Trinity News, volume 61, issue 3

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

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Ciaran O’Rourke, organiser of the TCD Apartheid-Free Campus Campaign, on a poster run in the Arts Block last week. Photo: Matthew Mulligan

‘Anti-apartheid’ campaign gathers momentum on campus

Photo: Samuel Verbi

Student campaign looks to form anti-apartheid committee on the back of support from academics and the Graduate Students’ Union.

Conan Quinn Staff Writer The ‘TCD Apartheid-Free Campus Campaign’, a new student campaign calling on College to cut its links with institutions and companies that support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, has gathered momentum in the last week after receiving the endorsement of the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU). A motion passed by 33 out of 56 votes at the union’s council meeting on Wednesday pledged support for the campaign as it looks to raise the issue at board level in the coming weeks.

The campaign, led by PhD student Ciaran O’Rourke, was launched last month after members of the Academics for Palestine (AfP) organisation revealed that Trinity has worked with Israeli drone manufacturer Elbit Security Systems and two other Israeli firms on an airport security project, as well as a separate

project with Israel’s International Security and Counter-Terrorism Academy, which they claim contribute to the oppression of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The GSU is now a signatory of the campaign’s petition, which calls on board members to end College’s research affiliations with firms that operate in or provide security services for Israeli occupation zones in Palestine, and to cut ties with Israeli institutions that deny equal right to Palestinian academics and have not condemned Israel’s “illegal policy of occupation and settlement in Palestine”. College, the GSU motion states should “ensure that it does not participate in co-funded or shared research projects with such universities, institutions of firms, while Israel’s policy of occupation and discrimination against the Palestinian people persists.”

While the GSU is obligated to respect any motions passed by its council, Megan Lee, the union’s president, told Trinity News that it would “invite any interested postgraduate student to bring forth a proposal regarding the TCD Apartheid Free Campus campaign if he or she wishes to modify, amend or quash the conclusions reached by Council.”

The passing of the motion is one in a series of recent displays of support for the TCD Apartheid Free Campus Campaign.

Among the Trinity lecturers and academics that have so far signed its petition are Dr. Siobhan Garrigan, the Loyola Chair of Catholic Theology; Professor Cormac Ó’

Cuilleanáin from the Department of Italian, Dr. Norah Campbell from the School of Business, Dr. Fintan Sheerin from the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Dr. Ciarán Cosgrove from the Department of Hispanic Studies, and Dr. Andrew Finlay and Dr. David Landy from the Department of Sociology. Dr. Ronit Lentin and Dr. Barbara Bradby, both retired sociology lecturers, have also confirmed their support of the campaign.

O’Rourke intends to build on these steps with an academic colloquium celebrating “the work of Mary Robinson and the law lecturer Kader Asmal against apartheid both in Trinity and internationally.” Recognition of the work of Trinity academics against apartheid in South Africa is the inspiration for the campaign and the acknowledgment of this work is one its principal aims, he told Trinity News. He is hoping to establish a committee in the coming weeks to decide on actions to be taken. Support from the GSU is significant as its president sits on the college’s board and therefore has the ability to raise issues within what is the executive governing body, he said. Fellows will also be targeted by the campaign.

“It’s about getting the people they represent on side and making them aware of it themselves,” O’Rourke said. The campaign, which is supported by the Academics for Palestines (AfP) organisation, has reached just over 200 signatories on its petition and hopes to achieve a target of 500 before presenting to the provost and board.

While a number of undergraduates have expressed interest in putting forward a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) motion at SU council, this approach differents from the apartheid-free campaign in calling for a boycott of Israel as opposed to a boycott working to “end academic complicity in the policies and crimes of apartheid states internationally,” Ciaran said.

Last week also saw a campus debate on the academic boycott of Israel organised by the Irish School of Ecumenics. The debate, which was chaired by Newstalk journalist Shona Murray in the Thomas Davis theatre on Wednesday, was led by Palestinian writer Dr Ghada Karmi; Prof Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian and a leading BDS; and British political theorist Prof Alan Johnson.

Professor Alan Johnson spoke first against the BDS movement.

He claimed that an academic boycott would only serve to reinforce the siege mentality of right-wing Israeli nationalists and that comparing Israel to South Africa under apartheid mischaracterises what is an unresolved national conflict. He said that the blunt instrument of a boycott fails to grapple with the complexities of the situation and undermines the potential for negotiations.

The first of the two pro-boycott speakers, Professor Ilan Pappé, e argued that Israeli academia was as a whole complicit in the destruction of Palestine. “The whole academic establishment is needed to brand an act of destruction as an act of self-defence and indeed an entitled act of self-defence,” he

said. “Doctors to treat people in order to torture them again, architects to build walls, orientalists to legitimise dispossession.”

The final speaker, Dr Ghada Karmi, dismissed the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict, citing Israel’s continued acquisition of land during and after attempts at negotiation and peace talks. She went on to argue for BDS as a tool of civil society which could be used to respond to the oppression of Palestinian academics and students under Israeli occupation.

There were heated scenes when the floor was opened up to questions from the crowd, with order having to be called several times to prevent shouting and interruptions. Several Palestinian academics gave passionate personal accounts of their experiences under Israeli occupation.

One man offered to buy Johnson a plane ticket to Israel and fund his expenses on the condition that Johnson visits his children in the West Bank who he hasn’t been able to see in 14 years because of the occupation.

One audience member brought up the claim that Palestinians wish to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. “No one is calling for the elimination of the Israeli people,” Dr Ghada Karmi responded.

“The way that Israel is structured -oppressive, racist, colonialist, genocidal, land hungry - is what people are calling for the destruction of. Not the elimination of the actual people.”

Inside

TN2 SPEAKS TO ROSAMUND PIKE ABOUT LIFE AFTER GONE GIRL, MYKKI BLANCO DISCUSSES HIS RIOT GRRL INFLUENCES, AND WE LOOK AT CELTIC NOIS IN TG4’S AN BRONNTANAS.

Dee Courtney

Alicia Lloyd talks to Trinity’s GAA stars about life at the top of their game.

casts a cold eye on Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In movement.

Conor O’Donovantalks to the volunteers behind this year’s much-hyped Web Summit.

Features p.8

Women in science

Comment p.14

SciTech p.20

Sport p. 22-3

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18 November 2014

News

What They Said

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“ “ “ “ Trinity ents’ mystery tour went to the foundry in Carlow.

Let’s just take a moment.

- B. Ryan, @shakqueera

Students unhappy with handling of water charges

Surveillance lecturer today had us introduce ourselves & then he added another fact he’d found on the internet, like our parents’ names.

It’s November and I’m in the 24 hour library with a 6 pack of energy drinks. RIP.

The key missing ingredient to reading computer science research papers on a Saturday night is a bottle of red wine.

- Jason Leonard. @jtlnrj

- Kevin Baker, @__kbaker__

- Anna Sheehan, @local_hippo

Do you approve of water charges in principle?

Student dissatisfaction with the government remains steady as controversy over the implementation of water charges continues.

James Wilson News Editor

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The poll also reveals deep hostility toward Sinn Féin in the wake of the Mairia Cahill controversy.

A Trinity News poll of student opinion has revealed deep dissatisfaction both government and opposition. Our poll of campus opinion reveals Trinity to be unhappy with the roll out of Irish Water as well as with Sinn Féin’s handling of the Mairia Cahill controversy.

While a solid 56% of students polled approved of water charges in principle - against 36% who didn’t and 8% who were undecided - the vast majority of those spoken to judged the roll out of Irish Water to have been badly handled by the government.

74% thought the introduction of the charges were badly handled, with only 3% considering it well handled and 23% unsure. Following the exclusion of the unsure, 96% judged the introduction of water charges poorly managed against 4% who thought it well done.

When questioned as to whether it made them approve more or less of the government’s job performance, a full 52% said it made them approve less, 24% said it made no difference to them, 4% said it made them approve more while 20% were undecided.

When the undecideds were excluded, 65% stated Irish Water’s roll out made them less likely to approve of the Government’s job performance, with 30% insisting it made no difference and 5% saying it made them more likely to approve of the government’s job performance.

When questioned as to their opinion on the overall job performance, 24% said they approved, 52% disapproved and 24% expressed no opinion, a small increase in the number of people who expressed themselves confident in the government in our previous poll, conducted between the 8th and

10th of October, in which 48% of interviewees expressed confidence. The figure of 24% who approve of the current coalition amounts to a drop of 3% since October, with the number of undecideds decreasing one point to 24%. Following the exclusion of undecideds, 68% disapproved against 32% who did.

The poll also reveals deep hostility toward Sinn Féin in the wake of the Mairia Cahill controversy. A full 65% of respondents judged the party to have badly handled Cahill’s accusations that she had been raped repeatedly by a member of the IRA over a period of nearly twelve months in 1997 and then subjected to a “kangaroo court”, in which she was forced to confront her attacker so that the IRA could assess her body language.

Conversely, 3% thought the party had handled the situation well, against 32% who didn’t know. Following the exclusion of undecideds, 96% of interviewees thought the party to have handled the situation badly against 4% who thought it well-handled.

When asked whether Gerry Adams should resign as Sinn Féin president - a position he has held for over 30 years - a similar 65% of those questioned thought Adams should resign the leadership.

A mere 2% thought he should continue, with 36% not expressing an opinion. When “don’t knows” are excluded, students thought Adams should resign by a huge margin of 97% to 3%.

EDITORIAL STAFF

Do you think the roll out of Irish Water has been managed well?

Yes 3 Don't Know 23

% No 74

Trinity News interviewed 100 students face-to-face on the 13th and 14th of November in the Arts Block, Front Square and at the Pearse Street entrance to Trinity.

New student support group aims to address the lack of women in leadership positions.

Contributor A new student support group launched last Thursday, 14th November, aims to provide a platform for students to connect with gender equality, specifically by addressing the lack of females in leadership positions. College’s first ‘Lean In circle’ was established last week by postgraduate student Nadia Reeves Long.

Already existing in 73 countries, ‘circles’ attempt to use peer support, networking, group discussions and structured meetings to “enable individuals to achieve their goals and develop personally and professionally” and “challenge the lack of women leadership at a grassroots level.”

The small empowerment groups take their inspiration from the manifesto of Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook. Her 2013 book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, uses research to highlight gender differences, and provide practical advice to women.

Attendees at the launch were invited to share their expectations for the group. These ranged from having “a network to connect people in a professional sphere, which would be a useful asset graduating from college” to “having space to discuss the negative social circumstances you might encounter and how to overcome them.” Students then carried out a ‘connection activity’ involving answering questions such as “what holds you back from pursuing your boldest dream?” A recurrent theme was a lack of confidence: “Even if I know something well, I will always be doubtful about it,” one person said. “I wish I could be more confident in my own

opinions,” another added. “Even if you are the most qualified person in the room to talk about something, you still doubt yourself.” This was claimed to prevent female students “applying to a company” due to feelings of comparative inadequacy, or not “believing in the value of their creative ideas”. Another problem discussed by female students was the tendency for women to be “judged more harshly” and “seen negatively for trying to address inequality.” Advice from Sandberg was echoed at multiple points in the meeting, including regarding negotiating: “Women should use ‘we’ and men should use ‘I’. Men are promoted on potential and women are promoted on performance.” The meeting featured goals-setting, inspired by the Facebook COO’s challenge of doing ‘what you would do if you weren’t afraid’ and the credo ‘ready for anything, capable of everything’ was developed to conclude the meeting.The group turned its focus to identifying “small things we could do in the next month to combat these.”

Before she read Sandberg’s book, organiser Reeves Long “would have not have identified as a feminist” and “had never read feminist literature before,” she told Trinity News. Realising she was “exhibiting many of the behaviours” discussed in ‘Lean In’ provoked her to set up a Lean In circle - open to undergraduates and postgraduates - which she hopes will permit “practical application” of ideas proposed

by Sandberg by “raising the issue of gender inequality on a broader level, because people don’t talk about it.” Regarding her experiences of gender inequality in Trinity, Reeves Long maintains she does not feel “overtly discri-

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Online society app causes headache for ball-goers Fionn McGorry Deputy News Editor

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What holds you back from pursuing your wildest dream?

Catherine Healy D. Joyce-Ahearne Naoise Dolan Matthew Mulligan James Bennett Daire Collins Natalie Duda Kevin O'Rourke Mariam Ahmad Kevin Threadgold James Wilson Fionn McGorry Clare Droney James Prendergast Conor O’Donovan Michael Stone Michael Lanigan William Foley Conor McGlynn Fionn Rogan Dylan Lynch Aidan Murray Luke McGuinness Alicia Lloyd Gavin Cooney Louis Strange William Earle A'Hern, Charles Croome Carroll

Trinity News is partially funded by a grant from DUPublications 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.

TCD ‘Lean In’ support group established Eimear Duffy

Editor: Deputy Editor: Online Editor: Editor-at-Large: Contributing Editor: Multimedia: Art: Photography: Design:

minated in any way” or that “men are sexist”. Instead, she perceives that while “our rights are equal,” women “sometimes hold ourselves back”. The circle, by “getting people to talk about it” aims to bring the subconscious to students’ consciousness: “Success and likeability is positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. I am probably as sexist as the next person and don’t realise it. I think that’s the problem.”

Reeves Long’s vision is that women will “get equal representation” across society. “The fact that there are 20,000 circles in the world shows there is gender inequality everywhere,” she said.

“Only 4% of the Fortune 500

CEOs are women. That it is a huge problem. If women didn’t want to get to those leadership positions I don’t think these circles would exist. Maybe women don’t all want to be in leadership positions but it’s definitely more than 4%.” Lean In circles are based on the principle that the type of gender inequality Trinity students face is a psychological problem that demands a psychological answer. Reeves Long credits encouragement from her friends who told her “definitely do this” as giving her the impetus to set up the group, indicating that circles of peers hold power to generate ripples of change.

Teething problems with the new online societies platform, Hive, meant prospective ballgoers were left uncertain as to whether they had successfully bought tickets last Wednesday to DU Law Society’s annual Swing Ball. The server hosting the ticket sales crashed, meaning that many had funds deducted from their accounts without receiving notification that they had been successful in obtaining a ticket for some time afterwards.

Hive, which had initially been released last year as Adme, offers societies the opportunity to centralise their online presence into a single platform for managing ticket and merchandise sales as well as handling credit or debit card payments, and managing mailing lists. The platform, which has been endorsed by the Central Societies Committee (CSC) as a method for promoting society events, is a Dublin-based start-up run by Trinity graduates.

In previous years, the Swing Ball, which is to take place tomorrow at the Shelbourne Hotel on St Stephen’s Green, had been ticketed through a process common to many societies, involving queues forming on the Arts Building concourse and payments being made in cash. Hive has been used successfully to ticket various events so far this term, including the Law Society’s Masquerave.

Many prospective patrons took to the ball’s Facebook event page to vent frustration or to inquire

as to whether or not their purchase had been successful. The committee intervened, with Law Society librarian Dervla Collins assuring members that they could check whether or not they had obtained a ticket by emailing her, and responding to several open requests for information posted by nervous patrons.

“

Auditor James Ringland indicated that the society was open to changing the ticketing process for future events.

Auditor James Ringland posted shortly afterwards with his apologies for any inconvenience that been caused to members.

Ringland indicated that the society was open to changing the ticketing process for future events, although they felt that the digital process was fair. He assured members in his post that concerns that had been raised would be taken into account for the Society’s next ball, the Law Ball in the new year, saying that the society “will do all [they] can to ticket the event in a way that’s as fair and stress free as possible.”

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18 November 2014

News

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Students told of direct provision horrors Minister Aodhán Ó’Ríordáin says he would be happy to stand over a “humane” system of direct provision lasting no longer than six months.

James Prendergast Investigative Correspondent

Photo: Huda Awan

Acclaimed director Ken Loach recalls struggle College Historical Society presents Loach with the Burke Medal for Contribution to the Arts.

Dee Courtney Staff Writer Addressing members of the College Historical Society (Hist) last Wednesday, award-winning film director Ken Loach recalled his struggle to present alternative points of view at a time when the state was “ruthless in their suppression of the weak.” Starting his address by reminiscing about the Thatcher régime, Loach talked about a documentary he made, called “The Question of Leadership.” It featured interviews of factory workers speaking out against the cronyism of union leadership: “Faced with strikes, the union leaders

did deals to sell our jobs. Faced with factory closures, they did deals to accept the closures after a certain period.”

When the film wasn’t shown on national television, they took it to Channel 4: “The programmes were never seen. And what makes me angry is that it wasn’t me who was censored.

These were people who had never been on television, whose voice was never heard.”

Moving to “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” he said he has been asked how he feels telling the story, as an Englishman: “My ancestors were farm labourers, and my father’s family worked in the mines. The same people who exploited my family exploited

yours, so what we share is class, not nationality.” He commented on Gordon Brown’s statement that Britain needs to stop apologising for the empire: “I’ve never heard anyone apologise for the British Empire, and it was a reign of terror.”

Despite the contentious nature of his work, Loach says that you can’t focus on an agenda too much: “The first duty is to the material. You find stories that you feel reveal more than the simple narrative of the characters. If you are true to your characters they tell their story, but they also reveal the wider society around them. Just by studying that microcosm you can reveal the whole society.”

“

You find stories that you feel reveal more than the simple narrative of the character.

He finished by telling the chamber about a play he made about a Jewish leader in Hungary during the Holocaust, who helped the Nazis get Jews into the trains to Auschwitz in exchange for saving a small number of them to go to Palestine: “There was outrage about this racist, anti-Semitic piece ... No one challenged the key fact of collaboration, and it remains unchallenged ... The tolerance of this political ideology of zionism has left us with the great cause of our time, that of Palestine.”

He ended by asking the crowd to take action: “Our politicians will do nothing. So what do we do? The answer is we have to boycott. It’s the only way.”

Anglican chaplain moving to Denmark College’s Church of Ireland chaplain, Darren McCallig, is leaving Trinity after seven years.

James Prendergast Senior Reporter The Reverend Darren McCallig, Church of Ireland chaplain and dean of residence, is to leave Trinity after seven years as chaplain. He is moving to Copenhagen where he will be chaplain of the English-speaking Anglican Church in the city. His wife Annilese has been working in Denmark for the past couple of years where she is head of the Danish National Opera.

“I have loved my seven years here in Trinity. It’s an extraordinary privilege to work in such a beautiful and stimulating environment. We are also very lucky to have an historic eighteenth century Chapel and a fabulous Chapel Choir,” McCallig told Trinity News.He mentioned the establishment of an Irish language choral evensong during Seachtain na Gaeilge, a Rainbow Week service, a candlelit Advent service, and the holding of evensong with simultaneous interpretation into Irish Sign Language as some of the highlights of his time as chaplain.

“A large part of my job is subversion – in the best sense of the word,” McCallig told Trinity News. “Sadly, many of the loudest voices in Christianity – and religion in general – are those who present faith in simplistic, exclusivist and unimaginative ways.” He said that the “excessive deference” towards clergy and the churches in recent Irish history was “very unhealthy” and “masked all kinds of appalling behaviour.”

