Trinity News, Vol.59, Issue 3

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

www.trinitynews.ie

>> Consumerism: have we had our fill?

Illustration: Éna Brennan

InDepth -p.7

Conan O’Brien awarded Phil honorary patronage Late-night talk show host comes to Trinity News -p.2

>> Hist panel to rule on unauthorised loan as treasurer resigns

T I ME L I N E June-July

Loan issued to Auditor John Engle, sanctioned

by Treasurer Emma Tobin but unapproved by committee

September

Hist committee member discovers loan when opening society mail late September - Officers informed of details pertaining to the loan

Financial controversy sees auditor under scrutiny from subcommittee

A

1st October

Final €500 of loan repaid, remaining members of committee informed

2nd October

Trinity News prints article on the controversy, Hist committee releases official statement

Photo: George Voronov

Rónán Burtenshaw Editor

3rd October

Private members business discusses issue, passes unanimous motion of regret, establishes subcommittee

3rd - 15th October

Subcommittee conducts fifteen interviews, receives thirty submissions from interested parties

17th October

Subcommittee delivers report “making recommendations for the resolution of the current situation”

A beestly story: Anthea Lacchia interviews Sive Finlay about her recent discoveries

Science -p.20

College Historical Society subcommittee is due to make its recommendations today on resolving the crisis caused by a ¤2,000 unauthorised loan from society funds issued to its auditor, John Engle, over the summer. This follows the decision last week by the society’s treasurer, Emma Tobin, who signed off on the loan, to resign from her position.

The loan was issued in July without the approval of the society’s committee, and repaid in full by the beginning of October. It became public knowledge when Trinity News broke the story on 2nd October.

Mr Engle asserted that the loan was to cover requirements placed upon him as a US citizen by Irish immigration officials. He subsequently acknowledged that some of this money was used on rent, and the subcommittee is also investigating whether it was used on a trip to Belgrade for a competition.

At present it is unclear what will be the recommendation of the report that is to be issued by the subcommittee. One possible outcome is a recommendation for Mr Engle to resign, following a similar suggestion from the Central Societies Committee (CSC) earlier this month. Trinity News understands that this is unlikely.

Mr Engle had received a degree of support from the members of the society at a private business meeting of the society on 3rd October, where the controversy was debated. Despite a motion of regret being passed, no motion advocating resignation was proposed at the time, although the meeting did conclude with the establishment of the present subcommittee to pursue the issue in detail.

In total, the subcommittee has five members, all but one of whom have held elected positions in the Hist previously.

The chairperson, William Quill, was correspondence secretary of the society in 2007-08 and is joined by Thomas Kinsella (auditor, 2008-09), Stephen Buggy (treasurer, 201011) and Jenny Kearns (senior member of committee, 201011). The final member, Jack Toner, is an ordinary member and is also the current treasurer of DU Players.

Mr Quill told Trinity News that the subcommittee’s remit was to “make findings of fact, recommendations for resolution of the current situation, and for changes to the laws”.

At the time of going to print, the subcommittee had taken 30 submissions and held 15 interviews but was “still deliberating”.

Ms Tobin’s resignation from

Trinity College and Royal Irish Academy of Music: now playing in harmony together

News -p.3

the Hist’s committee came on 3rd October in the form of an email to the committee, after she had missed that day’s private business meeting due to illness. She did not respond to requests for comment regarding her resignation.

Her resignation also formed one of the terms of reference under which the subcommittee was established. In full, these read: “… the loan arrangement for the auditor, John Engle; the communication of this loan to committee; the exposure of the loan to college; the circumstances surrounding private business of 3rd October and the resignation of Emma Tobin as treasurer; and other related events.”

The initial statement from the Hist’s committee acknowledged that “the acts [which led to the loan] were contrary to its expected standards of conduct” and “could not be ignored”. Despite expressing “regret” about the incident it said that “the proper recourse had been taken” and “an apology [had been] issued to, and accepted by, committee”.

However, the motion of regret at the meeting on 4th October was unanimous, with a number of committee members speaking against him in strong terms. This was despite his description of the “emer-

gency situation” he found himself in, with immigration officials giving him one week to “vacate the country”.

If Mr Engle does resign, it would be the second resignation by a Hist auditor in as many years, following Liam Ó Néill’s decision to stand down last year on health grounds.

Before that, the society had not had an auditor leave mid-year since 1942. Mr Ó Néill was replaced by Ursula Ní Choill, sister of subcommittee chairperson William, for the conclusion of the society’s 242nd session.

Any resignation would also cause significant difficulty for the society in the lead-up to its inaugural meeting on 24th October, at which the auditor is due to deliver an address.

Prominent guests Dr Norman Finkelstein and the former US defence secretary William Perry are also due to speak at the debate, entitled Pax Americana, at Mr Engle’s discretion.

But Trinity News understands that the subcommittee is unlikely to recommend his resignation, raising the possibility of resignations from disgruntled committee members.

Mr Quill said that the subcommittee was not bound or defined in any particular way, but he would not be drawn on whether its report would be the end of the matter.

Inside

On their return to Ireland, Hip Hop legends De La Soul discuss their latest project

>>

Winning streak: DUFC’s captain tells James Hussey how to rule the field

Sport -p.22

Renowned cinematographer Roger Deakins talks about his work on the new Bond movie, Skyfall, and reflects on his career so far

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

2

News

What They Said

“ “ “ “ “ “There’s nothing that can’t be improved by putting meat on it. I put meat in my cereal.”

“Silence of the Yams”, “Vegetarianism: Not a Missed-Steak” Elaine McCann

(suggestions for title of this issue’s articles of vegetarianism, pulled from Google search for “vegetable puns’”) TN editor-at-large

Aaron Devine TN2 magazine editor and committed carnivore

A converted try and Ireland could still win this. #believe Ross O’Carroll-Kelly

(@RossOCK) After Ireland went 6-0 to Germany in the recent World Cup qualifier in the Aviva Stadium

How many class reps does it take to bring down a chandelier? #CRT12

Ruairi Quinn in front of me in Spar queue. Three months trying to get him one-on-one and all it takes is a well timed Lucozade stop. #usi12

Anthony Wolfe (@antowolfe) No chandeliers were actually brought down at 2012 class rep training.

Unfortunately for us

John Logue (@john_logue) USI president

Quinn seeks powers of intervention in university disputes

Photo: George Voronov

Move comes a!er bonuses controversy and Trinity’s refusal to follow labour court ruling

T Rónán Burtenshaw and Ian Curran Editor and News Editor

Conan O’Brien awarded Phil honorary patronage Award-winning comedian, writer and television personality talks about family, fame and humour

T Catherine Healy Student Affairs Correspondent

he television presenter Conan O’Brien became the latest American celebrity to visit College last week when he was made an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society in a packed chamber in the Graduates’ Memorial Building. Famous for hosting Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien and the currently-running Conan, O’Brien regaled his audience for just under an hour with stories from a longrunning career spanning over two decades.

Opening his speech, O’Brien joked about his afternoon spent touring the college. As part of a “wide variety of activities”, he claimed to have had to visit the Book of Kells three times. “You’re all coasting on a 1,200-year-old book,” he said, “Get over it. If it was a truly great book, there would have been a sequel by now.”

O’Brien also described his reaction on receiving an invitation to address the society from the Phil president, Lorcan Clarke. It was “… a stunning confirmation that I had finally made it.” He said he had been expecting to address “most serious and enlightened minds”.

This, he joked, was until he discovered the society’s online Tumblr blog (since deleted), featuring images of “lust, depravity, drunkenness, slave auctions, men wearing bras, women not wearing bras.” “I was sitting at home watching The Fall of Rome,” he said; “I emailed Lorcan saying I wanted to come sooner and party.”

Having begun his career as a writer for Saturday Night Live and, later, The Simpsons, O’Brien moved in front of the camera following a successful audition to replace David Letterman as the host of NBC’s Late Night. He told the audience that, despite a year and a half of “solid negative feedback” for the show in the US, he “wet [himself] for three years straight” after getting what was “… the biggest television presenter job in the world.”

He credited much of his success to his ability to “keep talking and talking and talking”, something particularly necessary in interview with young actors, many of whom have “had no lives”. In uncomfortable in-

terviews, he told the audience, his “greatest weapon” has been to “make myself look silly or stupid”; when star guests on his shows have been complimented for their performances, he said that he sometimes thinks: “Look at the tape: it was me! …

Sometimes they just look at you and think: ‘Do your thing, you big-haired clown.’”

Now one of America’s most widely-recognisable television presenters, O’Brien also talked about the “cult of personality” that has grown around him.

“In a good way, it meant I knew fans liked the show,” he said, “but in a bad way, I now know what it felt like to be Stalin.”

He also spoke about the priest who stalked him from 2006 onwards, famously arrested after forcefully attempting to enter a taping of Late Night. His mother, with whom the stalker had been in contact, “… loved the attention, she loved the policemen coming.”

Telling the audience he has no intention to return to The Simpsons, he said the writing had been on the wall during his time as a writer with the show: “If I didn’t get out of there, I would explode … The whole time, I was dreaming about getting in front of people. I would do all the voices, even when I was pitching a line.”

Despite his short time working there, O’Brien had high praises for The Simpsons.

Coming from a background of satirical writing in college, he had been interested in “slashand-burn comedy”. He soon realised, however, that the most important thing about the show was family: “Homer may hate Bart and want to strangle him, but he loves him, he doesn’t really want to kill him.” This, he told the audience, is the reason for the show’s endurance.

A proud Irish American, O’Brien said that he is a “true son of this country … Here,I can be my guilt-ridden self.”

O’Brien’s “people” had moved from Dungarvan in County Waterford to central Massachusetts during the American civil war, “where they then proceeded to marry each other for the next 150 years”. He recounted his first trip to Ireland in the summer of 1997, when he drove from the Ring of Kerry to Dublin. He said he had stopped

to refuel the car “at a little cottage with a single pump”, and claims to have met “an old woman who said she’d say the rosary for me.” He had been “thrilled to be connected with the pure essence of the people” until he realised that she had filled the diesel engine with unleaded petrol. “I swore I would find that old bitch and shoot her; that’s why I came back,” he joked.

“If there’s anything that connects me and you, it’s that I have an Irish brain,” he told the audience. “It refuses to obey rules … The only quality that defines my work is that it’s absurd and meaningless”. He continued: “My comedic philosophy is not to have one. If a fan or critic detects a message, then I have failed.”

O’Brien concluded with his own message to young people:“You have less to lose than you think you do.” He left the room to a standing ovation, complimenting a member of the audience on her red hair as he reached the door before being quickly escorted into a taxi waiting outside the GMB. O’Brien had the distinction of being the Phil’s first guest this year to be awarded the society’s honorary patronage, an act carried out by the provost, Dr Patrick Prendergast.

he minister for education and skills, Ruairi Quinn, has secured government agreement to push ahead with landmark legislation that will give the Department of Education and Skills powers to force universities to comply with government guidelines on “remuneration, allowances, pensions and staffing numbers in the university sector.” In a statement released on 2nd October, the department stated that the legislation “will further address issues which have arisen in relation to the non-adherence to elements of the Croke Park agreement.”

Commenting on the matter, Quinn remarked: “No one sector should be able to operate outside of these strict parameters, as the university sector has done previously.” He continued, “While I recognise the desirability of universities retaining certain levels of autonomy, I believe the legislation I am proposing will strike the right balance between such autonomy and protecting the exchequer at a time of financial crisis and growing student populations.”

According to the statement, up until now the minister for education and skills only had the “extreme option of the government removing a governing body” and, as a result, “… the minister has had no power to compel a university to comply with its statutory obligations.”

The initial drafts of the legislation, which will amend the Universities Act 1997, indicate that the bill will give the minister the power to appoint an investigator to assess a university’s performance in relation to the payment of its public servants. The investigators will also assess the university’s compliance with collective agreements into which it and the department have entered, such as the Croke Park agreement.

According to the drafts, “An investigator shall be entitled at all reasonable times to enter any premises occupied by the university and shall be afforded every facility and cooperation by the university.” Pending the investigator’s report, the minister will then be able to make binding recommendations, in writing, to the university in question.

Should a university then fail to comply with the minister’s recommendations, Quinn has proposed that his office will be able to transfer certain “functions” of the university to the Department of Education and Skills. The university will then be prohibited from “attempting to exercise” this function for a maximum of two years.

The draft legislation also states that this aspect of the minister’s new powers will require him or her to consult with the Higher Education Authority (HEA) before a decision to “transfer functions” is reached.

The proposed legislation comes in the wake of a labour court case involving Trinity College, Dublin, in which the court ruled in favour of the reinstatement of three staff members who were made redundant. The redundancies were deemed to be in conflict with the Croke Park agreement, and College was told to reinstate the workers immediately.

The legislation also comes after the HEA penalised several Irish universities for unauthorised payments of bonuses totalling nearly ¤7.5m between 2005 and 2011. In the press statement, Quinn stated: “At a time when all areas of the public sector are being asked to do more with less resources, it is essential that universities adhere to, and are seen to adhere to, public-sector pay policy.”

Speaking to Trinity News, the general secretary of the Irish Federation of University Teachers (Ifut), Mike Jennings, said that the proposed amendment is “a very dangerous development”. He added that it was a decision that was “made almost inevitable by Trinity College’s reckless and ill-thought-out decision to defy the government on the labour court ruling.” He encouraged Trinity to “step back from the brink of what would amount to a very serious diminution of institutional autonomy in higher education”.

The secretary general disagreed with the department’s contention that “the amendment is in response to issues relating both to unauthorised remuneration and non-adherence to elements of the Croke Park agreement.” On the topic of bonuses, Jennings said that the issue “has been in the public domain for a number of years” and has been “actually substantially resolved”. He maintains that “the minister’s decision in this instance was triggered by the Croke Park agreement dispute, and that is the real target of this amendment.”

While Ireland ranks very highly in Europe for the autonomy of its universities, the Universities Act 1997 is itself a controversial document for some academics. An article written for the Irish Journal of Legal Studies in 2009 and made available on the Ifut website draws conclusions between a loss of autonomy in Irish universities and the enactment of the original piece of legislation.

Entitled Managerialism in Irish Universities, the article maintains that a certain vagueness in the language of the act left it “most unclear” as to what extent the HEA had the power to “direct” universities, thus creating a web of bureaucracy in third-level institutions. The author draws the conclusion that “Tighter central control of university activities results in more information about their activities, which is in turn

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Printed at The Irish Times print facility, CityWest Business Campus, 4000 Kingswood Rd, Dublin 24.

Trinity News is partially funded by a grant from DU Publications Committee. This publication claims no special rights or privileges. Serious complaints should be addressed to: The Editor, Trinity News, 6 Trinity College, Dublin 2. Appeals may be directed to the Press Council of Ireland.

Trinity News is a member of the Press Council of Ireland and supports the Office of the Press Ombudsman. This scheme, in addition to defending the freedom of the press, offers readers a quick, fair and free method of dealing with complaints that they may have in relation to articles that appear on our pages.

To contact the Office of the Press Ombudsman go to www.pressombudsman.ie treated as the revelation of further ‘problems’, the remedy for which is taken to be an even deeper control.”

In response to a request from Trinity News for comment, College said: “Trinity is considering the proposed amendments to the Universities Act and has no comment to make at this point.”

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

3

News

Loyola Institute

Royal Irish Academy of Music to gain associated-college status

College awards BAs in Catholic theology

TN Investigates

A Aonghus Ó Cochláin Contributor

proposal for the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM) to become an associated college of Trinity College, Dublin has been brought to the University Council. The proposal was outlined in Trinity’s response to the Higher Education Authority’s report on the development of higher education in Ireland.

The stated desire of the proposal is “… developing an internationally renowned centre of excellence in the performing arts.” College’s existing commitments under its Creative Arts, Technologies and Culture Initiative are set to benefit from the creation of such a partnership. The move would see the RIAM engage in collaborative efforts, projects, modules and initiatives with the Lir (the Trinity-affiliated National Academy of Dramatic Art on Pearse Street), the School of Drama, Film and Music and the School of Education.

Founded in 1848, the RIAM is Ireland’s oldest musical institution. Priding itself on fostering musical development and innovation, it boasts a distinguished reputation both nationally and internationally.

Its international reputation is bolstered through prize-winning teaching staff, including members of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. Staff and students from the RIAM have participated in a range of venues in Dublin, such as the National Gallery of Ireland and the National Concert Hall, as well as international performances.

Its students have earned awards from certain prestigious international competitions, such as the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition, the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World, the China International Vocal Competition, the Cologne International Piano Competition, the Dublin International Piano Competition and the BBC Young Musician of the Year.

The RIAM offers degrees at bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels, and courses cater to both full-time and part-time students. A joint Trinity and RIAM initiative would develop master’s and doctoral studies in areas such as music education, elaborating on the success of the bachelor’s degree in music education awarded jointly by the institutions for over two decades. The RIAM has planned links with other worldleading musical institutions, such as the Paris Conservatoire and the Juilliard School. As a result, collaboration between RIAM and Trinity would hope to further develop these connections. With both institutions being located in Dublin

city centre, College cites its proximity with the RIAM as a facilitating factor that would enable synergy between the two institutions.

Trinity’s Associated College Degrees Committee, chaired by the registrar, Prof Shane Allwright, facilitates quality assurance of external college provision. A greater partnership could involve the inclusion of appropriate representation from RIAM on the committee.

In return, representatives from Trinity would join the RIAM’s board of governors, with the objective of involvement from both institutions in programme design, delivery, evaluation and support.

Pooling of resources will,

it has been suggested, lower costs and enhance marketing in promoting the various programmes overseas. Such collaboration between the two educational partners hopes to increase multicultural outreach in light of the Irish government’s agenda to promote internationalism in education, a vision shared by both institutions.

Trinity has a history of merging and collaborating with other educational institutions.

Current links exist between Trinity and other colleges such as the Church of Ireland College of Education, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute and the Marino Institute of Education.

Graphic: Ella Hassett

Accounts of 19 societies non-satisfactory, while CSC spends €16,000 over budget

A Catherine Healy and Ruairí Casey Student Affairs Correspondent and Deputy News Editor

total of 19 societies have had their accounts deemed nonsatisfactory by the Central Societies Committee (CSC). The deadline for submission of accounts for the financial year 1st April 2011-29th February 2012 passed on 31st August last.

It was found that five societies had provided insufficient information, and a further 14 societies had either submitted their accounts late or not at all. As a result, these accounts were automatically deemed to be non-satisfactory. The statistics was announced by the CSC’s treasurer, Seán Gill, in his report at the Michaelmas term general meeting of the CSC on 2nd October 2012. All society treasurers were present at the meeting.

The CSC’s new constitution, introduced in February, has made more detailed stipulations regarding the submitting of accounts by student societies. Section 10.4.1 of the new CSC constitution states that “the status of recognition of a University Society shall automatically lapse if, for the two consecutive years prior to the current academic year, the University Society fails to either produce satisfactory fi-

nancial accounts, or full and satisfactory yearly reports of all of its activities and actions, or to elect a committee, or to submit a grant application, or if it is be declared by the Committee’s external auditor to be insolvent.” The changes to the constitution were made, according to Gill, “to ensure the further safeguarding of society finances”.

An email was sent by Gill to the treasurers of those societies whose accounts were recorded as non-satisfactory. In it, he explained what it means to have non-satisfactory accounts and what the effects were, adding that accounts should be submitted immediately if this had not already been done. He stressed that there would be consequences only if the same mistakes were repeated this year, stating that the societies “will only be affected if you have Non-Satisfactory accounts again [sic] after this financial”.

Many of the problems surrounding accounts seem to have stemmed from miscommunication between outgoing and incoming committees. The DU Archaeological Society, for example, found that its previous treasurer had not kept ac-

curate records, and so the current committee were unable to submit satisfactory accounts.

The incoming committee of Ógra Fianna Fáil found that accounts had not been properly logged. Though the issue was resolved before the current academic term began, the accounts were submitted late and, so, deemed non-satisfactory.

In his email, Gill also explained that the CSC would do its best to help society treasurers to prevent their societies’ accounts being deemed nonsatisfactory next year. He said that the CSC’s executive committee is there “to help and ensure that the society isn’t in this position in a year’s time.”

He also announced, in his general meeting report, that more helpful information would be made available to society treasurers in the form of an updated “treasurers’ introductory pack”, including details on managing finances and transactions.

Trinity News has also learned that the CSC spent approximately ¤16,000 over its annual budget in the last academic year. In a report presented to the committee’s recent general meeting, its honorary treasurer, Ronan Hodson, attributed this

overspend to the growing number of CSC-recognised societies, new initiatives such as last year’s societies yearbook and an increase in payable taxes. Also listed as a cause of increased expenditure was an expansion in travel grants, which exceeded the agreed cap of ¤35,000 last year.

While savings were made by the committee in areas such as the Society of the Year Awards and phone bills, it also saw a drop in supplementary revenues, such as the 2012 Trinity Ball, which was not as financially successful as the previous year. However, a new contract between MCD and the Trinity Ball Committee means that neither College nor the Ball Committee will be liable for any loss in the future.

In communication with Trinity News, Hodson said, “Aside from perhaps keeping a closer eye on travel grants, societies should expect the CSC to be no less forthcoming with funds than usual.” He said the CSC receives over ¤300,000 in income every year as a capitated body and, as such, will be largely unaffected by last year’s income reduction.

Ruairí Casey Deputy News Editor Trinity News has obtained a copy of minutes from a meeting of the executive committee of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, held on 18th October 2011. The leaked document contains a “reserved item”, not mentioned in the version of the minutes published online, which describes a discussion surrounding the establishment of the new Loyola Institute.

It reveals that a number of committee members objected to the institute, claiming that the final agreement differed from that to which they had agreed. Nine heads of school requested that the faculty’s dean, Prof Michael Marsh, include the discussion in the meeting, and that he “… specifically indicate ‘the procedure that has been followed in bringing this Institute into the university and into our faculty.’” Two student representatives were asked to leave the meeting at this point; the withdrawal of student representatives is not a common occurrence at such meetings.

The minutes describe how negotiations towards incorporating the Milltown Institute into Trinity College, Dublin were managed by the then-registrar Professor Juergen Barkhoff, the director of strategic initiatives, Michael Gleeson, and members of the prospective School of Religions, Theology and Ecumenics. The Loyola Institute would become part of this aspirant school, along with the Department of Religions and Theology and the Irish School of Ecumenics. Negotiations began in 2007, and were finally approved at a Board meeting in June 2011.

The minutes note the appointment of an interim director of the Loyola Institute, namely Dr Cornelius J Casey, and an endowment of ¤15m which would be used to “fund appointments”. The need for suitable accommodation for the institute is mentioned.

They go on to acknowledge that some members of the Department of Religions and Theology had argued that the final agreement differed from the version to which they had agreed. “At the start of Michaelmas term 2011 the provost gave permission for individual academics who so wished to explore the possibility of moving from the aspirant school although the Department of Religions and Theology will remain. In this context, Dr Anne Fitzpatrick, a member of the Department of Religions and Theology, felt it was only appropriate for her to resign as head of school.”

Three main issues Members of the executive committee felt that the process had been “deliberately opaque and noted that there had been no public announcement.”

There were three main concerns raised by members of the executive. Firstly, that there is a “danger to academic freedom” in incorporating a “structure which promotes faith based teaching”.

The second issue raised by attendees was that appointments to the institute would not be of

a sufficiently high standard and would not meet College’s equal opportunities policy.

A third concern was that the institute would become a drain when the endowment runs out, and reassurance about the source of the endowment was sought. In response, the dean said appointments would be carried out as normal and that he “would be in favour of contract appointments clearly linked to the endowment”.

One source stated that “the consensus view of those present was that individual members of the Department of Religions and Theology had been shabbily treated.” The source went on to say that the executive “asked the dean to appoint a senior member of the faculty who could provide guidance to them and act as their spokesperson as they negotiated a move from the existing department. The dean agreed to do so.”

Previous meetings The first official mention of the Loyola Institute seems to have been at a meeting of the University Council held on 7th November 2007, where “… a memorandum from the Registrar ... was circulated together with a draft framework agreement [and] Council approved in principle a strategic alliance between College and the Milltown Institute subject to a number of identified conditions.”

The topic later recurs at a number of meetings of Board referenced in the reserved item of the leaked document.

At a meeting on 21th November 2007 “the Board … agreed in principle to the proposed strategic alliance subject to … financial and governance arrangements”. On 9th July 2008, then-registrar Barkhoff told the board that the relevant College staff, including the dean of the faculty, Fitzpatrick (then head of the School of Religions and Theology), the director of the Irish School of Ecumenics, the treasurer, the librarian and the director of buildings had been involved in these discussions as required.

Also at this meeting, “Board members … requested that all necessary [financial] safeguards be put in place in advance of any final agreement.

The registrar clarified the role of the New Institute Trust in providing funding for the initiative.”

At the meeting of 2nd February 2011, the finance committee “approved the financial arrangements for the establishment of the institute” which would involve the establishment of a new trust to support the institute. The Board noted the dissent of Drs Sean Barrett and Mélanie Bouroche.

The meeting of 1st June 2011 concerned the naming of the institute. Legal advice prevented the use of “Catholic”, as canon law would confer rights and obligations to the Roman Catholic Church regarding academic work. The Board settled on the name “Loyola Institute”.

The dissent of Barrett was once again noted.

UCD’s interaction with Milltown Negotiations between Trinity and Milltown began in 2007 after a similar approach to University College Dublin (UCD) had failed. A source in UCD has told Trinity News that plans

were at a very advanced stage before the move was eventually scrapped. An offer had already been made to an academic to take the position of head of the proposed school, and Santiago Calatrava, the architect who designed the James Joyce and Samuel Beckett bridges, had been chosen to design a new building on the Belfield campus.

According to the source, the discussions between UCD and Milltown, which were led for UCD by Dr Philip Nolan (now the president of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth), ended after continuous objections by university staff.

The main objections were, firstly, that members of the university staff did not wish to compromise the secular nature of UCD. Secondly, since there is no theology department at UCD, the plan involved the integration of the Milltown Institute with the philosophy department. Dialogue with the philosophy department was inconclusive, and fears remained about how both institutions would be merged. Finally, it was felt that there were not adequate procedures in place to prevent the possibility of lay-offs among existing UCD academics, which would be a considerable industrial relations issue.

Trinity News understands that a large transfer of money would have been involved. Nolan elaborated on the source for this money at a meeting in UCD, naming a number of wealthy individuals who were backing the move. The land on which the Milltown Institute is located, adjacent to Gonzaga College, was understood to be extremely valuable at the time.

