD and looking for a victory to boost their chances of qualifying for the league finals, to be held in Cork this December. They were without 3 of their starting 12. Sorcha Browne had a previous commitment, Kyra O’Sullivan had a persistent foot injury, and leading scorer and fresher’s team captain Louise Gray was out with a sprained ankle from the previous match v UCD. TCD drafted in young talent such as Leanne Kessie and Beth Kelly,

A ROWING, SOLDIERING, MEDICAL LIFE A ONE-LEGGED MILITARY DOCTOR-MAJOR FROM THE BOAT CLUB: MICK LEAHY’S LIFE PROFILED COLLEGE SPORT, P23

and with the experienced Maria Daly back into the squad confidence was high.

DIT arrived with a full squad but no coach, so the players took on the coaching responsibility themselves.

TCD started the better, with the ever strong Elaine Stone, Sarah McGrath and Eleanor Friel cutting apart the DIT defense. Ruth O’Donoghue put in a solid performance as usual, excelling on the defensive end. The atmosphere was tense and the play was fast. With a 22-9 score opening up early in the match, the TCD coach was able to rest some players and rotate the squad. Siobhan Harty

came into the game and made an immediate impact with some excellent inside play and offensive rebounding, while Nessa Timoney continued her recent rich vein of form.

Lisa O’Connor came into the game in the second quarter and played some positive basketball, scoring some key baskets and rebounding well. The game began to get scrappy in the second half, with both teams struggling to find consistency. Fouls were a plenty and the lone referee had his work cut out for him. Aimee O’Hanlon added some depth to the offense, whilst Ciara O’Sullivan came back into the game ran

the point well, causing the DIT defense problems with her fast paced style of play.

TCD emerged victorious, though DIT fought till the end and seemed to enjoy working together as a team. The final score was 60-39. There was a good turn out of supporters, both club members and friends from outside of TCD, and the girls would like to thank everyone who cheered them on!

They would also like to thank the staff at the sports centre for all their assistance, and all officials involved on the night. It’s onwards and upwards for the TCD Ladies Basketball Team.

LEINSTER, IRELAND, TRINITY JAMIE HEASLIP TALKS COLLEGE SPORT AND PROFESSIONAL RUGBY. SPORTING LEGENDS, P22 collegesport@trinitynews.ie