“Things have changed and are still changing in Ireland. Some of that change is good and some of it is not so good. But we cannot go back to the ‘good old days’, b-

From left to right:

Dr Richard O’Leary, the Revd Darren McCallig, Canon Giles Goddard (chair of Inclusive Ireland) and the Revd Mervyn Kingston.

Photo: TCD Chaplaincy

ecause as we now know, those days were anything but good.”

McCallig said that he has worked with Michael Jackson, Archbishop of Dublin, to “present a Christianity which is spacious and inclusive,” welcoming Hindu, Jewish and Muslim guests to chapel. “I don’t know what the founders of Trinity College would have thought about such developments, but I believe they

are essential for building understanding and co-operation between people of different faiths.”

He said that numbers attending services have increased in recent years. “Even in what is, in many ways, an increasingly secular environment, many people – both staff and students – are searching for a faith which is intellectually credible and spiritually satisfying.”

McCallig’s final Sunday service as chaplain will be on the morning of the 7th of December at 10.45. It will be the final Sunday of the “By the Book” series and McCallig will be talking about his hero Desmond Tutu and his book, God is Not a Christian. A farewell reception will take place afterwards in the Exam Hall, to which all are welcome.

An asylum seeker who enquired about his transfer from an initial direct provision centre in Dublin to another centre in Sligo was jeered by a Department of Justice official who called out “Sligo, Sligo, Sligo,” Sue Conlan, the CEO of the Irish Refugee Council, told students last week. Conlan was speaking at “Direct Provision in Ireland: New Directions and Ways Forward,” a panel discussion about the system of accommodating asylum seekers while their applications are reviewed, hosted by Trinity Free Legal Advice Centre, DU Amnesty and the Society for International Affairs, at Trinity Global Room last Wednesday.

Conlan said that the Gardaí were subsequently called when the man expressed annoyance in response to the taunt.

She said that the Garda was the “most humane” official involved and described the asylum seeker as “the most traumatised young men” she had ever met.She also revealed that before being transferred, residents of direct provision are sent letters asking them to bring their “dirty sheets” to reception. In the letter they are told that if they refuse to accept the transfer they will not be offered alternative accommodation. Conlan succeeded in getting the young man transferred to another centre in Dublin.

The incident “is indicative of the dismissive way in which people new to the country can be treated both by management at the initial reception centre and also by Department of Justice officials themselves,” Conlan told Trinity News. “The inappropriate use of the Gardaí by management of DP (direct provision) centres is not unusual,” she said. “They are used as a form of control and intimidation even when there is no suggestion that a criminal offence has been committed.”

Incitement

Conlan went on to speak about an interview she gave on 9th October on WLR FM, a local radio station in Waterford, during which she claimed the presenter made “inappropriate and stereotypical comments about ‘sub-Saharan Africans’.”

She said that the producer did not respond to her requests for a podcast and that a local resident who had enquired told her that the programme had been taken down while an internal investigation took place.

Trinity News contacted WLR FM looking for a podcast, but the station has yet to provide one, despite being contacted

by Trinity News by both phone and email. At the time of writing the podcast of the show was still missing from the station’s website.

On October 24th, The Sunday World reported claims by staff at the Lissywollen Athlone Direct Provision Centre that they had been threatened by residents of the centre. The previous month 200 residents refused food in a dispute over how the centre is operated.

Conlan later gave her own account of the dispute to Trinity News: “Tensions at the site have been building up for a long time. Residents are of the view that core staff show a lack of respect for them and when they have attempted to address their concerns, it ‘ups the ante’.”

She continued: “In that context, staff have been trying to ‘build a case’ against the residents and the decision to walk out if there was another ‘incident’, which turned out to be a complaint from a mum that Coco Pops were not available one breakfast time for her child, was taken collectively.

Core staff ‘downed tools’ and walked off site, remaining off site for about two weeks.” She claimed that staff target those residents who are key to protests and make these residents’ lives harder.

Aodhán Ó’Ríordáin, Labour TD and minister of state for new communities, culture and equality, also spoke at the event, although he left early to launch the 1916 commemorations at the GPO. He described direct provision as “a serious issue for those with a social justice mind set”. He said that Ireland is “coming through a period of reflection” about the

“type of country we want to be one hundred years after the proclamation”. He also labelled as “vacuous” Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s slogan about Ireland being the “best little country in the world in which to do business.”

Institutionalisation

Ó Ríordáin described meeting a man from Afghanistan who he said was “completely and utterly broken”. He said that direct provision compounds this “as a deliberate act of public policy”. Direct provision centres are run by people who “effectively run catering companies”, he claimed. He said that he would be happy to stand over a “humane” system of direct provision lasting no longer than six months and that he is determined to keep the right to work “on the table”. “We have had a love affair in Ireland with institutionalisation…with locking people up,” he said. With only 18 months “or less” left in power, the coalition must “seize the opportunity” to reform the system. However, he conceded that a working group report about asylum seekers within the system wouldn’t be ready by Christmas.

“

[Gardai] are used [by staff] as a form of control and intimidation even when there is no suggestion that a criminal offence has been committed.

Punitive Patricia Brazil, Trinity’s Averil Deverell Lecturer in Law, said that the policy of “dispersal” that sees immigrants sent to often isolated direct provision centres around the country after their arrival causes mental health difficulties. She told students about LGBT refugees who had been transferred to Cavan and Monaghan where there are no support services for LGBT people. Brazil said that the direct provision system has “always played catchup” since its introduction. She said the system is “all over the place” with no single procedure to handle applications for different forms of asylum.

She outlined how the system has no statutory basis, originating in an administrative circular in the civil service.

She called direct provision a “punitive measure” and noted that the direct provision allowance of ¤19.10 has never been increased in line with inflation since its introduction in 1999, while extra entitlements depend on the decision of the local community welfare officer.

At the latest count she said that 4,494 people are housed in direct provision centres, with more than half staying in the system for more than four years.

In a ruling on Friday, the High Court declared that direct provision did not breach the human rights of the mother and son who took the case against the Department of Justice.

However, the court ruled that some of the house rules such as daily signing on, unannounced inspections and the ban on having guests is unlawful. The judge said that the ruling was “doomed” because the mother and son had failed to present oral evidence to the court. In anticipation of the ruling at the discussion last Wednesday, Patricia Brazil said that this challenge is likely to be taken to the Supreme Court. A protest has been scheduled to take place outside the Dáil, this Thursday, at 10am.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

News

4

News In Brief

Trinity graduate makes Time Magazine ‘Next Generation Leaders’ list Clare Droney Online News Editor

Iseult Ward, the CEO and cofounder of Foodcloud, was the only Irish person to be included on Time Magazine’s ‘Next Generation Leaders’ list, announced earlier this week. Ward, a Trinity College Business and Economics graduate, was “speechless” when Time contacted her, she told the Irish Independent.

Foodcloud is a food-sharing service that connects supermarkets, restaurants and other food businesses with local charities and community groups seeking food donations. They have developed an app to efficiently link

charities in need to retailers with surplus food.

The Foodcloud initiative combines a sustainable business model with charitable aims.

Ward recently told the Irish Independent, “We developed a charity that generates revenue for social good so it’s financially sustainable.” As well as providing charities in need with food donations, the project also benefits the participating businesses.

While Foodcloud charges larger businesses to take away their excess food, the project helps these businesses reduce waste disposal costs.

As a third-year student, Ward became particularly interested in social entrepreneurship and the issue of food waste and

food poverty in Ireland. She cofounded the Foodcloud project with Aoibheann O’Brien, who recently obtained an MSc in Environmental Science at Trinity College Dublin.

Ward was previously awarded the Business Student of the Year 2013 by Bank of Ireland and Trinity Business Alumni.

Foodcloud participated Trinity’s Launchbox programme which provided resources for the further development of the project.

Foodcloud also received funding from the Arthur Guinness Projects last year. The project recently received the Social Entrepreneurs Ireland Impact Award. over the weekend.

SciTech Editor A research group led by Professor Seamus Martin of the Smurfit Institute in Trinity College Dublin has published a study on how the Parkin gene controls nerve cells and is responsible for repair and replacement.

Professor Martin explained the importance of this breakthrough in a press release on the 13th of November: "This discovery is surprising and turns on its head the way we thought that Parkin functions. Until now, we have thought of Parkin as a brake on cell death within nerve cells, helping to delay their death.”

Parkinson’s disease, which affects roughly 8,000 Irish people, involves the death of dopamine producing cells in the substantia

Staff Writer “Will you strive for all that makes for peace? Will you seek to heal the wounds of war? Will you work for a just future for all humanity?” These were the words spoken at the Act of Commitment at College’s Remembrance Day service the second of the two services College held this year to remember both the University’s own war dead and all those who have died in wars since.

“Remembrance is difficult act which requires that we avoid the twin temptations of ignoring that which it is inconvenient for us to remember, and of nostalgia for all that has happened in the past,” the Reverend Darren McCallig told the Remembrance Sunday service in Chapel last Sunday. He continued: “Now, I call those two “twin temptations” because I think that at

nigra, a section of the midbrain.

Dopamine is a small neurotransmitter which is responsible for communicating electrical signals throughout the brain and central nervous system. Once 80% of dopamine is lost, symptoms ensue. With signals no longer being properly transmitted, patients experience loss of motor function and tremor throughout the body.

A mutation in the Parkin gene has been implicated in early onset of Parkinson’s disease for many years, yet its actual function was not known until the findings of the Martin laboratory were published. Mutations in the mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell) of nerve cells trigger the Parkin protein, resulting in either self-destruction or clean up and repair mode. The ‘self-destruction’ mode, other-

wise known as Apoptosis, is a regular function in which old body cells are programmed to die so that new cells may take their place. This process happens everywhere in the human body – blood, liver and kidneys especially have a high turnover of cells.

The degree of damage to the mitochondria dictates which outcome will be chosen, and these new findings suggest that sickly nerve cells are not being removed at a fast enough rate – they are allowed to accumulate in the brain, preventing their functional replacements from being recruited into the brain.

Mutated Parkin can’t perform the “cellular weeding” process that it needs to in order to maintain proper neural function.

Students unite to tackle homophobia in schools James Wilson News Editor ShoutOut, an LGBT charity founded in 2013 by Trinity students and alumni to tackle antiLGBT behaviour in schools, held a training session for prospective volunteers last week in Players theatre.

The volunteers, mostly Trinity undergraduates, were trained in how to best to deliver workshops to second-level students about LGBT issues, the effects of

TCD marks 1918 Armistice Will Dunne

College researchers make huge Parkinson’s disease breakthrough

Dylan Lynch

Illustration: Julia Helmes

homophobic bullying and how to support friends who might be LGBT. According to a survey conducted by the organisation last year, 92% of respondents felt that their school had not provided enough information and support to those struggling with issues related to their sexuality.

In addition, 67% has witnessed homophobic bullying and 49% of those who identified as LGBT had been subjected to it.

The charity now has branches in Cork, Galway as well as Dublin

their core, they are very similar – in essence both temptations are a refusal to engage with ambiguity, a refusal to grapple with complexity, and ultimately a refusal to assume proper responsibility.”

McCallig also talked about Sebastian Faulkner’s book “A Long, Long Way” which tells the story of Willie Dunne, an Irish private who finds his life certainties shaken as the war goes on. McCallig told of how Faulkner, “in telling his story restores to our consciousness a forgotten group, a forgotten generation.” This was as part of McCallig’s “By the Book” series of sermons for Michaelmas in which preachers, McCallig or guests, speak about literature which explores issues of living and faith. Guest speakers this term include Senator Katherine Zappone and the broadcaster Eileen Dunne.

Prayers of the people were offered by Senator Seán Barrett who asked that the congrega-

tion pray for Trinity College and for peace. After the service, the clergy, choir and congregation processed to the College war memorial in the 1937 reading room where wreaths were laid by the vice-provost, Prof. Linda Hogan, Dr. Terry Barry and Senator Barret. The war memorial lists the names of 454 members of the college community who died in the first world war. The vice-provost read the customary extract from Robert Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen” and a two minutes silence was observed concluded by the choir’s singing of the remembrance anthem.

Trinity has generally observed this commemoration annually but this year, to commemorate the first world war’s hundredth anniversary, an additional, short service was held on Tuesday 11th so that two minutes silence could be observed at 11am. The provost attended and an act of commitment was made.

Students react to US midterm elections Fionn McGorry Deputy News Editor The recent midterm elections in the United States have the potential to profoundly alter thecourse of Barack Obama’s presidency. With the Republicans controlling both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the likelihood of any level of reform agenda being enacted by President Obama is threatened.

Trinity News asked a number of Trinity students from the United States their views on the election results and their expectations of the remainder of his term.

Students were agreed on the effect of the polarisation of American politics on the policy environment. Junior Sophister Law and Political Science student Kacper Coulter expressed his fears that “Politicians have been less willing to reach across the aisle to work with their colleagues in the interest of bettering the nation.” Visiting student Patrick Harrington said the fault was Obama’s: “I think his haplessness at the beginning of his term at fulfilling many of his major promises, caused him and the entire Democratic Party to lose support from voters in the middle.” Ciara Franck, a Trinity

student on Erasmus in Mannheim, said “If the Republicans really try, they will block any new appointments to the Supreme Court and similar positions.

They don't care about policy, they just want to prevent Obama from doing anything.”

Junior Sophister Campbell Higle saw the potential for deadlock between Congress and the President as an opportunity: “As a woman I’m going to be thankful for these next few years because no action will be taken. I don’t want conservatives passing legislation that restricts my reproductive rights or that aims to close down planned parenting.”

When asked about the effect of the elections on perceptions of Americans abroad, views were varied. BESS student Dan O’Brien said that when he first came to Trinity in 2012, he was struck by the amount of Irish people enamoured of Obama, whereas “a lot of leftists in America had already grown tired of his moral compromises on major issues by that point.” He drew attention to the “good-natured ribbing" that Americans get at Trinity, and suggested that this attitude is unlikely to be affected by the midterm elections. Contrastingly, Harrington lamented Obama’s apparent weakness on foreign policy and the associated

perceptions. Similarly, Franck said that “People look to America to be a leader and are disappointed when they fail to step up or step up in the correct way.

They laugh about Americans being insular and isolationist and not travelling, whilst also craving American products and not understanding just how expensive it is to fly across an ocean.”

Other students questioned the true significance of the elections.

O’Brien noted that Obama had already faced “almost unprecedented ideological divide in Congress”, and that “the most exciting political trends in America right now aren’t happening in Washington anyway; they’re happening at the state level. The most recent midterms continued the trend toward marijuana legalisation with victories in Alaska and Oregon, and medical usage is becoming accepted to the point that even conservative politicians like Chris Christie can’t get away with bashing it... I think that Obama will have to continue to do as much as he can through unilateral executive action, but I’m not overly concerned about the midterm results in that regard.”

and has received funding from the US Embassy, TCD Equality and O2 Think Big. Speaking to Trinity News, ShoutOut’s director Paul James Behan said: “We're absolutely delighted with the response so far this year. We've welcomed 86 new volunteers to in the last week and with a bit of luck we'll be welcoming plenty more over the course of the year.”

New SU access officer calls for greater integration of TAP students

For further information, please see shoutout.ie.

Clare Droney

ShoutOut founders and Trinity graduates, from left to right: Lydia Rahill, Declan Meehan, Eoin O'Liathain, Owen Murphy and Jane Casey. Photo: shoutout.ie

Online News Editor Gabriel Adewusi, the newlyelected SU access officer, has pledged to increase awareness of the Trinity Access Programmes (TAP), which he said can be misunderstood by the wider college community. As a result, he said, some students can “feel a lot of trepidation in admitting that they have come from a TAP background.”

The senior freshman student was elected as the first SU access officer at the last SU council meeting, which took place on Tuesday 21st October. TAP welcomed the decision to introduce the part-time position, commenting, “This is a great idea as it means that the issues of access students will be represented at Students’ Union and committee level in College giving us all a stronger voice and meaning our issues will be at the forefront.”

Adewusi, a human health and disease student, completed the TAP foundation course before beginning his undergraduate degree at Trinity College. “I am immensely grateful for TAP and

I think that TAP is a wonderful resource – one of the best resources that we have on campus,” Adewusi told Trinity News this week. TAP encourages students from socio-economic groups under-represented in higher education to go to university and support them in this endeavour. Adewusi has continued his involvement with TAP as an undergraduate student by visiting local secondary schools as a TAP ambassador. He is also currently a TAP mentor.

Adewusi’s personal motivation for applying for the position was “to help people be more comfortable as TAP students and to raise awareness of TAP in the wider college community.” There are currently over 900 TAP students in Trinity. Adewusi believes that there is a definite need for someone to represent the needs of this significant group within College. The core duties of the position include promoting and publicising access within College, acting as the point of contact between TAP and the SU, and representing access issues at committee level and in relation to policy decisions.

Representatives from TAP have

welcomed the introduction of the new role and acknowledged in particular the support they received from the SU sabbatical officers. Dr. Lisa Keane, who oversees post-entry progression and alumni development in TAP, commented, “The main impetus for establishing the role this year was really the backing and support of an excellent SU team, who at the very beginning of their tenure came to TAP to reaffirm their commitment to the area of access.” Dr. Keane noted that the SU president, Domhnall McGlacken-Byrne, is particularly committed to the equality of access. “Domhnall ran on quite a strong access message. It’s nice to see that this is being followed up on,” she added.

The access officer position was established on the eve of the launch of new Strategic Plan.

In the Strategic Plan 2014-19, College announced the commitment to increase the percentage of underrepresented groups, including TAP students, enrolled on undergraduate courses to 25% in 2019.

Tuesday 18th November 2014

TRINITY NEWS

Michael Lanigan talks Islam and ISIS with representatives of Dublin’s Shia and Sunni community.

Features

p8

Blood on the page

D. Joyce-Ahearne speaks to poet Dylan Brennan about violence, his first collection of poetry, and the experience of being a foreigner in Mexico.

D. Joyce-Ahearne Deputy Editor “Almost with the amorality of a journalist I suppose. That sounds terrible, ‘the amorality of a journalist’. Objective, that’s what I meant. Jesus, that’s an awful thing to say to someone. You know what I’m trying to say.” No offence taken. Dylan Brennan is talking about the prose style of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a foot soldier under Hernán Cortés during the colonisation of Mexico who, in his old age, recounted his experiences in The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. Díaz is a voice in several of Brennan’s poems in his first collection of poetry Blood Oranges, published this month by The Dreadful Press.

The idea of the foreigner in Mexico is key to Brennan’s poetry. No surprise given it is how he has spent most of his life since leaving college. Born in Dublin, he has been swapping between Ireland and Mexico since spending a year in the latter following his degree. It is a place that has always been present in Brennan’s mind: “I became very interested in Mexico as a kid. My mam came back from the shop one day and she had two little Penguin books, one on the Incas and one on the Aztecs, for myself and my brother and I got the one on the Aztecs.

So it was in the back of my mind as I was coming to the end of my degree. I thought, right, I have to go live somewhere for a year to improve my Spanish and I’ve been to Spain, it’s great, but why not somewhere completely different? I suppose it was inevitable that I’d go there at some point.”

Beginnings

Brennan studied TSM Spanish and Portuguese (no longer available) and Italian in Trinity and it was here that he developed a love of Latin American literature.