However, an article from 11th September 2008 in the Irish Catholic about the merger of Trinity and Milltown claims that “… a Jesuit source said the order has no plans to sell the Dublin 6 site, where there are plans to build a residence and retirement home in the future.”

Background of Milltown The Milltown Institute, located at Milltown Green on the Sandford Road, describes itself as “a third-level College for the study of theology, philosophy and spirituality”. Since 1989, when the institute was granted designated status under the National Council for Education, it offered a variety of bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the areas of philosophy, theology and spirituality. Since spring 2011 it has discontinued many programmes in anticipation of the establishment of the Loyola Institute.

According to its website, hosted by Trinity, “This institute is dedicated to education and research in theology in the Catholic tradition.” The institute will offer a moderatorship in Catholic theological studies; its only member of staff at present is Casey, the institute’s inaugural director. Further recruitment will begin shortly as the institute searches for a Loyola chair of Catholic theology and four lecturers at junior and senior level. It aims to work “collaboratively” with the other elements of the new School of Religions, Theology and Ecumenics.

Sexual assault awareness campaign launched Trinity SU and societies endorse Canadian campaign

L Ursula Ní Choill Contributor

ast week saw the start of an awareness campaign in College which aims to emphasise that sex without consent is sexual assault, and that being drunk is no excuse for committing a violent crime. Students have already begun to notice the intentionally graphic posters of the Don’t Be That Guy campaign in college toilets.

A number of speakers passionately addressed the campaign launch which took place in the Parlour at the Junior Common Room in Goldsmith Hall on Wednesday 10th October. The launch was well attended and the DU Gender Equality Society (Duges) committee provided tea and cakes.

The idea for the Trinity campaign was sparked after an event on sexual assault that was co-hosted by the Hist and the Students’ Union Welfare Office in March. The panel discussion, chaired by senator Ivana Bacik, highlighted the need for more open discussion around sexual consent.

Polly Dennison, the chair of Duges, stated that in the coming weeks the campaign would be further developed to raise awareness of sexual violence against men. Ellen O’MalleyDunlop, the chief executive officer of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, stressed how important it was to tackle the common myths surrounding sexual assault and rape.

Aisling Ní Chonaire, the welfare officer of the Students’ Union, spoke bravely of her own experience of being sexually assaulted and of the shame that stunts the ability of victims abilities to speak openly about being violated. Andrew McEwan, the vice-president and welfare officer of the Graduate Students’ Union, said he was delighted that the GSU could play a role in promoting the campaign.

For years, young women had previously been told that it is up to them to avoid sexual assault. The present campaign began in Ottawa, Canada in

May 2011 and produced tangible results: incidents of sexual assault dropped in targeted areas. The campaign has two main focus points. It takes away the blame and responsibility for preventing sexual assault from the victims; rather, it appeals to potential offenders, speaking to them directly in their language. This poster campaign also highlights the fact that being drunk is never an excuse for committing a sexual assault.

The posters take a refreshing and new approach to tackling sexual violence among youth aged 19-25. Similar campaigns include the White Ribbon initiative and the My Strength Campaign in California which advocates positive masculinity.

Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop said she was glad the posters included the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s free 24-hour helpline, 1800 778888, and stressed that there is always a trained counsellor at the other end of the line.

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

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News First day of Trinity News School of Journalism Student Affairs Correspondent Trinity News held the inaugural event of its School of Journalism on Monday 8th October in the form of a panel discussion on the role of the media in society. The panellists present were the journalist Siobhan McDermott of Rabble magazine, the lecturer and columnist Harry Browne, the freelance journalist Gerard Cunningham and the broadcaster Heidi Bedell from Northeast Access Radio (Near) FM as well as the National University of Ireland, Maynooth academics Dr Anne O’Brien and Dr Gavan Titley.

McDermott spoke about the

aims of the non-profit newspaper Rabble. Run independently by volunteers, Rabble aims to create a space for critiques and stories generally ignored by mainstream media. Browne, now a Dublin Institute of Technology lecturer, told the audience about his experience of working for the Irish Times, during which he said he wrote very little “good journalism”.

He also addressed, amongst many other hindrances, the interdependent relationship that exists between journalists and politicians. Known for his coverage of criminal and civil trials, Cunningham also spoke about the reality of working as a journalist and the constraints involved.

Bedell, the vice-chairperson of the Near community media co-operative, told the audi-

ence about the openness of local radio and its inclusivity on a community level, while O’Brien addressed the barriers that still exist for women working in media. Listing examples of gender bias across radio and television, she raised a number of issues that she feels must be addressed in achieving a more representative media. Titley spoke about further problems with mainstream Irish media, referencing the coverage of the former junior minister Róisín Shortall’s resignation as an example of a reluctance to engage in wider political issues such as the privatisation of healthcare.

The panel discussion was followed by lively audience participation, where questions such as the possibility of critique and objectivity were raised.

Aonghus Ó Cochláin Contributor A vote among College’s scholars regarding the restriction of the scholarship examinations to senior freshmen alone has proved inconclusive. 99 scholars were in favour of the restriction and 99 against from a total of 198 votes. The results were revealed in an email from Tony O’Connor, the secretary to the scholars, via the scholars’ mailing list.

The vote, administered by the Scholars’ Committee,

Illustration: Ciar Boyle Gifford

Strong words on children’s referendum

News In Brief

Catherine Healy

Scholars argue themselves to standstill

John Porter Staff Writer On Wednesday 10th October, Trinity Young Fine Gael hosted an information evening on the children’s referendum, which proposes an amendment to article 42 of the constitution of Ireland. On the panel for the evening was the minister for children, Frances Fitzgerald, senator Jillian van Turnhout and the chief executive of the Children’s Rights Alliance, Tanya Ward.

The Jonathan Swift theatre, where the event was held, was filled to capacity with 100 people in attendance, revealing, perhaps, the level of interest in the referendum.

The proposed amendment is divided into five sections which together will constitute a new standalone article 42A, entitled Children. The first article recognises the natural and imprescriptible rights of the child. The further four amendments remove any distinction based on marital status, allow for an easier adoption process, guarantee that the best interests of the child be paramount and provide that, with regard to maturity, their voice be given consideration in legal cases.

Frances Fitzgerald spoke first, claiming that the amendment would be a “statement from this generation to future generations”. She stressed that, while the amendment had an obvious symbolic significance in demonstrating a break from Ireland’s past, it was also of great practical importance. The constitutional changes in relation to adoption and, especially, over marital status, Fitzgerald claimed, would provide crucial help to children who are neglected under the current constitution. However, she was careful also to stress that this amendment was not the completion of the task and that we “still have a job to do”.

In relation to the criticisms raised that the amendment would transfer too much power to the state, Fitzgerald repeatedly stressed that any intervention on the part of the state would be “exceptional” and “proportional”, and that the interests and the voice of the child would be at the heart of any state intervention.

The primary criticism that has been mentioned with regard to the children’s referen-

dum has been that it is an attack on the family. Fitzgerald was quick to dispel such criticism by asserting that the amendment will actually strengthen the family, giving rights to all its members. Each member of the panel was keen to stress that the amendment did not represent an attack on the family. Van Turnhout argued that the amendment, rather than removing power from parents, actually provided a “safety net” for every single parent in the country.

The wording of the document, which has received criticism from certain quarters, was given broad approval by all panellists. Both Fitzgerald and van Turnhout described the document as “balanced”, with van Turnhout stating that it was also “fair and appropriate”.

Ward did suggest that, perhaps, the amendment could have provided even further changes, but still gave her support to the article, accepting that not all legal change must be instituted in the constitution. Indeed, all panellists stressed the fact that the amendment should be seen as a beginning of legislative

change and not as a panacea.

Each panellist also expressed their delight at the number of attendees, and extended their hope that this would transfer into a high turnout on the day.

Ward articulated her worry that the general confidence the amendment will pass could mean a low turnout on 10th November. She asserted that a big turnout was necessary to send a message to the political establishment that the Irish people were concerned about children’s rights.

As yet, a visible No campaign has not emerged and all parties are supporting the amendment.

The government has stated that it will not take a complacent attitude, however, and has already allocated ¤150,000 for the campaign. The campaign has yet to unfold fully, but there still appears to be little opposition to the amendment; at least, to the broad principles that it espouses.

The referendum is scheduled to be held on Saturday 10th November, making it only the second referendum in the history of the state to be held on a Saturday.

over SF students, benefiting from a longer period of time studying the subject material and possibly having already attempted the exams in the previous year.

Given the results, “… the committee will adopt a neutral stance in any representations to college on the proposal,” according to Tony O’Connor. He further noted that the Scholars’ Committee does not retain a vote in the remaining stages of the proposal, and that the results of the vote will be reported to University Council and the senior lecturer.

Bookshop services cuts Aonghus Ó Cochláin Contributor A reduction in the Students’ Union bookshop’-s opening hours took effect from Monday this week. The bookshop, which previously opened from 9am to 5.30pm, will now open from 12pm to 3pm.

“In light of declining revenue, we are currently investigating appropriate reduction in hours so that we can guarantee that the bookshop remains both viable and sustainable,” stated

the Students’ Union president, Rory Dunne. “We want to continue to provide both a book buying and book selling facility to students, but we strive to do so in as efficient a manner as possible so that students’ money is spent responsibly and efficiently.”

On the subject of the possibility of staff being made redundant, one member of the bookshop staff said that a particular staff member is resigning to sit schol, and will not be replaced, but that this will not be a case of anyone being let go; rather, the position will be discontinued.

When asked for the reaction of staff, the source commented, “We’re not particularly sad for ourselves; it’s more that we think that it’s a great service, so it’s sad in that way.” The staff member went on to say: “When you work there, you really do realise what a great service it is for students.”

The staff member told Trinity News: “The bookshop hasn’t actually lost any money. Anyway, we were always under the impression that the revenue aspect was secondary to the service that we were providing, so the staff are a little upset about that.”

Beating diabetes Aonghus Ó Cochláin Contributor It may be possible to eliminate diabetes and diet-induced obesity, according to a new study by Marie Curie fellow Lydia Lynch in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology. The study was conducted in collaboration by experts from Trinity, the Beth Israel Deaconess medical centre in Boston, Massachusetts, US and St Vincent’s university hospital in Dublin.

The study reports that invariant natural killer T-cells (iNKT cells) were found to help

control diabetes and other metabolic diseases. Once thought to be rare in humans, these anti-tumour cells are believed to be present in omental fat. Initiating production of the iNKT cells in human bodies could be used as a form of treatment, the researchers found.

Clinical research carried out on mice that are believed to harbour these cells in fat showed a high presence of iNKT cells. “Similar to the human subjects we had previously studied, the animals lost their iNKT cells when they became obese,” Lynch said. She went on to say that the cells increased once the mice were put back on a normal standard-fat diet.

The researchers also discov-

ered that a lipid called alphagalactosylceramide (AGC) can lead to improvement in metabolism, weight loss, and fatty liver disease, as well as working to reverse diabetes by restoring depleted cells.

“AGC has been tested in clinical trials for the treatment of certain cancers, including melanoma, and proven safe and produced few side effects in humans,” said Mark Exley, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

The effect of natural killer Tcells on weight loss, obesity, and metabolic disorder may provide a new approach for the treatment of obesity and metabolic syndrome.

Class rep training successful John Colthurst Copy editor

Panel discussion indicates broad acceptance of proposed constitutional amendment

comes after a review working group chaired by the senior lecturer, Dr Patrick Geoghegan, issued a proposal that the scholarship exams be restricted to senior freshmen, with the implication that students from other years could no longer participate.

This arises from a concern over the significant increase of junior sophisters achieving schol in recent years, and the additional costs entailed. Currently available to all students throughout their undergraduate programmes, there is a perception that JS exam candidates possess an advantage

Over 240 newly-elected class representatives took park in the annual class rep training weekend, organised by the Students’ Union in the Ashdown Park Hotel last weekend. A record number of class reps, 357, were elected this year in the elections held on 24th-27th September; many of those absent from training were class

reps who were reprising their roles from the previous academic year.

The Students’ Union education officer, Dan Ferrick, described the weekend as “a success”. It included public speaking, educational casework, welfare casework, negotiation skills, campaigning training, communication skills and how to organise a class party, as well as comprehensive education on how the Students’ Union works.

The president of the Union

of Students in Ireland (USI), John Logue, spoke to attendees during the weekend, as did the Students’ Union’s sabbatical officers and guest speakers Colm Jordan (formerly president of USI, now an adviser to the recruitment company Monster) and Colm McGivern (a director at the British Council and trustee at VSO Ireland).

A representative of the Bank of Ireland, which sponsors class rep training, spoke about student accounts and offers, and held a raffle for attendees.

Trinity still not in top 100 of THE university rankings Ian Curran News Editor The Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings for 2012-13 have placed Trinity outside the top 100, in 110th position overall. While the college remains outside the top 100, it is an improvement on last year’s ranking of 117th.

The rankings are decided by five different criteria: teaching, international outlook, industry income, research and cita-

tions. Past THE rankings have rated Trinity’s international outlook and citations highly, with Trinity equalling or bettering universities in the top 20. This year has shown a slight decrease in these categories for Trinity, though improvements were made in all other areas.

The college did not place within the top 50 worldwide in any subject ranking.

University College Dublin (UCD), the only other Irish university to place within the top 200, were ranked 187th, falling from 159th last year. Both

Trinity and UCD have failed to come close to their highest rankings, achieved in 2010-11; that year UCD was ranked 94th and Trinity 76th.

The THE rankings are the last of the three major global university ranking tables to be released this year, the others being the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). Trinity placed 67th in this year’s QS rankings and in the 201st-300th category in the ARWU rankings.

Wednesday 17th October 2012

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TRINITY NEWS

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

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InDepth

Caelinn Hogan on young people caught up in the war in Syria Syrian youth: rebels with a cause

>> p.9

Dedicated followers of fashion It’s all networking, sponsorship-seeking and coffee-drinking in the run up to this year’s Trinity Samsung fashion show, writes the chair of the DU Fashion Society, Laura McDermott

A Laura McDermott Chair, Fashion Society

“

Occasionally we feel like killing each other, but in the end, we are all working towards the same goal: making the Trinity fashion show the hottest thing to grace iPhone calendars this academic year.

Photo: Dargan Crowley-Long The Trinity College Samsung Fashion Show takes place on the 26th of November in the National Gallery of Ireland. It begins at 7PM and early bird tickets - including the show itself, goodie-bags, reception and after party - are available for ¤15. Full ticket prices TBC.

s I sit writing in the depths of a dawning Saturday, cutting a prescribed deadline extremely fine, I find myself searching frantically for adjectives to describe the journey towards DU Fashion Society’s annual Trinity fashion show. Demanding, time-consuming and intense are all words that rise to the surface of my limited vocabulary, but I hear that positiveness is hard to come by at 5am.

I could fabricate a story which accounted the ease and creativity of the preparation, the pencil skirts and stilettos that strutted into potential sponsors, the casual rendezvous with industry experts, and the glamour of pulling looks for photoshoots; but I do not trust my imagination’s capacity, or, for that matter, its originality. Instead I intend to present you with a truthful, though occasionally exaggerated (for entertainment’s sake), account of the Trinity Samsung fashion show thus far.

Before we broke for the summer, the 2012-13 DU Fashion Society committee agreed to hold the society’s annual fashion show in November 2012. There were a vast number of reasons for the decision, some being that our proposed trip to London fashion week would be in February (the month in which the show is usually held) and that it would mean less pressure around essay deadline times. Holding the show at this point in the calendar would also mean that we could work on sponsorship throughout the summer and secure funds before entering Michaelmas term. All in all, it was a very prudent and strategically mapped decision.

And so, we set off for the summer, mapping our interrailing routes around Europe, researching the cheapest 10man tents for the festival hop of a lifetime, and co-ordinating outfits for our internships with the British Fashion Council. It was a summer never to be forgotten, or so I was told.

While all of the beautiful, cultured belles on the committee spread their batwinged rain macs and had their tinted lashes opened to a world of adventure, yours truly sat in her humble abode, in front of another sort of mac, drawing up sponsorship pitches and con-

tacting hundreds of multinational companies begging for the direct email of a marketing manager. How very fashionable.

It took weeks of generic nothank-yous before the sponsorship inbox was graced with a positive response. I often wonder what we would have done had we not secured our current sponsor, but quickly dismiss the subject before a nervous sweat takes over.

Since securing sponsorship and returning to this fine university, to-do lists, deadlines, drafting proposals and attending meetings have become as essential to my daily routine as eating, sleeping and Facebooking. Who would have thought that putting a fashion show together would be so unbelievably demanding?

The other day it was suggested, by an ignoramus whom I will not name for legal reasons, that putting a show together meant merely “picking pretty people off campus, putting them in nice clothes and making them walk up and down a couple of times.”

Though my animal instinct prompted me to engage in an attack – similar to that driven

by Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls – on this condescending nitwit, I somehow managed to adhere to the laws of social conduct and delicately explain that, while this may be the principle of a fashion show, a hell of a lot more goes into its preparation than simply “picking and dressing”.

Production, public relations, styling and model-dressing are four teams that basically run the show; we lovely ladies in sponsorship are responsible for dragging in the funds. Because of the nature of such a high-scale project, there are of course complications and issues along the way. Would it not be completely unrealistic to expect otherwise?

The fact that an external body has invested so much in the event, combined with the fact that it is being held outside of College, means that we have to up our game tenfold.

We are also focused on it being an entirely student-run production, which means that we are guaranteed hands-on action and, at the same time, a severe amount of responsibility.

One of the main issues that

we have faced so far is the maintaining of lines of communication with our charity, sponsor and official Trinity bodies throughout the sponsorship and PR process. You cannot begin to imagine the amount of yesses it takes to pass something as simple as an event logo.

Technical complications like these are what seem to make the project more stressful than it actually is. At times it can seem like cracks are beginning to form in the foundations of the show, with professionals demanding answers to questions that we do not understand in the slightest.

When this happens, as it often does, I find myself spamming the inboxes of every connection I have ever made, tactically guilting them into coffee and a brain-picking. It may mean foregoing the odd (noncompulsory) lecture here or there, but at least it sets us on the right track and assures us that we are going about things in the right manner.

Another prominent issue is the fact that we are all students, students who are obliged to maintain social lives, uphold social-media statuses, and occasionally attend final-year tutorials (listed in descending order of importance, obviously). Putting on a show of this scale takes a lot of commitment, which can be an issue for some of us, but it is a case of reminding ourselves that there are only another six weeks to go until the after-party of the year, never mind the show itself.

All in all, we are progressing really well (despite what my pessimistic outburst at the beginning of this piece may suggest). Yes, we have had setbacks with a few minor things like college policy, communication with affiliates, and conflict of views, but they are complications from which we all learn.

I am not going to lie and say that we, a group of ten opinionated girls, are getting on like a house on fire, 24/7, because occasionally we feel like killing each other; but in the end, we are all working towards the same goal: making the Trinity fashion show the hottest thing to grace iPhone calendars this academic year.

Feminist toil: a lot done, more to do Sally Rooney looks at the current state of affairs for feminism and gender equality at Trinity

T Sally Rooney Staff Writer

he Freshers’ Week issue of the Piranha, College’s satirical newspaper, came complete with a whole page on the DU Gender Equality Society (Duges). In a segment entitled “Ask Duges”, the feminists behind the organisation were lampooned as – wait for it – militant, man-hating harpies. So far, so cutting edge; and, indeed, the magazine deserves our thanks for mooting the possibility that feminists may not be fans of men. Who knew?

The connotation was not one of actual misogyny so much as merely pushing back against the mainstream: feminism had become such a political norm, the piece implied, that its stranglehold deserved to be questioned. Truth to power, and all that. The salient question, then, is not whether the parody is funny, but whether Trinity really is in the grip of a feminist mania. Are traditionalists and conservatives the new oppressed minority in College?

Has political correctness gone mad?

A recent article in the London Independent discussed the sexual politics of British college culture, and introduced a brand-new headache-inducing phrase to the gender lexicon: “slut-dropping”. (Put the kettle on; you might need to have a sit down.) Perhaps a trend, but hopefully an isolated incident, slut-dropping involves a group of male students finding young women late at night, picking them up and driving them far away from their intended destination. For the purposes of banter. Because, sluts.

No such activities have been reported anywhere within a generous radius of Trinity, and,

if that has any connection at all with our seeming gendermania, long may the feminists reign. The idea of “sluts” – that is to say, young women dressed in the way that young women are encouraged to dress and behaving as young women typically behave – being reprimanded for their existence is by no means a British quirk, and Ireland’s legislative inability to deal with rape and sexual assault stems in part from the same discomfort with female sexuality.

Societies like Duges help to raise awareness about the problem of blaming victims, which has legal as well as social ramifications, and is an uncool thing to do all round. Gradually, the idea of slut-shaming – or the policing of women’s sexuality – is, at long last, beginning to be stored in the box labelled “problematic”. The newly-launched Don’t Be That Guy campaign, an initiative shared by Duges and the Students’ Union, is founded on the same principle: that seemingly sexualised behaviour is not an invitation to non-consensual sex. It is one space where feminist activism is both necessary and welcome. The Duges chair, Polly Dennison, says that the campaign has had “an incredible response” from students, and it is a good example of what egalitarian activists are achieving in College.

Duges and its ideological ilk have had other successes in railing against sexism on campus. The uncovering of an unofficial College fraternity in February this year, uncontroversial in most US universities, caused a furore here; and, although a distaste for classism

had a role to play in the backlash, it was the no-girls-allowed clause that meant Trinity and Greek life were not to meet.

Very enlightened altogether.

And after the DU Law Society (LawSoc) and Ents infamously collaborated on a Playboy-themed party in November of last year, the tradition has come to an end, with the LawSoc committee confirming it will not be paying Georgia Salpa’s appearance fee again anytime soon. So maybe The Piranha had a point: Trinity is not exactly a dream home for the slut-dropping, fraternitylife antics that go down reasonably easily in other universities.

Feminism has won its share of battles in College, and, from a pro-equality standpoint, that is something to be thankful for.

Expressions of misogyny, though, are not limited to material interference in the lives of individual women. Women are not literally barred from being at the head of college societies, for example; they do not actually get slut-dropped miles away from the ballot box when they try to run for Students’ Union president. The issue of under-representation, a chronic and complicated one, cannot be boiled down to individual instances; it is not a case of one lone weirdo “doing the patriarchy” to women everywhere. It is, more often than not, a case of females opting out. But it is difficult to figure out why, in a college so apparently feministfriendly, women still decide that positions of power are not for them.

The existence of a complex matrix of sexual politics, beyond the headachingly obvious, has by no means reached

the mainstream. Outright incidents of sexism are rarely linked to the less visible problem of under-representation, and, even for those who suspect that the issues are related, finding a clear practical link is not all that easy. The “I choose my choice” rhetoric of liberal individualist feminism further complicates the matter. Is everything a woman freely chooses necessarily empowering for women? And, if the lifting of legal barriers to success is all we can hope for, have the feminists already won?

Duges is not itself a feminist society, but a gender-equality one; this is more than a semantic difference. For the most part, their events cover issues specifically affecting women, but they also focus on men’s rights, including rights for fathers and female-on-male domestic violence.

These are real problems and they are taken seriously by the feminist community as well as by liberal egalitarians, but in a significantly different framework. For the latter, the lack of legislation around fathers’ rights stands alongside the problem of female objectification: both are examples of sexism. Contemporary feminist thought, on the other hand, puts the problem of fathers’ rights firmly in the context of a male-dominated society, relating it to the pigeonholing of women as mothers. Sexism is no two-way street in this interpretation; rather, it is a patriarchal system that occasionally robs men of certain privileges in order to maintain its own power structures. There is even an acronym for it: PHMT (patriarchy hurts men too). Both

fresh (fresh) adj. fresh-er, fresh-est

Illustration: Ciar Boyle Gifford viewpoints support equality between the genders, but only one tries to theorise on the inequality that currently exists.

The powerful student backlash against the fraternity and the sexist advertising of nightclubs like Alchemy earlier this year have demonstrated the real-world impact of this university’s liberal ethos. Meanwhile, the notorious liveliness of the Duges Facebook group – with over 350 members, of various ideological stripes – and the existence of high-quality in-house feminist publications like Siren have helped to make sexual politics cool. Despite this, Dennison does not believe feminism is as popular as it looks: “We have a long, long way to go,” she says, “until openly being a feminist is acceptable.”

Struggling against isolated instances of misogyny, however successfully, does not necessarily entail an understanding of privilege and power. Despite

women making up over 50% of the student body, men hold over 80% of Trinity’s professorships. College has still never had a female provost. At the student level, female underrepresentation mimics that of the staff: it is not a generation gap, but a gender one. Further, despite the decreasing acceptability of open misogyny, it is not going away. When instances of sexism take place in a context of ongoing power disparity, it is not just the backlash that is a product of Trinity’s culture: the sexism itself is, too.

The problems we have proved ourselves best at tackling are the most visible and accessible to students: instances that affect heterosexual, middle-class, white women as well as more consistently marginalised groups. Do not get me wrong – those are examples of real sexism, and those successes have been real. The policing of

women’s sexuality carries real harms, and the more we can do to counteract it, the better. But to move from liberal egalitarianism to contextual feminism is to recognise a whole network of privilege and power, extending beyond gender and into race, sexual orientation, disability, class and beyond.

In counteracting isolated incidents, gender equality activists can get a whole lot done; and they have. But those incidents are symptoms of a power problem that has not been solved. A larger, more sustained critique of sexual politics from the student body at large might wait in the wings, but with it has to come a recognition of power, privilege and what to do with it.

These are difficult questions to ask and harder ones to answer.

For now, we can be grateful that, in some corners of College at least, being a feminist is cool.

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

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InDepth

Consumerism: have we had our fill?

“

Saphora Smith dissects the rise and rise of mass consumerism, and asks whether the time is ripe to cast it aside

“I Saphora Smith Deputy InDepth Editor

shop therefore I am” could be a mantra for modern society.

The slogan was immortalized by the artist Barbara Kruger in her 1987 conceptual artwork.

Perhaps ironically, her logo has now been recycled, slapped on the front of birthday cards, canvas bags and bedroom walls.

Behold the power of consumer culture: a work of art which draws attention to the consumerist nature of society has itself now been consumed, pawned out to every moneyed entrepreneur.

When discussing consumerism people are often wary of preaching. Those addressing the topic tend to do so with a holier-than-thou attitude, and one that positions them above the masses. This article will not pass judgement but will instead explore some of the theories of consumerism and analyze whether we live in a society which celebrates or suppresses the individual.

Consumerism and mass culture are not new concepts. So often assumed to be a modern phenomenon, the social value of commodities and the nature of consumerism have interested sociologists, philosophers, economists and other academics for hundreds of years. Mass culture, too, standardised and commercialised popular culture - the mainstream taste - has been much discussed by academics.

Marx saw consumerism as one of the plagues of capitalism. He introduced the concept of the commodity fetish, arguing that people imbued commodities with mystic value.

Marx argued that, to the people of the 19th century, commodities meant more than simply their pragmatic function; they had a social and spiritual significance.

This is closely linked to religious belief. A fetish was originally a divine object that people worshipped believing

it to be inhabited by a spirit. In associating consumerism and consumption with religious worship, Marx critiqued his contemporary society. Since the enlightenment and the celebration of secular reason, a society founded on religion has been considered primitive.

In arguing that the obsessive worshipping of commodities was religious in nature, Marx argued that his contemporary society was not in fact modern but still primeval. A modern society for Marx would be a classless one, freed from its superstitious association with the commodity.

Modern day commentators have also observed the quasireligious nature of consumerism. The Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry depicts in his Walthamstow Tapestry modern-day man’s journey through life. The famous 3-by-15 metre work is dominated by a river of blood, which flows from a graphic depiction of childbirth, through the seven ages of man, eventually leading to his inevitable death. Alongside man’s journey from birth to death are illustrations and inscriptions of brand names and aspects of consumer culture, highlighting Perry’s view that consumerism dominates modern day life.

The “smass consumptionhip of fools” is a telling example of Perry’s message. The ship, designed in the style of those used in the Norman conquest of England, a clear reference to the Bayeux tapestry, is filled with names of bankrupt firms, such as Merrill Lynch, Northern Rock, and Enron; the failed crusaders of modern capitalism. Furthermore, in the centre of the tapestry Perry depicts a woman, the “Madonna of the Chanel handbag”; his icon of consumerism. Clearly, Perry puts forward the case, similarly to Marx, that consumption has taken the place of religion in modern society.

Is consumerism and mass consumption even a barrier to the development of the individual?

Illustration: Ena Brennan

Other commentators have seen consumerism not as a form of religious practice but as a cultural means to repress and dominate society on the part of big business. This theory was established by sociologists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their work on the culture industry, a term coined in an eponymous chapter in their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment published at the close of the Second World War. Essentially, “The Culture Industry” argues that in a capitalist society the consumption of mass culture is used to manipulate the masses into passivity so that big business can thrive.

The theory argues that the invention of technology such as the radio and television helped to spread the consumption of standardised culture. The radio and television, unlike the telephone, ensure that you cannot respond or have any direct individual input or ability to criticise what is being said; thus Adorno and Horkheimer argued they were used as instruments of indoctrination, crushing any form of individuality. Society buying into this standardised culture was to ensure the prosperity and success of big business, as capitalists could appeal to the masses, thus making more money.

Interestingly the theory of the culture industry was heralded by the leaders of the student movements of the 1960s as their justification for radical action against the establishment.

They believed that they lived

in an oppressive society ruled by consumer culture in which individuality was stifled. Since the 1960s there has been no reversal of the power or significance of consumption and mass culture in society; if anything, arguably, standardised culture has only become more powerful and consumption more obsessive. However, there is today undeniably less enthusiasm for such theories among students.

It is perhaps necessary to question why.

Is it pure laziness that we do not in rebel in any cohesive form against consumerism or is it that we genuinely believe that we live in a society that celebrates the individual? Since the 1960s, after all, we have witnessed both the political and cultural liberation of gender, race and sexual orientation. Is consumerism and mass culture even a barrier to the development of the individual?

Perhaps students feel less inclined to flock to the streets due to the invention of the internet. The world wide web is perhaps the easiest and most powerful medium for individual contribution to wider discussions. To an extent, Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory that big business has manipulated us through the radio and television, instruments of indoctrination, no longer seems valid, as the internet allows for individual expression. At last you can comment, criticise or endorse ideas, while reaching the majority of the developed world.

The internet seems to give us the opportunity to escape mass consumption, but doesn’t it seem more often to facilitate it? Perhaps we have all become devoted to the culture industry - our fanatical obsession with trends and buying lifestyles religious in nature. Who knows?

Consumerism and mass consumption dominate modern society and have done so, ever-increasingly, since the industrial revolution. Academic theories tend to focus on why consumer culture is so potent within society but few, if any, offer hypotheses as to how to break it down.

Today’s intellectual elite are often criticised for having no ‘big idea’ to propose to direct society. Without this metanarrative, or an ideal to pursue - are we all just too happy to settle for consumerism, and for lusting after whatever the Joneses’ have?

Stick or twist Illustration: Ciar Boyle Gifford

Max Sullivan InDepth Editor

We have been told it is the best four years of our lives, but it does not feel that way for everyone. Should you change course? Or should you just drop out and get a job? asks Max Sullivan

F

amous billionaire entrepreneurs are always proclaiming with defiant glee how they dropped out of college or, at the very least, did not pay any attention in lectures: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Ralph Lauren, Michael Dell, Ted Turner.

Needless to say, they are all American, and most of them dropped out of coveted Ivy League institutions. Their families’ considerable wealth and powerful social circles may have had something to do with their rise to supremacy, rather than their dropping out of college. Not everyone who feels ill-suited to college life and academia, even students of Trinity, can feel so confident about being in that situation.

Trinity attracts Ireland’s top students. College admits more students with 550 or more CAO points than any other college.

While high points in the leaving certificate are a strong indi-

cator that a student will finish college, and Trinity has one of the lower dropout rates among higher-education institutions, high points are still no guarantee that students will not feel lost at some point.

When they do, they often go to the Students’ Union education officer, Dan Ferrick. “Some students come from a school where they were top of the class, and now they’re in a new class, full of people who were at the top of their class in school,” Ferrick notes. “But you’re also suddenly in a class where everyone loves what they’re doing.”

Ferrick helps students if they need to sit supplemental exams, change course, repeat a year or contest their results.

“Some people come in and they are just struggling academically. But what I’ve got to keep in the back of my mind when I’m talking to students is that something which might mani-

fest itself as an academic issue can have its source somewhere else.”

For many students, acclimatising to College also means acclimatising to a new city and new living arrangements.

“Trinity Hall has a lot of people who have moved from different parts of the country. Sometimes students don’t realise that the reason they’re feeling sad, or not doing well academically, can be to do with the fact that their daily routine has completely changed. You might be used to living at home, having someone ask how your day was, and suddenly, maybe, no one asks you how your day was.”

In this sense, it can be easier for students from Dublin to attend Trinity. Those who have siblings or friends who went to Trinity know what to expect. “One thing we get with first years is that they go from getting 90% in school to 60%

in college, and it’s a shock. No one tells you that anything over 70% is remarkable when you walk in the door.”

The first few weeks of College for new students can be full of hard knocks, but it should soon become clear if students are happy with their choice. “How are you finding it?” is a question students will answer an innumerable amount of times during their college careers, and it is good to know how to answer that question. Some will be able to answer it more quickly than others.

“You’ll be able to tell in the first week or two if you’re able to do your course. Not whether you like it or not, just if you’re able to do it.” Jack Sheehan is in his third year of history at Trinity, but he started off reading computer science. “I changed courses because I made a very big mistake in choosing computer science. I picked my CAO

based not on what I wanted, but on which course I thought would be an achievable number of points. I didn’t listen to my mum.”

Nationally, computer science is the course with the largest dropout rate, with 27% of students who enter it as first years failing to continue with their degree. Medicine, by comparison, is the course with the least dropouts nationally, at 2%.

“I had an idea of computer science and of science courses that wasn’t true to life. In the open days and literature they [College] tell you what you could end up doing in a career or as a final year project – you could be a programmer for Google, for example – not what you do in your first few years of the course. I wouldn’t say the college lies, but there is an elision of the truth. They want more science graduates. Computer science wasn’t the type of

college experience that got sold to me, but arts definitely is.”

Sheehan was offered a way out of computer science early on in first year. “I was offered history and political science two weeks after I applied to change course, but I didn’t take it. I was afraid I’d missed too much of history and political science, but I hadn’t. Now, I know that I could have caught up very quickly.”

“I decided that I would drop out of computer science in January. Instead of going to lectures I went on nights out, did stuff with societies. That’s a very important part of the college experience, but you shouldn’t just be doing that.”

For anyone considering dropping out, or repeating a year, money is always a consideration. “If you’re set on it, it’s worth dropping out before Christmas so that you don’t have to pay full fees if you want to reapply through the CAO. I didn’t drop out before Christmas, so I had to work in a car park for four months over the following summer to earn my fees. It was a job that consisted of standing up and doing nothing for eight hours with no music or reading material. The monotony was broken up by people screaming at me. Once, I met Pat Kenny. Good money, though. It became a mulligan year.”

The payoff, though, has been considerable. “History suits me down to the ground. You get out what you put in. If you’re interested in it, even the boring stuff isn’t boring.” Last year, Sheehan sat the foundation scholarship exams in history and was successful, giving him five years of paid tuition and accommodation on campus. “I wouldn’t have done schols if I hadn’t had that summer. Paying for your year makes you appreciate it a bit more. I didn’t mind doing the work.”

“When you’re making the decision [to change course], try not to think about what will ‘get you a job’, what your parents think, or the fact that you may want to move into a ‘messer course’. Ultimately, if you don’t like your course, you won’t finish it.”

Karl Peters is in his final year of English studies. However, he

started off in college with half a term of law and European studies in Limerick, before changing to communications in Dublin City University. “I changed because I didn’t like law, or European studies, or Limerick. I just chose a course the first time to use up as many points as possible, which was a bad idea.”

“I suppose my mistake was that I listened to everyone around me and their sensible, reasoned arguments about job prospects and stuff, but I never actually wanted to do law. Just do what you want to do, and if you don’t know what you want to do, don’t do law.”

After graduating from communications in DCU, Peters decided to go to Australia. “In Australia I picked a lot of lettuce, did telemarketing and trained racehorses. The guy I was working for offered to apply for a visa for me if I stayed with him working with horses, but he had me staying in a caravan with a hole in the roof in the middle of nowhere, so even though it was a great job, I didn’t want to commit myself to that.”

How do Peters’s college experiences compare? “Limerick was tough, but law is tough.

There is no way I could have coped with the workload. Everyone seemed a million times smarter than me. DCU was easy. I coasted for three years, it’s way behind Trinity though in terms of teaching and the careers office did nothing useful for me. Trinity is great, I feel attached to the place and have a certain sense of pride being here, a sense I can see echoed in all aspects of college life. The academic atmosphere is tougher in Trinity. I feel loads of pressure to do well, if I don’t get a good degree then the whole thing is pointless for me.” Having already completed a degree, Peters has used up his free-fees allowance: “I’m working during the summer and doing gardening in my spare time.

Living at home still also helps.”

“I’ve found possibly the only thing I want to do in college. It’s much more relaxed, in many ways, being a mature student.

Though, most of the time, I don’t really feel like one.”

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

8

InDepth

Green is good?

Lifestyle choice, sound ethical stance, or idealistic folly?

Emily Ranson tries to find the inner idea of a life without eating meat.

T

Emily Ranson Contributor

he World Vegetarian Day festival took place on 30th September at St Andrew’s Resource Centre in Dublin, kicking off Vegetarian Awareness Month.

The month is dedicated to raising awareness to the cause of living a meat-free life and all the ways this will help health, the environment, and living standards. World Vegetarian Day was established as an annual celebration by the North American Vegetarian Society in 1977, to promote the “joy, compassion and life-enhancing possibilities of vegetarianism.”

The International Vegetarian Union formally endorsed it in 1978. While 1st October is the official date, individual groups, such as those in Dublin, are allowed to schedule their events at a different time where necessary.

The idea of vegetarianism is likely to date from at least the time of Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras in 580BC. He believed that the soul was immortal, a “spark of the divine”; in essence, a part of God. Unlike many contemporary religions, he included animals in this conception of sacred life, and as such he taught that all animals should be treated as kin. Pythagoras also recognised the health advantages of a meat-free diet, and viewed vegetarianism as an important contributor to a harmonious society. He believed that by killing animals the human soul was corrupted.

Vegetarianism was driven underground in the early Christian area, and since then it has varied in its acceptance within society, gaining more sympathy throughout the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras and thereafter. The idea of vegetarianism was important, not just for how it affected an individual’s way of life, but for how it helped form political ideas about society, from differ-

ing but overlapping egalitarian, democratic, individualistic and libertarian philosophies.

But why become a vegetarian? The existence of the World Vegetarian Day festival, and the idea of October being Vegetarian Awareness Month, are to encourage meat-eaters to make the switch. It could be argued that by promoting itself it is creating a label for itself, a clique for the initiated few. In society, where labels are very important and designed to compartmentalise people (by, say, religion, race or sexual orientation), is vegetarianism just another means of isolating groups?

What we eat is no longer seen as simply personal choice.

According to James E McWilliams, author of Just Food: “Our diets are deeply, intimately and necessarily political … What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me.”

Is this true? Is vegetarianism not simply a lifestyle choice, drawing some in because of their dislike for meat or their desire to feel healthier? Of the vegetarians I know, the reasons for their food habits certainly seem to stem from political choices, with more people focused on the effect that meateating has on the environment and on animal cruelty. They consider it a moral choice. Certainly, considering the way the subject is approached in the media, I can understand why vegetarianism seems a valid, and increasingly moral, choice for people worldwide.

Environmentally speaking, in the words of Ed Ayres from the environmental research organisation WorldWatch Institute: “Pass up on a hamburger, and you’ll save as much water as you save by taking 40 showers with a low-flow nozzle.”

The UN states that ranchinginduced deforestation is one of the main reasons for the loss

of plant and animal species in tropical rainforests; in the US, grazing has contributed to the demise of 26% of federal threatened and endangered species. Livestock is increasingly regarded as the numberone cause of greenhouse-gas emissions, a 2006 report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation citing it as being responsible for 18% of emissions

spewed into the atmosphere, far more than emissions from transportation or industry.

Then, there is the issue of animal rights. Animal-rights advocates oppose the anthropocentric notion that humanity has a right to consume all things non-human, as though the world were a buffet just waiting for us to dig in. Factory farms have become the

blight of the livestock industry, with the very mention of them evoking popular horror and disgust. Animals are routinely injected with hormones and stimulants to make them grow to abnormal sizes. To enhance milk production, a number of dairy ranchers use recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), a chemical which has strong carcinogenic links. Bat-

tery-cage farming, designed to induce and increase egg production, is proven to cripple and maim. It is not hard to see vegetarians’ points.

Yet, while there clearly are a number of worthwhile causes behind vegetarianism, the idea that it is the only moral choice, that meat-eating is the primary bane of human existence, seems over the top. Even some of the well-known factual arguments against meat-eating should be taken with a pinch of salt. The 2006 report suggesting that less meat means less heat (that is to say, less global warming; apparently, rhymes are a fantastic way to infiltrate the subconscious) is a case of ignored science, according to Frank Mitloehner, an air-quality specialist at the University of California, Davis. Rather than focusing on reducing our consumption of meat and milk, developed countries should focus on cutting the usage of oil and coal for electricity, heating and vehicle fuels, with proper studies concluding that raising cattle and pigs amounts to just 3% of greenhouse-gas emissions, compared to the estimated 26% from transportation.

The World Vegetarian Day festival, and the concept of Vegetarian Awareness Month, are understandable. But are their overall aims too high?

Most people would like their lifestyles and preferences to be more widely adopted in society, not through any ill intent, but because they believe that the tenets to which they are committed are the proper way to live. Conversely, it could be said by those who view vegetarianism as a legitimate political choice that their population is just not large enough to effect any real change, and that this is why it needs to be popularised. But can consumer choice, and particularly that of a small minority, ever really be enough

to effect change in such a powerful and hegemonic capitalist system?

This does not take away from the idea that vegetarianism is an ethical choice. It is clear that animals can feel pain and have emotions, and that their lives are often abused under the current regime. Is simply choosing not to eat meat enough for a political stance, though? “No matter what you eat, someone has to die to feed you,” says the environmentalist Lierre Keith, pointing out what many fail to acknowledge; that agriculture destroys ecosystems, where entire spreads of land are taken and all living things are cleared from them. Once the grassland or forest has been removed, the soil is exposed and ultimately turns to desert. It is not only deadly for the planet, but unsustainable.

Some others reading this might take a less understanding view of the politics of vegetarianism. Are our diets not inherently personal? If we are what we eat, surely we should be given the choice on what we wish to dazzle our taste buds with? And who says that every meal should be bogged down with high and mighty morality?

Whatever you may think of vegetarianism as a political or moral stance, it is easy to see why it appeals as lifestyle choice, and it is easy to understand the benefits it can have on society. But many other factors can help lead us towards a more sustainable society: reducing consumption of water, turning off lights when you leave the room, cycling to college instead of driving.

I am not a vegetarian and, to be fair, my friends who are have been accommodating of this fact. After that long cycle to college, if I want to enjoy a bacon sarnie, then – as they have told me many times – it’s my life, and my choice.

Graphic: Ena Brennan

Keyboard warrior Ciaran McGrath profiles Wael Ghonim ahead of the activist’s appearance at the Dublin Web Summit on Thursday.

M Ciarán McGrath Staff Writer

easured against all the other technology and marketing executives speaking at the upcoming Dublin Web Summit, Wael Ghonim has a fairly typical CV. A former Google executive in the Middle East, he currently runs a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Egypt. However, Ghonim may just be the summit’s best advertisement for the power of the internet in the real world: he helped take down a government, and he did it using Facebook.

Ghonim’s recently-released book, Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power: A Memoir, tells how a politically naive marketing executive found himself at the epicentre of a movement for democracy and reform that swept through Egypt as part of the Arab spring in early 2011. It is the tale of an accidental revolutionary, one who began by agitating for justice and found himself carried by events into calling for the end of a corrupt regime.

Throughout all of this, he kept himself anonymous, using the pseudonym El Shaheeed [sic], or “The Martyr”. It was a title that came frighteningly close to being prescient: as the protest movement spread across Egypt in January 2011, he was snatched by the government’s security forces.

As a result, his anonymity was stripped away, revealing the role he had played in the events that would eventually lead to the former president Hosni Mubarak leaving office after almost three decades in power.

That January, as protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square escalated, the embattled government shut down citizen access to

the internet, a move that was reported across the world. It proved to be too little, too late.

The protest movement had begun on a Facebook page but it had already migrated to the real world.

An Egyptian-born marketing executive at Google, Ghonim had returned to Egypt from Dubai only days earlier, intending to play an active part in the nascent uprising. His Facebook page, Kullena Khaled Said (We Are All Khaled Said), opened in memory to a young man beaten to death in Alexandria, had attracted hundreds of thousands of followers though its calls for justice and an end to corruption.

It was on the Kullena Khaled Said page that the first call was made for a protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 25th January.

Originally intended as an ironic commentary on Egypt’s Police Day, a national holiday, it became something more in the wake of the successful Tunisian uprising against President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali earlier that month. As the page administrator, Ghonim renamed the event “January 25: Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption, and Unemployment”, and it became the spark that grew into a revolutionary flame.

Ghonim himself missed most of the revolution. Arrested in the early hours of 28th January, he was held in isolation for 11 days. His release on 7th February may have been intended to assuage the protestors, but an emotional TV interview and a speech he gave in Tahrir Square instead proved further steps towards the point of no return. On 11th February, the government announced Mubarak’s resignation.

Avatar taken from Wael Ghonim’s Twitter account

“

As the page administrator, Ghonim named the event “January 25: Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption, and Unemployment”, and it became the spark that grew into a revolutionary flame.

In the wake of his unmasking, many called for Ghonim to take a leadership role. Some of those calls even came from Facebook, where a page entitled “I delegate Wael Ghonim to speak in the name of Egypt’s revolutionaries” gained 130,000 followers. However, he has firmly and consistently resisted such efforts. His anonymity, which began as a safety precaution, had become a philosophical point.

Ghonim has acknowledged the legitimacy of the criticism that the Egyptian uprising had no leadership to take over when Mubarak was ousted.

An uncertain future may have been the only replacement for a longstanding dictatorship, but he argues that many Egyptians have now become empowered where previously they had accepted the corruption and brutality of the Mubarak regime.

In Revolution 2.0, Ghonim describes pre-revolutionary Egypt and the aura of fear that surrounded Egyptian state security. It is a personal book, focusing on how Egypt came to rise up against Mubarak. In many ways it reads like an ex-

planation of how he came to be in the position of a revolutionary. However, it never strays into self-congratulation, and he is candid about just how quickly he revealed his activities to the security forces after they began questioning him.

Despite his efforts to resist a leadership role, his actions before and during the revolution have ensured that the limelight remains on him. Since he emerged into the public eye, he has taken part in the ongoing political discussions in Egypt, acted as a consultant to the development of the country’s e-government portal, and been named as the second most powerful Arab in Arabian Business’ annual Power 500 of the world’s most influential Arabs.

He has also found himself feted abroad: he delivered a Ted talk on the revolution in March 2011, was named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2011, and received the JFK Profile in Courage Award on behalf of the Egyptian people.

Perhaps inevitably, given his views on personality cults and the political naivete he refers to repeatedly in his book, he has taken a step back from political activism since becoming a public figure. Instead, his energies have been focused on a technology-based NGO that aims to combat poverty and promote education in Egypt. His comments on the political process in Egypt have emphasised that the revolution is a process, not an event, and that the Egyptian people need to participate in solutions, rather than wait for a singular leader to solve everything for them.

The Dublin Web Summit’s Paddy Cosgrave says that Ghonim’s speech at the event will form part of a wider look at the influence of social media on political events. On a parallel track, the summit will host a workshop on the future of political communication and governance in Europe. The ultimate outcome of the Egyptian revolution may still be in the balance, but the power of the internet to shift political and social opinions has never been clearer than it was in the early months of 2011.

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

9

The backlash of endorsing Mitt: Conor McGlynn on Stacey Dash’s unexpected tweet Race. Closed. Hypocrisy.

Whatever.

InDepth

>>

p. 16

Priory Hell

O Elaine McCahill Editor-at-Large

n Saturday 13th October 2012, the residents of Priory Hall staged a protest march from Donaghmede Shopping Centre to the shambles of a property development they once called home. They carried placards and banners reading: “What’s another year? 10,000 tears and more financial fears.”

The residents and their supporters, around a thousand in total according to RTÉ News, marched in “the hope of refocusing minds” to their plight.

They were marching exactly one year on from the day that 249 of them were ordered to evacuate their homes because they were living in a death trap, which would go up in minutes if it were ever unfortunate enough to catch fire. As one resident, Graham Usher, describes: “Priory Hall was a fire waiting to happen. It was a Dunkirk-type situation.”

The residents of Priory Hall bought their properties from a catalogue and based on a viewing of a show apartment in 2005. Usher, who is one of the main spokespersons of the property’s residents’ association, paid upwards of ¤300,000 for his apartment. Difficulties and errors were apparent from the outset, with the site being shut down in 2006 due to unsafe working conditions.

The residents did succeed in moving in to their new homes in 2007 but nothing but problems have plagued their “dream apartments” since.

Another resident, Stephanie Meehan, found that all the windows in her duplex apartment had been installed incorrectly, meaning that, whenever it rained, the apartment flooded.

Usher describes it as “an absolute eyesore … and we had problems with the plumbing, the heating, the boiler that you wouldn’t expect to happen in a new home.”

Pictures on the “Priory Hell” Facebook page illustrate the horrific conditions in which these people had paid a great deal of money to live in. They show water marks on the walls of the underground car park, a result of the recurring flooding that occurred. In a television interview, a resident named Ursula recounts how one morning she left her apartment to go and collect her car, only to discover that flood waters had carried her car down to the far end of the car park.

These injustices are a result of the follies of our property boom, where developments were thrown up overnight and builders and contractors could “self-certify” and claim that their properties complied with the government’s safety policies and building codes. Yet, this development is now crumbling; another resident, Niall, describes how when one turned on the taps in one’s own apartment they would end up flooding someone else’s.

The interviews and statements given by the residents are upsetting, especially when describing the circumstances in which they had to vacate their homes. Two fire engines were placed continuously on call at the site. However, due to defects in the brick facade at the front, they were required to park between the two blocks lest bricks fall down on top of the engines. They were also under strict instructions not to enter any of the buildings unless there was someone inside.

The fire officer for Dublin city council later told the courts that Priory Hall was so unstable that, if a fire broke out, it would spread through the development in minutes. Alison Doyle describes her fear during those 48 hours which they were given to pack up their lives and leave their family home: “I will never forget the sense of panic as we realised we had been living in a ticking time-bomb for over four years. Living on the third and fourth floors, we would never have gotten out had there been a fire. Having to decide what parts of Sean’s [her son] first year were not important enough to keep while we packed all of our belongings up quickly was heart-breaking.”

Initially, they were informed that would be returning to their homes within five weeks, on 28th November 2011. The residents received a 16-page document from the council detailing how nearly every single fixture and fitting in Priory Hall was either unsafe or badly constructed, and that it would be weeks before they would be able to return to their homes.

The disgraced property developer Thomas McFeely who developed the site was ordered to conduct the necessary repairs, but when it was discovered that the works were not being carried out to schedule, a court order forced him and his workers off the site and denied them access to the apartment block.

The site has not been touched

Elaine McCahill investigates the ongoing efforts by residents of Priory Hall to reclaim their homes

Illustration: Alice Wilson

“

“I will never forget the sense of panic as we realised we had been living in a ticking timebomb for over four years.”

since.

Instead, Dublin city council has been paying for 24-hour security, which over the past year has cost more than the temporary accommodation for the residents, coming in at just over ¤697,000. Despite this constant security presence, and having to show ID in order to access their properties, Ursula’s apartment has been broken into twice.

McFeely is a former Irish Republican Army (IRA) hunger striker from Northern Ireland who made a fortune through real estate; in late August, his multi-million euro house in Dublin was seized after he defaulted on his mortgage, and he has subsequently been proclaimed bankrupt against his wishes. He has taken a legal action on the enforced bankruptcy and is expected to appear in court next on 14th December, a week before another Christmas that these people will not be able

to spend in their homes.

The first Christmas that they spent out of their homes was described by both Niall and Ursula as “horrific”, commenting that they had no energy “to make an effort”, but that they will have to do so this year as they don’t know when they will be able to return to their homes. They are still, for the most part, living out of their suitcases, with their furniture in storage and unable to make their temporary accommodation feel like home.