It was after finishing his under-

grad that he spent his first year in Mexico: “After that [College] a couple of friends told me that they wanted to go to Mexico and I thought, yeah, sounds great.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go straight into a masters or what.

They said they had got jobs organised for the two of them and kind of at the last minute I said well I‘ll go too and I’ll look for a job. And I got to Monterrey in the north of Mexico, liked it, and got offered a job there. So we worked for a while, saved our money and then we travelled from there by car and we ended up on an island off the coast of Honduras. So I became pretty fascinated with that part of the world and ended up going back quite a bit.”

Brennan returned to Ireland to do an MA in Cultural Policy in UCD. As part of the masters he did his work experience in Poetry Ireland and it was here that he first really engaged with poetry outside of an academic setting: “Poetry Ireland seemed to me quite active and a place to meet interesting people. I worked there just helping generally whether it was data entry, answering the phone, or even serving the wine at readings. So I got to meet and listen to a lot of people like Pierce Hutchinson, Paul Durcan, Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney.In one edition of the Poetry Ireland Review I helped Paul Lenihan proof-read it and I really got to see what kind of poetry was being accepted and what was popular. And I got a feel for what I liked, what I didn’t like and noticed certain trends.

Because I wasn’t really engaged with contemporary literature before that to be honest. Everything I read was before the turn of the century. I used to think you could trust a classic whereas you don’t know what you’re going to get with some new hotshot novelist.

But I’m totally the opposite now.

Since I joined Twitter I’m very clued in.”

Writing

Following his work with Poetry Ireland, Brennan returned to Monterrey in 2005. He would move from Ireland to Mexico twice more before settling in Mexico in 2011. He is currently living in Cholula where he has been working on his doctoral thesis on Mexican writer Juan Rulfo.

It was from 2011 onwards that he began to write the poems that we find in Blood Oranges. Brennan came relatively late to the poetry game: “When I was a little kid I

loved to write stories but had never really thought about doing it seriously. There was no poetry, no stories, nothing like that in college. When I was in Mexico [in 2005] I started writing, scribbling some very short lyrics, nothing serious.

“I’m quite grateful to a friend of mine called Cody Copeland.

I was working in a small town called Miahuatlán in the south of Mexico and he had done a degree in Creative Writing and we found we had a lot of free time. He used to like to play writing prompt games and got me writing stories and pieces of texts in like 10 minutes and it got the creative juices flowing. And I was telling him he needs to get back on his novel and he read a couple of my poems and said to me you need to start this again and from then really, 2011 into this year, has without a doubt been my most active period. Because before that I’d write maybe two poems a year and one of them would be crap, and very short. So I kind of thought well let’s actually really try and do this.”

Though he had been published in the Poetry Ireland Review, Brennan hadn’t gotten a lot of exposure in the Irish poetry scene.

However, the dynamism of the new publications and publishers that have emerged over the last few years opened doors for him, as they have for many others: “I just knew the old [journals]. I was published in a few of them but not so regularly. I was in the Poetry Ireland Review once. But it was a godsend to find these new journals, quite experimental, open to all sorts of things. Colony and gorse and The Bohemyth are fantastic. And The Penny Dreadful, I remember seeing their first call out and I thought I’ll apply and I remember I was really impressed when it came out. It was only a small poem of mine but there were people like Roddy Doyle and Elaine Ní Chuilleanáin. In their second issue I think they had Paul Muldoon, Gerard Smith.

And then recently Rob Doyle, who’s doing great things. So when I had enough poems together for a collection these were the first people I asked.”

Blood Oranges

Blood Oranges is a strong and vibrant first collection. Aptly named, it looks at violence, the natural world and humanity’s cultivation of both. The foreigner in Mexico, whether through the clear crisp voice of Díaz or the poet himself, is also central to

the collection. The three have often found themselves united throughout Mexico’s history and violence is as present today, in the ongoing drug wars, as it was under Spanish colonisation: “My doctoral thesis is on a guy called Juan Rulfo, who is just an amazing writer. I was reading a lot of interviews with him and he was very interested in this idea of history repeating itself and how the violence of the conquests is still going on. An acquaintance of mine, a good friend of a friend, was murdered as I was reading these interviews on recurring violence, and so that kind of became an obsession of mine.

I think that’s obvious in some of the poems, the idea of violence through the ages, whether it be the conquistadors or the narcos or police brutality. There’s a lot of blood and guts running through the pages. There’s a juxtaposition of old violence and new violence and they don’t seem so different to me.”

Brennan cites the Italian writer, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and the Northern Irish poet, Michael Longley, among his chief influences. While the foreigner in Mexico is a focal point for many of the poems in the collection, the idea of the foreigner being Irish is not something that Brennan consciously considered, though he recognises that his being Irish plays a role to an extent: “I suppose it must, I think every piece of writing has got to be autobiographical in some way, maybe very obviously or maybe very obliquely. You bring what you have to the table whether you want to or not. But the idea of the foreigner in Mexico is more personal than the idea of an Irishman in Mexico, I think.

But there are some poems that were written very recently that are in the collection where there is a definite connection [to Ireland]. There was a time I went to Monte Albán and saw these sculptures called the danzantes, who were these people who they think suffered genital mutilation for purposes of sacrifice. So the sculptures show them writhing around in pain but the ones that are vertical they call the dancers.

But it really links, for me, to a poem by Longley about Sheela na gigs and I incorporated some of his words into the poem and made a connection there. So there are some poems that are clearly referencing [Ireland]. And I think that’s how people think and learn, by making these kinds

of connections.”

The French poet André Breton, who appears in Brennan’s poem Breton in Mexico, called Mexico “the most surrealist country in the world.” In his poem, Brennan examines the relationship between reality, surreality and the subjectivity that allocates something as one or the other.

Breton becomes another of the foreign voices through which Brennan examines his adopted home: “Sometimes I find myself agreeing that it’s so surreal and then other times I think no this is just the colonial European projecting his viewpoints. Just because it’s strange to him doesn’t make it absurd or surreal, it’s just a different place. So it’s a contradiction that sometimes I find myself agreeing with him and then sometimes not. I thought about

it once when I read in Chihuahua that there had been 23 people massacred on a lawn at a teenager’s party, something insane like that, and they caught the guy and it was a case of mistaken identity.

He went to the wrong house and I thought this is bizarre, this is reaching the levels of surrealism.

And then I thought that Breton’s statement was perceptive and condescending and ridiculous and brilliant all at the same time, in a sort of surreal way.”

Brennan is in Ireland to launch his book and defend his thesis but returns to Mexico at the end of the month, to his girlfriend and his job. It’s clear that Mexico is home and, from the strength of Blood Oranges, an inspiring one at that:“Cholula, where I live, they claim, is the oldest continually inhabited town

in the Americas. From my house you can see the volcano, always steaming away. It erupted two days ago. It keeps you on your toes. I don’t want to fall into the trap of exoticising everything, it’s something I try not to do but I wake up every morning and there’s a volcano outside my window. And the locals are so used to it but I vow never to get used to it and I think that’s maybe the key to poetry: maintaining a sense of astonishment at things that are genuinely astonishing.”

Room to improve at the Web Summit Some Summit volunteers say they struggled to deal with significant administrative issues at the much-hyped event.

Conor O’Donovan Features Editor Two weeks ago, Paddy Cosgrave, the founder and CEO of the Web Summit, opened proceedings on the main stage with an anecdote intended to define the essence of the event. One year previously, at last year's Night Summit, Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber, got together with investor Shervin Peshawar over a pint at Bruxelles pub on Harry Street. Before long they were back at the Shelbourne, signing a payment agreement. This was how Uber got to where it is today. This anecdote was largely accurate and it was no doubt this sense of possibility was what drew some to volunteer at the event. The Summit probably did represent an opportunity for someone to do something advancing. As Cosgrave would have it, the Web Summit provides attendees, and perhaps even volunteers, with the chance to move into ever more rarefied spheres of influence.

Enthusiasm

Many of the volunteers who offered testimony for this article rated the experience as worthwhile. They cited a strong group spirit among the volunteers, a diverse and interesting range of speakers and opportunities to network, with industry professionals as well as liked minded volunteers, as positive reasons to volunteer. One volunteer from the response team viewed volunteering as "an opportunity to work with volunteers from a range of different backgrounds and experiencing the Web Summit from a different perspectives

than that of normal attendees."

The atmosphere at the Summit was quite captivating with a wide array of exhibitors pitching up daily.

The co-ordinators of the volunteer program were described as enthusiastic and engaging by those who came into contact with them and they were similarly positive in their feedback: "Volunteers travelled from near and far to give up their free time to make this event a success, in which they did! Reports from media, attendees, exhibitors, staff and external stakeholders was how supportive, efficient and friendly all volunteers were to make the event a more enjoyable one."

However, it seemed that a lot of the positive feedback came in spite of an underlying sense of disorganisation with qualifying statements such as "I didn't have that much of an issue with it" or "I overlooked it at the time because I was at the Web Summit" recurring frequently in the testimony of the volunteers interviewed for this piece.

Responsibilities

The degree to which volunteers were willing to overlook the dissatisfying experiences they had while on duty varied. Many found that their roles weren't sufficiently defined which led to confusion.

"There wasn't a proper manager as a team leader, just another clueless volunteer," stated one volunteer who worked on Information Desk 1 at the entrance to the RDS. There seemed to be no clarification as to what those on the information desks in particular were meant to be doing, a problem originating in a lack of informed leadership: " We all arrived on the morning of the first

day and essentially milled around waiting for someone to tell us what to do. After about twenty minutes people started manning the desk, because this was the main entrance and people were starting to flood in, we spent the first morning basically making it up as we went along, having had no detailed briefing as to where things were and what was happening where."

Another interviewee who was a part of the startups team stated his role was similarly ill defined and was apparently indistinguishable from those of members of other teams. He also identified the lack of trained team leader as problematic: "I began to feel that the team leaders were more of a metaphysical concept as the person giving me direction confessed they were completely at a loss. I began to receive text messages as five different team leaders claimed me and offered me lunch vouchers."

Other volunteers felt illequipped to deal with significant administrative issues that arose.

"There was a problem with food vouchers too, some attendees didn't receive them and couldn’t get food without them. We told the leaders but nothing was done about it all day so we had to explain to a couple of hundred hungry people that they'd have to trek back over to the registration office to see if they could sort it out," a volunteer from the Food Summit said. (This issue was later addressed in an email from the staff.)

Many volunteers felt their situations were complicated by the fact that the things that would have allowed them to perform more effectively were lacking.

"A lot more could have been

done with the app, and even basic things like having the correct schedule of daily speakers and a list of exhibitors for the attendees," related a volunteer from Information Desk 2, who found the Summit good overall despite some stressful moments. Back at Information Desk 1, things followed an increasingly formulaic pattern as a result. "We spent all of our time fielding three questions: ‘Where is the Wifi?’ Apologies, it isn't working at the moment. ‘Can I have a map?’ Apologies, we have currently run out. ‘Can I have a list of attendees?’ Erm, no. There isn't one. You might be able to find it online, but there isn't any Wifi."

There were those who took a more freelance approach to their work, taking queries as they came and doing what they could. "I had some success on the Wednesday morning, getting screwdrivers and stuff from the production office so people could repair their stalls." stated one volunteer who was assigned to the Marketing Summit. "There were a few stalls that couldn't get their Ethernet working, so I went to the info desk and then the staff tent outside where I was redirected somewhere else. There seemed to be confusion over who should radio the relevant person."

Another volunteer, who had previously volunteered at the Cork Film Festival among other events, compared these experiences with ushering on the Marketing stage: "The stage was large and we struggled to handle the numbers as people moved in and out... As a volunteer, it’s normal to be improvising but at an event this size things can become very difficult for us and those attending."

Disorganisation

Many of our interviewees felt the disorganisation was either due to or symptomatic of a greater problem. "The friendliest people in a position of authority were the security guards. The staff were very dismissive," said a volunteer from the media area, who also found it upsetting that master’s students had come from as Germany and Finland to volunteer in what was, in her opinion, an unchallenging atmosphere. The interviewee from the startups team put the high number of travelling volunteers down to the "inflated rhetoric" surrounding the event and questioned the significance of the Web Summit itself. "I find the whole notion of solutionism surrounding the tech industry at the moment, whereby entrepreneurial spirit and the supposedly chronic need to invest in it is overemphasised, to be quite hollow," he added. "In general, people are not encouraged to be realistic in their expectations.

I met one startup (Rently) who had attracted investors due to the quality of their product. However, they were very much in a minority as many talented people were overlooked."

The event has expanded from 400 attendees at the inaugural event in 2010 to 22,000 this year with attendee and volunteer numbers doubling since last year. The Web Summit caters to a culture focused on creating apps dedicated to streamlining every aspect of our daily lives. That such an event is lacking in certain fundamental areas suggests it is expanding in an artificial way. That being said, those involved are aware as to the shortcomings of this year's event.

The volunteer co-ordinators acknowledged the main issues arising in our testimony as "clarity of roles, communication and direction", thanked Trinity students for their contribution to the event and stated they "will take all constructive feedback on board to ensure

that Web Summit 2015 is bigger & better." It is possible that, outside the circularity of the media glare and entrepreneurial rhetoric the event currently exists within, the Web Summit could flourish into an event as stimulating as parts of this year's installment were.

There was speculation amongst our interviewees as to how the event would progress over the coming years, with some suggesting it will be sold on. In its present incarnation, however, there seems to be room for improvement. "If those at the very top, organising the event, don't value the volunteers enough to direct them properly, ultimately, the work (the volunteers) do will be valueless," concluded the startups team interviewee. While this may seem like harsh criticism, it is, at the very least, constructive.

Tuesday 18th November 2014

TRINITY NEWS

Features

7

Viral marketing targets Tinder users Turn Off The Red Light’s recent Tinder campaign has attracted worldwide attention for good reason.

Danielle Courtney Contributor Tinder is the playground for sexual networking. Download for free onto your phone and hundreds of available singles will appear on screen. Swipe left to never see them again, swipe right in a bid to chat to that seemingly good looking person displayed in their photos. The game continues on in a never ending stream, browsing through people in your area, with the hope that those who accept wish to meet up and everything that follows. Reports during the summer allude to a less innocent side to the app, with The Washington Post and the CBC reporting on escorts using the platform to find clients.

Digital media across the world featured a similar scrutiny of the app this past week, following an Irish sex trafficking awareness campaign advertised through Tinder. Turn Off The Red Light (TORL) partnered with marketing firm, Eighty Twenty, to raise awareness of Ireland's increasing problems with sex workers being trafficked here and exploited.

Strategy

Illustration: Natalie Duda

Chinese students seek edge at Irish universities

Irish higher education provides new opportunities for a growing number of Chinese students. But the overseeing role played by Chinese authorities could present future challenges for third-level institutions.

Catherine Healy Editor Wang Can, a final-year PhD student, and I are sitting in a cafe in UCD’s Conway Institute. Like hundreds of other Chinese students, the Beijing University of Chemical Technology came to the university through its premasters programme. In China, he says, most private and public sector employers favour westerneducated graduates. “We know how to deal with people from foreign countries,” he explains. “This is an advantage for Chinese companies that want to break into the western system.”

Hongbo Sun, a second-year undergraduate, accepted a place in UCD after completing a year-long foundation course in the Dublin International Study Centre. His English was poor when he first moved here in 2011, but the majority of his friends now are Irish and Spanish. He spends most of his time these days running a Dublin-based mobile startup designed to simplify inflight shopping. And Kuan Yang, a final-year PhD student, came to Trinity on a Chinese government scholarship.

He hopes to find an academic position back in China at the end of his studies.

These three journeys resonate with a growing number of Chinese students opting to study in Ireland. Higher Education Authority (HEA) statistics show an increase in the number of Chinese students in full-time Irish higher education from 1,596 in the 201213 academic year to 1,706 last year - not including the number of Chinese students on short-term

exchange programmes. Panpan Lin, a Trinity graduate working on Chinese social media for the university, tells me that more and more students are engaging with posts on its recently launched Weibo profile, which is now followed by over 3,000 users of the Chinese microblogging site.

For western-looking students, Irish higher education offers a welcome break from the gruelling Chinese education system.

In China, Hongbo says, lectures can begin as early as 6am and students tend to study late into the night. Western universities tend to be more innovative in their teaching, typically combining traditional lectures with multimedia and online learning systems, Can explains. Another major advantage offered by Irish universities is their relatively low admission requirements. Students without the grades required by top US and UK universities can study here before applying to higher-ranked institutions that are less likely to recognise Chinese qualifications.

Student recruitment

But the trend also serves an important purpose for Irish universities increasingly reliant on international student fees. The majority of Chinese students are from the country’s rapidly expanding middle class and can afford to pay full tuition, a blessing for third-level institutions facing massive shortfalls in funding. For Trinity, which hopes to at least double its Chinese student numbers by the 2018-19 academic year, recruitment strategies include partnerships with Chinese universities and selected education agents, visits to key schools, attendance at education fairs, and targeted social media activity, including a new Chinese-language website. Its new Centre for Asian Studies will offer an MPhil in Chinese Studies from September 2015.

UCD has been even more aggressive in its targeting of Chinese students. Over 500 students are now enrolled at the BeijingDublin International College, an institution it established in 2012 in partnership with the Beijing University of Technology. It plans to open a new international campus in the Shandong province

by 2016 and recently announced plans to open a new global centre in Beijing.

But drawing more Chinese students to Ireland also means working with Chinese authorities. UCD’s oft-promoted Confucius Institute - which, thanks to joint funding from the Irish and Chinese government, will be housed in its own dedicated campus building by 2016 - is part of a global network of Confucius Institutes that has been accused of operating as a propaganda arm of the Chinese state.

In the last month, two American universities, the University of Chicago and Penn State University, closed their institutes over concerns about the infringement of academic freedoms. The closures followed a campaign by the American Association of University of University Professors that called for university agreements with Hanban, the Chinese government body that oversees the institutes, to be ended or renegotiated. But these concerns have not prevented the Irish government from pledging 3 million to its UCD division in Budget 2015.

CSSA

Even the Irish branch of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), the only official organisation for overseas Chinese students, has links to the Chinese embassy.

Can, its current president, is careful when asked about its embassy funding. The association is pushing for more financial independence, he tells me, to prevent potential difficulties over political issues. He mentions that the embassy had contacted the association about identifying students involved in last month’s Dublin demonstration in support of the Hong Kong protests. In his opinion, the “Hong Kong problem” is part of a wider political game.

“Some foreign countries control the students [in Hong Kong],” he says. “Students are very easy to control. You give them a bit of money and lie to them. [They] trust everything.”

When the conversation turns to Trinity’s attempts to increase international student numbers, Can claims that there have been historical “difficulties” with the

university that have hindered its recruitment efforts. He explains that the Chinese embassy was “not happy” when Dr. Lobsang Sangay, the elected leader of Tibet’s government in exile, was invited to speak on campus by the College Historical Society, its student debating society, in 2012. These kind of events can complicate Trinity’s relationship with China, he says. The remark is later deflected by a spokesperson for the Global Relations Office, who says society events are “nothing to do with Trinity as an institution” and that the university has “an open and supportive relationship with the Chinese embassy in Dublin.”

“

Some foreign countries control the students [in Hong Kong].