This temporary, rented accommodation in the Dublin 13 area is being paid for by Dublin city council, and, while some residents have negotiated a moratorium on their mortgages, some are still paying the mortgage on an apartment in which they cannot live. Those who have received a moratorium find their mortgages consistently accruing massive interest, which will have to be paid back once the moratorium is not renewed or they are actually able to return to Priory Hall. The interest as a result of these moratoria means that thousands have been added to the cost of some residents’ mortgages, and this may result in an added 600 to their monthly mortgage repayments when they return to paying their mortgages.

As Usher describes: “A lot of families got what they thought would be short-term moratoriums. That was fine when it was looking like they’d be back in within three months, but a year on that mortgage is just getting bigger and bigger. It has added about ¤15,000 to most mortgages.”

Many have expressed their distress over the unjust financial drain into which they have been cast. If Dublin city council succeeds in overturning the court order that requires them to pay these residents’ rent,

some of the refugees of Priory Hall will not only have to pay rent for their current accommodation but also pay back their mortgages as well as the accrued interest. This will mean that the majority of them have to default on their mortgages if they have to pay rent. As Meehan expounds: “At the end of the day, we will have to default on the mortgage if we also have to pay rent.”

As well as the financial strain, the situation has also disrupted her relationship with her husband: “We’re like ships passing in the night, but we both have to work to keep it all going. If it came to paying rent as well, we just wouldn’t be able. We’re working all the hours we can, something would have to give …”

Both Stephanie and her husband, Fiachra, work as many hours as possible trying to keep things afloat. They now use a mortgage adviser to handle their dealings with the bank, who “… is providing his services pro bono, which is a huge weight off our shoulders. It shows there are still good people out there, because we felt we were really thrown to the wolves.”

Their words reflect the hurt and torment that these people, cast out of their homes through no fault of their own, are going through. The supreme court date for Dublin city council to overturn the order that requires them to pay for temporary accommodation, has been pushed back a number of times and the residents find themselves in limbo, unable to move on with their lives due to financial suffocation.

Many had hoped to have started a family or got married by now after having bought their apartment as a young couple back in 2005. Their lives are now on pause, waiting for Mc-

Feely, the government and the construction company to accept responsibility for the risks they took in building and selling such dangerous, unfit properties, and to go about fixing the dilapidated blocks of apartments that are now said to be infested by rats and fallen into further disrepair.

The story of Priory Hall is held up as a prime example of Ireland’s punctured bubble of the property boom both at home and internationally, with the New York Times describing it as “the worst example” of the craziness of the 2000s. As Dearbhail McDonald, the legal editor on the Irish Independent and the author of Bust: How the Courts Exposed the Rotten Heart of the Irish Economy, explained: “Priory Hall embodies the craziness of the decade, where cheap credit led to houses and apartments being thrown up virtually overnight, often in entirely unsuitable areas and, in many cases, without regard to the quality of the housing.”

Despite their well-attended and well-documented march last weekend, there does not appear to be an immediate solution in sight. Local councillors like Brian MacDowell have been very supportive, but the continuous refusal of the minister for community, environment and local government, Phil Hogan, to meet with them is a source of frustration. The residents believe that he should endeavour to be a part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

The impending winter looks bleak for the unfortunate residents of Priory Hall, but they still hope for a solution, and that the apartments they once called home will soon become home again, instead of being “a noose around our necks”.

256 evacuated 48 hours notice

€2,136,943

spent on Priory Hall

€396,460 spent on hotel accommodation

€335,616

spent on surveying, engineering, and fire safety consultancy work

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

10

InDepth

“Who lives here belongs here” Rónán Burtenshaw talks to Anti-Deportation Ireland about the challenges facing asylum seekers in Ireland and their campaign to organise migrants to be at the forefront of the struggle against injustice

I

met the activists from AntiDeportation Ireland (ADI) at a small art exhibition in south inner-city Dublin. Showcasing the paintings of local artist Anthony Hackett, “Beyond Borders” had a clear and articulate political message. It displayed images that were at once particular and universal; distinct and intriguing, yet showing diverse faces in scenes that felt as though they could be anywhere.

The exhibit was opened by Luke Bukha, a Zimbabwean anti-racist activist in Ireland who was involved in the establishment of ADI back in January. He spoke to me afterwards with his colleagues Alessandro Zagato, an Ital-

ian who lectures in sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and “John”. John, a close relative of an iconic west-African revolutionary leader assassinated in the late 20th century, is in Ireland on political asylum and spoke to us on the condition of pseudonymity.

His concerns about political retribution and persecution by the state in an upcoming asylum hearing provided evidence of the vulnerable position of deportable migrants which was assume a central position in our conversation.

ADI was officially launched on 3rd October with an event in the offices of the Unite union in Dublin and a report by

Dr Elena Moreo of Trinity’s Department of Sociology.

The report, discussing the human and economic costs of deportation, said Ireland’s policy in the area “reflect[ed] a wider European trend of treating asylum and migration as a security issue which requires forms of deterrence.”

It went on to describe the conditions of deportation as “inhumane and degrading”, noting that they “often involv[ed] the use of violent methods of restraint and psychological intimidation.”

The report detailed how one in five people deported from this country since 2010 have been children, while the overall cost of removing 280

Our Place On Earth by Anthony Hackett. Part of his exhibition Beyond Borders in The Back Loft, St. Augustine Street, Dublin 8

persons from Ireland in 2011 was in excess of 1m.

Containing meticulous scholarship on the state of play regarding deportations in the country, and harrowing testimony from those who have fallen victim to it, the document concluded with the three “specific demands” of ADI: “an immediate end to all deportations; the immediate abolition of the direct provision system; and the right to work for people seeking asylum.”

The first two come up almost immediately during the interview. “We are against deportation. This is a fundamental principle, but this is very abstract,” Zagato explained, “We think that the system as it is now is irrational. The idea that one person can spend six or seven years in a condition of deportability is completely wrong. Our concrete politics focus on the extremes of the system, with direct provision being another example.”

“Deportability” is a term used to refer to the precarious condition in which failed asylum seekers and illegal migrants find themselves in between deportation orders being issued and put into effect.

The system of direct provision, which was officially introduced by the Irish government in 2000, requires those seeking asylum to remain in statedesignated accommodation centres. Under direct provision, asylum seekers are not allowed to work or study and are dependent on an allowance of ¤19.10 per week (¤9.60 for children).

ADI was set up with a distinct philosophy for groups working in the area, aiming to put migrants “at the forefront of the struggle fighting for their rights and conditions.”

“For some of us as immigrants there was something missing,” Bukha explained. “There were a lot of residents and nationals working with NGOs [non-governmental organisations] in the area, but we wanted those in the process of deportation to have a voice. We did not believe, as some others did, that they were too weak or precarious. If you tell people every time ‘You are vulnerable’, then they will be scared. I think what we see in this campaign is that people are ready to

Syrian youth: rebels with a cause The war in Syria has dominated the headlines for months but Caelainn Hogan now looks at the human side, profiling one young man’s experience against Bashar al-Assad.

A Caelainn Hogan Guest Contributor

recent article by Robert Fisk reported that 48% of 18-19 year olds in Syria are jobless, with 58% of the population who are under 24 years old being unemployed, a figure which is higher than that of Egypt. Fisk noted that Syria’s jobless youth now have a new occupation as activists and combatants in the Syrian revolt.

Burhan Agha Mousa is one such activist, a 27-year-old living as a refugee in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, close to the border with Syria. An invite on Facebook brought him to the first demonstration in Bab Sbaa, his neighbourhood in the now besieged city of Homs, where he remembers the small gathering outside the mosque after Friday prayers suddenly chanting ITALICS “Allahu Akbar” ITALICS in public, an action previously inconceivable in a society repressed by fear.

From that day, Burhan took an active part in the demonstrations, despite an increasingly violent clampdown on such protests by government security forces. Due to his activism, one day he was arrested, bundled into the back of a white Hyundai by men he says were ITALICS shabiha, ITALICS the pro-regime militia, and brought to a jail where he was held for 10 days and tortured.

“When I got out of the jail, I continued my activism and they wanted to arrest me again,” he explains. “They arrested my cousin twice and they wanted to arrest me too, so someone told me: ‘Burhan, get out of Syria, get out right now, today better than tomorrow.’”

He fled across the border to the relative safety of Lebanon, though he remains here without official papers and constantly fears he will be sent back if apprehended by Lebanese security forces. He lives in a cramped two-room flat with his father and brother in a dilapidated apartment block.

Since coming to Tripoli, Burhan has found a vocation as a media officer for the Syrian Refugee Network in Tripoli, funded by the oppositional (and predominantly US-based) Syrian National Council (SNC).

Like many young activists, he invests his time taking videos of the protest marches by the Syrian refugee community in Tripoli and interviewing refugee families. He regularly

facilitates foreign journalists and has himself appeared on al-Jazeera and the BBC. He says he always had an interest in journalism. The revolution has perhaps given him an opportunity he would never have had before.

Though many of his friends have joined the Free Syrian Army, he was advised to stick to activism and to assist the media section of the opposition because of his English. He has dedicated himself to organising and leading many of the anti-Assad demonstrations in support of the revolution in Tripoli, often taking command of the loudspeaker and leading songs and chants himself.

Like all young Syrian men, Burhan had to complete one year of obligatory military service with the Syrian army. He counts himself lucky that he had already finished this service before the uprising began in March of last year. His younger brother, however, was still in service and risked his life to defect. Burhan says that before his brother escaped he was imprisoned for refusing to open fire on civilians, a light sentence due to his officer being kind. His brother had told him stories of other soldiers he knew who had been shot by their officers for refusing to open fire.

“They say secret service stand behind them, and if they don’t shoot they will be shot.”

Rising tensions between the Sunni majority in Tripoli and the small community of Alawites there (who are generally in support of the Syrian regime) have led to increasingly violent clashes and casualties, sparking old enmities from Lebanon’s brutal civil war. In the rival neighbourhoods of Bab Tabbaneh and Jebel Mohsen, tanks patrol the narrow streets and the walls are littered with bullet holes. Burhan and his friends, having avoided taking up arms in Syria, are now being drawn into the conflict here.

Burhan admits the opposition has faults and not all its actions have been justified, though he says this is true of all revolutions. “It’s war, and you must do everything,” he says simply.

Burhan believes people will choose the SNC once the regime is toppled, arguing that fears of a new Islamist regime

are unfounded as extremists make up a minority of the opposition and Salafism was never popular in Syria before. He is adamant that Syria will become a true democracy, though he is vague about how exactly he believes this will be achieved.

“We make a revolution for democracy and freedom. We will not accept that we kill Bashar and then come under another Bashar,” he adds.

In Tripoli’s hospitals, many young Syrians who bear the physical impact of this conflict are eager to return to Syria to take up arms with the opposition. Despite serious injuries, some losing arms and legs from bullets and shrapnel, their wounds seem to have only dispersed their fear and made them feel they have nothing more to lose.

Amjed Habuk, 21, had only arrived to the hospital six days previously, having endured four days of struggling to cross the border. After a mortar exploded in front of him, his hand had to be amputated and one of his legs was badly broken, with it now being held together by a crude external fixator.

“I will be a fighter when I go back,” says a 27-year-old electrician from Kedder in the Homs countryside, who has been at Tripoli general hospital for four months and is eager to return to Syria. He was not a fighter when he sustained his injuries, caught in the blast from a tank shell that government forces shot during a protest.

This spurring to arms and understandable retaliation among Syria’s youth is, perhaps, what fuels concerns of reprisals against those who supported the regime, as well as Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities, once the opposition take power.

However, activists like Burhan are resolved that, once the revolution is over, those who fought with the regime and are guilty of committing atrocities against civilians will face justice not through the barrel of a gun but through a fair judicial system.

“After revolution [is] finished we will take to the jail any man with a hand with Syrian blood, if he was Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Christian. We will judge him and take him to the jail … Syria, in the future, I think, will be for all Syrians.”

Burhan at his flat in Tripoli

speak and act themselves.”

Their critique of NGOs is nuanced but fundamental. “Our aim is to struggle with those facing deportation. NGOs are not political groups, they are people with jobs and don’t do that. I think there is a distinction between doing something for a political reason and a professional one, even if both can provide benefits. NGOs are often funded by government, tied by their red tape and necessitated to listen to them. We don’t suffer from this.”

“I think NGOs open one eye and close another, in some ways,” Bukha added. “They do offer services to migrants but, if they were doing what they say they were doing, there wouldn’t be any space for us.

The fact that we are becoming more popular shows that there’s a vacuum. Because when the NGOs clock-off and switch off their phones, there’s nowhere to go. But that’s when things are happening, and that’s when they call us.”

The trauma of the deportation process, often occurring at night and with the use of force, can have serious psychological a effects. During the interview John brought up the case of Emmanuel Landa, a 62-yearold former diplomat under Mobutu in Zaire who suffered severe physical and mental duress during a protracted deportation process.

After suffering a heart attack when initially seized for deportation in 2011 his plane was turned around over Algeria due to the conflict in Libya, after which he suffered two further heart attacks before being found dead in his apartment last month. According to John he “had been driven mad”.

“People stay in these places for years, waiting for residency or to be deported. They are in a condition which is not free.

They can’t work and are frequently in one room with a whole family and under a lot of stress. The hope for something that in many cases is not coming, mixed with the threat of deportation, brings depression. We see this.”

Earlier in the year, the group was witness to another controversy involving a Nigerian family whose deportation,

ironically, took place on World Refugee Day in June. The father, convicted of drug dealing, was taken along with his wife and children. The mother, “in desperation” according to Zagato, attempted to self-harm before being pulled out into the road, barely dressed and pepper-sprayed. A wound from a recent surgery opened up during the fracas and she had to be treated in hospital before being deported.

“If people knew exactly what was happening with deportation they would not keep quiet,” according to John, “but stories like this are reported as a single criminal being deported. No one even mentions the family or children.” He argues that there is a lot of ignorance amongst the population in general about deportation, with few able to distinguish between asylum seekers, refugees and migrants.

But the group also highlight significant problems with what they call the “deportation industry”. “Most centres that hold asylum seekers are privately-run, while many hotels now in use were in danger of closing beforehand,” Zagato said, also highlighting the millions made by businessmen like Seamus Gillen of Bridgestock, who has been involved in the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers in both the UK and Ireland.

One Bridgestock facility, Lisbrook House in Galway, faces closure in the coming days after a government decision to “consolidate” accommodation used by the Reception and Integration Agency (RIA) nationally. The decision, which leaves 273 residents facing dispersal to different parts of the country, has been met with protests.

On the back of the dispute in the west, thejournal.ie on Saturday published an article revealing that 53 people seeking asylum in Ireland have died while in state care over the past decade. One quarter of those who died were under five years of age, while one third of asylum seekers in Ireland (1,789) are children.

The minister for justice, Alan Shatter, responded to the deaths by saying that, although the deaths were “tragic”, the RIA has provided accommoda-

tion for “over 50,000 persons over the course of the twelve years the direct provision policy has been in place, and the numbers of deaths need to be viewed proportionately and against this background.”

These responses are perhaps why ADI explicitly eschew the kind of integration with the government that NGOs working in the area utilise. “We are willing to be pragmatic to make material gains for asylum seekers, we are realistic.

But we are working towards the end of deportation and this comes into conflict with some very foundational aspects of the nation-state.”

“To say that you have to deport someone because they are a criminal doesn’t make any sense. We have prisons here, if necessary,” Bukha argues, “but that’s the thing. Prisons are meant to rehabilitate people and return them to the community, whereas there’s the stat wants to exclude asylum seekers from the community. We take the opposite approach. I think a lot of people would benefit greatly from being able to stay here, much more than the people of this country would from expelling them.”

And, on the broader question, do they believe that deportation in its current form will be transcended in their lifetimes? “It’s good to dream, but it’s better to keep trying.

It’s an international struggle and we know that there are other people doing what we are doing all over the world.

That’s enough for now.”

Anti-Deportation Ireland will host a fundraising event in conjunction with Anti-Racism Network Ireland on Saturday, November 10th, 2012. MishMash will take place from 5-10PM in the Back Loft gallery at 7-11 St. Augustine Street in Dublin 8 and include performances from a range of artists showcasing culturally-diverse international music and dance.

Wednesday 17th October 2012

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TRINITY NEWS

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

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Prove me wrong – Mark O’Meara argues that the No vote in the referendum was not an endorsement for USI

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Graphic: Ena Brennan

No choice for the Students’ Union but to communicate Callum Jenkins bemoans the widespread disengagement from student politics, and exhorts the Students’ Union to engage effectively with its membership

T

Callum Jenkins Staff Writer

he Students’ Union president, Rory Dunne, has commented on the results of the disaffiliation referendum: “Trinity students have voted to remain affiliated with USI [the Union of Students in Ireland].” But have they? 2,431 votes were cast; that may seem like a lot, but when you compare it to the 16,747 that were registered as students last year, that is a 14.5% turnout.

Unfortunately this is not an isolated incident; only 22% voted in the election for Students’ Union sabbatical officers last year.

The conclusion from this is obvious: the majority of students do not give a damn about student politics. Instead of harking back to the “good old days” of student politics, it is much more constructive to try and understand why there is such disengagement from the student body.

The truth, which may make for uncomfortable reading for elected officers of the union, is that other students just don’t believe that they make a difference to their everyday lives.

The most prominent campaign of both our union and the USI is the campaign against fees.

This is an important issue to all (or, maybe I should say, most) students, yet it was considered that there was a poor turnout from Trinity students at the last major anti-fees protest. I was one of those who attended; but, did I feel like I was genuinely influencing the decision-making process? No, of course not!

Before someone jumps to the union’s defence, I am not saying that it does not play a very important role in student life. What I am saying instead is that many students do not see this. They feel that the union is playing at politics with no actual power; so, why should they care who is a sabbatical officer, or whether we are affiliated with the USI? Voter disengagement is not something which is restricted to our student body, but is, in fact, symptomatic of society at large. Turnouts are falling. I put that down to the same problem: voters feel that their vote does not make a difference, that it

doesn’t change anything.

What is the solution? Changing people’s attitudes is not easy, but, since the electorate in a university changes radically every year, it may not take as long as it might for society in general. The onus falls almost entirely on the Students’ Union itself.

The union has to be seen to make a difference on the socalled bread-and-butter issues that affect students’ daily lives.

To pinpoint these, the union must look at what is actually important to students: things like accommodation, food and, yes (probably most importantly), drink.

The job of re-engagement does not just fall to the sabbatical officers. It falls primarily to the first point of contact for most students: the class reps.

They must make their class feel that any concerns raised are being taken seriously by the union.

However, it is not all down to the union itself; student media play an important role in influencing the opinions

“

The truth, which may make for uncomfortable reading for elected officers of the union, is that other students just don’t believe that they make a difference to their everyday lives.

of the student population.

This role comes in two parts.

Firstly, when the union does something which genuinely improves student life, College’s various papers need to ensure that everyone is aware of this.

Their second and more important role is holding the union to account for any failings and ensuring that the union knows what is expected of them by the student population at large.

Communication is vital from all sides. The union must ensure that the student population is aware of how it makes a difference to their lives. The student population must make the union aware of what they want them to do.

If the Students’ Union makes itself part of the everyday life of average students, then it will find it much easier to engage people in its campaigns. If this happens, we may see a greater turnout come election time, and this can only be a good thing.

The Orange Order: a view from the ledge John Porter analyses the complex and multifaceted relationship of the Orange Order with Protestants in Ulster

O John Porter Staff Writer

n Saturday 29th September, 30,000 men and women paraded to Stormont to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Ulster covenant. The parade, which was largely composed of Orange Order lodges and other Protestant societies like the Apprentice Boys of Derry, passed without serious incident, despite fears on the part of the police and Catholic residents. Residents have, however, claimed that the Belfast lodges broke their promise to only play hymns outside St Patrick’s cathedral, by allegedly playing the famous Orange anthem The Sash.

Yet, in general, it was agreed that the parade was an example of what could be possible if respect were shown and compromises made. Fr Michael Sheehan, the administrator of St Patrick’s cathedral, said: “I think a degree of respect was shown that hasn’t been seen

before.” This has come at a pleasing time for the police and parade bodies, given the large number of anniversaries in the coming decade: the 1916 Rising, the Declaration of Independence and the creation of Northern Ireland. The Police Service of Northern Ireland assistant chief constable, William Kerr, expressed his hope that this parade would set “a positive platform for dealing with sensitive parades.”

Certainly, it is the hope of nearly everyone that the violence often seen at parades, which indeed seems to have increased in recent years, will fade away into distant memory.

Yet, many question the need for parading. Is it unnecessary provocation? Does it merely inflame tensions? Questions can indeed be raised as to whether the Orange Order should be allowed to exist at all, considering it is an organisation found-

ed on sectarian principles that directly discriminates against other religions.

I come from an Orange family. When I was seven years old, the Twelfth of July was the best day of the summer; a day filled with bouncy castles, candy floss and fights with cheap plastic swords, and tacked on to this was marching for about an hour in total. I loved the day, but was obviously too young to appreciate the full significance of what was going on. All the while, a very mild form of indoctrination was taking place.

I was aware at the time that Catholics were different to us, and that we should obviously remain separate; this is the natural unthinking acceptance of a child.

If I were to return to such an event now, I’m sure I would feel very uneasy with the flag waving, the drum beating, the barely-contained sectarianism, the

peculiar mix of semi-religious ceremonies and lads gradually growing more intoxicated, rowdy, and obnoxious. I am however perplexed by the fact that, as I have grown further apart from the Orange Order, my parents have grown closer to it, seeing it now as having more importance than ever. Perhaps they are clinging to a vestige of the past, in desperate hope that they can turn back the clock to when the words on every unionist’s lips were: “Never, never, never.”

To a certain extent, I feel a sense of embarrassment at my family’s involvement with the Orange Order. When I’m talking to them I will criticise it harshly, and yet, I feel a certain duty to defend it and them in public. I can’t deny that bigotry exists within the Orange Order; it is written into its very constitution, and will be openly expressed by nearly any mem-

ber you care to ask. What must be remembered, though, by the numerous commentators who have passed judgement on the Orange Order since the centenary parade is its significance for the community.

It is a widespread opinion that Ulster Protestants are on the wrong side of history.

They are generally viewed as the enslavers, the overseers, akin to white South Africans.

They will forever be labelled as ignorant aggressors who put pause to the idyll of a united independent Ireland that so many young men died dreaming about. In my opinion, being painted as such essentially leaves an Ulster Protestant with two choices: either they reject their heritage, tradition and culture, as I have done; or they fully embrace it, and become more active in defending it, as my parents have done.

While nearly every unionist

is glad that the Troubles seem to have ended, many will still express feelings of betrayal at the way this was brought about, and many still feel a sense of chagrin at the fact that they must share government with Sinn Féin (or Sinn Féin/IRA, as they are often still called).

A feeling of betrayal and being portrayed as backward and ignorant can be a powerful draw toward old-fashioned and comforting institutions like the Orange Order. The Orange Order is a reminder to many Ulster Protestants of the good old days, which have sufficient rose-colouring for some to truly believe that the old days were better for Catholics as well as Protestants.

For this reason it is not as simple as castigating the Orange Order as a hopelessly outdated sectarian organisation that only under-educated people would join. The Orange

Order continues to provide incredibly powerful communal ties; the Twelfth is one of the few events that will be attended by every generation in the population. The Orange Order guarantees a strong sense of personal identity in a time when many personality traits and identities shift from week to week. I would not wish to be involved with the Orange Order, but I cannot blame those who are members for wishing to keep alive what is a fundamental root of the Ulster Protestant tradition.

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

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Seen and heard? Contributors debate the Chldren’s Referendum

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Ask not what arts can do for you, but what arts can do for society Rather than allowing themselves to be subjected to a shallow, slanted line of questioning, the arts and humanities should be asking the difficult, deep questions, argues Manus Lenihan

U Manus Lenihan Comment Editor

nder current austerity policies (I refuse to use the word “times” or “climate”, as if they were as impersonal and unchangeable as the weather or the calendar), arts courses are in trouble. Arts in University College Dublin, the biggest course in the country, has seen applications fall dramatically in the last few years.

Part of the cause is an implicit and explicit devaluation of arts subjects. The explicit question runs along the lines of: “Why should the government fund you to study airy-fairy courses like English and history when they’re cutting back child benefit?” The implicit statement rings out every time someone says: “You won’t get a job out of that,” or talks about the “knowledge economy”.

“In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty programme is a first-class education,” Barack Obama stated in 2010. He felt the need to begin with “In the 21st century”, and the late Alexander Cockburn pointed out that this was intended to convey a cutting-edge, high-tech image: squeaky-clean labs instead of dark satanic mills, and highly-qualified professionals instead of wage slaves.

Jack Metzgar of Roosevelt University provides a reality check: around two-thirds of US jobs do not demand a third-level education at all. As a result, Cockburn wrote, we see millions of young workers in the US getting up to their necks in student debt, just for a chance at a decently-paid job in that top tier. This is a gamble which – for many or, indeed, most – cannot mathematically turn out well.

The same applies for Ireland.

Around 80,000 people make chemical, pharmaceutical, medical, precision engineering and optics products; that is the same number as those who work on farms, and well under a third of the number who work in wholesale and retail trade. Every other day, there is a news story about so many dozen or hundred jobs being created in science and technology. The bigger issue is rarely highlighted: 14,000 jobs lost between April and June this year, which is broadly in line with longer-term trends.

The idea that, if we churn out enough graduates with the right “know-how”, then businesses will flock to Ireland to hire them, is also fantasy. The foreign direct investment of the 1990s was very significant,

but is totally unrepeatable today given the state of the world economy. Generals always fight the last war, or, in this case, the last economic crisis.

Most of us, no matter what or how hard we study, will probably work in the service industry for the foreseeable future.

These facts are not presented to depress anyone who likes science, business or any other subject, but to bring some reality to the knowledge-economy hype and to restate the value of an arts degree.

Neither government, nor indigenous industry (what indigenous industry?), nor foreign direct investment are creating a significant amount of jobs in any sector. The economy is broken and going nowhere under austerity policies. Those who talk up the “smart economy” are trying to disguise this fact by directing people down blind alleys.

The knowledge economy is part of the mythology saying that all you have to do to beat the recession is immerse yourself in a shiny new sector; or start up a business that will most likely fail and leave you crippled with debt; or work for free until you have enough “experience” to demand wages; or go to Canada.

Think about how ministers and journalists now talk about “the agri-food sector” instead of farms. Doesn’t that sound much more dynamic, innovative, forward-thinking, and all the other buzzwords?

The other side of the smarteconomy coin is the implication that arts are not smart.

CAO advice supplements in newspapers usually damn arts courses with very faint praise.

Writing about the topic, the best thing one journalist could say about arts was that it “allows you to keep your options open”, and it is emphasized that their critical-thinking skills and problem-solving abilities have allowed arts graduates to enter advertising, PR, management consultancy and banking.

Teaching was only a sidenote in the article; never mind that around 160,000 people, most of them arts graduates, work in education. It is no great mystery why these predominantly public-sector and decidedly non-smart-economy jobs did not get a mention.

In any case, it is wrong to gauge the social value of knowledge by merely counting jobs, let alone merely counting private-sector jobs. Arts sub-

Photo: George Voronov

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We should apply our criticalthinking skills to reveal the propaganda behind the argument that arts degrees aren’t worthwhile

jects are just as valuable as any other to society. Obviously, they are not as valuable to most businesses or to foreign investors, so they are not job-magnets, and we should not try to pretend that they are.

This trait – value to business – is the only distinction between an arts course and any other subject. Confusion arises due to the shockingly widespread belief that the interests of business and those of society are the same thing.

One example will suffice here. Through the study of history, we realize that everything we see as monolithic, overpowering and eternal in our everyday lives or in the wider world is just one tiny point on an epic trajectory. We see the mountains of old and continuing stories that define everything from the language one speaks to the macroeconomic history of one’s country. You see yourself, and your time, in context.

This is worth absolutely nothing to the vast majority of businesses, but it is of immense benefit for society to have widespread knowledge and insight

into the past. Otherwise, we can no more interpret the present and act to influence the future than we can write a review of a film based on a single frame.

The same test applies to most academic subjects. There are vast swathes of scientific knowledge which are of no use to business, but of immense use to humanity. Arts degrees, however, meet with special hostility: graffiti in every other cubicle in College give us a crude invitation as to what to do with an arts degree.

Official political, media and managerial discourse holds up two myths as truths: firstly, the knowledge economy; and secondly, the belief that benefit to business equals benefit to society. Both give rise to the view, voiced self-deprecatingly by most arts students, that literature, philosophy, history, film studies and all the rest are self-indulgent luxury interests.

Then, the first line of defence when we come under serious criticism is to insist that – hang on – some of us will get jobs in banks.

Of course, whatever about

them being beneficial to society as a whole, we need to feed ourselves, and people are turning away from arts courses because it is thought that there are no jobs at the other end. We should first apply our arts-student critical-thinking skills and see that, while there are little bits of truth in this, a lot of it is propaganda.

Secondly, we should address those grains of truth. We should ask why people with a deep knowledge of the past, which explains every aspect of the present, of political discourse, of the creative arts we enjoy every day of our lives, of the very bases of understanding reality and ethics and a vast range of other areas, are seen as useless and are not economically rewarded.

We live in a society that encourages us to ask “how” to do this job or that job, but penalizes us for wanting to ask “why”.

Apply your problem-solving abilities to that.

Through a window, darkly Unemployment robs individuals of their purpose and self-esteem.

Megan Nolan reflects on a time in her life characterised by isolation, dependence issues and being terrified of the a!ernoon

W Megan Nolan Staff Writer

hen I was on the dole, I would walk past the same mid-range Italian restaurant every day.

There was something about the place which drew me to it; I would pretend to scrutinise the menu, looking shiftily beyond it at the bickering families and rosy candlelit couples, at women in Reiss blazers and sensible heels, sharing their Friday night bottle of wine, gossiping intently over uneaten carbonara. Who were these people?

Who were these people who left the house at eight, five days in a row? They stated something indefinable but inexplicably hurtful to me with their presence, showcasing their ability to survive where I had lost mine.

I lived in Ranelagh for the entire time I was dependent on social welfare. Ranelagh, in its entirety, is a self-congratulatory display of the ability to thrive in our society. Its main street is made up of different ways to tastefully rid yourself of excess income: restaurants with typewriter font on the menus; independent book shops; neat little boutiques which sell detachable collars and shrugs. An old bakery endearingly sold “Sex and the City” cupcakes. I loved the place, although it didn’t belong to me, nor I to it. So much of what I had thought made up a “good” neighbourhood, when I had first moved there with a job, turned out to be connected to consumption, inaccessible to me in my new life.

I was working on and off in stage management, and had excitedly rented the studio in Ranelagh while rehearsing a new play. It was the first apartment I had lived in alone and, although tiny, was beautiful to me, with its high ceilings and

view of the leafy redbrick street outside. To begin with, I found it an immensely peaceful experience to live without others: the ability to amiably sit with myself and not require distraction or company was comforting. I had spent much of the previous two years trying, with varying levels of resulting disaster, to sate the incredible need I had somehow developed to be distracted from my own thoughts.

That, in a way, was what had led me to be living alone and unemployed in a bedsit at the age of 21. Most people I knew were then in their final months of college. That was where I should have been, too. I had been to Trinity, and dropped out. I had been to the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, and dropped out. Something fundamental had changed since I had been a schoolgirl, when I could not have been surer that I would move to Dublin, study in Trinity and become a writer.

Something had happened, or had failed to happen, and before I knew it my life had unravelled with such pace and assurance that it seemed unstoppable.

What had happened, what had I done, that I was no longer somebody with ambition? I had become somebody terrified to look out the window when I woke, in case it was 3pm again, which it always was. The simple answer is that I became grotesquely dependent on alcohol; and then there is the multitude of less simple answers which lie beneath that dependence. I was afraid to try, for one. I had never been academically brilliant, but was generally considered clever in school, which gave me

a lazy confidence that lasted until I completed my mediocre leaving cert. Trinity instantly overwhelmed me with its abundance of people who were infinitely more gifted than me.

These people were not only naturally more academically inclined than me; they also displayed the kind of work ethic that I had never bothered to learn. Taking all of this in, panic-stricken, it seems I immediately disregarded the option of trying altogether. How could I be shown to have a sub-par intellect if I didn’t employ it at all? I was 18 years old and living away from my parents for the first time in my life. I was lonely, and furious with myself for my terrible homesickness, and so I became better and better acquainted with the selection of ¤6 wines in my local Spar. It’s difficult to write about my relationship with alcohol without reverting to reflexive self-mockery.

It seems faintly absurd to speak about it seriously, because it has never seemed as serious as one would almost wish these things to be. I have no James Frey-style harrowing stories about open facial wounds and interventions. I have only a sadly repetitive and small collection of memories which make up two of the prime years of my youth.

Many of my habits were shared with friends, who, crucially, were able to motivate themselves to at least minimally attend college and maintain some semblance of routine. I was unable, and woke into the dull nothingness of alreadyspent afternoons. I nursed myself in the stuffy mess of my bedrooms, sedating my frantic, feverish brain with junk food. I

“

I have only a sadly repetitive and small collection of memories which make up two of the prime years of my youth.

killed time, rewatching DVDs and refreshing Twitter, until it was acceptable to text around asking who was up for a drink.

Until recently I had no conception of how so many people could take a sip of their first glass of wine and get that indulgent, blissful look of relaxation. They loved that first sip, the introduction into their weekend treat. I hated the first sip; always thin, acidic, nauseainducing; always the necessary stepping stone to that second or third glass, the vaguely underwater, stoned feeling of it; oblivion.

After dropping out of college and, a long time after that, hitting a sort of rock bottom, I came out on the other side. I went home to my family for a while, went to the doctor, and re-learned how to get up in the morning and eat three meals a day. I thought, with the jubilant certainty of somebody in recovery, that I could never return to that way of life.

My few months being unemployed showed me how vulnerable that prized return to mental health is. So much of my enduring depression returned, in smaller doses. I was astonished at how much of what I considered necessary to be a functioning member of society was connected to having disposable income. The day I collected my dole, I would buy Grazia magazine, the hateful rag to which I am addicted, and a can of Diet Coke and tobacco, and feel normal again for that afternoon.

But the utter lack of purpose to my days meant that even treats like those quickly felt empty; these little perks generally cushion the hard edges of a working week. Without that structure, I felt hopelessly undeserving and pathetic. Living in a state of dependence is demeaning and humiliating to most.

It is lonely and extremely damaging to live your life entirely outside of the hours of the majority of those who surround you. But, oddly, I found Sundays the most difficult to navigate. There is a seemingly endless number of hours to fill between buying the paper and going to sleep. I returned to a time in my life where I could not soberly go to sleep without the sound of other human voices in the room: a Mad Men box set; a radio show.

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

Comment

14

The backlash of endorsing Mitt, Conor McGlynn on Stacey Dash’s unexpected tweet

p. 15 Illustration: Ena Brennan

Think global, redact locals College is now looking to high-paying international students to plug the funding holes.

But what does this mean for potential future Irish students, asks David Barker

W David Barker Deputy Comment Editor

Time for USI to practice what they preached With Trinity students having voted No in this month’s disaffiliation referendum, those who favoured reforming the Union of Students in Ireland from the inside must now keep to their word, writes the manager of the Yes campaign, Mark O’Meara

I Mark O’Meara Contributor

t is just a few days since I stood in House Six to hear the result of the disaffiliation referendum. A two-to-one defeat would not normally be easy to take, although at that stage I was so exhausted from campaigning that I did not have the energy to react. I just shrugged, waited for the Students’ Union’s communications officer to get a few quotes from me, and then walked slowly to the nearest computer room to start and finish the assignment that I had been putting off for the preceding week.

The campaign took up every free second I had for the previous four weeks, so it is worth remembering how it all started in the first place and realising why it is important that the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) does not take the result as an endorsement of the organisation that it is today.

In November 2011, just after the USI-led occupations, a number of students emailed Trinity College, Dublin Students’ Union outlining their frustration with the USI and their annoyance with the fact that actions were being taken in their name, and with their money, but without their consent. The then-Students’ Union president, Ryan Bartlett, decided to set up a meeting for everyone who had emailed him. The aim was to discuss the problems each student had with the USI and to determine what course of action Trinity could take to rectify the situation.

At the start of the meeting, the idea of disaffiliation was labelled as the “nuclear option”; an action we should only take if all else failed. But after the history of problems within the USI and Trinity’s attempts at fixing them was recited, it was clear that all else had, in fact, already failed.

Nearly a year later, I was confirmed as the campaign manager for the Yes campaign. In the following week I held a number of three-hour meetings with the rest of the team to plan out our campaign from start to finish. It was tough starting with a blank page, but I was proud of the result.

During these meetings we acknowledged a number of problems that might have arisen; as it turns out, our success in predicting the problems did not guarantee our success in being able to deal with them.

We acknowledged that we would be at an immediate disadvantage due to the fact that USI officers, who are on a salary partially paid by us, would be able to stand around the campus all day long while we would have lectures to go to.

We knew how this campaign would ultimately be decided: by those who knew little to nothing about the USI simply turning out to vote for their friend in the class rep elections.

We were all acutely aware of the Young Fine Gael (YFG) issue. There were a number of YFG members on the campaign team, but there were also a number of people on the campaign team with no political affiliation and who wanted to be assured that this was not a YFG campaign, an assurance they quickly received. Yet, the fact that we as a team knew our motivations were not ideological did not remove the likelihood of it being brought up in the campaign, either by those who did not understand the campaign, or by those deliberately attempting to discredit it; likely, a mixture of both.

In light of these facts, running an informative and honest campaign was still the plan.

Our approach was to show that the USI is simply not a credible, capable or accountable representative for our views.

We planned out a number of short articles to be posted on our campaign’s Facebook page throughout the campaigning period, hoping that they would serve as information for those unsure about our arguments.

Our decision to ask Bartlett to take our only speaking place in the debate on disaffiliation, organized by the University Philosophical Society and the University Times, was made because he was in a position to inform students about his experience of working with the USI, the realities of attempting to bring about change, and ultimately why disaffiliation would

be the correct next step in that attempt to bring about better national representation (despite the No campaign’s cynical attempt to label his presence as part of a wider agenda).

His speech was certainly persuasive to those in attendance who had not yet made up their mind, but, in hindsight, our campaign put a lot of effort into the wrong places. Through our hope to be as informative as possible, we forgot about actually winning. We ignored the previously acknowledged fact that the vast majority of voters will not know what the USI is, and will not care, either. We failed to come up with a plan to convince those voters to tick Yes on the ballot paper.

This is where the USI campaign’s manpower came in.

They had the capacity to give dozens of lecture addresses while ensuring they still had campaigners visible around campus. During the second week of campaigning, a Bess student came up to me and said he was voting Yes simply because he was annoyed that the USI had interrupted four of his lectures to give an address about the campaign. It was nice that their tactics had moved one person to our side, but I knew he was the exception to the rule.

Yet, there was little we could do. Our campaigners had lectures to go to, as well as other commitments. I had failed to look for enough people to join the campaign team in the preparation stages, and now we were paying for it.

Even the simple action of putting up our banner in the Arts Building brought its disadvantages, because it meant, due to Students’ Union Electoral Commission rules, that at least one team member had to stay within sight of it the whole time, and therefore could not run off quickly to talk to nearby crowds of people or to give a brief lecture address.

Of course, the referendum’s result was not unexpected.

Feedback during campaigning was mixed. In the Hamilton Building, students regularly told me they had yet to see a No campaigner. Many came up

to me in the Arts Building declaring they were voting Yes, including one guy who said: “I know 10 people voting Yes, I don’t know anyone voting No.” It was tempting to take these stories as more than anecdotal evidence, but I knew the other campaign’s vast superiority of resources would count for a lot.

The purpose of briefly illustrating the campaign is not to make excuses for the result.

After all, we had predicted the obstacles we would face, and, with a bit more preparation and dedication, we could have countered them. I have illustrated the campaign to point out that, if we had run a better campaign with the same arguments, the result may well have been very different. It would therefore be wrong for anyone in the USI to take the result as overwhelming support from Trinity students for either their actions or the way they carry out their business.

In light of the result, we as USI members should be asking: “What now?” Everyone who told me they were voting No seemed to be very unsure about their position, acknowledging the serious problems within the USI, but questioning the possibility of alternatives.

My concern is that the USI will take the result as an endorsement of its organisation.

It will reason that those advocating disaffiliation either did not know what they were talking about or were ideologically blind to reality. The organisation’s immediate response to the result has been less than encouraging.

Ultimately I believe it is now up to those who advocated “reform from the inside” to take the lead. Those advocates, generally originating from the No campaign, now need to show the rest of us what exactly they believe can be done from the inside.

They need to prove to the rest of us that the USI does not need the motivation of disaffiliation to reform itself; they need to prove that reform is indeed possible, and that, in the words of the manager of the No campaign, Jack Leahy, “… there is absolutely nothing in USI that is set against change.” Their campaign was based on this promise to the students.

I remain just as cynical about the USI as I was in November 2011 when the campaign to disaffiliate came into existence. I am not going to hold my breath for change; I don’t expect it to come. However, I would still encourage those who disagreed with me to try to prove me wrong.

ith all the noise and politicking surrounding the fees debate, an important development has gone largely unnoticed. Earlier this month, College launched a new global relations strategy that aims to promote its international brand and, in particular, to strengthen its ties to the booming Asian market for quality education. The scheme hopes to enrich Trinity on a number of fronts: developing global relations; building on alumni networks; boosting philanthropic income; and embedding “internationalisation” into the educational culture of the university. It plans to do all this by doubling the number of foreign students in College.

Due to the timing and circumstances of this new strategy, I believe it is crucial to the fees debate. As students already at Trinity, it is easy for us to repose before the golden promise of an internationalised educational culture and to fail to see that the Irish leaving certificate student could soon become an endangered species in College.

Given the size of our grounds, it is safe to say that Trinity is pretty restricted in the number of students it can take in. Doubling the number of international students significantly decreases the number of domestic students to which the college can offer places, and the reasons why Trinity would want to do such a thing are disturbingly obvious.

It is no secret that the situation regarding third-level fees has drastically stagnated, and it seems as if the college’s administration has taken matters into its own hands. The plain and simple fact, regardless of how utopian this new international Trinity may seem, is that foreign students mean more money; and not just student contribution money, but fully fledged fees. Trinity is gaining the capital that it needs to remain a global player by tapping into the foreign demand for high-quality education, and the genius of this strategy is that it doesn’t target College’s students. It targets the one group of students that university un-

ions can’t protect: leaving cert students.

More international students mean more money; they also mean fewer Irish students. The problem will arise next August, when points for courses at Trinity drastically increase as places in the college become even scarcer. Year on year, we will see fewer and fewer Irish students making the cut into Trinity and, as the number of foreign students grows, so will the college’s bankroll. While I concede that College is doing the best it can at the moment with severely restricted funding and has had to come up with creative solutions in order to maintain standards, I can’t help but feel that this is an underhanded way of doing it.

Both College and, indeed, the provost have respectfully declined to become too involved in the fees debate, not wishing to look like the bad guy to either side. Yet, with this, it seems as if they have resigned themselves to taking matters into their own hands. It is no secret that Trinity desperately needs more funding; the college’s newly appointed viceprovost of global relations, Jane Ohlmeyer, went as far as to reference the demise of universities in the West, commenting: “There is hardly an educational institution in the western world that is not facing some sort of crisis.”

So, while Trinity desperately and obviously needs more funding, it will never publically demand this of the Irish student base and, in the process, solidify its position in Irish culture as an out-of-touch ivory tower. Instead, College’s authorities have cut to the root of the problem and left Ireland out altogether. Their thinking seems to be along these lines: why should Trinity suffer, when there are thousands of students across the globe willing to pay good money for their services without complaining?

Perhaps the most disturbing facet of this venture is the fact that it has been aided and encouraged by our tánaiste, Eamon Gilmore. Gilmore seems

much like Trinity in his attitude, in that he would rather College maintain its current standards so as to remain a global player for Ireland, even if that means Irish students won’t get to experience it. The tánaiste knows that he can’t offer Trinity more funding, and he also knows that he won’t get away with 100% upfront fees; so, he supports a strategy that surely contradicts his party’s typical stance on education.

Traditional leftist politician that he is, Gilmore had this to say of the initiative: “Irish education must be seen as a critical element to supporting Ireland’s future global trading relationships. International collaboration and participation in education ... not only improves the quality and profile of our research and increases opportunities of commercialisation of new technologies, but also enhances the quality of education for our own students.”

Irish education must be seen as a critical element to supporting Ireland’s global trading future, even if it is not Irish students who are being educated.

This new global relations strategy is a sign that Trinity is taking matters into its own hands. If we as students can’t provide them with adequate funding – and our government certainly can’t – they will raise the funds themselves by auctioning off places on courses.

Yes, Trinity has a right to take this course of action, and yes, you can’t wholly blame the college for wanting to maintain its brand; but should our government be supporting such an endeavour? No. While for current College students this strategy may be harmless and even has the potential to be beneficial, the same cannot be said for students looking to apply here in the future. For thousands of hopeful students looking to study in a domestic university with global standards, this strategy could be the beginning of the end. But at least it will be points and not prices that drive Irish kids away, right?

Letter from Students’ Union President Rory Dunne in response to ‘State of Unions’ (Comment, 2nd October)

I am writing in response to an article entitled “State of the Unions” which was published in Trinity News on 2nd October 2012.

I would like to start by saying that the author raises some important issues. If the Students’ Union is to remain relevant to students and for it to evolve with changing demands, we must be open to debate about how we conduct ourselves.

However, I would like to clarify some of the points made and provide a response on behalf of

the Students’ Union.

Firstly, I would like to address the point that, as a “union”, we are compelled de facto to go about our business in a certain manner. The Union has often encountered criticism from a vocal segment of students within College who claim that it is not militant enough when striving to achieve objectives.

The reality is that the Union has developed a professional lobbying capacity, both internally and externally, which has helped us to achieve our aims

in a far more effective manner. To say that nothing can be achieved without the mass mobilisation of students is to ignore the successful implementation of the Student Support Act 2011 by both the Union of Students in Ireland and Trinity College, Dublin Students’ Union, or the facilitation of the payment of the student contribution charge in two instalments here in Trinity.

It is acceptable, in the right context, for someone to call for a different type of union.

Indeed, we encourage such debate as a means of ensuring the Union remains responsive to students’ needs in ever-changing circumstances.

On the other hand, it is not advisable to make assertions such as “… students and their representatives still hold on tight to the ‘free fees’ policy,” when this is simply not true. The student movement is not discouraged from “engaging in activity on every day of the year save one”, as recently evidenced by a record election of class representatives.

We do not carry out our business according to a preconceived notion of a union, but by the will and desires of our members. We cannot have a situation, which the author appears to call for, where an officer wantonly acts outside of their mandate, not for reasons of conservatism or lack of a desire for activism, but so that our actions remain representative of the desires of students.

We can make demands and shout, and I concede that these shouts may be heard, but, as we have seen in recent fee rises, our shouts are not necessarily listened to. We have decided, as a movement, to pursue an alternative path and not to go further down the old one.

I urge readers to consider that the Union forms policy from its members. Should any one member want to change, in any way, the direction of the Union, they are free to do so at Council and I would strongly encourage them to do so.

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

15

The lessons reality television can teach us - Hannah Coogan on falling in love with Honey Boo Boo Child

Comment

p. 19

Race. Closed.

Hypocrisy. Whatever.

The hyper criticial backlash to Stacey Dash endorsing Mick Romney shows the double standards of the liberal establshment, argues Conor McGlynn

I Conor McGlynn Contributor

magine, for a moment, the following scenario: a celebrity, say, Christian Slater, announces on Twitter his support for Barack Obama. Within minutes of his post, his feed is filled with hundreds of hate messages and death threats from Republicans. He is called a traitor to his race; he is told that he should man up, that real men vote for Mitt Romney. There would, surely, be huge public outcry. News outlets around the globe would carry stories of the bigotry of Republicans.

They would be decried as racist and unreconstructed. Romney would probably have to make a public statement condemning the attack in the harshest possible terms. Obama would jump about ten points in the polls and be a shoo-in for the election.

But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that there were no public outrage. Many news channels do not pick up on it, and those that do mock and ridicule Slater. They point to his flagging career, and claim that he is just supporting Obama to gain some publicity.

White comedians lampoon him on television. The notion of a white man actually siding with Obama is seen as simply ludicrous.

You will probably think, quite reasonably, that this incident is impossible outside of a Harper Lee novel. And yet, with two notable differences - race and gender – it is precisely what happened earlier this week.

Stacey Dash, the black actress best known for her role in the 1995 film Clueless, tweeted her support for Mitt Romney last Sunday: “Vote for Romney. The only choice for your future. @mittromney @teamromney #mittromney”. What followed was a barrage of hateful, sexist and racially charged comments. Amongst the less offensive ones: “You’re an Oreo.

May you get cancer twice and die once,” as well as a number of calls that she should kill

herself. Most of the criticism centred on her race and her gender. There were a number of accusations that she was trying to move “from the field to the house”, and that she was selling out on women’s rights.

She was dismissed as “crazy” by the actor Samuel L Jackson. By not supporting Obama, she had committed the moral equivalent of treason.

The hostile reaction to Dash’s tweet highlights two things. Firstly, race is still very much a live issue in American politics, and attitudes do not seem to have changed since Obama took office. At the last election he ran on a platform of hope and change. Four years down the line, his rhetoric has a hollow ring to it; instead of barriers being broken down we find them reinforced. It’s hard to imagine that a black actress who came out in support of George Bush 12 years ago would have evoked this much negative backlash. Now we see huge pressure on minorities to conform and to vote for Obama, under threat of being ostracized like Dash.

The second striking thing is the condescending indifference of the media in relation to this event. Whatever about the behaviour of Obama’s supporters, the limp reaction of news stations alone ought to cause alarm. The story was treated briefly, if at all, by most media outlets, with a number choosing to focus instead on Romney snubbing the children by refusing to appear on Nickelodeon. There was barely any mention of Dash outside the United States. While many pieces on it affirmed her right to vote for whom she pleases, a palpable hostility was present. Many tried to present it as a cynical publicity-grabbing stunt by Dash. The Huffington Post wrote: “Dash’s Romney endorsement caused some to scoff at the entire notion of celebrities getting political.” This is the same site that was report-

Out of sight, out of mind With thousands travelling from Ireland every year seeking termination of pregnancy, it is parsimonious to claim that abortion does not exist here, argues Molly Ó Catháin

L Molly Ó Catháin Contributor

et’s get one thing clear: Irish abortion exists, just not in Ireland. The Department of Health reports that, in 2011, 4149 women travelled abroad to terminate pregnancies.

The consequences of this fact are hugely detrimental to equality in Ireland. The capitalist values of our state have taken human rights, such as education and healthcare, and turned them into capitalist commodities. These can then be sold for profit to the classes who can afford them.

Equally, the rights of women to reproductive choice and control have become a luxury enjoyed by the middle class. If you have the money to travel, you book a Ryanair flight and make an appointment at a foreign clinic. I do not wish to undermine the physical and psychological burden of this experience, faced by approximately 11 Irish women a day, but at least they have the means to make this difficult journey. I want to highlight the cause of those for whom this journey is impossible.

There are many reasons why women are unable to travel abroad for terminations. In today’s economic environment the reality is that, for many working-class women, the funds to travel are simply not within their means. In sheer desperation, women have taken out loans, sold cars and borrowed from friends and family, but this is not a possibility for everyone.

An abortion in the UK costs between ¤600 and ¤2,000, plus the cost of a ferry or flights.

This is a huge amount of money, especially for working-class or unemployed women. Bear in mind too that the reason for

many women choosing to abort is that they are already struggling to support themselves, let alone a child, or in many cases another child.

There are other reasons for women being unable to travel to procure terminations. Consider women who are living as illegal immigrants or whose visas don’t allow them to leave the country. Women living in abusive relationships, in which a partner prevents them from travelling, are yet another vulnerable group in society for whom the exclusive nature of Irish abortion is devastating.

The fact that Irish abortion exists outside of the island of Ireland directly targets the weakest and most disadvantaged in our society, those whom society should aim to strengthen.

The government has yet to legislate even for the 1992 X case, which would give abortion rights to women whose lives are at risk due to pregnancy, including suicidal women.

Although legislation in accordance with the X case would represent groundbreaking progress in Irish society, it would in effect mean that women would be forced to claim to be suicidal in order to procure an abortion at home. This is demeaning to women, implying that they cannot make an objective and rational decision about their own bodies in a fit mental state, but it would also create a “boy who cried wolf” effect on the very real and separate topic of suicide.