Students are very easy to control.

You give them a bit of money and lie to them.

[They] trust everything.

That the head of the CSSA appears to be aware of embassy grievances lends credence to the view that its highest-ranking members are closely aligned to Chinese authorities. Hongbo, who has stepped back from the association after founding its publicity department last year, says he regards it as a “[Chinese] government-supporting organisation”. It is useful, he tells curious students, “if you want to be a “government official or politician”.

Social life

But the CSSA’s pulling power it has established 17 third-level chapters with over 6,000 registered members since its 2004 launch in Ireland - means it also fulfills an important social role in the lives of many Chinese students. One of its most frequent outings is to Kildare Village, which offers CSSA members a 10% discount in all outlets as well as a free return bus service.

Designer brands are much more expensive in China, Can tells me.

David Zhao, the president of the CSSA’s Trinity chapter, the socalled Chinese Society, also sees its role as being primarily social.

“Our focus is on culture and celebrating events like the Chinese New Year,” he says. “It’s not as if we’re toeing the line. Protest just isn’t our focus.”

For those Chinese students feeling isolated in Ireland, the CSSA provides a welcome community. Kuan says he was “very lonely” here until he was introduced to the association. Cultural differences can make integration difficult, Panpan tells me. “Chinese culture is collectivist, while Ireland and the West are more individualist,” she says. “Here, at a lot of parties, you arrive, take a drink, start talking to someone, and then move on to the next person. But at an organised Chinese party, they will arrange a circle or table. People like to do social games together as a group, not in twos or threes. You don’t really move around. There are always usually one or two organisers who will tell people what to do.”

But most Chinese students only have a limited time in Ireland.

The majority of postgraduates are funded by Chinese government scholarships that stipulate that sponsored students must return to work in China for at least two years at the end of their studies. Others are only able to stay on if they find work within a year of graduating. Wherever their destination, this growing Westerneducated cadre looks set to face more opportunities than China’s older generations ever have.

Illustration: Reed Patrick Van Hook

As part of the campaign, headed by the Immigration Council of Ireland but featuring 70 different organisations, three fake profiles were made from real stories.

Models were captured in a stream of five photos, enticing the viewer first with a sultry image, followed by four photos revealing abuse at the hands of the Irish sex industry. The final image of one profile tells you, “Your options are left or right. Women forced into prostitution in Ireland have none.”

This slide includes the Immigrant Council of Ireland’s logo and a link to the website.

While this particular arm of the TORL movement is specifically targeted against sex trafficking, the group are working towards the end of any type of legal sex trade in Ireland. Though we see no red lights flaunting prostitution in Ireland, Irish law makes the practice legal behind closed doors. You may not advertise your services, but once consensual sex is exchanged for money it's seen as a legally protected exchange under our laws.

In 2009, their research showed that the domestic sex industry is continuing to expand. Last year it was worth over ¤200 million per annum.The Criminal Justice Act 2008 has made it illegal to buy sex from someone who has been trafficked, but with no strict liability on the purchaser. Therefore a defence can successfully claim you did not know that the sex worker was trafficked.

Attention

The campaign has garnered international attention, from Time to The Telegraph to Buzzfeed. It’s a novel approach to viral marketing, people across the country can happen across it in their daily lives. This type of guerrilla marketing is a new frontier for advertising companies. Eighty Twenty, the company behind the campaign, are better known for creating apps than infiltrating them and have worked for Bank of Ireland, Bulmers and have made an ingenious Chrome extension, which removes all references to Garth Brooks from your screens, like a secret service redaction.

Turn Off The Red Light has been active online since 2011, but it was Cathal Gillen of Eighty Twenty who thought of using Tinder as a way of taking the campaign in a new direction, targeting a new audience directly, who could be potential purchasers of sex. Cathal Gillen said “Tinder has become an extremely popular app in Ireland, and it provides us with a unique, innovative and stand out way of communicating to men the issues faced by women involved in sex trafficking.”

Clara Kelleher, Eighty Twenty's senior accounts manager, talked me through the finer intricacies of setting up the campaign. Three stories were taken, reconstructed in a photoshoot, then used to create seventeen different profiles, with seventeen different names spread throughout the country.

Though catfishing (the practice of putting forward a false identity online) has plagued Tinder like all other social media and though the app has already been infiltrated, in many countries, by sex workers advertising their services, its use as a medium for campaigning is an innovation. It's a little ridiculous that it's taken so long for the app to be commercially penetrated, and the immediate thought goes to how potentially cost effective this new advertising platform is. Kelleher confirmed that the firm behind it all were blown away by the international attention the profiles have received. They started the campaign in the last fortnight by

geo-targeting Ballsbridge, home to the monumental Web Summit, knowing that a diverse subset would be the ideal place to launch the profiles and engage users.

Through a generator website, they were able to emulate geospecific profiles with PCs instead of phones. Gradually they’ve broadened out the base to its current seventeen profiles which appear throughout the country.

International reaction has been colossal but has also at times confused the issues at hand. Time’s article featured quotes from activists who saw the campaign as a conflation of two separate problems: trafficking and the sex industry. Mashable.com quoted Gillen responding to criticism that Tinder is an app for people to meet and opt for consensual sex and therefore not the correct platform to target those who purchase it.

These arguments seem to make not only the unquantifiable claim that the two are mutually exclusive, but ignore all reports that Tinder has been used for solicitation in the past, and new apps based on its format are being created specifically for the sex industry, like Peppr.

The legal standing of prostitution is an issue that the EU is currently targeting together. Last October, The European Women’s Lobby held a conference in Brussels, Together for a Europe Free from Prostitution, with the backing of 200 NGOs and 60 MEPs, including six Irish MEPs.

“

They started the campaign by geo-targeting the Web Summit, knowing that a diverse subset would be the ideal place to launch the profiles and engage users.

Reactions

I reached out to DUGES, who have yet to decide an advocacy stance on the question of whether to further legalise sex work in Ireland. Their coming out in support of either side should be welcomed in the future, as Trinity needs a united voice to speak on this issue. Their chair, Ciara O’Rourke, in a personal capacity, thought TORL using Tinder to spread awareness of the issue a good idea, and spoke knowledgeably about the conflicting sides of the movement here in Ireland.

Katie McGrew, sex worker and RTÉ reality star, is one of the most visceral opponents to the movement, and after giving a speech to Feminista Cork, inspired them to leave TORL this summer. McGrew gave a frank interview to the Irish Independent around the same time, detailing her experience from New York all the way to her Cork-based website and the college students who are her clients, who admit that “their parents are paying for me."

Mick Wallace expressed more direct negative comments about TORL in an Irish Examiner viewpoint this week, eager for the sex industry and sex trafficking to not be condensed into a soundbite solution, though failing to offer any other way of addressing trafficking. He voiced his support to preserve the inherent virtues of the completely separate sex industry, in his eyes at least.

I spoke to Rachel Collier, CEO of Young Social Innovators, a foundation that was originally part of the same preceding organisation to the Immigrant Council of Ireland (ICI), before both initiatives were separately launched.

YSI have supported TORL from the beginning and she welcomed the campaign, particularly for its engagement with younger users of the app. Her support for movement suggests we won’t be seeing other TORL members drastically change their stance like Feminista Cork.

Denise Charlton, Chief Executive of the ICI stated in the press release that, “Sex trafficking is one of the most lucrative crimes, with the sums involved on a par with those for drug smuggling and gun running” and that the ICI is “committed to using every possible opportunity to increase awareness about the activities of the thugs behind these crimes and the impact on their victims.”

Tuesday 18th November 2014

TRINITY NEWS

Features

8

Illustration: Nadia Bertaud

From Karbalā to Milltown via the South Circular Road Michael Lanigan talks Islam and ISIS with representatives of Dublin’s Shia and Sunni community.

Michael Lanigan Online Features Editor It is Friday afternoon in Milltown’s Ahlul Bayt Islamic Centre and Imam Dr. Ali al-Saleh is speaking before a congregation of 24 Shia men. It is the eve of Muharram, the first month in the Islamic calendar, and his voice booms through the building with a delay effect on the microphone.

Each word spoken repeats itself four times, rendering the Imam’s address near incomprehensible at first. It takes me several moments to grow accustomed to this intensely dizzying sound and learn that he is discussing the topic of a person’s atheism as being no worse than that of Christianity.

Then, a man invites me into the main room, where the sermon is taking place. I pass by eight men, locked in prayer, kneeling between two 15 metre cloths of green and thirty plus prayer beads. Several voices greet the two of us: “Salaam Alaykum!”

The Imam continues talking, undisturbed, switching between English and Arabic on a frequent basis. Surrounding him at the lectern, are a series of black tapestries, emblazoned with stories written in Arabic and images of red flags stitched into the cotton material. Two Iranian men present later inform me that these are temporary decorations, set up for the first 10 days of Muharram, which concludes with the Day of Ashura on November 3rd. This is the mourning period for Shia Muslims, set aside to commemorate the death of the Third Imam, Hussein, grandson of Muhammad, on October 10th, 680 AD at the Battle of Karbalā in present day Iraq.

Beheaded by soldiers of Yazid I’s Umayyad Caliphate, Hussein is the Christ-like figure of the Shia faith, a sacrificial figure falling in his attempt at securing a caliphate for an Imam chosen by God. This right, in accords with Shi’ism belonged to Ali, the father of Hussein, who died at the hands of Muawiya, during 661 AD. His assassination gave way to the foundation of the Umayyad Caliphate, centred in Damascus and Yazid, Muawiya’s son, succeeded him as caliph in 680. This, the Shi’at Ali would contest as a case of evil overpowering piety.

Travelling from Medina, Hussein led 70 men into a fight against sin. However, after failing to garner further support en route, his men perished at the hands of four thousand Umayyad cavalrymen and archers. The survivors refused to swear allegiance to the Caliphate and as punishment; the Umayyad decapitated Hussein and his remaining men.

This conflict has defined modern Middle Eastern history, as it was at this battle where the rift between Sunni and Shia emerged, while the caliph Yazid I has become a point of reference for many commentators, having been labelled as the first George W. Bush by Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the nationalist militia for the Iraqi Shia. However, the more obvious name aligned with this dynast is Abu Bakr-Baghdadi, caliph of the Islamic State, while Hussein has become the Shia symbol of moral resistance to a new wave of extremism.

A martyr to the Shia cause, Hussein’s name is ubiquitous in the room, appearing on various posters that noted him an unsung hero on par with Lincoln, Jesus, and Ghandi amongst countless others. This was something of a surprise initially, but in keeping with the Imam’s words, which were more concerned with global solidarity in the face of the threat from the Islamic Caliphate. “It is not a first”, he stated as a reminder for all those gathered in the room. “Look at history. We have faced this before and we must act now to end the violence of these new Wahhabi-Salafists, be they al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or indeed, ISIS.” Soon thereafter, al-Saleh concluded the sermon by leading the now packed room, of forty men in a thirty-minute prayer. All knelt upon the green cloths, each man clasped his set of beads, chanting in unison ‘Allah Akhbar’, before the Imam began a hauntingly hypnotic hymn built around several lengthy calls and responses.

By 2:45pm, the crowd began to disperse, one by one entering into the hallway to converse over tea and biscuits. This was when the two aforementioned men welcomed me warmly, before guiding me through the room to explain the Mourning of Muharram. The more talkative of the two inquired into my presence at the Centre. Informing him that I had come to meet Al-Saleh, the quiet second man stood up and strolled over to the Imam. Then, after a moment, he gestured for me to enter the lobby, where the Imam introduced himself to me: “Good evening, I am Imam Ali alSaleh. You are the reporter, yes?”

Nodding slightly and without a moment to respond to his question, he motioned me into the main room once more.

Rise of ISIS

My interest in the Imam came following his appearance on

Newstalk in September. Speaking on the Breakfast Show, he notified listeners that since the rise of the Islamic State, members of his family and associates had begun overhearing more and more expressions of enthusiasm amongst Irish Muslims towards the actions of ISIS. Al-Saleh stated his message, plain and clear, by urging all Irish Shia Muslims to aid Gardaí in their investigations.

When I asked him to comment further on this matter, Al-Saleh responded calmly, saying that he had been aware of such a presence for a long time. “Even before the 11th of September, we have seen this kind coming.”

“When we talk we are saying without confrontation, that this is going to grow. They are going to achieve more and more than they already have as Daesh.” These people, he says, are not simply ISIS, but part of a growing trend that sprouts from oppressive states and are “more dangerous than al-Qaeda, even Daesh. So, if we don’t confront it in a proper way, this will produce something worse than Daesh.”In the context of Ireland, he continued by saying, “This world is coming quickly, not necessarily to Ireland just yet, because it is a small country with very good people, but they are using it as a haven. It is not like France, here, where there are up to a million Muslims, or in Britain, where there are two, or three million, or even Canada, but if you don’t do something, we are going to face it sooner, or later.”

For al-Saleh, the major names such as ISIS, or Al-Qaeda are not necessarily the primary aspects, which he is concerned about, as he places more worry upon their ideologies; Wahhabism, Salafism and Takfirism. In terms of the Wahhabists, he pointed to the Second World War, saying: “The world after this war jumped to democracy, and yet it surprises me very much because in the 20th century we still had countries governed like the Gulf States.”

According to al-Saleh, in states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, although immensely wealthy, they were and remain rife with social crises, which, in turn motivates disenfranchised people to subscribe to such extreme ideologies as Wahhabism and Salafism. “Under these savage governments and dictatorships, you will see the most extreme people. You don’t see this extremism in more liberal states such as Lebanon for example, or even in Egypt. This kind of ideology is the solution for people who live in crisis.”

Adding to this, he believes that the joining of such terrorist organisations has as much to do with one’s own personal defects and hence, these ideologies can offer “some kind of opportunity to show off. That is why you see some converts by people in Iraq, even though they live in a dem-

ocratic state. I am not sure; we need psychologists to help us.”

However, despite these eruptions in Shia governed states, such as Syria and Iraq, he maintains nevertheless that the issue stem from the Gulf States and, in particular, the House of Saud.

“Saudi Arabia is officially Wahhabi, and all extremists are Wahhabi. They have the richest countries. The ideology is coming from there, but they have oil so Western governments support these states. Despite the fact that everybody knows that Wahhabism is from Saudi Arabia, nobody will talk about it.”

Here was where I interjected to ask about the issue of accusing the Saudi officials of actively helping such groups. Allegations over the funnelling of money into such groups frequently came against Kuwait, or in the case of Saudi Arabia, its “deep state”, as opposed to any officials. The matter was opaque of course, and without any solid investigations, it remains pure speculation. However, contrary to such accusations, Saudi officials, on March 7th, 2014, began an active clampdown on terrorism, first by blacklisting the Muslim Brotherhood, Jabhat al-Nusra and Daesh, and second, by arresting known members residing in the state.

Silently shaking his head, he gently said, “No, no, the government is certainly doing something to support Wahhabism, because the big headquarters is there and it is now spreading because of their oil money.”

Divisions

In terms of the vicious antagonism against Shi’ite Muslims, al-Saleh dismissed the Wahhabist claims of liberation as a mere scapegoat ideology without any pious logic, saying: “They need something to target and its founder [Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab] at the time targeted the Shi’ites. Now, if you want to recruit people, if he’s Muslim, you attract him against Shia, or if he’s non-Muslim, you attract him against America, the West, or Christianity.”

“This ideology is using those accused to brainwash the minds of youth,” he continued, before grinning slightly as he began to highlight the absurdity of the militants approach. “Now, with Israel, they recruit people from Palestine, but those Palestinian people with Daesh will not fight Israel. They will fight Syria, or go to fight in Iraq.” At this point, alSaleh could barely hold back his amusement, as he went on: “If they live inside Israel and there is an Israeli soldier in front of them, still they spend money to smuggle themselves from Israel to Egypt, then to Turkey into Syria and then to Iraq to explode themselves in front of the Shia there.” Almost wiping off a tear of laughter by this stage, he sighed, saying, “This just shows the funny

thing about this ideology.”

Our brief discussion drew to its conclusion, but not until he emphasised the validity of the Shi’ite faith in the face of this negative period for Islamism as a whole.

“We are the proper Islam and think that this issue shows that there are some defects inside Syria. We see ISIS’ support by the youth and now, we must think what is inside ourselves to solve this problem.”

When I finally pose to him the fact that although people fear the radical elements of Sunni, Shia Islam has frequently bore the brunt of criticism from Western commentators, in particular regarding Iran post-’79, Assad’s despotism and Maliki’s oppression of the Iraqi Sunni following the Awakening in 2005. Could he perhaps clarify for some people the actual nature and motives of Shi’ism when they may feel overwhelmed by another case of the Western media’s tendency to oversimplify Islam? “Even if what is said about the Shia is true, still, Shia wouldn’t explode themselves and children, even if we do not believe in Jesus. I will not find a reason to explode myself in front of Christians. Listen to the Shi’ites. Why are we targeted by ISIS? And now, why are they targeting Christians? We are all on the same side of this war.”

After this encounter, I decided to make my way out to the Islamic Foundation of Ireland Mosque on the South Circular Road one week later. Here, the Irish Sunni population come in droves each Friday to filling the main hall, capable of holding eight hundred people. Like a condensed Mecca, the crowds spill out into the car park, where, on this occasion seventeen young men have had to set up for the Dhuhr prayers of midday. On the opposite side of the building, four women stand in relative silence, supervising their children.

The prayers end and a sea of men from all classes flood the front steps. Poking over the hedges and fences, as I stand on the opposite side of the road, I see an assortment of keffiyeh headdresses, luminous American Apparel baseball hats and taqikay skullcaps. At the main gate, one small man in a high-vis jacket catches my eye and gestures towards the information centre to his right.

Sunni perspective

Knocking on the door, a man in his early 30s answers. I immediately brief him on my presence, asking whether there was someone on the premise at that I could speak with, in order to get an alternate scope on what alSaleh had been saying. He nods silently before guiding me past the Imam’s office and down two small flights of stairs, where I overhear a voice bellowing:“You are Muslim, therefore you act. A man who neither prays, nor acts is not Muslim. You must act.”

We continue into an office, where he takes a seat next to the manager, Mudafar al-Tawash.

Born in Iraq and a former UCD student, al-Tawash is the eyes and ears of the community throughout the week, until Friday, when the Imam makes his address.

Reiterating what I had told the first man, al-Tawash responds by coming straight out to say that he had yet to hear al-Saleh’s warnings. Nor was he aware that any extreme elements of the Sunni faith were present in this community, insisting, “We don’t have any of those problems here with our people.”

There is a pause. We both nod.

To stop myself from saying “excellent, that’s that I suppose”, I ask about his work in the Sunni community.

“Well, we deal with local issues: marriage, divorce and community matters, but of course, regarding the issue of going to the war to fight with ISIS, well, anybody can ask us these questions, but we will ask why? Is this a just war?

We are against anybody killing anybody; killing minorities, killing them as people to establish the Islamic State. But what is this Islamic State?"

For al-Tawash, while not a visible concern, he stresses that social media and generational gaps, by creating communication barriers, can aid in pushing young men over to the extremist side of Islamism. If al-Saleh’s claims are true, then it is from such areas, where people find excitement in hearing about the swift action of Wahhabism, while being cut-off from the necessary critical discourse within their own community: “They just look, see, and decide this is what they want to do.”

“But even now, with the media, we don’t know what is exactly happening in Iraq, it is mixed up. It’s hard to get the real story, when you hear different stories from different people in Syria and Iraq.

Nobody really knows anything.”

Yet still this influence, he tells me “is difficult to control. You cannot tell somebody what to do, because it’s hard to tell what exactly is going on in a young person’s mind.

It is very rare with the younger generations to discuss their feeling towards ISIS, but we must discuss with them what is good for Islam.” Adding to this he states, “Of course, I can sympathise with them. They are Muslim and they have the ideology. But, do they study what they believe and know what they are doing?”

He stops for a moment and I ask how he would respond were he to be approached by somebody expressing such an interest to partake in the war? “For me, if somebody asked me to go there and fight, I’d say no. It’s not a fight for just reasons, truth, or anything. We are asking for all the things opposite to the Islamic State, you must be nice to your neighbour. We try to tell them that if anybody is interested to do

something for Islam, let us help; let us build our community and help the Muslim people in Ireland.”

I interrupt him here on the matter of creating a stronger locality, by asking how the Sunni Irish are seeking to lessen tensions with their Shia neighbours.

However, much to his dismay, he notes that a large problem in this field is the legacy of Karbala, which remains as controversial now as it was thirteen centuries ago.

In frustration, he begs his fellow Muslims to ask one simple question: “Why are we fighting about something in the past?

Okay, we should learn a little bit from it, but the fight between Shia and Sunni… It’s not valid.”

Comparing it to the Catholic Protestant rivalries, he emphasises that it has little to do with actual faith, but is a power struggle, plain and simple. Shaking his head, he states further that “We believe in the same god, one prophet, one book. We just differ on this one issue. People must get on with their lives, yet we still fight about it.”

This is why he looks upon the situation in Iraq with immense cynicism in terms of the perceived democracy that al-Saleh cited it as being. Closing his eyes, he grimaces, utterly baffled by that remark. “When the US went in to free Iraq, nothing happened, only more killings. These people were not ready for democracy, yet somehow people thought it was okay to bring armies in to dismantle whole systems.” The West, al-Tawash says failed to grasp the vast cultural and societal differences of Iraqis, which in turn helped spark the match that set the region aflame once more.

“It is not Europe, which had its own struggles for a long time to reach this point of democracy. We still have many of the old problems inside Iraq and Syria. You cannot have democracy by just kicking Hussein out. There is a lot of tribalism, sectarian rivalries and uneducated people, so because of this, Iraq especially is not ready for democracy.”

However, for all of the problems, in the end, he maintains that one can start to overcome these rifts by studying Muhammad and particularly his attitude of tolerance towards “minorities”.“The people find it difficult to accept that this was the way of the prophet. Yes, he told us to learn from the history books, but he also taught forgiveness and mercy. You cannot keep fighting over something that happened hundreds of years ago. We must put that behind us for good.”

Tuesday 18th November 2014

TRINITY NEWS

Features

9

Not your typical killjoys Killjoy Prophets, a collective of feminist women of colour, have risen to Twitter prominence might look like from the perspectives of the most marginalized themselves. We work to affirm power and agency among those whose voices have for too long been spoken over.”

James Bennett Contributing Editor Contemporary feminism in the western world has already set itself apart in tone from the movements that preceded it.

It is already being referred to by the media as “fourth-wave feminism” in order to acknowledge that it is doing things differently. The current wave of feminism tends to operate outwards from the micro level.

It highlights the individual experiences of women and uses these to call for changes in societal thinking. This strategy is very effective. Most people who engage with the feminist Twittersphere will find it hard not to get angry at the stories being shared. You can scroll down through thousands of 140-character stories about the difficulties faced by women simply going about their own business.

Illustration: Natalie Duda

Postcard from Aragón Spanish banks, supermarkets and nightlife take one Erasmus student by surprise.

Maxton Milner Contributor Like all JS European Studies students, I have the good fortune to spend this year on exchange at a European university, in order to have a proper stab at learning a foreign language before graduating. In my case, home is now la Universidad de Zaragoza, in Aragón, north-eastern Spain.

With language comes culture, and differences in going about life. The good bits, the bad bits, and the oddities make it an interesting way to pass a year.

The small differences in everyday life provide some of the most enjoyable and readily-felt aspects of my new surroundings. For example, the general awareness of, and interest in, Erasmus students is a world apart from what I’ve seen at home in Trinity. The majority of my lecturers here specifically ask after foreigners, both to check that we sufficiently understand what’s going on and to incorporate our varied perspectives into what is being taught - be it politics, languages, or history.

This attitude extends outside of the classroom, and attests to a general warmth across society here. On several occasions in the early weeks, strangers invited me to come and eat with them in the canteen rather than on my own.

In fact, food is a decidedly communal affair. “¡Que aproveche!”

(Enjoy it!) universally accompanies the sight of someone with food, and waiting to eat before everybody is ready to start is a habit observed even in the most informal situations.

Economy

As you will know, unless you’ve missed the last six or so years of worldwide financial upheaval, Spain is a bit on the rocks. In the two months I’ve been here though, I’ve begun to see why.

There seems to be an unspoken job-creation scheme at play, disconnecting employment and the concept of providing a service to the customer. Numerous public services are unnecessarily duplicated and getting anything done tends to involve getting appointments with, and the signatures of, half-a-dozen demi-gods. The functioning of banks is something akin to the 1980s, with halfnine to half-two being considered a solid day’s work. My appointment to open an account one day was a rather brief affair due the manager cheerily informing me that he hadn’t looked at any of

the paperwork required and that I should come back tomorrow.

Similarly, the university administration has a one-word mantra for working before 10:30am or after 2:30pm: “impossible.” Technology is startlingly absent in many situations, often compounded by human refusal to run an efficient system.

Supermarkets and shops do not have self-service check-outs and generally let large queues form rather than open a second till. Meanwhile shelves are left bare and some products appear only intermittently despite the presumed existence of a supply chain. Trinity’s wireless printing system is significantly more sophisticated than the Zaragoza alternative of one person physically manning a printer at irregular hours of the day on behalf of the entire faculty.

As a British student of an Irish university, it’s worth emphasising that this isn’t the reactionary opinion of some little-Englander unused to life in another country; for example, opening an account with AIB in Freshers’ Week was a 10 minute affair, in contrast to the reams of paperwork required by Santander this time around. Instead, this difference in approach to a fairly basic activity has underlined, and made me appreciate, the close cultural overlap between Britain and Ireland in comparison with some of our continental friends. A more regular reminder of this is the Spanish obsession with I.D. and the constant need to prove one’s identity in the most mundane of situations. Simple tasks such as paying with a debit card, joining a hockey club, or competing in a fencing competition all require official accreditation. The innocent may have nothing to hide, but the slightly authoritarian tinge this gives life is something that I appreciate living without back in Ireland or the UK.

Sport

Sport is a huge part of life here, and the old stereotypes of Spanish soccer seem to contain more than a pinch of truth. Public following here is about 45% Real Madrid, 45% Barcelona, and 10% Real Zaragoza or another one of the many scorned local clubs which abound in Spain. Numerous supporters of Real Zaragoza have confided their despair at the fact that ‘away’ support outnumbers home fans when one of the big two come to town.

Meanwhile, there is seemingly no concern about passionately supporting Barcelona one day before

playing five-a-side in a Chelsea shirt the next. “What’s the harm?

I like the colour blue.” At least when the Irish pick sides at random they have the excuse that St. Pats or Longford Town aren’t really comparable set-ups. Cheating and associated dark arts are also readily embraced; there is widespread confusion as to why there could be anything negative to say about Luis Suárez, or why it warrants mention that Gareth Bale or Cristiano Ronaldo – for all their undoubted skill – are reprehensible cheats. Related to this is the unstated stance that soccer is, to all intents and purposes, a non-contact sport. As a life-long follower of the English game, it is quite revealing to consider the difference of views which often exists between fans and players at home in this context.

Rugby has a special relationship with Spanish university life, despite otherwise being virtually non-existent otherwise. Tradition dictates that each faculty has a team, overwhelmingly comprised of people who learn the game from scratch before abandoning it the moment they graduate.

And while sports such as fencing and trampolining have a similar rhythm in Ireland, they don’t enjoy the prime real-estate afforded to rugby here; the mini-stadium on campus in Zaragoza caters for rugby football rather than its association counterpart. A purist, though, may feel that some of the finer points of the game haven’t quite made it unharmed across the linguistic frontier; when discussing positions recently with a Spaniard, forwards were in all earnestness labelled as ‘fat ones’.

One delightful aspect of the faculty teams is the expression it gives to the identity formed by occupants of different buildings.

Trinity’s informal division between the Arts Block and Hamilton provides a stark contrast to the good-hearted competition in existence between such groups in Zaragoza.

On the theme of identity, having the Halls experience a second time around has given new life to the familiar order to ‘down it, fresher!’ Unlike at Trinity, students from JF to SS are mixed in together, with the odd postgrad cropping up as well. The result is a community spirit and wellengrained system of traditions passed on every year to incoming Freshers. The largely uniform environment of Trinity Halls can’t provide an equivalent, and to me seems poorer for it. Outside of the residences, though, Spain seems to entirely lack the idea of “Fresh-

ers”: no week set aside before the start of term; no special events; no freezing-cold mornings setting up stalls in Front Square to lure unsuspecting young people into giving you their phone number in exchange for pizza and a society membership card. In part this is because societies and clubs essentially don’t exist; the accompanying pan-university community and identity bound up within them are similarly missing. While I am enjoying the external sports clubs I’ve joined since coming to Spain, they don’t compare to what I stumbled across at Trinity when arriving in Ireland as a freshman.

“

Pre-drinking ends at around three in the morning, clubs fill up between four and five, and the ‘night’ ends at about eight.

Social life

Partying, that other mainstay of university life, also differs significantly in both what they do and when they do it. I suspect that most people reading this have at least once turned up to a lecture slightly worse for wear due the antics of the night before: functioning, but barely. In contrast, the remarkable hours Spanish students keep makes that virtually unknown here. Pre-drinking ends at around three in the morning, clubs fill up between four and five, and the ‘night’ ends at about eight. It’s madness: incredible fun, but madness. And unlike the Anglophone preference for fuelling nocturnal activities with a bottle of vodka, some cans, and a few drinking games, alcohol plays a relatively minor role in this never-ending night out. Some people do end up drunk, of course, but weak red wine mixed with coke (Kalimotxo) is the common tipple of choice, with a moderate amount being drunk over a long period of time – which is all the more surprising given that a bot-

tle of spirits only costs about ¤5.

Self-control and immense duration repeat themselves during Pilares; the October festival akin to having ten St. Patrick’s Days in a row. The historic city centre is turned into a concert venue, Trinity Ball-style, while the surrounding streets are filled with musicians, performers, and artists. A dedicated theme park and party zone is also constructed in the south of the city to cater for those who want to carry on until sunrise – with more live music on hand. Zaragoza essentially shuts down for a week and a half, with shops, public transport, and the university functioning on only a skeletal timetable to account for the public processions and cultural activities given precedence.

Meanwhile, the Peñas – dedicated fiesta clubs, each adorned with their own colours, brass bands, rituals, and traditions – fill the streets and ensure that a good time is had by all who want it.

Each morning starts with Vaquillas, whereby the general public – often coming directly from a night out – are allowed into the bullring with the bulls in order to prove quite how brave/stupid they are. Though undoubtedly cruel (especially as it serves as a curtain-raiser for the afternoon’s actual bullfighting) it is an incredible spectacle. The risk of being seriously hurt remains very real, with several people being hospitalised this year after proving not quite as fleet-footed as they had thought. All good fun though, eh?

Having been in Spain for only two months, already I am thoroughly in love with the experience of being somewhere new. At the same time, a part of me does miss Dublin; the obvious distance Erasmus puts between me and the life I’ve built there over the last two years can’t fail to have its effects. But the world is an interesting place. People come in all shapes and sizes; how they live, act, and interact is worth seeing, and I’m glad to be able to do so in this small corner of the world.

When June comes around to send me home I will doubtless look forward to starting another chapter in the familiar surrounds of Front Square and the Liffey. But Zaragoza, with its linguistic challenges, badly-supported football team, and fondness for mixing red wine, will easily keep me entertained until then. ¡Adiós!

Identity politics Twitter has become an exciting place to be engaged in identity politics. By virtue of its openness as a platform, it is bringing together a more diverse array of voices than anything else ever could. On top of this, the hundred and forty character limit is challenging people to come up with innovative ways to express complex thoughts and emotions around discrimination and identity. Groups that would have a hard time being heard in conventional media are flourishing on Twitter.

One such group is Killjoy Prophets. In their Twitter bio, they define themselves as a “collective centering women of color feminism” which is dedicated to “ending dudebro Christianity.” The group feels that the mainstream of Christianity in the United States wilfully buries its head in the sand when it comes to issues of race and gender, and often uses theology to justify oppressive systems. Killjoy Prophets was created out of frustration with already existing “progressive” Christian groups.

Suey Park, one of the co-founders of Killjoy Prophets, wrote on the progressive Christian blog Emerging Voices about the shutting down of women of colour’s anger within Christian discourses: “The reality is that far too often we are silenced for our questions. We have been labelled ‘toxic’ and ‘divisive’ and chastised for not showing enough ‘grace.’ We have become cast as the problem for pointing out the problems of heteropatriarchal white supremacy.”

Challenging power Park went on to explain that the challenging of power is a central tenet of the group: “We founded the Killjoy Prophets Collective to make space for people of faith (especially Christians) to continue asking these questions, to amplify the whispers and to continue troubling the dominant narratives of justice and liberation while we also seek to imagine what liberation

#NotMyChristianLeader Killjoy Prophets rose to prominence on Twitter in August this year with the #NotMyChristianLeader hashtag. It was used mostly by women of colour to express anger with their churches. A lot of the criticism stemmed from the use of the Christian concepts of “forgiveness” and “grace”, “salvation” to gloss over the justified anger felt by oppressed groups. @ pdxPinay criticised Christian charity as a tool of glossing over racism at home: “Obsessed w/ the "salvation" of black & brown people in the 3rd world but no care for well-being of people of colour in your country #NotMyChristianLeader.” @ boldandworthy criticised her church for failing her when she was being domestically abused: “When you told me to stay w/ an abusive husband b/c "God commanded wives to submit to husbands" disregarding my safety #NotMyChristianLeader.”

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The reality is that far too often we are silenced for our questions.

We have been labelled ‘toxic’ and ‘divisive’ and chastised for not showing enough ‘grace.’ We have become cast as the problem for pointing out the problems of heteropatriarchal white supremacy

Although Killjoy Prophets have not yet surpassed the success of #NotMyChristianLeader, they are showing no sign of slowing down. They are still angry. Like many popular Twitter activists who are working in the area of race politics right now, Killjoy Prophets is not seeking a “racial reconciliation that envisions the goal as representation and recognition by whiteness.” Suey Park says that this is inadequate “because our aim is to dismantle white supremacy altogether.”

She does not want to slip into a niche for women of colour within a still white-dominated Christianity. She want to smash the lens that makes people see whiteness as the universal experience, and non-whiteness as the other.

Illustration: Nadia Bertaud

Tuesday 18th November 2014

TRINITY NEWS

Features

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Graduates ponder future on Front Square New graduates reflect on their time in Trinity and what lies in store for them.

Lia Flattery Senior Reporter Alanna Clarke, a former student of French and Spanish, is one of hundreds of graduates to have been conferred with degrees across a range of disciplines over the last month. Thinking back over her college career, she says “it is hard not to look back on the experience through rose-tinted glasses.” Though only out of college a few months, she already feels “nostalgic” thinking about “the summer season, playing cricket till dusk out in College Park before indulging in cakes and sandwiches on the steps of the Pav.” Handing in her dissertation was another particularly rewarding experience. “That newly bound book represented countless hours of reading, examination, interpretation, toil, tears, revelation and writing,” she recalls. It “was my one ring and I had just dropped it into the flaming pits of Mount Doom.” She is uncertain but optimistic about the future. “I hope to find a career path that I love and if that means having to search around for a while first, then that is very well what I may be doing in a few years: searching.

Come back to me then and I’ll tell you what I have found.”

One of the things that meant most to Matt Ritchie, a history and political science graduate, were the other students. “My year were really great people and we were all very close, which made just about every part of my four years better,” he says. “Whether it was group studying or grabbing a bite to eat between classes, there was always somebody around looking for company.” He speaks fondly about his role in society life, and in particular his involvement with the College Historical Society (Hist), which offered him many opportunities, from debates and listening to famous guests to trips and competitions around Ireland. “The free beer and wine at the weekly receptions certainly didn’t hurt either,” he adds.

Now back home in Canada, Matt is living in Ottawa and doing a master’s degree in public and international affairs. As for his plans for the future, he says, “After the next two years, the dream is to land a job with the Canadian civil service, hopefully something abroad. I’d love to get a chance to make my way back to Europe, maybe even back to Ireland, at some stage.”

Opportunities

For law and business graduate, Hannah McCarthy, Trinity was “exciting, terrifying and exhausting” and created “an environment where you can take risks and play with ideas.” Asked about some of the defining moments of her early days in Trinity, she says her first Hist speech in the “photogenic, but not particularly hospitable” Exam Hall comes to mind. The motion was ‘That this House believes the modern Irish woman has no need for a women’s movement’ and former president of Ireland, Mary Rob-

inson, was chairing the debate.

Contacted by the committee the night before the event, she said she was “a last ditch attempt to get a woman speaking for the motion.” She “can still remember the nerves; the mixture of excitement and terror, as I realised what I’d agreed to.”

Hannah is currently working in Washington DC for a US senator.

Her years in Trinity, she tells me, were largely responsible for getting her to where she is now. “I’m not sure I would have been bold or imaginative enough to have attempted to get work like that without Trinity and all the friends I made there as my springboard.”

Challenges

Ailbhe Nic Cába, who studied modern Irish and history, recalls entering Front Arch on her first day of college in September 2010 “excited” about her achievement and “the prospect of what lay ahead for the next four years.”

However, Trinity proved “a very lonely place” at times despite having had many friends, though the “highly competitive atmosphere” went on to act “as a catalyst to spur me on further.”

Having just gone through the graduation process, she expresses several reservations about the way Trinity conducts its commencement ceremonies. “Trinity certainly conveys how proud they are of student academic achievement through formality, rather than words, which, when compared to the ceremonies of other universities, comes across as rather emotionless,” she says. She also criticises the seating of students according to grade during the ceremony as “completely unnecessary,” leaving some students “with a strong feeling of inferiority on what should be a day they feel most proud of their degree from such a prestigious university, regardless of their final result.”

Ailbhe plans now to continue her studies with a master’s degree in communications in Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge at NUIG.

Memories

Morgan Macintyre, a former history and political science student, says the graduation day has been a nostalgic occasion. “I will always remember fondly my days working in the JCR with all of my friends,” she says. “The cafe became a safe haven for me in college, a place where I could seek refuge.”

Among the other highpoints of her time at Trinity, she recalled her last year when her younger sister joined her in the college, as well as the 2013 and 2014 Trinity Ball, at which she had the pleasure of performing.