The non-secular Catholic state is often blamed for the lack of progress surrounding Irish women’s rights in general, and abortion rights in particular. While this is true, there is another reason which we must

understand: what has truly kept abortion out of Ireland in the modern day is our proximity to the UK. Abortion exists, with varying restrictions, in other traditionally Catholic states such as Spain and Poland. This is primarily due to the huge number of botched backstreet abortions and the consequent deaths. Our close abortion commute has prevented these horrific statistics from becoming a reality here, but those horrific statistics did eventually force other non-secular states to introduce at least limited abortion rights.

In the current economic times, as fewer and fewer women can afford an abortion abroad, we run the risk of seeing a rise in high-risk illegal abortions, especially among women who have had very little sexual and reproductive education. Think about why the wire coat hanger is a prochoice symbol.

While the government fails to make any progress on this topic, they continue to make cuts in areas such as child benefit, back-to-school allowance, one-parent family payment (86% of Irish lone parents are women) and carer’s allowance (80% of those receiving carer’s allowance are women).

Hence the state not only leaves working-class women with no option other than to have the child; they also continue reduce their means to provide for them.

We cannot continue to be a state which ignores the rights of working-class women, once the middle classes have found a solution exclusive to them. Reproductive choice is a right and should be available freely to every woman living in Ireland.

Photo taken from Stacey Dash’s Twitter page

ing, with awestruck reverence, on the cavalcade of celebrities being paraded through the Democratic national convention a little over a month ago.

They also linked to a video of the black comedian W Kamau Bell deriding Dash, writing her endorsement off as nothing but an attempt to get back into the media spotlight.

Had this been an attack on a white actor for supporting Obama, there is no question that it would have been treated differently. This double standard in the media is allowed to pass unnoticed. Granted, race is a fraught issue in the US, perhaps more so than we appreciate in Europe, but the presentation of this event is, at its heart, politically motivated, at a time when Obama is slipping in the polls.

Lurking behind this sort of media coverage is the assumption that there is no way that a black woman could really support Romney. It must be a publicity stunt. There must be something wrong with her.

This is the sort of mindset you find in fanatics destined to blow themselves to pieces in crowded restaurants, or creationists who insist that the world was made 6,000 years ago. If you know that you have the truth, then any dissenters must be either mad or agents of the devil.

The liberal paradigm does not allow for the fact that some African Americans will vote for Romney because they agree with him on policy, or that, after four years notably lacking in change, many people who voted for Obama last time are feeling disillusioned.

This election promises to be close, very close. After an evenly matched vice-presidential debate, everything is riding on the next Obama-Romney contest, later this week. It would be a shame if the American people voted based on outdated racial stereotypes.

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

16

Comment

Children’s Referendum

I William Quill Contributor

n 1978, during a Seanad debate on a referendum to recognise the Adoption Board, Mary Robinson proposed an amendment that would mandate the board to treat children equally regardless of the marital status of their parents. This was rejected at the time. In 1993, in her report on the Kilkenny incest case, Justice Catherine McGuinness made a prominent call for the welfare of children to be recognised in our constitution in such a way that would make early intervention possible and would, again, remove the distinction in such cases between children on the basis of the marital status of their parents.

A Yes vote on 10th November will be a chance to correct these and other legal lacunae; but it will also be much more.

It is a chance for the Irish people to make a clear statement of its values. As we aspire to make Ireland one of the best countries for any young person to grow up in, we have the opportunity to make a statement that our fundamental law will both respect and protect children.

Currently, the constitution can act as a barrier to the courts when they wish to consider children’s best interests in cases involving a natural married family. It is only by clearly including a declaration to protect children as individuals in the constitution itself that we can allow judges and lawmakers the ability to balance children’s rights on one hand with the constitutional aim of promoting and protecting the family on the other.

With the proposed article 42A, section 2, the amendment shifts the constitutional grounds for state intervention from “physical or moral” failings on the part of parents to a question of whether the “… safety and welfare of any of their children is likely to be prejudicially affected …”

This focuses on the impact, rather than on the reasons for any failure on the part of parents. The current provisions

Yes

had allowed two parents in Roscommon, who were the subject of public outrage and an inquiry, to get a high court injunction to prevent the Health Services Executive (HSE) from seeking to remove the children from their care. The parents had neglected and serially abused their children over a period spanning 1996-2004.

While the current wording on intervention does not make it impossible for the state to intervene, it has created a chilling effect where social workers are reluctant to intervene.

The same section 2 in the new article 42A would also introduce the concept of proportionality, giving structure to the levels of intervention. The assumption in the constitution remains that the best place for children is with their families, and the mention made in the proposal that the state would “[i]n exceptional cases … supply the place of the parents” does not have to mean that parents would lose their positions as guardians in cases of intervention. The proportionality clause gives constitutional context to the early stages of intervention. Allowing the state to support families when they are in need, rather than intervening when it may be too late or they are in crisis, will protect vulnerable children.

At the moment, a child can find him- or herself in longterm foster care for a number of reasons. If the biological parents are married, these children cannot be adopted without a ruling of permanent abandonment against the parents. The amendment will guarantee that all children, regardless of the marital status of their parents, will be treated equally in this regard. There are 1,600 children in Ireland in long-term foster care; many of them now have families in the form of their foster parents.

The amendment would allow these children to be adopted, and the accompanying legislation has ensured that this could only be done through the high court with full representation for all parties.

Another provision of this amendment will guarantee that the position of the child be represented in court proceedings, whether those involving threats to their safety or welfare, or more common cases relating to adoption, guardianship, custody or access. Up to

now, a child’s perspective could be sidelined in cases of family law; assumptions can be made as to the best environment for children without direct reference to them. In many cases, when considering both parents in cases of separation and divorce, it is the father who would provide a more stable home for the child. A change in this could increase the likelihood of fathers being considered more favourably in these matters, as judges could no longer make assumptions on the best place for a child without an attempt to ascertain the child’s views.

These are some of the specific ways in which the amendment will make a difference for children’s lives. But the context of this change is important too. Frances Fitzgerald is not merely the minister for the children’s referendum, but the minister for children and youth affairs. While all government departments are subject to severe budgetary constraints, the establishment of this new department ensured that resources for children would be considered in their own right, rather than simply as part of the health budget and managed through the HSE. From next year, a new Child and Family Support Agency will manage resources across the country.

Nor is it all about resources: taking a recommendation from the Ryan report, designated officers will be put in place in sectors working with children, and it is now an offence not to pass on information on the abuse of a child.

This referendum is but one part in a wholescale re-evaluation of the place of children in Irish society, a response to 17 damning reports detailing protection lapses and the effects of failing to give due place to children as valued members of society. The rights of various groups, such as associations or religious bodies, are explicitly acknowledged in the constitution. It is clear that children could benefit from clear constitutional recognition. I look forward to a strong Yes vote, sending a clear message that we value and respect the voice and interests of children in this country.

William Quill is the treasurer of Trinity Young Fine Gael

T Gerry Fahey Contributor

he former supreme court judge Hugh O’Flaherty recently stated that all – or nearly all – of the objectives identified by the Oireachtas joint committee on the constitutional amendment on children are to be found in existing articles of the constitution, in our ordinary legislation or in court judgments; the only one that is not can be dealt with by legislation.

This view is consistent with the view of current supreme court judge Adrian Hardiman, who stated in 2006 regarding the “Baby Ann” case: “It would be quite untrue to say that the constitution puts the rights of parents first and those of children second. It fully acknowledges the ‘natural and imprescriptible rights’ and the human dignity, of children, but equally recognises the inescapable fact that a young child cannot exercise his or her own rights. The constitution does not prefer parents to children.

The preference the constitution gives is this: it prefers parents to third parties, official or private, priest or social worker, as the enablers and guardians of the child’s rights. This preference has its limitations: parents cannot, for example, ignore the responsibility of educating their child. More fundamentally, the constitution provides for the wholly exceptional situation where, for physical or moral reasons, parents fail in their duty towards their child. Then, indeed, the state must intervene and endeavour to supply the place of the parents, always with due regard to the rights of the child.”

Yet we are having a referendum on an amendment to change the constitution with respect to children’s rights.

Could it be that these senior judges are wrong?

I personally do not think so; and here is why.

The proposed amendment can be broken down into three parts: the welfare of the child; hearing the voice of the child; and adoption issues. Welfare issues are currently more than adequately dealt with in the constitution, as Hardiman makes clear, where provision is made for state intervention under article 42, section 5, when parents fail in their duty of care towards their children. The Roscommon incest case is frequently cited by advocates of a Yes vote as a reason for supporting the amendment. However, if the state had acted as it was required to do under this article, then the Roscommon case would have been properly dealt

No

with by the state and the children would have been removed from their abusive home.

Moreover, no constitutional provision regarding children’s welfare will be of value if society or government agencies choose to ignore it. For example, the abuse highlighted by the Ryan report was not a consequence of a deficiency in our constitution: it was a consequence of societal values.

The reformatory and industrial schools abuses had stopped by the late 1970s because victims started to speak out and a small number of conscience-driven journalists gave a public voice to the victims and exposed the abuses. This happened without a constitutional amendment because society at large could no longer ignore the abuses.

On the question of the voice of the child, there is no need for a constitutional amendment. Germany, for example, has almost identical wording in its 1949 constitution with respect to citizen rights, the family, upbringing of children, and state intervention. In its family courts, every child from the age of four has the right to have her or his voice heard. All we have to do here is for the courts to do the same; there is no prohibition on the voice of the child being heard. In addition, our courts have followed a doctrine of unenumerated rights (that is, rights which are not explicitly stated) in interpreting the constitution. Is there anyone who would argue that children’s views should not be listened to? It is hard to imagine that our supreme court would not regard the right to be heard as an unenumerated right under article 40, section 1, of our constitution, particularly since article 8 of the European convention on human rights also requires it.

What about adoption, then?

O’Flaherty rightly pointed out that the adoption issue can easily be dealt with by legislation.

The Yes side argues that one practical effect of the amendment will be to permit the adoption of a large number of children, whose parents are married and who are now in long-term foster care, and that there are 1,600 of these cases.

Sadly, this is not true: there are 4,400 children of unmarried parents available. Yet only 15 were adopted in the most recent year for which figures are available. Adoptive parents generally want very young children with whom they can establish attachment bonds with at a young age.

There is no need for the referendum because, as Hardiman points out, children’s rights are adequately catered for in the constitution as it is; there is no legal impediment to the voice of the child being heard; and the adoption of a very small number of children can be dealt with by simply amending section 23 of the Adoption Act 2010.

Voters should bear in mind the inherent dangers in constitutional amendments arising from “unintended consequences”. The best example of these is to be seen in the eighth amendment, which reads: “The state acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”

One unintended consequence of this amendment was that it actually did allow for abortion in Ireland, even though the advocates of a Yes vote thought that the amendment would ban abortion in Ireland. Following the X case, the 13th amendment to the constitution was passed to deal with the case’s consequences.

There is a view that one of the possible unintended consequences of the proposed amendment is that it will pit children against parents on some issues and that the courts may be called upon to arbitrate these disputes. The X case was an “outlier” event not foreseen by the Yes side at the time the eighth amendment was passed.

It is very possible that there are unforeseen outlier events with respect to the present amendment; for example, when can the state intervene under the new article 42A, section 1, or what happens when parents and children disagree.

In addition, the existing article 42, section 5, is to be replaced by the new article 42A, section 2, paragraph 1. The reasons for state intervention in exceptional cases will change from “physical and moral reasons” to where the situation has progressed “to such extent that the safety or welfare of any of their children is likely to be prejudicially affected”. This changes the role of the courts from one in which each case is evaluated, to some degree, retrospectively to one in which the courts will henceforth be guessing and taking a prospective predictive view.

Finally, remember that our family courts are de facto secret courts. Usually, when something is kept secret, there is something to hide. There are hundreds of cases going though these courts each year. How do we know whether the constitution and legislation is being adhered to in these secret courts?

The simple answer is, we don’t.

There is no public accountability.

For these reasons, and others, I will be voting No. Gerry Fahey is an occupational psychologist and a graduate of Trinity (BA Mod 2001, psychology) and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (MSc 2002, psychology). He works with companies in solving the ubiquitous human problem of fitting the person to the job. He also has a degree in chemical engineering.

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

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TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

Editorial E

Rónán Burtenshaw Editor

ighth October’s panel discussion on the role of the media in society was thought-provoking.

Six panellists who had interacted with a diverse spectrum of the journalistic world in community, non-profit, freelance and broadsheet journalism, as well as media-studies academia, grappled with some of the most difficult topics pertaining to the industry.

There was little good news for those looking to make a living as journalists. Student journalism is not easy but it is, at times, sheltered from the harsher winds of an industry under sustained attack from the forces of the hegemonic forces of the market and the information age. Gerard Cunningham’s sober speech offered a (perhaps necessary) welcome tonic to this.

But for those interested in the media for less applied or career-focused reasons, the debate offered plenty to contemplate. Was objectivity possible in the media? Was being a journalist a profession or a vocation? What is the role of women in the media? Does a journalist seek to be a mediator, a neutral arbiter, or to represent certain sections of society?

Our panel approached these questions with intelligence and candour, and those present for the debate will be better in their understanding of the media for their contributions.

Trinity News thanks Dr Gavan Titley, Harry Browne, Dr Anne O’Brien, Siobhan McDermott, Heidi Bedell and Gerard Cunningham for agreeing to come in and speak to us.

But one thing that was not broached on the night was this question: “What is the role of Trinity News in society?” It is something our editorial team has considered and something on which this editorial will seek to elaborate.

Trinity News 2012-13 will focus on four pillars of journalism, specific to its position and social function. We consider issues related to Trinity College, Dublin, higher education and students in general to be our bread and butter. As a student newspaper we understand that our primary obligation is to inform, educate and remain relevant to members of the College community.

This is also where student journalists will best learn how to locate, cultivate and produce a story; where the skills of the trade can be picked up and passed. There is a tendency in student media for young journalists to aim for recognition and respect for their work by seeking to emulate (often cheaply) the mainstream media in tone and focus. This is something we hope to avoid by striving for high standards of content and design, which should allow us to be taken seriously for the hard work we do while offering space to do things a little differently.

We also understand that our position, relatively uninhibited by reliance on advertisers or state funding, not necessitated to sell newspapers and less integrated into the circulation of power in Irish society gives us the opportunity to cover or give prominence to things that the mainstream media does not. This is the fourth pillar. We will seek to give voice to those people and arguments left voiceless by a media that is too closed a shop, and too rarely critical at a fundamental level.

This distinct, and arguably privileged, position also influences how we do what we do.

We understand that the print industry is struggling. We have

in student journalism – is not capable of being the sole source of guidance. As of yet we have neither the experience nor skill ourselves to take on this role.

This is why we are looking to bring in those who do, from a broad spectrum of sources in Irish media and academia, to teach and enter into dialogue with our staff on the big questions of the industry. We hope, in doing this, to create an atmosphere of educated debate about what it is we, as journalists, do and should be doing, and, maybe, to leave a lasting positive impact on Irish journalism in the process.

This recognition of our limitations does not mean that our

WHAT

WE DO heard the chorus of those who sound its death knell. But, actually, we quite like it. Producing a newspaper and magazine, rather than isolated articles amidst a smörgåsbord of soundbited instantania, offers us the chance to provide a spectrum of content in a unit – the value of which risks being lost as media progresses.

The attempts of Dargan, Éna and our design team, as well as Aaron and his TN2 project, this year to make us look different also stems from an understanding of our position and role.

Not having to be primarily concerned about profit offers us a freedom to experiment with the aesthetics of a newspaper in a way that a lot of commercial broadsheets and tabloids cannot.

Authentic experimentation requires the acknowledgement and acceptance that something can go wrong. If the bottom line does not allow for this possibility, then a newspaper finds itself in a restricted position where it is less easy to do the things TN is looking to do this year: push the boundaries of how broadsheets look and present their content. With so few media outlets able to do this experimentation with the necessary lack of inhibition, we understand that our position is important.

The launch of the School of Journalism this month was also a statement of intent. We see Trinity News as a training ground for aspiring journalists, as opposed to a hobby for the flighty writer. However, it is clear that our editorial staff – though committed, and with a number of years behind us all

senior editorial staff lacks journalistic philosophies of its own.

Mine, as editor, will not be representative of what is a diverse and thoughtful group. But it does guide those decisions that affect my role in this newspaper and bears outlining for that reason. I will seek to explain, in a personal capacity, the approach to the trade I have developed over five years working as a student journalist. It has been a dialectical process, balancing the competing influences of idealistic notions and the requirement to produce news stories on a regular basis.

I think that the first task of a journalist is to form an understanding of the public interest.

This dictates my perspective on what is and is not worthy of going to print. My understanding of the public interest is rooted in an analysis of power.

For me, information provided to the public about the machinations of centres of power and those who occupy positions of power is of value. Information provided outside of that context is generally not. Expressed simply, I aim to create conditions of transparency for the powerful and privacy for the powerless.

That power analysis can be applied, too, to the kind of information with which a journalist should be concerned.

While all information about those in powerful positions is of public interest, there is only so much space in the paper for copy and in people’s minds for news. This means that it has been necessary to interpret informational value by degree, and apply a hierarchy of sorts.

Information proliferated by

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those in powerful positions for purposes of public relations – such as press releases – may be of value. But they are rarely of as much public interest value as information extracted from those same bodies by investigation. Similarly, while articles on those things powerful people have done well do serve to inform, those on their demonstrable wrongdoings provide more valuable.

When power analyses are applied to a university context it necessitates the creation of a framework in which to judge who occupies positions of power. I reject the notion that Trinity, the academy of Ireland’s ruling class, is the preserve of the powerless. The affairs of College, its more senior staff and students holding prominent and influential positions within its gates are, in my estimation, of public interest.

This is not to say all pieces of information about people in these positions are newsworthy. I regularly receive emails and letters containing tip-offs for stories about college that I don’t run with, because they are deliberate attempts to discredit individuals or not related to their work in their positions of power.

Ultimately the decision of who does and does not occupy a position of power is a judgement call. I understand that this comes with a significant burden of responsibility and, as a journalist, one is regularly made aware that many disagree with the calls one makes.

But the freedom of the press is based on the right and capacity to decide what is and is not published independently, especially in the case of an editor.

If you treat your job seriously, this will be as much a burden as a liberty.

My journalistic philosophy does affect my role as editor, and inspired the choice of the newspaper’s motto for this year: George Orwell’s famous quote about journalism being “printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

But this paper will also remain committed to other principles, too. We respect our readership, and hope to engage as well as inform them.

We will never do things by half and never presume that those who read what we write expect anything less than rigorous and honest journalism. We will seek to challenge and provoke, but not for sensationalism’s sake.

Arundhati Roy, in her 1998 essay The End of Imagination, included in a list of suggestions for “how to live while you’re alive” the advice that one should “never simplify what is complicated nor complicate what is simple”. This is also a good standard for journalism and one which TN intends to stick by.

Pageantry and prejudice

I Hannah Cogan Public Editor

spend a lot of time writing articles on serious things I feel strongly about. I spend a lot less time writing articles on serious things I don’t know how I feel about, and this is one of those articles. The serious thing in question is Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. For those who are not dedicated fans of HCHBB, the reality show follows the life of six-year-old pageant queen Honey Boo Boo (real name Alana Thompson), her mother June, her father Mike “Sugar Bear” Thompson, and her sisters Jessica, Anna, and Lauryn.

The family is from McIntyre, Georgia. In the season finale, Jessica, age 17, gave birth to her first child. In the first episode, the family bid for junk food at auction, went pageant-shopping at the dollar store for Alana, and attended the Redneck Summer Games. A sensitive portrayal this is not.

White-trash entertainment is a growing market. In the last few years, we have seen an explosion of shows designed to show us the depths to which humanity will sink when not firmly encased in a liberal, educated, urban, Starbucks-fuelled

environment. My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, Jersey Shore, and MTV’s 16 and Pregnant all fall into the same category. These shows reassure us that our struggle is worth it, all economic evidence to the contrary; if only because we would never belly flop into the mud on cable television.

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo casts this social divide in especially sharp relief, since the show is rooted partly in beauty-pageant culture, which, in its own weird way, indulges the American belief that you can work and spend your way to greatness. If you can afford the entry fees, the glitter, the makeup, the coach, and the stylists, you will be the “ultimate supreme”, as they say in the business. You’ll even have a shiny trophy to prove it.

With so many pageant mums desperate to force their kids into the limelight as tanned, eyelashed, bespangled living dolls, Honey Boo Boo, a selfproclaimed “size cute”, is a great thing to see. I have never been more in awe of somebody’s parenting skills as when, without coaching or a prompt, all four of June’s daughters

suggested they be weighed on the show. In the 21st century, four teenage girls comfortable enough with themselves and their weight to be weighed on national television is absolutely staggering. Hell, I lied about my weight on my driver’s licence.

Both Forbes and the Guardian issued scathing critiques of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo when it was released. Calling it “an attempt to portray Alana’s family as a horde of lice-picking, lard-eating, nosethumbing hooligans south of the Mason-Dixon line”, Forbes writer Helaine Olden labelled it “dwarf-tossing for the reality show age”, suggesting its representation of the differences between urban and rural were harmful to American society.

I think the opposite may be true. For all the ways the Thompson family might be different, in some crucial ways they are exactly the same.

When Alana’s gay uncle, called “Poodle” by the family, helps her rework a dance routine for a beauty pageant, Alana offers the camera her deceptively profound take on equality: “Ain’t nothing wrong with be-

ing gay. Hell, everyone’s a little bit gay.”

RuPaul wants to do a duet with Honey Boo Boo “because she understands what the spirit of drag is”. For America, a country that generally suggests everyone outside New England or California is intolerant, this acceptance is an important message to get out.

Alana and her family have won. In a way that was perhaps completely unintended, they have Here Comes Honey Boo Boo as a testament to their tolerance and humanity; those who condemn them are furthering a festering cultural arrogance that is increasingly problematic.

That America is a deeply divided country isn’t a matter of opinion. There are deeply cauterized splits between Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, and the urban coasts and the rural midwest. The Honey Boo Boo clan prove that a strong prejudice still exists in American society; when liberal America crosses that divide, they may have more in common, and more to aspire to, then they think.

The world of the invisible

Illustration: Ciar Boyle-Gifford

Elaine McCahill Editor-at-Large Walking to College in the morning or coming back from the pub at night, one nearly always encounters an unfortunate homeless person on the side of the street. They are usually either crouching outside a shop, asking passers-by for spare change, or asleep in the doorway of a shop, with a sleeping bag covering their heads as they try to sleep on the cold Dublin pavement. Yet, we walk along, chatting about our lectures that day or what happened last night, and more often than not avoiding eye contact with them so as not to make ourselves feel too uncomfortable. However, the very nature of homelessness is uncomfortable, for those unfortunate enough to find themselves in that harrowing and undignified situation, for their families who may or may not know what they are going through, and for the members of the public who are confronted by the appalling circumstances that homeless people have found themselves in on a daily basis. In our developed country, it is such an injustice that, regardless of economic difficulties, people can actually find themselves in a situation where they have nowhere to go and the only option is to sleep on the street.

Everyone has the right to dignity. The economic chokehold that we are experiencing has led to people losing their jobs and, subsequently, their homes, and as a result some have found themselves living on the street.

Unfortunately, there are only minimal resources available to cater for the constantly increasing numbers, and there is only so much that volunteers can do through the Simon Community or through student volunteer programmes such as those run

by Trinity’s Vincent de Paul (VDP) society. Of course, not everyone who finds themselves living on the dark and dirty streets of Dublin has the same story. Many are addicts, others have mental-health issues, and yet others are those whose finances crumbled when the world’s economy did likewise.

The issue here is not how these people ended up on the streets; it has to do with the lack of services and funding to help them and a need for change in public perceptions.

Many of those who beg do so in quite an aggressive manner, and it is natural that this is quite off-putting for members of the public, but, as with any minority group, it is unfair to tarnish them all with one brush. I will concede that there have been many negative highprofile cases in the Irish media regarding a number of people who were arrested for making a living from begging, especially since the introduction of new legislation in February 2011.

The Criminal Justice Public Order Act did not criminalise begging, but did make “aggressive begging” illegal, which includes intimidating a person while they are attempting to use an ATM or a vending machine. The legislation also deemed “organised begging”, or living off the proceeds of another person’s begging, to be illegal. In recent years the rise in numbers of those who are genuinely homeless has not been a major talking point in national media; it is usually the negative stories that make the papers and the radio talk shows.

In particular, the Roma gypsies who characterised the streets of Dublin during the boom years and afterwards maintained a high profile within this public sphere. The Irish Times reported on an arrest of a “barefoot beggar” who previously operated on Grafton Street and was found to be carrying approximately ¤1,800 in ¤50 notes. A garda inspector quoted in the article explained that people who were genuinely moved by the man’s plight had been known to buy footwear for him in sports shops on Grafton Street, but that “… he has more runners, I think, than the Foot Locker at this stage.” The investigation that launched since the legislation was passed has resulted in multiple arrests and the seizure of thousands of euros gained through organised begging, a substantial amount of which was confiscated during raids on buses that leave from Dublin for Romania once a week. These high-profile stories that diffuse throughout society, especially in Dublin, give an incredibly distorted view of what is endemic on the streets and doorways of Dublin and in other towns and cities around the country.

One must concede that, as outlined above, there are people who beg who do have a home to go to at the end of the day, and some of them are incredibly aggressive and intimidating. All the same, aggressive begging is incredibly intimidating and, at times, slightly frightening. Personally, I have had a few dubious experiences with professional beggars. On a night out last week, there were three men with paper coffee cups begging at the ATM kiosk in Temple Bar Square and having a blazing row over whose territory it was. A scene like that would naturally be incredibly off-putting to even the most seasoned city slicker, let alone tourists who are on holidays and attempting to enjoy the “cultural hub” that is those few cobbled streets.

Another day, while working in a city-centre shoe shop, a lady asked to try on a pair of boots, which she duly did, and then left the shop to fetch some money with which to pay for them. However, she did not return with a couple of crisp notes from the ATM; she arrived back 10 minutes later with a woman whose children were in the same school as hers. It later became apparent that she had harassed this lady into buying the shoes for her, claiming that she had no money and that the boots she had been wearing had holes in them. It was an incredibly awkward situation, made all the more incredible when I walked past the same lady later, aggressively begging outside the Spar on Nassau Street with the old pair of boots back on her feet.