She hopes now to focus on playing music and writing songs.

“After four years in college I feel that I owe it to myself to explore music as a possible career,” she said, adding that if it doesn't work out she will always have her degree to fall back on. “I'm not in any rush to settle down into a 'proper job'. At 22, we've all got years ahead of us to try out any number of careers or passions.”

Clockwise from top, left to right:

Doreen Burke, Dearbhla Hone, Aine Clarke, Jo Kane, Mátyás Lukács, Emily O'Leary and Deirdre Geraghty (European Studies); Matt Ritchie (History and Political Science); Dillon Sheehan (TSM Drama and Sociology).

Photos: Catherine Healy

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I’m not sure I would have been bold or imaginative enough to have attempted to get work like that without Trinity and all the friends I made there as my springboard.

Chronicle of a scam nightmare Elena Lynch stumbles upon several Facebook scammers in her search for the perfect student room.

Elena Lynch Contributor If you are looking for accommodation as a student, it’s all about location, location, location at a decent price. You want to be close to university to stay in bed longer.

You want to be close to the city centre, so that it only takes a few minutes of drunk walking to get home after the pub. So when a mouth-watering opportunity arises to rent at fancy addresses such as 51 Harcourt Street, 95 Capel Street and 35 Mountjoy Square in Dublin, you do not think, you act especially if the prices are reasonable and the rooms advertised all look like swanky hotel rooms. But in the mad rush to snap up that dream apartment, you run the risk of abandoning your common sense – like I did.

On 13th October at 10:45pm, I answered an accommodation advertisement I came across in a Facebook group for internationals in Dublin. My first scammer was named Andres Ann. The flat was at 51 Harcourt Street in the very heart of Dublin. The room was at ¤600 a month – all inclusive. Although it was over my budget, I wanted to schedule a viewing to get an idea what the market situation was. Andres Ann alleged that she was currently in the Philippines, which explained why she wanted to let out her flat so urgently. I would only receive the key to view the room after a deposit was paid. I therefore declined by saying it was too expensive anyway. She then asked me

how much I was willing to pay and immediately agreed to my suggested price of ¤500 – which came across as rather peculiar.

On 22th October at 5:14pm, I wrote to Sophie Kroll. The room was available at a ridiculous ¤350, including all additional expenses. Plus it was located in Capel Street, just 10 minutes walk over Grattan Bridge to College. Again, the advertiser was abroad. The key would have to be shipped from London to Dublin after a contract had been agreed to and my deposit payment had been confirmed. Her Facebook profile was rather modest – no photos, no friends. It stated that Sophie Kroll was originally from Frankfurt am Main in Germany.

Even though she was obviously struggling with her English, she funnily enough claimed to have grown up in Dublin. This whole situation appeared very odd, so I did not take it any further.

On 24th October at 12:41pm, I wrote to Indra Besing. The room with private bathroom was at ¤500, again all included. The pictures I received showed a lightflooded and nicely furnished flat with a great big fireplace. Once again, the landlord was not in Dublin but in Edinburgh for business. For the first time, I felt pushed and under pressure, as she pressed to proceed with contract and payment. I was unsure how to handle the situation. As I browsed through Facebook, I discovered that there were three Indras – all with the same face. According to my Facebook research, the real Indra Besing lived in Berlin, was

married and worked in the film business as a production designer and actually existed, leading a real life.

My three scammers all liked the same football clubs (Bayern München and Chelsea) and had very few – never more than 30 – and very bizarre Facebook friends. Neither of them were available to schedule a meeting and all of them wanted a deposit, pre-paid. All of this, of course, provoked my suspicion. Was I a victim of organised crime? In the end it was my dad who brought me back to my senses. He suggested googling the issue, as he did not feel too comfortable with what I was describing. Dad and Google saved me the embarrassment of turning up at a doorstep demanding to view or move into a fictitious flat. According to the Independent, the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) spoke to an innocent woman who lived in the apartment that was advertised and she said that a number of students have turned up at her door expecting to move in after paying the scam artist a deposit.

Intimidation and disbelief remain though. I put off my roomhunt for a while – after all that I experienced, it is difficult to trust any kind of advertisement for accommodation anymore. In future I will turn to institutions like the International Student Accommodation or the Students’ Union (SU) rather than answering Facebook ads. Such institutions are well aware of this problem as Ian Mooney, SU welfare officer, confirms: “It is more com-

mon than people might think, as I have found out myself this year. It's happened to students in other colleges around Dublin as well, with similar experiences – someone posting up the details of a home and asking for a month’s rent or a deposit up front.” According to Mooney, the SU will try to prevent this in future, by “educating students coming from abroad on how to avoid these scams while they are looking for accommodation.”

Back in my home country, it is common policy to view a place and meet the landlord before agreeing to a commitment such as renting a property. But as a foreigner I did not know how things were done here and even though my common sense was telling me to be careful, the need and pressure to find accommodation made me ignore the warning signs. “Unfortunately it seems that students from abroad are particularly vulnerable to this kind of scam. Reasons for it may include simply not being familiar with such scams in their native countries,” as Mooney states.

“The absolute best tip to avoid this kind of situation is to always view a place and meet a landlord before paying any kind of deposit or signing any lease,” Mooney says and I agree, after all, renting a room is serious business. So, I guess, the moral of the story is to listen to your gut and never let yourself be pressured into something you are not convinced of. Be wary. Be vigilant. And finally – listen to your parents.

End of an era for Trinity

Students of the 1960s only obliquely apprehended that everything was about to change.

Peter Henry Contributor It was exotic and unique – like nowhere else on earth. The decade was a golden era. The Trinity College of the 1960s is praised and eulogised using these words in new volume of photographs by Anne Leonard.

Portrait of an Era: Trinity College Dublin in the 1960s provides a remarkable visual insight into undergraduate life during a decade when Trinity was “small enough to be a college yet large enough to be a university”. Where an erratic Junior Dean ruled over all and where a bizarre collection of student types all knew one another.

Anne Leonard has revisited her undergraduate years before.

Two charming compilations of the stories and legends of Dr McDowell already provide a look at the eccentric world of this bygone Trinity. Now in the new book, the faces – and cars, buildings, streets and fashions – of that time are beautifully reproduced. For those who had the great fortune to be there, these photographs must provoke a thousand memories and more.

For recent Trinity students, the snaps are eye-openers. Until now, the stories of those languid days had only been imagined, the mind’s eye picturing a Trinity without those modern fabrications so crudely dumped among the austere older buildings.

What does one see? At the College Races, a punter holding

a beer and reading TCD. Morning dress. That forgotten variety of club neckties, worn with the smallest knot one could manage.

Cricket and rowing. Cars that are now called “classic”. People smoking. Porters.

This was a time when Trinity still revelled without shame in its many peculiarities. These added colour, identity and a sense of belonging, and one struggles to see how they could have impeded academic or social life. The vocabulary was distinctive – Leonard lists three pages of Trinity words at the end of the volume.

The students’ entire life centred on the college.

A sartorial tradition existed that is now almost obliterated.

Other curiosities contributed to a unique culture that had collected elements from many decades, perhaps centuries, and that has since been nearly completely effaced.

What these students of the 1960s only obliquely apprehended was that everything was about to change, that their golden era was also truly the end of an era.

Across the water, the “plate glass” universities were going up. These ideological experiments in stone would soon become models for Trinity’s decision makers. The University of York and its friends would oust the ancient universities as institutions to be admired.

Another change would transform the corpus of undergraduates from a weird mix of a couple of thousand students to a huge monolith of regular Irish people like me. Archbishop McQuaid

may have been the bête noire of the Irish Times letters page, but it was under him in 1970 that “The Ban” he inherited from his predecessors was dropped.

Very soon many of the formerly excluded were thanking God for Regina Elizabetha hujus Collegii conditrice at Commons. And, sadly, many of the new students didn’t feel that Trinity’s idiosyncrasies could be theirs.

This didn’t have to be the end of the “golden era”. Every Trinity student is heir to College’s culture. But the revolutionary spirit of the 60s, which only really swept Dublin the following decade, combined with the mindset of the new majority, wouldn’t stand for it. The old life of decades of undergraduates – portrayed in its dying days in Portrait of an Era ­– was swept away.

Anne Leonard MBE, Portrait of an Era: Trinity College Dublin in the 1960s, is available in the Library Shop, ¤49.50.

Peter Henry was editor of Trinity News between 2006 and 2007.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

Editorial

12

Stop treating international students as cash cows

Catherine Healy Editor Cash cow: a business, investment, or product that provides a steady income or profit. Irish universities have long sought high tuition fees from international students. But the commercialisation of higher education, along with financial pressures as a result of state cutbacks, has resulted in the financial burden placed on international students increasing.

College’s rhetoric of internationalisation belies the cold, monetary terms that drive its international recruitment agenda. In recently increasing non-EU tuition fees by 6%, it has undermined any claims to a merit-based globalisation strategy, opting instead to prioritise a commercial model that frames the recruitment of international students as a lucrative industry.

To justify further increases in international fees as providing much-needed revenue is to accept a neoliberal model for universities. A standard feature of this increasingly popular model is to transfer the financial burden from government to students and untenured staff - and in the process lessen the need to adhere to government legislation relating to issues such as hiring and remuneration. This is an ideological decision. If thirdlevel education is a public good, financial challenges should instead be cause to argue for in-

creased state investment.

Take Venezuela and Cuba, whose 2004 pact, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA), has provided free university education, particularly medical training, to students from third-world countries, as well as US students from poor backgrounds. While many foreign students in Cuba are from Central and South America, the Caribbean and Africa, the country’s higher education system also attracts Hispanic and African-American students from the US who cannot afford the fees of private medical schools at home. Students attending Cuba’s Latin American Medical School (ELAM), the largest medical school in the world by enrolment, receive free tuition, accommodation, meals, textbooks, and a small monthly allowance.

The Cuban and Venezuelan approach to international students contrasts markedly with internationalisation in universities like our own, where students are viewed primarily as cash cows, useful above all for bringing in large chunks of funding in the form of ever-increasing tuition fees. Education is a human right, and should not be linked to wealth or nationality. There is another way.

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Hand in hand

Matthew Mulligan Editor-at-Large I’m a gay man in a long term relationship. I’ve always been open about my sexuality and my relationships to friends and family. I came out when I was a still a student in my Christian Brother secondary school and was vocal about staff strategies to combat homophobic bullying.

I have never second guessed any of the choices I’ve made to be open about who I am and I don’t believe in self-censorship or hiding parts of myself. That is until it comes to holding hands with my partner in public; I am absolutely terrified of public displays of affection. Kissing, hugging or the aforementioned hand holding are all things that are out of the question for me, based on past experiences and fear of future harassment.

Recently, this issue really be-

came problematic for me and gave me pause for thought.

With my boyfriend travelling for work during a weekday afternoon, the last time I saw him before he headed to the airport was on the street during lunch time. When I left him to return to college, I realised that I had simply said goodbye — no hug, no kiss, nothing to show I care — and that if anything were to happen to him when away, that might have been the last time I saw him. Why had I chosen to suppress my nature, to ignore the impulses in my heart and instead listen to my brain? When in public I effectively erase an important part of my life for the benefit of others. I don’t want to be stared at, or cause a scene, or be an invitation to harassment or physical violence in a country gearing up for a same-sex marriage referendum.

This might sound like an exaggeration, but believe me when I say that the fear of being harassed is something that I think about on a daily basis. From being called a fag because of what I’m wearing to threats of violence outside of gay clubs, I’ve been on the receiving end of a wide range of homophobic abuse that constantly run around in my mind. I do constantly check myself at the traffic lights, and at the fast food counter and the pub bar.

I mention all this in light of the release of the Garda Inspectorate’s Crime Investigation Report on Tuesday 11th November.

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The fear of being harassed is something that I think about on a daily basis. From being called a fag because of what I wear to threats of violence outside gay clubs, I’ve been on the receiving end of a wide range of homophobic abuse that constantly run around in my mind.

The document was the end result of a two year examination into investigative practices by the gardaí during which around 1,000 officers of all ranks were interviewed. Among the many findings presented by the report was the fairly shocking situation related to racist and homophobic incidents, where not one of the 1,000 officers spoken to had ever reported a crime with racist or homophobic elements. In Ireland, the requirement needed to report a crime as racist or homophobic is the same one used by police in the UK, namely any incident which is perceived to be racist or homophobic by the victim or any other person.

This culture of underreporting stands alongside findings by the EU Fundamental Rights Agency which in 2013 found that a third of LGBT people in Ireland were physically or sexually attacked or threatened with violence in the last five years and that eight out of every ten people who experienced a homophobic or transphobic incident did not report the last incident to the gardaí. It’s a toxic circle of victims not coming forward and the police failing to contextualise this and improve upon their outreach to the LGBT community, and one that is going to be hard to change without improvements on the side of the gardai.

I have never reported any homophobic incident I have suffered, even though they weigh so heavily on my mind. I’d just feel too intimidated to present myself at

a station and explain what happened to me while also trying to pin point exactly what made me a target for attack. Recommendations on how to improve this situation have been put forward by the Garda Inspectorate and incorporate a victim-centric policy when investigating such incidents. These recommendations include the establishment of third party sites where victims can report crimes and the overhaul of the PULSE system to properly accommodate recording of crimes under each of the nine strands of the Garda Diversity Strategy.

As we move towards the referendum next year, it is important to remember how far we’ve come as a society but also how much further we have to go. What is the value in granting marriage rights to same-sex couples when there obviously still exists a reluctance to report crime among the LGBT community, and a fear in displaying their love in the same public, innocuous ways as their heterosexual counterparts?

It is integral that all citizens of a republic feel security and safety in their lives, and this should a core aspect of reform of the police forces. To do anything less would be taking half measures, and that is something that we cannot afford as a society anymore.

Struggle is not about respectability

The Cuban and Venezuelan approach to international students contrasts markedly with internationalisaD. Joyce-Ahearne tion in universities Deputy Editor like our own.

“Well it’s not about water, is it?” was Enda Kenny’s response to a question about the Irish Water protest in which Joan Burton’s car was blocked and she was struck by something that was fired at her by an angry protester. Burton herself chose to focus on how terrified she was that the proverbial children might have been hurt. She later accused Paul Murphy TD, who was involved in the protest, of failing to understand the significance of a graduation ceremony for those who didn’t receive a third level education.

For Kenny and Burton, the less it’s about water the better. The more it’s about vulnerable children put in harm’s way by “violent” protesters and opponents

who can’t comprehend the importance of a “sense of achievement for disadvantaged people” the better. When in doubt, make it about the decorum and respectability of the discourse, rather than whatever is actually being said. Within the limits of “respectable” discourse, smearing shit on Aodhán Ó Riordáin’s door is more damaging to the fabric of Irish society than another tax on people who can’t pay it.

Respectability politics also reared its head last week with a government sponsored video promoting the centenary of the 1916 Rising. The video was criticised for shying away from the violent aspects of 1916. Stripping the Rising of any sense of

urgency or disruptiveness, its centenary was made to look very respectable, like a careers fair that spurred people to be more dynamic and energised. The people who fought in the Rising were not “respectable”.

The water dispute that the government are currently engaged has the potential to turn very volatile. It follows from this that the last thing they can afford to do is highlight a cultural heritage of disregarding the respectable rules of engagement. Nontrench warfare? Attacking the empire while its back is turned?

The Rising clearly did not follow the “respectable” discourse of how to achieve change.

Neither must the Irish people if Irish Water is to be buried. But

Kenny and Burton will use every excuse to make it about respectability. Paint them as animals then you can tax them as animals, just like the British could shoot us as animals. The ideal commemoration of the Rising from the government’s perspective would be one that painted the rebels as savage dissidents who got what they deserved.

The government’s line on Irish Water, as it is everything, is we’re respectable because we’re respectable and if you disagree with us then you’re not respectable.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

13

Comment

Fighting Roma stereotypes in Ireland

In the light of Barbara McCarthy’s recent article, Naoise Dolan looks at the reality of Roma life in Ireland.

Naoise Dolan Online Editor

Photo: Catherine Healy

Why Trinity should cut research links with pro-apartheid Israeli institutions Ciaran O’Rourke of the Apartheid-Free Campus Campaign makes the case for boycotting research that contributes to the oppression of the Palestinian people.

Ciaran O’ Rourke Contributor The TCD Apartheid-Free Campus Campaign was founded at the beginning of michaelmas term by graduate students in the college. The goal of the campaign is twofold: to celebrate Trinity’s record of solidarity against apartheid states in the past, specifically South Africa, and to petition for apartheidfree standards of education in the research policies and affiliations the university currently pursues, specifically in relation to Israel. So far the response to the campaign has been largely, though not exclusively, supportive. Few members of the college community seem to object to a project that seeks to pay tribute to the work of Kader Asmal, Mary Robinson, Nelson Mandela, and other figures associated with both TCD and the international anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s and earlier. That the university should formally recognise and build on the example of these leaders in anti-apartheid activism and education seems like a reasonable proposal, and perhaps even a belated one, given the extent of the impact these figures had on progressive thinking and action against apartheid internationally.

Instead, reservations about the campaign seem to revolve either around the classification of Israel as an apartheid state, or else, accepting this classification, around the issue of formally introducing an apartheid-free campus proviso into Trinity’s research and development policies. This latter measure, some individuals have suggested, would be to the detriment of more general values of open academic exchange and freedom which Trinity extends to all potential partner institutions – in other words, regardless of these institutions’ records of collaboration with apartheid states, crimes, or policies. Although both of these concerns are in fact anticipated and responded to on the campaign’s website, www.apartheidfreecampus.org, this article attempts to deal with such reservations and to represent the Campaign’s goals and provisions as fairly as possible.

Findings

Firstly, the campaign does not associate Israel with apartheid flippantly, or even for the sake of provoking discussion on this

point. Rather, the campaign takes the conclusions of the International Russell Tribunal on Palestine as providing adequate consensus for the usage of the term ‘apartheid’ in relation to the organisation and policies of the Israeli state. The executive summary of the Tribunal’s sessions in Cape Town, November, 2011, reads as follows: [The] Tribunal concludes that Israel’s rule over the Palestinian people, wherever they reside, collectively amounts to a single integrated regime of apartheid…

The state of Israel is legally obliged to respect the prohibition of apartheid contained in international law. In addition to being considered a crime against humanity, the practice of apartheid is universally prohibited.

These findings have been reiterated in the Tribunal’s sessions since 2011, and it is in light of such statements that the terminology of the Apartheid-Free Campus petition has been decided. The petition urges the provost and board of the university to support apartheid-free standards of education and research by bringing the following measures into effect: - an end to research affiliations with firms that operate in or provide security services for Israel’s occupation zones in Palestine, - a severance of ties with Israeli institutions which have not condemned Israel’s illegal policy of occupation and settlement in Palestine, and which do not offer equal educational rights and access to Palestinian academics, - a policy of non-participation in co-funded or shared research projects with such universities, institutions and firms, while Israel’s programme of occupation and discrimination against the Palestinian people persists.

What this would amount to on a practical level would be a refusal to collaborate further with Trinity’s recent (and current) research partners in Israel.