Stories such as this are exasperating, and result in feelings of contempt towards those who beg; but those who are genuinely homeless are the ones who suffer. These negative, isolated incidents aside, those that sit quietly with a sign asking for food, or the man who writes a poem relating his story on the city pavement in coloured chalk for people to read, are not trying to scam you out of your money. More often than not, they do genuinely need it.

What it is necessary to realise is that the negative aspects are

the ones that result in greater representation and discussion, but they are not representative of the greater problem or experience. The majority of students do not, however, have spare cash to give to those on the streets; if you gave a euro to every person you passed, you would be broke. As such, one cannot assume that those who beg make much from it, even those who are being aggressive. A sandwich or a cup of tea is often appreciated more, as I witnessed the other day when a group of secondary school girls gave a man sitting outside College a bite to eat.

Incredible work is done by Trinity’s VDP, who organise soup runs every Tuesday and Friday night delivering food to those in need around the city, and help out at the Capuchin Day Centre for Homeless People in Smithfield during the week. I spoke with a VDP volunteer who spent all of last year helping out with the evening soup run, and who still relays the sad, unfortunate stories of members of the homeless community whom she met. One such story involves a man who was previously a student at Trinity. Due to mental health problems, including depression, he dropped out from our institution and, through a series of unfortunate events, found himself homeless and sleeping rough. He must have been quite a student, as College security guards still remember him and, on occasion, allow him to access the College library to read. Another distressing tale involved a girl in her early twenties from Wexford who had moved to Dublin to get a job. As is the case these days, she lost her job after a few months and, unable to become re-employed, lost her flat. She tried to get some sort of council housing from Dublin city council; the council claimed she needed to be processed where she was from, but her local council took the opposite stance and insisted that she be processed in Dublin. With the delays in the system, and unable to find work, she found herself homeless. The VDP volunteer found these instances incredibly harrowing, as they were not the stories of stereotypical drug addicts: they were people close to her own demographics and experience in life who had simply become down on their luck and found themselves on the streets.

The Dublin Simon Community claims that there are approximately 2,000 people homeless in the greater Dublin area, with over 100 people are sleeping rough in the citycentre area each night, and that the numbers are constantly increasing. These figures are not difficult to believe; a walk up Grafton Street or Dawson Street in the evening will illustrate how many people are sleeping rough. It is a strange dichotomy when you compare it to the relative privilege that defines and dominates those streets and our university. While it is unfeasible to give everyone who you pass on the street some change, or to always have enough time to volunteer, it is not untenable to simply acknowledge their existence, nod and smile or make eye contact. Just don’t pass them by with indifference, or turn your head away.

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

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Science

Science in Brief Anthea Lacchia

Birdzilla: the bird-vampire dinosaur

What do you get when you cross a bird, a vampire and a porcupine? Between 100m and 200m years ago, an animal like this really existed. Prof Paul Sereno, based at the University of Chicago, described a new species of herbivore dinosaur from South Africa: Pegomastax africanus. The animal was less than 30cm tall, sported sharp

fangs in a parrot-like beak, and was covered by bristles. Even though the enlarged canines are not typical of plant-eating dinosaurs, the study suggests they could have been used for defence and competitive sparring.

The research was published this month in the journal ZooKeys.

Illustration: Ciar Boyle-Gifford

Special providence in the fields of Barryroe

Gay or straight?

Let me check my gaydar Can you tell a book by its cover? Enda Shevlin sees if facial features can act as windows to sexual orientation

B Enda Shevlin Staff Writer

eepity beep beep beep! Many people insist they have an innate ability to sense the subtleties in an individual’s character such that they can reliably tell whether a person is gay or straight. The common term for this implied social phenomenon is gaydar, a familiar term with an unfamiliar background and a sketchy social provenance. But is there anything to it? Is it real or an urban myth?

And can it be proven?

Originally exclusive to the gay community as a metaphor for the trials of meeting others of the same orientation, gaydar is today more representative of are-they-or-aren’t-they conversations about anyone who takes your fancy. There have been quite a number of studies on the subject, with many published in respected peerreviewed journals.

One recent study, published in PLoS One by scientists from Cornell University and the University of Washington, reaffirmed the gaydar theory and aimed to build upon previous findings that people are capable of estimating sexual orien-

tation in both men and women at a frequency greater than would be expected by chance.

The study asked 129 college students to look at pictures of over 100 gay and straight men and women for 50 milliseconds each (long enough to see a face, but short enough for little else to register) and immediately judge the sexual orientation of each. To exclude the possibility that stereotyping or preconceived ideas about the subject’s appearance were exerting influence, the pictures used were free of any possible social or cultural giveaways: all images used were in greyscale, all hairstyles were digitally removed and faces were free of tattoos, makeup, piercings or glasses.

Despite the manipulations, judgements of sexual orientation based on female faces were accurate 65% of the time, a full 15% above the 50% level predicted by chance. Distinguishing a male’s orientation proved more difficult, with participants answering correctly 57% of the time. The discrepancy in ability to judge women versus men can be explained,

according to the authors, by an increased “false alarm” effect with men: participants were more likely to categorise a straight man as gay rather than a straight woman as gay; an instance, the researchers say, of how gender norms in western culture are applied more rigidly to men than to women.

The researchers then went further and asked what exactly it is about the human face that acts as a reservoir of such personal information. When we look at human faces, we tend to process them in two different ways: featural face processing (noticing the chin or nose) and configural face processing (where we register the distance between the eyes or facial width-to-height ratios).

It is already believed that we use configural face processing to rate attractiveness in potential mates (people rated as attractive tend to have symmetrical facial features) and so the authors asked whether this could also be applied to judging sexual orientation. Simply turning the previous pictures upside down disrupts configu-

ral processing and in turn, the authors postulated, may also disrupt gaydar’s accuracy.

The result: turning the pictures upside down did indeed disrupt gaydar’s accuracy levels. Predictions were significantly better when the pictures were viewed the right way up as opposed to upside down, leading the authors to conclude that “Configural face processing contributes to gaydar’s accuracy”.

The authors hold that their results are highly replicable, that they have been repeated over a dozen times and that, in short, gaydar is a scientific fact.

Humans are capable of detecting tiny, almost subconscious cues in a person’s face to predict their sexual orientation well above the level expected by chance.

The authors did, however, take pains to note that you should not place absolute trust in your gaydar, no matter how developed your sixth sense may be: “Our experiments demonstrate gaydar ability – which is far from proficiency.”

So you want to fund your science project?

I Robert Conway-Kenny Contributor

Robert ConwayKenny takes a critical look at Petridish, a new crowdfunding website dedicated to the funding of science projects

t did not take long for crowdfunding to come to the aid of the scientific community, but, while the help and enthusiasm of the public is necessary, is turning to the lay person instead of more developed avenues for funding a good idea?

Some of the world’s greatest discoveries owe credit to the humble Petri dishes in which they were discovered.

The dishes, used by biologists to culture cells, have remained largely unchanged since their invention near the end of the 19th century. Many of the discoveries have led to huge financial gains for researchers, and it seems that, once again, the simple-yet-elegant dish might yield huge rewards for two American entrepreneurs.

Petridish (www.petridish.org) is a new crowdfunding website dedicated to the funding of science projects from acclaimed or amateur researchers in a wide range of scientific fields, from astronomy to zoology.

Crowdfunding, a term coined to describe collective donations made to a project by members of the public with no motive other than personal interest, has become massively popular in recent years and appears to still be gathering momentum. This new venture, modelled heavily on the prominent crowdfunding websites Kickstarter and RocketHub, promises an opportunity to “explore the world with renowned re-

searchers” from the comfort of your couch, the bus or the classroom.

While the best-celebrated example of Petri dish use, the discovery of penicillin, took years to make money, Petridish offers researchers a quick and easy route to cash once a minimum amount has been raised.

This all-or-nothing approach adds to the risk of the game, and proves useful near the end of the donation period when fundraising is at its most crucial stage. Donations are almost exclusively made on a trust basis, and Petridish (and others) usually take a 3% cut of all monies raised. This trust system seems to work well, with only the best projects reaching their funding goals and thus adding credibility to the crowdfunding sites.

The list of projects is seemingly endless: you can fund communication research in primates, artificial photosynthesis or the tracking of fur seals. For the most part, projects tend to be from a biological background, for a number of reasons. Firstly, they are often easier to plan and, hence, usually have achievable goals in a time frame suitable to retain public interest. They are also usually simpler to describe to the public.

Without belittling a whole scientific discipline, it is easier to gather public support for killer whale habitat research than the complex multistep chemical synthetic pathway to a natural

product. Many would highlight this as an inherent flaw in the theory of crowdfunding, where only the most glamorous or engaging projects get funding,, but this may change as it becomes a more established route to funding.

Putting aside this flaw, there is an obvious educational appeal to school students who can follow researchers’ progress in a novel way. With points for the common entry science course at Trinity exceeding 500 this year and talk that they will continue to rise for the next few years, a huge amount of pressure has been put on the effective teaching of science at primary and secondary levels, subjects that were once commonly overlooked in revision of educational programmes. At a time of huge change for state education in Ireland, new and imaginative ways to remove the constraints of the textbook will prove to be popular and the teams behind the likes of petridish.org will learn this very quickly. Whatever your opinion on the creation of Ireland’s “knowledge economy”, the uptake of new Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses is vital to this island’s recovery and any venture that promotes science for young people has a place at the table. The popularity of another modern initiative, our Science Gallery, is testament to this with more than 500,000

“

story. The Barryroe site, 50km

This may seem obvious, but it

from 10th-11th October.

Cancer research makes new strides

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visitors in its first two years.

Science is starting to get cool and, more importantly, interest in science is now a serious moneymaker.

However, we must address the greatest flaw of crowdfunding, a flaw which appears to undermine the very core of the business, certainly when considering the use of these websites for scientific research.

Many researchers would agree that there exists a balance between public engagement and the covertness of scientific research, but it turns out that this balance leans quite heavily to one side. The mechanism of success of these websites is through greater and greater public awareness. Most scientific research, however, is secret for a reason. The licensing of patents and the establishing of spinoff campus companies generate revenue to fund future projects, not only for the individual researcher but usually for the whole department.

In industry, talking about your research outside of the company will not only get you fired but will also ensure you never get hired again. Some pharmaceutical companies guard their research so well that all correspondence made on company property is monitored.

Big Brother has to be watching when a simple 20-carbon compound can be worth billions of dollars. By putting your idea online, you give the

On 10th October, the Irish-

based oil and gas company off the Cork coast, has been the Humans are Providence Resources an- subject of significant reservoir nounced that its prospect in analysis. The economic value of capable of deCork should yield about 280m this find is not yet certain and barrels of oil. The company’s will depend on market value at tecting tiny, chief executive, Tony O’Reilly the time of extraction. Provialmost subcon- Jr, said this was the beginning dence is currently looking for of an Irish oil industry and other companies to participate scious cues in described it as a huge success in the find by co-venturing. a person’s face to predict their Signage: size really does matter sexual orienResearch at the University of has real economic impact. The tation well Cincinnati, based on American study found that this case of survey data, showed communication failure affects above the level consumer that signage which is too small all groups and ages. Results or unclear frustrates consum- were presented at the National expected by ers and leads business owners Signage Research and Educato lose potential customers. tion Conference in Cincinnati chance.

Researchers may not like to admit it, but there is a serious amount of politics in science, and it all revolves around reputation

whole world a chance to copy you before you have even begun, and you might not even raise the funds to proceed. Ask yourself, are serious researchers really willing to take that risk? Another smaller factor working against crowdfunding for noteworthy research is reputation. Researchers may not like to admit it, but there is a serious amount of politics in science, and it all revolves around reputation. By turning to crowdfunding websites, you open yourself to questions about your ability to raise funds from better-established routes, which may damage your reputation and your ability to raise funds in the future.

Crowdfunding may prove to be a reliable and innovative way to fund projects in the short term, but one cannot help but feel that the major winners will be the lawyers when the first of many intellectual property cases comes before the courts.

Cancer cells are known to detach themselves from the structural elements that hold tissues together and reattach to new sites, but this mechanism is not well understood. A new study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has identified some of the molecules that are critical in this process. The re-

searchers compared the adhesion properties of four types of cancer cells and measured how well cells from each type bound to protein pairs. The results shed new light into the mechanism that allows cancer cells to spread, thereby aiding the development of new potential cancer drug targets.

Science Gallery Ian Curran ollege’s Science Gallery has announced four new exhibitions that it will host in 2013. The launch of the new exhibitions was attended by the minister for arts, heritage and the gaeltacht, Jimmy Deenihan, as well the Science Gallery’s director, Michael John Gorman, the director of Riverdance, John McColgan, and a representative of Deloitte.

The first exhibition to take place in the gallery will be Oscillator, exploring the science of vibration, oscillations and feedback. The exhibition is said to contain “everything from cyclical chemical reactions to swinging bridges, and outof-control automated pricing schemes to weather phenomena.” The second exhibition to take place in 2013 will be

Risk Lab, an interdisciplinary exhibition spanning the fields of neuroscience, genetics and mathematics to “explore how we determine the probability of everything from a car crash to a coin toss.” Summer of 2013 will see Illusion, an exhibition that is set to provide a look at the field of neuroscience and “the physics of illusion”, as well as the issue human perception and the way it “underpins how we see, feel, think and understand the world.” The fourth and final exhibition on the 2013 calendar for the Science Gallery is entitled Living Machines and is a “provocative” look at the ideas of artificial and biological life as well as “the themes of living versus non-living, human versus nature, and design versus evolution.”

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

20

Science

Student research upfront: Sive Finlay Bumblebees and nematodes: a beestly story

S Anthea Lacchia

ive Finlay, a zoology PhD student, was recently named best biology student in the Science, Engineering and Technology Student of the Year Awards for her research into bumblebees.

Q. So, you’re just back from your award ceremony in London. That must have been very exciting, right?

Yes, the three finalists from my category had to go and present the projects, and then the award was presented at a dinner ceremony. It was kind of my Oscars moment, with the big presentation ceremony, dinner and awards; it was all very exciting!

Science Editor

Q. You won this award for research undertaken during your undergraduate project.

What was your project about?

It was about the immune system of bumblebees and their interaction with this parasite, a nematode, roundworm.

Q. Could you summarize your main discoveries?

Bumblebee queens are the only ones to survive over winter, and they go into diapause, which is like hibernation. During this time, all the metabolic activities decrease. This affects a number of systems, but no one had looked at how it affects the immune system of the bees.

They spend six to nine months in diapause, so it’s a really significant period, and if their immune system is decreased during this time, it leaves them vulnerable to attack from parasites and pathogens in general.

So my project first established that the immune system does decrease during diapause, and then, leading on from that, it looked at this parasite which infects queens during diapause.

It has a massive effect in terms of changes of behaviour in the bees: it stops them from producing, and ultimately kills

them. Bee populations are declining so much that it’s important to understand the reasons why.

Q. Before your project, did people know these parasites were there in the first place?

Yes. I did my project with PhD student Joe Colgan, who is in his final year. He was very supportive and helpful, a great supervisor. And then I also had Prof Celia Holland as an academic supervisor. I was really lucky to have both.

Joe’s project involved looking at the bees and parasites, but at a molecular level, so at the proteins that are expressed.

Other than that, these parasites are not very well studied, although they are quite common; they are found throughout the northern hemisphere and they can infect up to 50% of the queens in the Dublin area.

Q. Are other species of parasite affecting the bumblebees as well?

It’s one species that infects the bumblebees, a nematode called Sphaerularia bombi, and there’s a new species called Sphaerularia vespae which infects wasps, but there may be other species as well. It’s just that no one has necessarily identified them yet.

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Bee populations are declining so much that it’s important to understand the reasons why.

Q. And the way this nematode infects the queens is pretty gruesome, right?

Yes, it’s very dramatic! The nematodes evert their uterus to a structure 300 times the volume of the rest of their body.

This enormous uterus releases numerous eggs into the host and also extracts nutrients from the bees. Sphaerularia castrate the queens so they don’t form new colonies. Having released larval stage nematodes into the soil, parasitised queens die, and the nematodes are ready to infect new queens entering diapause.

Q. Could you tell me a little more about bumblebee population decline and the resulting loss of pollinators?

A lot of media focus tends to be on honeybees and colony collapse disorder [the abrupt disappearance of worker bees in a colony], but bumblebee populations are declining as well, and they’re not as commercially relevant as honeybees. But since honeybees are in trouble, bumblebees are even more important, because they are taking up the slack of honeybees not being as abundant.

Q. What is the best habitat for bumblebees?

They need to go where there is enough pollen. The problem with modern agriculture is having crops that are just the one kind. For example, a big field of rapeseed is not enough for bees; they need variety in plants.

There’s a research group in the Botany Department, led by Dr Jane Stout, which is looking at plant-pollinator interactions.

Q. There is a Ted talk given by behavioural ecologist Noah Wilson-Rich on beekeeping.

He set up Best Bees to encourage people to become urban beekeepers. Do you think this

is a good solution?

It’s a great idea. There are great schemes that involve people keeping beehives on roofs, as part of roof gardens. It’s really important to extend populations in urban areas. But it’s not enough to just keep the bees, you have to have food available for them.

Q. But your current postgraduate research is not related to bumblebees, is that right?

Yes, it’s completely different.

I’m doing my PhD on the ecology and evolution of tenrecs, which are a group of mammals only known from Madagascar.

They’re an amazing group; they can range from the size of a field mouse up to about a cat, and they have evolved to look like lots of other animals. Some are like hedgehogs, others are similar to moles or otters, but there are only 30 species, so it’s incredible how they have evolved to fill lots of different niches.

I’m interested in the convergence of tenrecs: so, trying to understand how and why they have evolved to look like all these different animals. To do that, I’ll be doing museum work in the USA and London and also behavioural work. In addition, some tenrecs can echolocate and I’d like to investigate this behaviour using DNA analysis.

Q. What are your plans for the future? Do you think you’ll stay with tenrec studies?

I don’t think I’ll spend my life on tenrecs. The great thing about this project is that I’m learning how to study evolution in general. Tenrecs are a good model and through them I’ll be learning useful techniques. But I’d like to jump around between different things with time.

Graphene: secrets between the sheets Aidan Murray explores what lies beneath the surface of the pure carbon substance

I Aidan Murray Contributor

n 2004, armed with little more than a pack of pencils and some sticky tape, Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim at the University of Manchester in England made what could prove to be the 21st century’s most significant contribution to science. The substance at the heart of their work, graphene, was already known about in theory, but this was the first time it had ever been synthesised. So significant was their discovery that they won the Nobel prize in physics in 2010, “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”.

Graphene is essentially a sheet of pure carbon, one atom thick. If one looks at the atoms and bonds, the simplest way

to conceive it is to imagine atomic chicken wire, although graphene is 100 million times smaller than its everyday-sized counterpart. These sheets have many novel qualities, such as their ability to heal themselves.

Graphene exhibits the highest current density of any substance at room temperature, meaning it can conduct electricity faster than any other material known to man. This is one reason graphene is potentially an excellent candidate for integrated circuits. Graphene also exhibits saturable absorption: as light is shone on graphene at higher and higher intensities, it absorbs less and less. Recently, several research groups, including Prof Werner Blau’s group at the School of

Physics, which is working as part of the Integrated Disruptive Components for 2µm Fibre Lasers consortium, have harnessed this property in order to make mode-lockers for ultra-fast pulse lasers. This essentially involves continuous laser beams being changed into pulses of light.

It should not come as too much of a shock that graphene has such impressive credentials, as it is a form of carbon, which itself appears to be a miracle material. Though it may be an irritating element when you burn your toast, it is undeniably useful. Carbon occupies both extremes of the spectrum, from the brittleness of pencil lead to the hardness of diamond. It forms stronger-

than-steel carbon nanotubes, and the so-called “buckyballs”, spherical molecules made up of hexagons and pentagons.

In the eight short years since the discovery of graphene, scientists have put away the sticky tape and have devised more efficient methods of obtaining higher quantities of the material. As Blau explains: “Graphene is relatively simple to produce, and therefore comparatively cheap. Carbon nanotubes are still as expensive as, say, gold, and therefore unlikely to be used in large quantities in consumer goods.”

One of the most popular methods used to produce graphene is liquid-phase exfoliation of graphite, the stacked form of graphene. This tech-

nique boils down to sonication, or shaking the graphite while it is immersed in a special solvent. Prof Jonathan Coleman’s group at the School of Physics is at the forefront of improving and perfecting this technique, so much so that Trinity’s Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices entered into a collaborative research partnership earlier this year with Thomas Swan & Co Ltd, a leading manufacturer of performance and speciality chemicals based in England. Coleman is leading this 750,000 euro project to scale graphene production up to an industrial level. As Blau points out: “Market predictions forecast a $100m [77m euro] graphene market in 2018. But

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Though it may be an irritating element when you burn your toast, it is undeniably useful. Carbon occupies both extremes of the spectrum, from the brittleness of pencil lead to the hardness of diamond.

you have to be extremely careful with such large numbers, since they are usually based on far too many optimistic predictions. What one can say definitely is that there will be a large market in the future.”

Another widely used method for producing graphene is chemical vapour deposition on copper plates. This works by having a hydrocarbon gas flow in contact with a heated copper substrate, forming a single layer of graphene. This approach allows for the largest sheets to be produced. Samsung created the largest to date – 40 inches (102cm) in diagonal – in 2011, beating their previous best of 30 inches (76cm) reported in June 2010. If you don’t think much of this, keep in mind that the material is just a single atom thick.

Researchers are now turning to other two-dimensional materials, such as molybdenum disulfide and boron nitride, to see if they have similar properties. “No single material is the solution to all problems, so each type will find dedicated applications. Boron nitride nanotubes, for instance, are now being discussed as tether materials for space elevators. Nothing else seems to possess the required strength for this special, but ultimately important, application,” explains Blau.

Other even more exotic materials boast the potential to prove even better than graphene in several respects. A paper published in August 2012 proved the existence of Dirac fermions in silicene, the silicon equivalent of graphene; and while they may sound like dodgy knock-offs you would purchase from the same guy selling you a pair of Ray-Bends to go with your Dolce & Banana handbag, graphane, graphyne and graphdiyne are all relatives of graphene and are hot on the heels of their Nobel-prizewinning cousin. Graphene has become ubiquitous in the research community, popping up everywhere from cancer treatment to anti-corrosion coatings. It is a material with which we will likely become very familiar over the course of our lives. Blau remarks: “It is great to see two decades of our pioneering nanocarbon research here at TCD come to fruition in a number of ways that address major global problems such as renewable energy and health.

Hopefully, many people around the world will ultimately benefit from it.”

Graphene and many other interesting aspects of the nanoworld can be examined up close at the Magic Materials exhibit, currently open at the Science Gallery.

Wednesday 17th October 2012

TRINITY NEWS

Sport

Flanker Brian du Toit scores after long period of DUFC pressure close to the Dungannon line. Photo: Peter wolfe

The big match preview

Champions Made to Sweat by Plucky Exeter

L

James Hussey spoke to the new DU Football Club captain, Michael McLoughlin, about the year ahead and their upcoming semi-final in the Leinster League

L James Hussey Deputy Sports Editor

ast season’s triumphant march to Irish club rugby’s top tier has provided fresh impetus for all involved with Dublin University Football Club (DUFC).

The city centre outfit overcame all comers in the rough-andtumble world of Ulster Bank All-Ireland League (AIL) Division 2A, braving trips across the country and never compromising their free-flowing, fastattacking style of rugby in their quest for league dominance.

I am sitting in the Arts Building with Michael McLoughlin on the day before DUFC’s first game upon their return to Division 1. With traditional rugby powerhouse Blackrock College RFC visiting College Park for the season’s opener, DUFC faced a team with the most enviable heritage of any club side in Ireland. This was a baptism of fire for our university’s young charges.

“Blackrock College RFC are probably the oldest stronghold in Irish rugby. Before the foundation of the Celtic League as the top level of rugby in Ireland, Stradbrook Road [Blackrock’s home ground] was getting up to 20,000 spectators for ’Rock games, week in, week out. They are a great club, and we have to show them the respect their name deserves.”

Under the careful watch of their new coach, the New Zealand native Ben Mannion, BCRFC will look to put their relegation from Division 1A behind them and make an impression on a league that is relatively new territory for both sides. McLoughlin continues: “As a side, we have no fear coming in to games like this. This year is a fantastic opportunity for DUFC and, after our successful pre-season matches, we are starting to silence the voices that questioned our ability to compete at the top level. Comments have been passed that Trinity could go straight back down, but with the group of

players we have, feeling in the camp is that further promotion could yet be on the cards.”

The aforementioned preseason took the form of Leinster League matches, a competition that will see DUFC contest last year’s AIL champions, St Mary’s, in the semi-final on 20th October. Last Saturday saw the Trinity outfit defeat a fancied Greystones side in difficult conditions.

“We were against a big wind in the first half, playing on a pitch that sloped slightly uphill. Greystones are a big team with a powerful pack; we had to rely on our wiles and running game to get around them.

Our current team boasts a strong sevens tradition; our main strength is in loose, open play. Paddy Lavelle picked up where he left of last year in this regard, scoring a try before half time to leave us 10-3 up at the break. Our discipline was something that let us down in the second period, and we had three players sin-binned. We really dug deep at times due to being a man down, and ran away with the game in the last five minutes.”

DUFC ran out winners on a scoreline of 32-10, a result that misrepresents the tough nature of the game. There were many positives to take out of this preseason friendly, with new players blooded, ready to challenge for a place on the starting 15 in the coming campaign.

Our conversation with McLoughlin moves forward a couple of weeks; after two wins from their opening two games in Division 1B, the team are looking forward to the Leinster League semi-final, to be played in Templeville Road against St Mary’s.

The defending AIL champions ran out as impressive victors in last year’s competition, but, having split their opening two results in Division 1A, the chance of an upset is definitely

on for the students, whose excellent form aided a tough 2216 win in Dungannon RFC’s Stevenson Park. Tries from the effervescent duo of Niyi Adeolukan and Paddy Lavelle ensured the points for DUFC, in a game that also saw the highly anticipated debut of Irish under-20 international, Cathal Marsh. Michael elaborates on the contention for places within the 2012-2013 DUFC squad.

“Competition for a starting place is going to be intense this year. We will be playing, week in, week out, against academy players from the various provinces so there is no space for complacency. We are extremely lucky to be joined by former Scotland international and ex-Edinburgh Rugby professional, Alan McDonald, who has just begun an undergraduate degree in medicine. Alan was brought on as a substitute the day that Dan Parks slotted a last minute penalty over, to deny Ireland the Triple Crown in 2010. His experience on the highest stage is invaluable.”