First: the private security firm and drone manufacturer Elbit Systems, which is one of the key suppliers of building and surveillance materials for the illegal apartheid wall in the West Bank, Palestine. As Trinity News reported in February 2014, academics from Trinity collaborated on an airport security project with this firm, and they are still engaged in ongoing security research programmes, scheduled for completion in 2015. Another of Trinity’s research partners that would be affected by the Apartheid-Free Campus pro-

viso is the Israeli Security and Counter-Terrorism Academy, an institution infamous for its development and training links with illegal security programmes in the Occupied Territories, Palestine. Lastly, there is the Weizmann Institute of Science, a long-term research partner of Trinity, which also has a continuing record of service provision for the Israeli military establishment. Future academic links with these (and similar) institutions, particularly under the Horizon2020 research network programme, would also be forgone.

Different kind of boycott

Importantly, however, and although there may be some persuasive arguments in favour of such a stance, the TCD petition does not call for a total boycott of Israel per se. Indeed, this distinguishes the TCD Campaign from movements demanding the full intellectual and cultural boycott of apartheid states, which Kader Asmal in Trinity, and other members of the Irish AntiApartheid Movement, helped to realise in the case of apartheid South Africa. The terms of the TCD petition are precise in advocating for a condemnation of apartheid crimes and an official refusal to collaborate with institutions that support their continuance, in this case in Israel.

One result of this is that, hypothetically speaking, should academics in TCD wish to co-ordinate research with programmes run by an institution like B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), or the Alternative Information Center, then such academic ventures would not be impeded by the college-wide Apartheid-Free Campus proviso. In contrast to the Israeli establishments with which TCD has traditionally collaborated, B’Tselem and the AIC have formally condemned Israeli policies of occupation and settlement (among others); they do not contribute funding or research to the furtherance of such projects on legal and humanitarian grounds; and they maintain a non-discriminatory employment access policy in their own workplace and research.

So the petition takes into account the respect for human rights and humanitarian standards which certain Israeli institutions promote and adhere by, and this is directly reflected in the academic measures it calls for. However, and perhaps more

importantly, the campaign also highlights the fact that no discussion of academic freedom and accountability with regard to the policies of the Israeli State can proceed in good faith without recognising the rights of Palestinian academics, their families, and other members of the civilian population. According to the United Nations, Israel’s unlawful assault on Gaza from JulyAugust 2014 alone resulted in the death of an estimated 1,462 civilians, including 495 children, as well as the damage of 228 schools, 26 to the point of total destruction. This is in addition to Israel’s continuing policies of occupation, settlement, and discrimination against the Palestinian people.

In fact, it was in addressing these broader, ongoing crimes in 2004 that the International Court of Justice ruled that all states have a legal obligation to take steps that will end Israeli violations of international law, particularly as they relate to the separation wall and the construction of settlements on occupied Palestinian territory.

This was also the year that the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees first called on the international academic community to review, and if necessary to suspend, research links with Israeli institutions until the educational and human rights of the Palestinian people are respected

by Israel. In spite of the fact that this appeal has been reiterated on numerous occasions since 2004, Trinity has retained and increased its research affiliations with Israeli institutions in recent years.

It is on this point, perhaps, that the second concern about ‘academic freedom’ in Trinity’s research policies comes most plainly into view. For the fact is that the supposedly neutral position of academic inaction is severely undermined in Trinity’s case. This is a stance that would maintain current research links with Israeli institutions which support apartheid practices, and do nothing to avoid further links of this kind from developing in the future. Trinity’s research and development record has consistently neglected Palestinian academics’ demands for peaceful solidarity against the criminal practices of the Israeli State.

Furthermore, such neglect has been accompanied by an active increase in coordination with establishments that have unambiguous links to Israel’s illegal and

discriminatory policies against the Palestinian people. Formal inaction on Trinity’s part will only compound the university’s record of biased neutrality to date, and give further academic ratification to the ongoing crime against humanity that is Israeli apartheid.

College reputation

Trinity’s recently launched strategic plan clearly states that the university’s research policies and affiliations are integral to the image and standing of the university, particularly in a global context. The TCD website states that “Trinity has an open approach to creating value from research…in partnership with enterprise and social partners”, and moreover that “its research continues to address issues of global, societal and economic importance.” Once seen in light of Trinity’s affiliations with Israeli institutions, however, such assertions take on a disturbing aspect.

Generating value from research, after all, shouldn’t come at the price of creating a culture of impunity for violations of international law, and certainly not in the name of some non-existent right of universities to ignore the systems of political injustice which they simultaneously profit from. The institutional links we cultivate are directly related to the broader academic and state policies we endorse. Academic complicity in apartheid crimes cannot be justified by heedless emphasis on global innovation, nor vindicated by highly preferential notions of academic freedom. This is particularly the case when such notions, as they are actually reflected in a university’s research policies, tacitly reject the rights of employees and students in Palestinian universities, in favour of lucrative funding contracts with institutions in Israel that support state measures defined principally by their appalling violence and blatant illegality.

If Trinity is to be an institution of international standing and pioneering example, as we’re told it should be, then it can start by upholding ethical, apartheid-free standards of education in the research affiliations it pursues. The Apartheid-Free Campus petition is one among a number of affirmative, progressive steps which members of the TCD community can take to see that happen.

Recently, the Irish Independent’s Barbara McCarthy wrote an account of her experiences in pretending to be a Roma beggar. She got a well-earned social media slating for dressing up her impersonation as a “first-hand” experience of “what it’s like to be amongst society’s most persecuted”.

As a corrective, some first-hand accounts might be useful. I am no better-placed than McCarthy to offer one. Instead, I’ve consulted a report drawn up by City of Dublin VEC in association with the Pavee Point Travellers Centre and the Roma Support Group – based, notably, on extensive interviews with actual Roma people from a broad range of communities.

Collecting data on Roma populations is challenging; as a result, the numbers of Roma are underestimated in state census statistics across Europe. There are a number of explanations for this: the erasure of ethnic identity in census forms and statistics collection, difficulties in identifying the Roma people by their living situation when not all are nomadic, and an understandable reluctance to tell officials that they belong to a group continually subjected to state-sanctioned racial discrimination.

Compounding this issue is the fact that Ireland has never produced official statistics on its Roma population. Estimates place the number of Roma in Ireland between 2,500 and 3,000. The majority appear to be predominantly from Romania (though it is important not to conflate the two). Others come from the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Lithuania and Poland.

Roma have migrated to Ireland since the early nineteenth century, but were first recorded as asylum seekers in the 1990s.

Roma in Ireland are made up of diverse groups with a shared pattern of ethnic belonging.

Many experience racism on a daily basis. Historically, Irish state policies aimed at the Roma have been characterised both by outright human rights violations and by a more passive (but damaging) lack of cultural awareness. An OSCE report notes that “countless programmes for Roma have been destined to fail because they were developed without Roma participation, and correspondingly, with scant awareness of the specific culture and needs of the intended beneficiaries”.

Ireland’s largest Roma population concentration is in Dublin city and county. Other groups live in Louth, Monaghan, Limerick, Athlone, Kilkenny, Carlow, Sligo, Mayo, Meath and Donegal.

Urban Roma groups frequently live in substandard and isolated accommodation far from public infrastructure. These factors contribute to lower life expectancy and education participation, and to higher infant mortality and poverty.

Social issues

Barriers to Roma adult participation in education (primarily, language and literacy development) include stress of the asylum process and an inability to plan for the future, non-literacy in both native and non-native languages, limited and/or no English language skills development, traditional gender roles, cultural attitudes to mixing in non-Roma sectors and fears of losing Roma culture, and limited and/or negative experiences in formal education provision.

Traditional gender roles also hamper children’s participation; other factors include a lack of

family support for school, parental inability to help with schoolwork, difficulties eliciting accurate information on children’s previous school experiences and/or enrolment, peer group relations in schools, and problems to do with literacy and familiarity with a formal learning environment.

Majority societies often propagate negative stereotypes of Roma women, e.g. that they are subservient to men and confined to the domestic sphere. While many Roma groups assign traditional patriarchal roles to men and women, women are allotted the responsibility of versing children in Roma traditions and culture, a task the Pavee Point report notes as vital to the preservation of the group. As a consequence, Roma women sometimes contend with fears that if they engage too much with formal education then they will lose their ethnic identity.

Because their parental role is that of primary healthcare provider, Roma women are often the familial contact point with governmental administrative offices, healthcare provision and education structures. However, they continue to experience a three-fold exclusion: as women, as members of the Roma community, and as having little or sometimes no formal education.

“

Roma in Ireland are made up of diverse groups with a shared pattern of ethnic belonging. Many experience racism on a daily basis.

Answers

In order to tackle these issues, the report suggested a number of approaches designed to foreground the “importance of the extended, intergenerational family-group learning environment in Roma culture”. These suggestions include establishing/building a link between the home and education institutions for adults and children, understanding traditional social and cultural roles maintained by the majority of Roma families in Ireland, providing programmes for Roma men that have specific work-related outcomes and programmes for women that reflect childcare responsibilities and socialisation roles, and taking a family learning approach to language and literacy development.

While acknowledging that the educational access issues facing the Roma in Ireland are “longstanding, complex and multifaceted”, the report ultimately highlighted that “innovative and inclusive education services, projects and programmes for Roma adults and children are emerging throughout Europe and Ireland” and that such provisions are achievable “if cultural and social factors as well as historical experiences are taken into consideration”. In other words, majority populations and their policy-makers should ask more and presume less.

In other words, that thing Barbara McCarthy didn’t do.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

Comment

14

Lean In movement destroys female lives and solidarity Sheryl Sandberg fails women when she ignores the structural inequality of Lean In’s partner companies.

Dee Courtney Staff Writer Sheryl Sandberg, the founder of Lean In, says that all company boards should be 20% women by 2020. She encourages women to pursue their ambitions, to ‘focus on what we can do instead of what we can’t do.’ The core principle of Lean In is that if women work hard, with a supportive circle of other hardworking women around them, they can achieve anything a man can in the corporate world. So now let’s talk about why it’s a lie.

Sheryl Sandberg is interested in women becoming CEOs, I won’t deny that. What she isn’t interested in are women who either cannot be CEOs or don’t want to be. At the end of May this year, a group of workers at the Hilton Hotel in Boston appealed to her for help in forming a union. They petitioned Sandberg to meet with the female workers at the hotel when she came to Boston to give a talk at Harvard, and she insisted that she did not have the time. Hardly surprising, given Sandberg’s love of supposedly ‘focusing on the positives’.

She isn’t interested in workers who are struggling to form a union because they corrupt her message – that women can rise through the ranks of corporate America by applying themselves and thinking positive. The Hilton workers aren’t trying to rise anywhere; they just want fair pay and working conditions.

Complicity

Photo: Healy SandbergCatherine wants to focus on the top tier of corporations because that way, she can avoid discussing the structural inequality of the companies she represents.

It’s okay for a CEO to pay the lowest level workers minimum wage with no benefits as long as she’s a woman. And dealing with the working class is something Sandberg just can’t do, because taking one look at the lack of social mobility for low-level workers in the majority of companies shatters her perfect picture of hardworking women achieving their goals. Her brand of liberal feminism is about individual women achieving what they want, not any kind of collective action and structural change. Sandberg isn’t selling progress, she’s selling the American Dream. And yes, you still need a trust fund and an Ivy League education to get it.

Her refusal to take direct, proactive action with the Hilton workers is unsurprising when you look at what Lean In is actually about. To receive the Lean In stamp of approval, companies have to do one thing, and one thing only: state their commitment to gender equality. What

else, you ask? Well, that’s it. You can apply to partner with Lean In on their website, stating in a few hundred words how your organisation is Leaning In. But of course, they probably have a vetting process. They wouldn’t let in companies that don’t really have a commitment to gender equality, would they?

Lean In partners

Let’s take a look at some of the companies Lean In has partnered with and how they treat women. Bank of America, who denied loan modifications to eligible homeowners, thereby forcing them into foreclosures, have received the Lean In stamp of approval. Kicking families out of their homes hardly says gender equality – and it doesn’t stop there. Lean In have also partnered with Chiquita, who dump toxic pesticides that are illegal in most countries on their plantations while their farm labourers are working. Their pesticides poison local water supplies in impoverished regions. Oh, and let’s not forget their funding of paramilitary groups in Colombia and how they helped start a civil war in Guatemala. Amazon, who employ slave labour and who had ambulances on standby for when their workers collapsed from exhaustion and heat - and that includes sick and pregnant women - have also been approved.

And there’s no way Lean In would support big tobacco, right? But they do. And not just big tobacco, but the most cartoonishly evil corporation you could think of, British American Tobacco, who sell cigarettes to Nigerian children and have a plant in North Korea. Yes, it’s really in North Korea. Let that one sink in.

“

Sandberg isn’t selling progress, she’s selling the American Dream.

And yes, you still need a trust fund and an Ivy League education to get it.

Illustration: John Tierney

Disproportionate on women

effect

These issues don’t affect women exclusively, but they do affect them disproportionately. Conflict increases sexual violence and displaces women who tend to be the most vulnerable in countries. Bad working conditions and poison environments affect reproductive rights, and foreclosed homes disproportion ately affect single mothers and other vulnerable women and dependents. Feminists should care about economic equality because the vast majority of women are poor. But they aren’t

just poor: they suffer from a lack of basic human rights, and they are in a far worse position than their male counterparts.

The truth is that Sheryl Sandberg doesn’t care about these women, because they’re not Leaning In. She has no interest in women who can’t achieve greatness with minimal assistance, because that would mean tackling the structures she and her company are complicit in.

What she really wants is to coopt upper middle class, attractrative, educated women just like her into those systems to protect them from criticism. Because

profit for despicable companies; she puts a feminist rubber stamp on the very ones that are oppressing literally thousands of women. Nestle and Coke’s sexist and abusive practices become harder to question with the face of liberal feminism supporting them, propping up their claim that they support gender equality.

In the end, this is what Sandberg and her brand of liberal feminism do to women and the movement. They discourage solidarity and encourage individual achievement. They tell women that you should be a CEO and if

other women can’t do it, it’s their fault. Your achievements are yours; they don’t have to do with where you’re from, what school you went to or what your surname is. You don’t need to worry about other women and you don’t need to defend them. If they failed, it’s only because they didn’t Lean In, and you did.

You just don’t get to where Sandberg is without huge privileges, and instead of using that position to challenge the structures that cause gender inequality – sexual violence, lack of education, poverty and many more – she tells women to develop a

can-do attitude. Moreover, she tells women that a can-do attitude means generating profit for corporations that systematically abuse and exploit workers, many of whom are women, and often in a gendered way. In truth, what the Lean In movement really wants is for the people oppressing women to be 20% women by 2020. That just isn’t enough for me, and it shouldn’t be enough for you.

Time to bring back full student fees The current fees system in Ireland is inadequate and inequitable; it’s time for the students to pay for their education.

Andrew O’Donovan Staff Writer The last half-decade has been one of the most tumultuous of recent times: be it the detested FF government that implemented the bank guarantee or the Savita Halappanavar tragedy that absorbed the nation, there has been plenty for students to raise their voices about. Yet we have resolutely refused to engage as a collective to support or oppose anything, with one exception: a ¤500 increase in the student registration charge provoked upwards of 25,000 to protest on Dublin’s streets in November 2010. The prospect of paying higher college fees antagonises students like no other, so I could hardly have positioned myself more at odds with the student body than in arguing that they should do exactly that.

However, I hope to show that it is in our interest as students and in the interests of society that we pay our own way. First, though, some background.

In the mid-1990s, when a member of the rainbow coalition, Labour implemented a policy of abolishing third level fees. The aim at the time was to remove perceived barriers to entry and make education available to all.

When tuition fees were abolished, a provision was introduced to allow universities to charge to cover examinations, registration and student services – officially the “student services charge”, it was commonly known as the “registration fee”. Initially the equivalent of ¤190, it increased almost annually, breaking the one-thousand-euro mark in 2009/10. What the charge was originally supposed to finance is rather ambiguous, something higher education institutes were able to exploit. With revenue

from the charge being used to fund libraries and, in one case, to vaccinate vets, it was labelled by one university head as “fees by another name”. According to an HEA report, the registration fee, in the year in 1996/97, accounted for about 3-5% of the cost of educating a student; by 2009/10, that had more than tripled to 15%. Students were bearing an ever increasing proportion of the cost of their education. How was that compatible with the original intentions of the registration charge? The charge was abolished and the “student contribution” was born.

Inequality of access

It’s clear that the free fees scheme has been altered dramatically since its introduction.

Higher education in Ireland is no longer universally free, merely subsidised. But a question remains as to whether the initial policy was successful in its aim of balancing the socio-economic distribution of higher education, as Labour would contend.

This is the damning assessment

by UCD economist Kevin Denny in a paper examining the effect of the abolition of fees: “Prior to the reform, many low-income students did not pay fees because they received a means-tested grant covering both tuition costs and a contribution to their living expenses. In effect, the reform withdrew the one advantage that low income students had relative to high income students .. The only obvious effect of the policy was to provide a windfall gain to middle-class parents who no longer had to pay fees.” It’s hardly far-fetched to suggest that free fees has allowed those middleclass parents to spend the money they would ordinarily have saved for college fees instead on sending their children to fee-paying schools at second level and/or

providing them with grinds. The central conclusion of Denny’s paper is that performance at second level is the overwhelming factor in deciding third level progression. So such spending on private education by the wealthy would only further widen the gap to low-income students. In effect, therefore, the policy does nothing to encourage children from low-income families to attend college and improves the ability of middle class ones to do so.

Given Denny’s conclusion that progression to third level is largely determined by success at school, let’s examine Ireland’s second level system. Several OECD studies have shown Ireland to be one of the developed countries with the least social mobility between generations.

Denny says in his paper that, “the educational immobility between generations in Ireland is high relative to many other countries”, with one study of OECD countries in particular finding that “the association between education levels of individuals and their parents was highest in Ireland.”

The CAO recently released statistics concerning progression based on postcode. 84% of students from D4 (with schools such as St Michael’s and Muckross) progressed while 99% of students from D6 (with schools such as Alexandra College and Gonzaga) did. By contrast, the figures were 15%, 16%, and 23% for Dublin’s (and Ireland’s) worstperforming postcodes – D17 (Coolock, etc), D10 (Ballyfermot, etc), and north-inner-city D1 respectively. Those figures are for progression to higher education, not to universities where there is reason to believe the balance is even more tilted towards the wealthy. Over a third of Trinity’s students attended a fee-paying

school despite such schools educating less than ten percent of second level students.

There exists in Ireland, then, a second level system that allows for a huge divergence between the poor and the rest. And, with the CAO’s one criterion for allocating places being Leaving Cert results, there is no way for colleges to offset that advantage in their admissions. It’s a problem created at second level that cannot be fixed at third level.

Bring back fees

A way of minimising the problem would be to provide adequate financial support to such students.