He continues: “Our games so far weekend allowed us the opportunity to see the strength in depth of this year’s DUFC team. Dave Fanagan started at full back and, alongside Alan McDonald, Martin Kelly started at prop. Martin is a giant man and will bolster our scrum in the long season ahead. We are also delighted to welcome Brian du Toit and Tom Collis, both Leinster academy players, Pierce Dargan, a former USA under-20 representative and Cathal Marsh, the ITALICS de facto ITALICS Leinster fourth-choice outhalf. This is undoubtedly one of the strongest squads Dublin University has assembled, and it is a great honour to lead this group of players.”

Unusually for a college side, DUFC has held on to all but one of last year’s squad, with Paul McFeely the only depart-

ing member of the 2011-2012 panel. The already-established cohesion and experience of the team, coupled with the introduction of high-quality debutants, points towards a promising season for the men of Trinity. Michael, in his capacity as captain, is looking forward to the challenge of leading a team at Division 1 level, an extra honour to hold in the red and black of DUFC. “As captain, I want to take the lead from where David Joyce left off. I hope that we can press for Leinster League honours again, and be in with a shout of promotion to the pinnacle of Irish club rugby. Despite some pre-season controversy and debate about the nature of this year’s Colours match, we hope to prove to UCD that a home or away fixture doesn’t affect us.”

“This year represents a huge challenge for the team. There can be no complacency; every game must be played at the highest level. The teams in Division 1 have professional players and players released for the week by the provincial academies. Basically, if someone isn’t representing their province, they are sent out to their clubs.

If we lose concentration in games against teams like that, we will be punished. We have to ensure that we play with consistent intensity throughout.”

The year has begun in exhilarating fashion for the men of DUFC, with their unbeaten record a testament to the dedication and talent of this prodigious panel. Undoubtedly, the cohesion the team was able to build on from last year’s success has been an integral part of their explosive start. Trinity Rugby will continue to disprove their doubters with the unique, unrelenting brand of rugby that has helped them reach this level.

Reuben Smyth Contributor

einster made hard work of grinding out a 9-6 victory over Heineken Cup newcomers Exeter Chiefs in Dublin on Saturday.

Three Jonathan Sexton penalties were enough to secure the result as the defending champions struggled to tame their visitors.

It could have been worse for Leinster but Argentina international Ignacio Mieres missed a last-minute penalty that would have snatched a draw for Exeter.

Man-of-the-match Tom Hayes led the Chiefs, who played the better rugby for much of the Pool Five opener. The team from England’s south-west looked comfortable in Europe’s top tournament.

Twice Ireland fly-half Johnny Sexton put the home side in front with kicks in a tense and low-scoring affair at the RDS, once after 10 minutes and then again midway through the second half.

But the Chiefs were hassled and harried throughout. Rob Baxter’s side never allowed the reigning European champions to pull away, and Gareth Steenson’s kicking tussle with Sexton was dead-even for the most part.

The 28-year-old fly-half kicked penalties in the final minute of the first half and within just a couple of minutes of the Sexton’s second successful attempt to keep the home fans biting their nails and fearing the worst.

The Chiefs were making it an difficult day’s work for Leinster.

Full-back Ian Madigan’s drop goal attempt from the halfway line was a measure of the hosts’ desperation.

Sexton did step up to save the game with his third penalty of the day in the final 10 minutes and Leinster looked to have done enough to scrape a narrow win to start the defence of their Heineken Cup crown.

But Exeter weren’t done and came within a whisker of coming away from Dublin with a draw in the end, a result that few would have argued against on merit.

The tireless work of the Chiefs’ pack was rewarded with a penalty just inside the Leinster half as the clock ticked over 80 minutes but, with Steenson off

the field, Mieres was unable to convert it and the competition holders breathed an almighty collective sigh of relief.

Leinster coach Joe Schmidt admitted that his side were “very lucky” to escape with a 9-6 win over Exeter Chiefs on Saturday.

“It was disappointing,” the South African said, “I don’t think there was the fluidity out there from either side. There was quite a bit of play bit it didn’t going anywhere much.

“I thought both sides defended really strongly, it’s the first time in a long time we haven’t conceded a try so that’s something positive. We got exactly what we expected - they’re really tough, tough to clear them out of the ruck, tough to even keep up with them - I thought they played across the field really well.

“As I’ve said before I think they’re really well coached, they’re a really tough side.

I know we’ve got to go back there yet, I’m not looking forward to that because we got out of jail today.

“If anything a draw would’ve been a fair result maybe and in the end I think they missed one more kick than we did so it could have even gone their way so we were very, very lucky.”

Exeter’s Irish skipper Tom Hayes said his team was still growing and would take great confidence from such a promising performance in their first Heineken Cup game.

“We came here today to play are rugby, we said we’re delighted to be in the Heineken Cup so we weren’t going to be afraid of being in it when we got here,” said Hayes.

“We put everything we had into the game, we’ve come up a little bit short but there’s a lot there for us to be positive about and a lot to build on.

“We’ve a lot of belief in ourselves in what we’re about as a team. We’ve grown a bit as a team together over the last three or four years and we’re developing all the time so today is just another step forward.

“We’re not the finished article by any means but hopefully we can kick on from here and try to improve and at some stage turn games like that today into wins which will be crucial for us.”

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

23

Sport DU Athletics Prospectus

Women’s boxing finally a contender

Tom Roseingrave takes a look at the history of women’s boxing in Trinity and the wider world

I Tom Roseingrave Contributor

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The argument that women’s boxing is being used as a vehicle for women’s rights is not shared by many of the boxers themselves.

These women are athletes.

Quanitta “Queen” Underwood, representing the USA, stated bluntly: “History doesn’t mean anything to me.

A gold medal does.”

n 1997, Lennox Lewis’s manager, Frank Maloney, used the term “freak show” to describe a bout between two female boxers. After witnessing the first sanctioned female fight in Britain, the Daily Mail’s Ian Wooldridge described the scene as “schoolgirls belting the living daylights out of one another for the entertainment of vicarious yobbos in a nightclub”.

The views of Maloney and Wooldridge were representative of much of the British (and, indeed, Irish) public at the time. The boxing authorities were similarly reticent. So how has Katie Taylor managed to capture the hearts and minds of an Irish public in a sport that, until recently, had been greeted with hostility? More importantly, what happened in the interceding years that allowed for the introduction of women’s boxing as an Olympic sport?

The history of women’s boxing is a complex and fascinating story. It is littered with characters that spent their careers fighting both inside and outside the ring. Women’s boxing had, in fact, featured as a demonstration sport at the 1904 St Louis Olympics. Yet it soon fell out of favour until a generation of pioneering female boxers enacted its revival toward the end of the 20th century.

In 1993, Dallas Malloy defeated USA Boxing, the American amateur boxing association, in an historic lawsuit.

The US supreme court ruled that the refusal of USA Boxing to grant amateur licences to women on the basis of their sex was discriminatory. Malloy was one of the first female boxers to be granted a licence, and on 1st November 1993 Malloy fought Heather Poyner in the first officially-sanctioned amateur women’s boxing match in the US. It took a little while longer for women’s boxing to be recognised in Britain. The sport was completely banned by the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBC), partly on the grounds that premenstrual syndrome made women too unstable to box. In 1998, Jane Couch, a female boxer known as the “Fleetwood Assassin”, won a landmark case against the BBBC, which allowed her to fight professionally in the UK. She was also awarded £15,000 (¤18,611) compensation for “loss of earnings”. In November 1996, the Amateur Boxing Association of England voted in favour of ending the 116-year ban against women boxing.

Deirdre Gogarty is an Irish boxer who seems to have escaped the nation’s notice. Born in 1969 in Drogheda, County Louth, she was inspired to take up boxing as a remedy to the bullying she suffered at school.

Due to the fact that the Irish Boxing Union refused to sanction any of Gogarty’s fights, she was forced to leave Ireland to pursue a career in boxing.

She travelled to London, where she participated in female bouts, often held clandestinely. On several occasions the fights were quite literally underground; Gogarty recounts fighting in the basements of various pubs. She left for America, where a small group of female boxers fought in professional matches. The high point of her career was her fight against Christy Martin at the MGM Grand Garden in March 1996. The fight took place before a Mike Tyson-Frank Bruno match, and was watched by an audience of nearly 30 million. Women’s boxing had finally been allocated the exposure it so greatly deserved.

Watching Gogarty’s bout was a young Katie Taylor from Bray, County Wicklow. She wrote to Gogarty and expressed her frustration with women’s boxing in Ireland: “I can’t see [women’s] boxing taking off ever here in the near future … I am fed up not being able to get fights, especially when I see the lads I spar winning championships.” The year was 1996; Taylor, and, for that matter, women’s boxing, still had some way to go before the discipline was recognised as an Olympic sport.

The cause was advanced by the establishment of the World Championships in 2001, yet it was not until 2009 that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that women’s boxing was to feature in the 2012 Olympic Games.

The IOC’s decision was not without gender bias. The committee was reluctant to increase the number of boxers in London; in a compromise, the men’s weight divisions were pared to 10 from 11, allowing 250 men to fight. The women, meanwhile, were to compete in three separate classes. This would allow 36 women to compete.

Our own DU Boxing Club has welcomed female boxers for some time under the guidance of its head coach, Dan Curran, who set up the club in 2001. The ladies’ vice-captain, Laura Healy, reports an almost equal ratio of males to females at training sessions. She has also seen a surge in female members this year, and is certain that Taylor’s exertions may have had something to do with this trend.

The club currently boasts over 100 female members.

When asked about the stigma attached to women’s boxing, Healy said that her granny was particularly disgusted at her participation, with the exact words being: “Do you actually enjoy hurting other people?”

The former Olympic bronze medallist and current boxing coach Mick Dowling has seen an increase in participation in the sport since the 2012 Olympics. He claims that enrolment in his boxing fitness classes has skyrocketed, with both men and women seeing boxing as a way of staying in shape. These new recruits may not be stepping into the ring any time soon, but it seems that Irish men and women have warmed to the sport as never before.

Despite this, women’s boxing continues to attract criticism.

Writing in the Toronto Star, Cathal Kelly described the crowd watching the inaugural Olympic women’s boxing match at the 2012 Games as the rowdiest “and likely the drunkest” at the competition. He sees the sport as an attempt by the IOC to attract viewers, and thus revenue, to the Games. Kelly is clearly mistaken in seeing women’s boxing as merely a form of entertainment; he is ignorant of the obvious skill of the competitors.

Nicola Adams, of Team GB, stresses that women boxers are more technical than their male counterparts. Women boxers are more likely to be “stick-andmove” fighters, employing fast jabs, split-second footwork and spiralling movement to beat their opponent. It is rare to come across a woman “brawler” boxer, throwing clumsy hooks and relying on undiluted aggression. It was Adams’s technical potential that persuaded her trainer, Fred Gummerson, to take her on. Before meeting Adams, Gummerson had been completely against female participation in the sport.

The argument that women’s boxing is being used as a vehicle for women’s rights is not shared by many of the boxers themselves. These women are athletes. Quanitta “Queen” Underwood, representing the USA, stated bluntly: “History doesn’t mean anything to me. A gold medal does.”

The recognition of women’s boxing means that athletes such as Adams receive an annual salary allowing them to train all year round. Limiting these women to the status of political relics is to ignore their determination, skill and technique.

Gone are the days when the likes of Gogarty were forced to fight in the basements of London pubs. Gone are the days when boxing associations cited woman’s “unstable nature” as the reason for their exclusion from the sport.

Unbecoming of a lady? The 20,000-strong crowd that turned out for Taylor’s Olympic homecoming in August of this year didn’t seem to think so.

Sport In Brief

Attie Papas The cross-country running season kicks off this week, and DU Harriers and Athletics Club (DUHAC) athletes have been training hard to make this a successful year for Trinity athletics. The Colours road-relay competition will take place on 3rd November at University College Dublin and promises tough opposition from our rivals in Belfield. After this, our teams will head to Maynooth and face the rest of the Irish universities in the intervarsity road relays. While colleges such as Dublin City University and the University of Limerick boast several international-level athletes, DUHAC are confident that we can provide competitive performances from both our men’s and ladies’ teams.

In past years, DUHAC men have shone in track and field competitions; but while athletes such as Éamonn Fahey have been earning gold in the long jump, Trinity has failed to make a significant impact in the cross-country or road-relay competitions. With recent progress from athletes, however, and some significant additions to the cross-country and road

relay teams, we could be seeing a shift in the balance. Several of DUHAC’s long-distance athletes were picked for the Irish universities team in the Belfast Invitational this year, and February saw Liam Tremble pick up a bronze medal in the under-23 cross-country competition. With results like these, our men look set to put on a good show in the upcoming competitions.

DUHAC are delighted to take on former Harvard track captain Brian Hill this year. Brian promises to make a huge splash at our upcoming competitions, currently ranking as one of the fastest 800m runners in Ireland and having reached countless National College Athletic Association finals in his homeland. Also new to the team this year is Alan O’Shea, who has a considerable number of achievements from his athletics career at University College Cork. Brian and Alan will join distinguished DUHAC athletes Liam Tremble and Sam Mealy for the intervarsity road relays next month.

The ladies of DUHAC have long been outperforming their male counterparts in longdistance competition, with an impressive third-place team finish in cross country last year and DUHAC’s Tal Coyle finish-

ing in ninth place in the modern pentathlon event at the London Olympics. This trend seems set to continue with cross-country medallists Irene Gorman and Lorna Begley both clocking personal best times in the last few months.

All eyes are on the Trinity women, set to take home medals in the upcoming competitions. While the ladies team was narrowly edged out of the top three in last year’s road relay competition, the addition of junior freshman Trinity athlete Iseult O’Donnell, who was rated in the top ten in the 800m this year, is sure to lift us into a stronger position.

The return of DUHAC legend Becky Woods is also an incredible boost to the team this year.

Becky has competed for Ireland at international level, and holds no fewer than three Trinity records from her time as an undergraduate.

Following the successes of last year, 2012 should see some exceptional performances from both our well-established DUHAC athletes and our newcomers. November will be the start of a busy year for DUHAC, with our athletes competing throughout the year at many different levels. Watch this space.

Six Trinity fencers selected for Five Nations Gabriel Beecham Six fencers at DU Fencing Club (DUFC) have been named as members of the Republic of Ireland squad for next month’s senior Five Nations tournament, which returns to Ireland this year and will take place on 3rd November at the Dublin City University sports complex in Glasnevin.

DUFC’s head coach and former captain, Colm Flynn, will lead out the men’s épée side, joined by the club’s president, Rory Greenan; while its alumni officer, Jack McHugh, will be making his third consecutive Five Nations appearance in the men’s sabre event. In women’s foil, 2012 graduates Jenny Jennings and Geraldine Davies will be hoping to draw inspiration from their contributions to DUFC’s trophy-winning performance in women’s foil at last February’s intervarsities, while

former Irish national champion Liz Fitzgerald rounds out the field in women’s sabre.

Trinity College Sports Centre’s Ancillary Hall played host to an Irish Fencing Federation open training day last Saturday 13th October. The wellattended session, led by Flynn, attracted over 40 intermediate and elite fencers from across the country to improve their skills across all three weapon classes (foil, épée and sabre), and also served as an opportunity for the newly-selected, 24-person Republic of Ireland squad to begin tactical preparation in anticipation of the Five Nations.

The previous weekend saw Trinity fencers come away with a brace of medals at the Irish Intermediates, held in the newly-refurbished sports centre at University College Dublin

(UCD). Junior freshman Max Milner made his Irish fencing debut in style, reaching the final of the men’s foil event in a field of 29 competitors, and coming away with a silver medal after a narrow 15-13 loss to Grant Couper of Salle Dublin. The club’s women’s captain, Clodagh McCarthy Luddy, came third in women’s épée, being knocked out in the semifinals by the event’s eventual winner, Naomi Mullins of UCD; while Olivia Flynn won second place in women’s sabre, losing a tightly contested final to University College Cork’s Erin Barclay. At this stage in the season overall squad strengths remain unclear, but the early results bode well for DUFC’s bid to retain the Frank Russell Trophy for a sixth consecutive year at the 2013 Intervarsities.

Ladies’ Hockey off to sticky start The season began in full last weekend, with matches for the first-fourth XIs. The first XI, captained by Hayley O’Donnell, having lost their first game 2-0 to Hermes, came up against a formidable opponent in Old Alexandra College, going down 3-1 at full time. They also played Corinthians Hockey Club, losing narrowly 1-0. They are a relatively new team having lost six graduates to Pembroke’s firsts this season, the team being replaced by a mixture of talented freshers and seconds.

This weekend they fell 4-0 to table-toppers Railway Union.

The second XI, captained

by Sarah Lochrin, faced New-

bridge Hockey Club away in Naas, losing 2-1 in their first-ever match in Division 2, having climbed four divisions in only four years. Their second taste of this new division saw a near win against favourites Railway II. The final score was 1-1, but they displayed great potential which could be unleashed in Trinity second XI’s first year at this level.

Trinity’s thirds have come back fighting from a relegation last season. They drew with Tullamore Hockey Club and the UCD thirds away in their first two league games, a very promising start to the season.

They came back from 2-0 down

Hayley O’Donnell

to UCD at half time to score two fantastic goals and take a crucial point from Belfield. The fourth XI recorded the only DU Ladies’ Hockey Club win last weekend, a 1-0 result against Malahide Fingal.

Goalscorers: Division 1: Trinity 1 (Éanna Horan) Alex 3 (7th October) Division 2: Trinity 1 (Laura Gibney) Newbridge 2 (6th October) Trinity 1 (Laura Gibney) Railway 1 (13th October) Division 6: Trinity 2 (Catherine Simpson, Shauna Kavanagh) UCD 2 (13th October)

DUCAC holds AGM for 2013 Attie Papas Dublin University Central Athletic Club (Ducac) held its annual general meeting last week, electing the club’s executive committee for the coming year. The body is responsible for providing funding and support to each of the 50 sports clubs in College; funding comes from College’s Capitation Committee, as well as profits from the Pavilion Bar. The chairman of the committee is Cyril J Smyth, a fellow and former professor of microbiology. Cyril worked in College variously as a lecturer, head of

department and senior dean for a whopping 28 years between 1981 and 2009. Since then, he has been serving as chairman of Ducac’s executive committee and captains’ committee.

Joining him this year are the vice-chairman, William Hurley, from the Boat Club; the senior treasurer, John Lumsden, from the Association Football Club; the treasurer, Garret Dunne, from the Harriers and Athletic Club; the secretary, Lucy O’Donoghue, from the Ladies’ Boat Club; and six new club representatives from Harriers,

Sub Aqua, Swimming, Fencing and both boat clubs.

Last year’s executive committee also elected six “Pavilion Members”, graduates of Trinity who sit on the Ducac executive committee. Elected this year were former member of DU Football Club Gerry Kelly and 2010’s ladies track captain, Claire McGlynn, alongside John Dillon, Brendan Leahy and former boat club members Donagh McDonagh and Michael Gleeson.

TRINITY NEWS

Wednesday 17th October 2012

Sport

Match preview: James Hussey speaks with DUFC Captain Michael McLoughlin

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Bannwell winner sends Trinity second Sarah Burns

L

Sports Editor

DUAFC are currently taking applications for the Trinity Mega League Cup, which will kick off in February 2013. The Mega League, which has been running for over 20 years, is an internal league open to all Trinity students and staff. All games are 11-a-side, and a maximum of two external players are permitted per squad.

If interested, contact Tommy Dunne on 086-3856726.

ast Sunday, Dublin University Association Football Club (DUAFC) secured their fifth win in six games in the Leinster Senior Football League (LSL) Sunday Major Division. The wet autumnal morning saw the side pick up a 1-0 victory over Enniskerry YC at College Park.

Having lost only once in the league so far – to Swords Celtic – the team were determined to continue their winning streak, and did so despite the slippery conditions.

DUAFC dominated much of the first half with a number of early breaks up the right wing from the skilful Gus Shaw Stewart, who continued to cause problems for the Enniskerry side. DUAFC’s best chance in the first half came from confusion within the Enniskerry defence that gave Brian O’Reilly an open shot on goal in the 28th minute which was kicked wide. However, Enniskerry made a break of their own just minutes after which was comfortably saved by goalkeeper Ray O’Malley. DUAFC continued to create chance after chance in the first half with much of the play coming from the nifty Chris Allen. Allen was central to most of the team’s set pieces, while also acting as the side’s main playmaker.

With half-time approaching, DUAFC were eager to get a goal, with shots on target from Conall O’Shaughnessy and Niall Bannwell. The Enniskerry defence held on, just; two yellow cards in the space of five minutes were the result of some desperate defending from the Wicklow side.

A DUAFC corner in the 47th minute made it look like Trinity might just snatch a goal before half time, but it was unluckily headed just wide by O’Shaughnessy. A scoreline of 0-0 at half time was unrepresentative of DUAFC’s clear dominance in the game and the

numerous goal chances that had escaped them.

The second half saw Enniskerry begin to settle into the game with a great chance in the 51st minute that was headed wide. Signs of frustration that consistent pressure hadn’t culminated in a goal began to appear within the DUAFC team when the captain, Darren Burke, received a booking for dissent. The team finally looked to capitalise just after the hour mark with a goal from Shaw Stewart, but he was deemed offside by the linesman.

Finally, in the 67th minute, Trinity’s hard work was paid off with a goal from Niall Bannwell, who slotted it in from short range after a corner from Jonas Loebbing. DUAFC looked like they would strike again, with goal opportunities coming from O’Reilly and Bannwell just minutes after.

Enniskerry continued to cause problems with two great chances for Colm Devitt in the last 20 minutes of the game.

However, DUAFC’s defence remained firm, with notable performances from Andrew Cullen, Paddy Doyle, Conor Bobbett and O’Shaughnessy.

A last-minute upset could have been on the cards for Trinity as Enniskerry won a free kick ten yards out from the box in the 90th minute.

Enniskerry substitute Graham O’Sullivan stood up to take the shot, which took a deflection and went out for a corner that was subsequently cleared by Burke.

A good performance from DUAFC saw them secure the game, albeit probably disappointed that they couldn’t add to their goal tally. Their victory now leaves them on 15 points in the table, with some difficult matches ahead against the likes of St John Bosco and the current league leaders, Swords Celtic, away.

DUAFC Photo: George Voronov

BALLIN’

David Murphy of the DU Basketball Club explains how, after a difficult season last year, the men’s team is ready to rebound this season

T David Murphy Contributor

he DU Basketball Club men’s team has undergone comprehensive change over the summer. A dismal Dublin League campaign, followed by relegation at the Intervarsities in Limerick, led to the removal of Wesley Cooper as coach of the men’s A team.

This prompted a recruitment drive, resulting in the acquisition of Todd James as head coach and Marius Leonavi ius as assistant coach. This year the team is justifiably optimistic in hoping for significant improvement on last year’s performance.

Throughout the 2011-12 season, the team fought hard in a very tough Dublin Division 1. Many games went down to the wire but, critically, Trinity came out on the losing side on all but two occasions. The issues with organisation and a general lack of cohesion in the squad were seen as part of the reason why the team struggled last season.

Cooper took over the men’s A team coaching role full-time after stepping in for the reasonably successful 2010 Intervarsities at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Cooper had previously been coaching the B team in College. During the 2010-11 season, the team gained promotion from Dublin Division 2 to Division 1 and maintained its A intervarsity status.

However, it is fair to say that the talent within the team was never fully utilised and they relied on defensive intensity to pull them through games.

All members of the team have been quick to express their gratitude to Cooper for taking on the job in Galway when they needed him. The former coach made enormous efforts to learn on the job for the good

of his players, earning himself respect not only within the club but with other coaches as well.

Despite this, the committee decided that results and performances on the court were what mattered, so after two years they parted ways with Cooper.

Over 25 coaches applied for the vacant post. It became clear early on that James was the man for the job. He hails from the California in the US and was once the California high-school coach of the year, but moved to Ireland over 30 years ago. Later, he coached in the Irish Super League with Killester, as well as playing in Dublin Division 1 at the tender age of 50.

For assistant coach, the team is also delighted to have the services of Leonavi ius, a qualified basketball, strength and conditioning coach from the Lithuanian Academy of Physical Education.

For those uninitiated in the world of basketball, Lithuania is one of Europe’s and the world’s powerhouses of the sport. Basketball is often described as Lithuania’s second religion. The Baltic nation can lay claim to a rich history in basketball, providing many players to USSR sides before the breakup of the Soviet Union, and, out of the five Olympic Games Lithuania has competed in since 1992, they have come away with bronze medals on three occasions.

As such, having a Lithuanian on board the Trinity coaching ticket will add a new perspective to proceedings in Trinity basketball affairs. Leonavi ius has also agreed to take on the B team and the freshers’ team for their annual tournament in November.

vs

Enniskerry Leinster Senior Football League Sunday Major Division 14th October 2012

DUAFC

1-0

Ennis

Teamsheets Enniskerry DUAFC

The club is overjoyed with the acquisition of these coaches, as it has never been able to entice coaches of such stature in the past. This difficulty in attracting coaching staff has been due mainly to lower funding compared to other colleges like University College Dublin and the University of Ulster, Jordanstown.

It is fair to say that, in James, Trinity has one of the best – if not the best – coaches in the country guiding its way.

In the coming season, the team can be optimistic about its chances for success. There are some very promising freshmen coming into the squad this year,

as well as Erasmus students who will certainly bring something new and add an exciting spark to Dublin Division 1 and college basketball.

Hopes are high that the team will challenge well in both the Dublin and college leagues.

Promotion back into the A intervarsities is a definite goal.

Pre-season training has seen the laying down of the building blocks for a promising year.

James brings an ethos centred around hard work, defensive intensity and intelligent use of the ball on offense.

The first game of the season saw Trinity facing Oblate Centurions in Inchicore last Friday.

1 - Ray O’Malley 2 - Andrew Cullen 3 - Paddy Doyle 4. - Conor Bobbett 5 - Conall O’Shaughnessy 6 - Chris Allen 7 - Gus Shaw Stewart 8 - Darren Burke 9 - Niall Bannwell 10 - Brian O’Reilly 11. - Jonas Loebbing. Subs: 12. - Eoin O’Driscoll 13. - David Holt 14 - Ilik Scruffelen

Eoin Fox Craig Comiskey Daniel Dalton Colm Devitt Ronan Walsh Ian Morris Sean Cirary Billy Piegot Darren Lyons Kale O’Rourke Iks Kkeey Subs: Stephen Smith Graham O’Sullivan Ciaran Barry Stephen King