Neither the state nor individual colleges can afford to, though. In Ireland, students whose family income is below ¤23,000 receive a grant of ¤2,400 and all incomes above that threshold and below ¤46k receive a grant of ¤300¤1,200. By contrast, students in the UK with family incomes below the first threshold receive a grant of ¤4,200 and are entitled to a low-interest loan of ¤3,600 for each year of study; those whose family income is at the upper-threshold receive a grant of ¤1,500 and are entitled to a loan of ¤5,000. The UK puts Ireland to shame: a grant of ¤2,400 for the very poorest students is patently inadequate. It effectively forces them into working alongside their studies. The state would be far better able to support low-income students if they weren’t constrained by having to subsidise fees.

The ultimate solution to the problem of inequality, however, is to increase funding to primary and secondary education.

Decreasing class sizes, providing homework clubs, and many other measures would greatly improve the prospects of disadvantaged children. Again, the cash-strapped government is

incapable of such funding without freeing up money elsewhere.

And scrapping the free fees initiative represents the most obvious source.

In fact it is in the selfish interest of every third level student to support the introduction of fees. The Irish Universities Association claims that income per student has declined by over a fifth since 2008. In that time exchequer funding has fallen by a third and only partly been compensated by increases in private funding and revenue from the student contribution. Ireland’s student-staff ratio has increased from 1:15 to 1:19 compared over the same period compared with an OECD average of 1:16. Judging by the Times Higher Education rankings, the quality of Ireland’s education has markedly declined: in 2010 both TCD and UCD were in the top 100; four years later, TCD has fallen out of the top 100 and UCD out of the top 200. In Trinity, library staff have been cut resulting in restrictions to opening times; class sizes get ever larger; additional, and highly regressive revenue-raising measures like the supplemental exams fee are proposed. The HEA judges forty percent of university infrastructure as below standard. Student numbers are set to increase by 15% by 2016, and that trend is set to increase. Irish universities are cash-strapped and will remain that way unless there is a substantial reform of the way they are funded. The quality and reputation of our education and that of future generations is declining and the only solution is to increase funding by implementing student fees.

But that shouldn’t happen without providing an adequate means of financial support. And there is the prospect that one could be introduced that is great-

ly favourable to the current one, which is not fit for purpose. By the next academic year, the student contribution will have risen to ¤3,000, and for a family earning anything above ¤55k there is no assistance with the payment of that. The threshold refers to gross income, and student contributions for the first child are non-tax deductible. So a family at that level is expected to pay over 5% of their after-tax income for each year of study. The burden becomes even greater if there is more than one child in college and represents a sizable barrier to entry for those from average-income families.

Government-backed loan system

That barrier can be removed by introducing a governmentbacked loan system. For a model, we need only look across our northern border, where anyone, regardless of family income, can have their student fees covered by a low-interest loan system. After graduation, one makes repayments at a rate of 9% of income over £21,000 (¤26.3k). For example, someone earning £30,000 per year (above the nationalaverage wage) would repay £67 per month. No one earning under that threshold makes repayments and anyone who falls below it ceases payment. All outstanding debt is written off after thirty years. While, admittedly, there would be associated cost and complexity involved in setting up such a system, it is hugely preferable that students rather than their parents are responsible for the payment of their tuition fees, and that system would allow students to defer repayment until they are earning.

In summary, the rationale for abolishing the Free Fees initiative is three-fold: it would lead to more equality; it would have

the potential to improve the standard and reputation of our education; and it would lead to a more desirable payment mechanism. You may espouse a view that higher education should be a right and universally free. I believe that a scenario in which students pay for a superior education and in which there is increased participation from disadvantaged sections of society is considerably more favourable than the status quo. The state is struggling to afford to support the crumbling third level system as it stands and access to that system is grossly unfair. A richer future Ireland may be in a position to reappraise and decide that it is in Ireland’s interests to provide free higher education.

But I urge that we allow pragmatism to trump ideology in the medium term. The rallying cry of students should be against injustice and in favour of fees.

“

Several OECD studies have shown Ireland to be one of the developed countries with the least social mobility between generations.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

Comment

15

Illustration: Natalie Duda

One-size-fits-all education fails students

Guidance counsellors need to think more creatively and reevaluate their overemphasis on third-level education.

Rachel Graham Staff writer Going to college to do an undergraduate degree costs twelve thousand euro and three or four years of your life. So why are you here? “To get a job”; “to learn”; “to have a good time”; all answers you will hear if you ask the question, and all valid in their own right. But the real reason most of us are here is because it’s just what you do. Whether you went to a fee-paying school where going to a top university was expected, or a disadvantaged community school where progression to third level was seen as a great achievement – your secondary school experience was designed to send as many of you on to college education as possible. Encouraging all children to be educated (and providing the support and infrastructure for that to happen) is a good thing.

But in a climate where jobbridge interns often require a bachelors degree, devastating cuts are being made in colleges, and our top universities are sliding down the league tables, our attitude towards exactly what kind of education we encourage needs to be looked at.

A report by the OECD describes the Irish second-level education system like this: “The upper secondary education pathway in Ireland is a large one… with relatively little specific vocational preparation taking

place at that level. This results in a strong emphasis upon preparation for tertiary entry within the school system... reinforced by competitive external examinations”. This report is from 2002, but since the introduction of the Leaving Certificate Applied in 1995 there hasn’t been significant reform in Irish secondary education. Roughly 60 percent of school leavers attend tertiary education. Most come to college directly after school, many without having had any kind of job or academic experience beyond the school curriculum.

Guidance counselling is poorly implemented, something which is not just the fault of counsellors themselves but of poor organisation at school and national levels and the influence the points system has on views of higher education.

In 2010 the average dropout rate for first year students was about 15 percent across ITs and universities. If dropping out didn’t mean throwing a lot of money down the drain, it would likely be significantly higher.

The undergraduate population is rife with apathy and disillusionment. Everyone is familiar with tutorials where few have done the reading, and the experience of throwing together an essay thinking “this is crap but it will probably scrape a 2:1”. This isn’t just because Irish young people are lazy, it’s due to the nature of our entry into third level education. It is not a meaningful tran-

sition we make from secondary to tertiary education.

Career misguidance

In fourth year, you do the DATs, which tell you where your skills lie based on a single test and offer a list of possible careers with little explanation as to why you should pursue them. If you have a reasonably high aptitude for most things, you’re told to do whatever you think you might like. You might also do a “preference test”, to tell you what is it you’d enjoy. Mine told me to be a farmer. I’m sceptical that had I really wanted to be a farmer, my Dublin school counsellor would have approved or given me any help in that direction.

At the beginning of sixth year, you are encouraged to take a day off school and visit the Irish Times ‘Higher Options’ exhibition, where instead of meaningful direction you can avail of hundreds of shiny prospectuses all telling you why studying everything, everywhere, is absolutely fantastic and the right choice for you. Then there is the competitive mania around the leaving cert, with articles about the usual geniuses who got 600 points (or 625 points as some might like to remind you) filling the news. This sense of competition encourages an uncritical passage from second to third level. If you can do it, you should do it. If you were the best in the class at physics, then science is probably for you.

This blasé attitude towards tertiary education, where the sole focus in schools is on academic exams and progression to academic third level courses, is bad for a number of reasons.

For a start, many people are simply unprepared for college.

Although most people enjoy it, it might be more fulfilling and ultimately more useful if they were better informed upon entry, or encouraged to wait a year or two rather than rushing in to what will be a defining part of life. Postponing entry could prevent many people who choose a course simply because they feel they have to choose something from becoming locked into degrees they know they don’t really want to be doing as a result of financial concerns or perceived failure. Students who had some time to reflect on their futures without the clouds of the leaving cert hanging over them would be better placed to make decisions about their continued education and in a better mindset to get all they could from it. Delaying college entry is not unheard of elsewhere – nearly ten percent of UCAS applicants take a year out before beginning college, and gap years are correlated with higher satisfaction and performance levels at university.

False expectations

The secondary system could also be accused of leading people down a path that doesn’t live up to expectations. Many stu-

dents become disillusioned with their course when they realise it is not the ticket to employment they thought it was. Earlier this month, the inaugural Irish Survey of Student Engagement found that 23 percent of arts and humanities students said they had never looked at how the things they learnt were applicable to a work environment. The stats for science students were lower but still significant, with fifteen percent concurring.

It is becoming increasingly necessary, or at least perceived as such, to do postgraduate study.

The ubiquity of level 8 degrees has led to an expectation to do a masters. This is a cycle entered into very casually by schoolgoers who might find themselves having to stay and pay for more years in college in order to gain meaningful employment in their area of study. That college is not a ticket to a decent job in Ireland needs to be explained to school students. In recent years this has been made abundantly clear by stories of new graduates finding it nigh on impossible to gain suitable employment, and the high rates of students actively considering emigration as reported in the aforementioned survey.

Narrowing choices

The focus on college entry also has the negative effect of narrowing educational possibilities.

An acknowledgment that college is not for everyone would be a better alternative to the

attempted expansion of onesize-fits-all education. This is not only a matter of ability but of happiness, priorities and lifestyle. While traveling in Austria and Germany last Summer, I was struck by how different the attitude to education was amongst the people I met there. It was striking how they didn’t see university education as the be all and end all of a good education or career. Many of them had chosen to forego it in order to enter vocational programmes instead, not because of lack of financial or academic ability to enter college, but because they simply didn’t see it as the best place to learn the type of things they wanted to learn, and established vocational programmes are available. One man was beginning a residential course in organic farming, another was doing a four year apprenticeship under a master blacksmith, and one girl was embarking on an apprenticeship in a bakery.

In schools there, they have a tiered system, and only certain schools do the equivalent of the leaving certificate, while others offer more practical education.

Although such a tiered system certainly has its faults, it does offer inspiration for integrating vocational education into the school system.

The leaving certificate applied and the leaving certificate vocational programme are the current alternatives to the established leaving cert, but tend to be

Rethinking Remembrance Day Commemmoration is primarily about Britain and its antiquated sense of empire.

Louis Strange Senior Editor On Sunday, British Prime Minister David Cameron made the point that this year’s Remembrance Day took on particular significance given that 2014 marks not only a century since the outbreak of the First World War, but also 70 years since the D-Day landings, as well as the end of Britain’s conflict in Afghanistan. And, in making this apparently innocuous link, he revealed what Remembrance Day is really about.

It is not about the First World War – despite still being tied to the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, it has lost its original, unique correspondence to that conflict. And it is not necessarily even about remembering fallen soldiers, either – whatever the rights and wrongs of commemorating warfare in this way, I am not trying to get into a discussion here on whether

Remembrance Day should take place at all in a more general sense.

Remembrance Day is primarily about Britain. To be more precise, it is about Britain’s antiquated (or very current, depending on how you look at things) sense of empire. The objections to Britain’s neo-colonialist urges, as expressed in the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, are equally valid when it comes to the way in which Britain remembers the First World War today. In referring to Afghanistan in the same breath as the First World War, Cameron made explicit that which was already implicitly known: Remembrance Day is about empire, and, to a lesser extent, about monarchy, the symbolic head of the empire – two concepts which, to a large degree, come as a pair. The Queen, of course, takes pride of place in Britain’s Remembrance Day, the literal incarnation of the traditional British values being celebrated there. But what does Britain stand for? The answer

to that question would probably be a very different one in this country than in Britain, and it is in this context that we must rethink how Ireland itself handles Remembrance Day, which means negotiating the difficult relationship with Britain.

For Britain, Remembrance Day is all about remembering “the good old days”, turning back the clock to the era of the First World War when Britain was a world power; in this context the ambiguity surrounding the term “The Great War” becomes all the more significant. There is a nagging sense that, somewhere beneath the layers of pomp and ceremony, the core of Remembrance Day has shifted from mourning loss of life to nostalgia for imperialistic grandeur. From respecting the deaths of many British soldiers, Remembrance Day now serves to arm the British Armed Forces with an infallibility which brushes under the carpet its role in imperialistic expansion and brutality, silencing those dissenters who refuse

to submit to revisionism. The objection of James McClean, a Championship football player from Derry, to wearing the apparently obligatory poppy during this weekend’s fixtures revealed the jingoistic, knee-jerk response to any sort of deviation from the party line, despite his eloquent and well-reasoned explanation that the uncomfortable extolling of the British Army did not sit well with him on a personal level.

All of which begs the question of what form Ireland’s involvement in the act of collective remembrance should take. The Taoiseach attended a Remembrance ceremony in Enniskillen, while the Tánaiste attended a ceremony in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Yet this was the first year since the establishment of the Republic that the Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom took part in a Remembrance Sunday ceremony, generally regarded by the media as another step along the reconciliatory trajectory which Britain and Ireland have been

following in recent years. The fact that the ceremony attended by the Irish Ambassador in London was headed by the Queen, and saw a procession of representatives from Commonwealth countries lay wreathes (it should be noted that the ambassador himself laid a laurel, and not a poppy, wreath), underlines the imperialist overtones of Remembrance Sunday. However, whilst the Taoiseach and the Irish Ambassador to the U.K. were careful to be seen joining together with Britain on Remembrance Sunday, President Michael D. Higgins, drawing parallels between Ireland and Africa during an address in Ethiopia on Wednesday, had underlined how Ireland had “experienced the scourges of colonialism and hunger”.

This is not necessarily to suggest that there was anything particularly pointed in the timing of the President’s remarks, but they do serve as a timely reminder that in this country we should think very carefully about the real meaning of Remembrance

Day. Having grown up in London, with an English dad and Irish mum, I always found uncomfortable the glorification of the twin concepts of empire and monarchy, inherently tied to the 11th November in Britain. And for me, the real meaning of Remembrance Day has always had much more to do with those concepts than anything else. It goes without saying that I am fully behind reconciliation between the two countries (how can you not be, walking around Dublin with an English accent?) but this does not mean that Ireland should take part in honouring the British empire.

The tragedy of those who died in the First World War – as many as 50,000 of them Irish – should have nothing to do with the glorification of an army, or a country, or with its colonial nostalgia.

seen as options for people who would do badly in the traditional leaving cert rather than as valuable alternatives in their own right. LCVP is designed to give an opportunity for less academic students to gain more CAO points than they would otherwise, while LCA was set up with the express aim of keeping early school leavers in school and tends to be seen as an easier leaving cert that doesn’t gain students much capital in the employment market. Neither of these options offers meaningful practical education – they are not a true alternative but rather a watered down version of the highly competitive, highly academic school programme that 80 percent of students complete. People who struggle with, or simply do not find fulfillment within such an academic programme should be offered a proper alternative.

This could start with vocational opportunities being widely discussed by guidance counsellors in senior cycle in addition to the endless CAO chatter. Alternatives to mainstream college education need to be talked about not just to students whom guidance counsellors think need extra help but to everyone, if they are to be seen as a viable option and respected equally alongside academic degrees.

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There is a nagging sense that, somewhere beneath the layers of pomp and ceremony, the core of Remembrance Day has shifted from mourning loss of life to nostalgia for imperialistic grandeur.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

Comment

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Northern Ireland: time to start governing It is time for politicians in the North to be held to the same standards we normally hold public representatives to.

Callum Trimble Jenkins Staff Writer

Illustration: John Tierney

Rehabilitating a love of wisdom How can we incorporate an appreciation of wisdom into our liberal education system, especially into our universities?

Conor McGlynn Deputy Comment Editor What is it to live well? Since the ancient world, philosophers have considered questions about the good life. How should society best be structured to facilitate citizens to achieve their potential? What good should governments orientate their policies towards? Aristotle was the ancient philosopher who was, perhaps, most influential in considering these issues. For him, living well was about the full exercise of one’s capacities as a human being. The good life involves living virtuously, both intellectually and morally.

Aristotle

Central to Aristotle’s theory of living well is the notion of wis-

dom. Knowing what the good life is, and knowing how to achieve it, requires practical wisdom.

What is wisdom? According to Aristotle, wisdom involves insight into what is good or bad for a person in a particular situation, and insight into what is required of them in that situation. The wise person doesn’t apply general rules they have learned by rote, but rather uses correct reasoning to identify and achieve virtuous action. Having the insight to be able to consistently act virtuously is the essence of wisdom, and it is essential for living well.

Discussions of wisdom fell out of fashion after the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, and with the rise of the modern, individualist, egoist political philosophy. Under this paradigm, the individual is the sole arbiter of what constitutes living well for him or her. If their actions don’t negatively impact on anyone else then no one else has the right or the authority to pass judgement on the quality of their life. There is no privileged viewpoint from which we can say this life is good and that bad; there is only good or bad for me and good or bad for you. Wisdom is therefore afforded no special status; if no lives are objectively better than others then there is no basis to judge the quality of a life.

Elitism

There are other reasons why wisdom, in the Aristotelian sense, became unfashionable with the rise of modern liberal democracies. Wisdom, as was mentioned, cannot be taught; it is not democratic in that sense. As conceived

by Aristotle it is inherently elitist, in that it can only be gained through experience, specifically experience of moral reasoning and acting virtuously in the polis. For the Greeks, this meant that wisdom was the sole preserve of the free, well-off males who made up the active political community, which excluded slaves and women. Aristotle’s idea of wisdom was not one that included equality of opportunity.

For these reasons, wisdom is a term we rarely hear used in public discourse today, by politicians or by other commentators. We still use it in private, in uncontentious ways to describe our elderly neighbours and relations.

However, as a yardstick by which we assess the worth of public figures it has all but disappeared.

While Aristotle’s notion of wisdom is highly problematic as it stands, we seem to be missing something that is both important and valuable when we leave aside questions of wisdom, elitist though it may well be.

Elitism is not necessarily an ill in itself. In a master-slave society, elitism is based on accident

of birth. Those born into the aristocracy have dominion over others not based on their abilities and skill, but because of the actions of their ancestors. The injustice of this situation creates instability, with the slaves eventually rising against their masters. In a liberal democracy, however, there is no such tension. As long as the institutions of society are fair and just, an elitism based on talent and ability is justifiable. Obviously our own society is not at this point yet; some gross inequalities persist. However, as long as the progress of democracy is a story of breaking down barriers of class and caste, a task that democracy has proved infinitely more adroit at than any rival system of political organisation, we have a basis for meritocratic elitism.

It is in the context of this sort of elitism that wisdom may be rehabilitated. Unlike in Aristotle’s world, there are no classes or groups of people who are a priori denied the opportunity to attain wisdom. Wisdom is something that can be acquired by anyone.

However, as Aristotle says, wisdom requires experience, experience of moral deliberating and experience of action with the political community. Only through thought and action do we gain the insights into what constitutes the good life. Apathy, intellectual laziness, dogmatic rule-

following: all these are anathema to the development of wisdom.

Talk of wisdom allows us to be prescriptive in our approach to public affairs; it allows us to explicitly incorporate a conception of the good into our policies.

Personal lives

Wisdom also has a role to play in our personal lives, especially in our lives in college. How can we incorporate an appreciation of wisdom into our liberal education system, especially into our universities? Wisdom cannot be taught, but it can perhaps be cultivated under the right conditions. What might these conditions be? Certainly they must not include the vices named above. A university must above provide an environment of openness and engagement. It must allow for individual and collective excellence, for intellectual and moral actualisation. In concrete terms, this means allowing for the interrogation of dogmatic beliefs. An open society demands openness in its educational institutions, an openness which in turn demands engagement from students on these issues. By pursuing goals that reward intellectual curiosity and moral deliberation, universities can provide an environment conducive to the development of virtuous, intellectually honest, and ultimately wise citizens.

Racist stereotypes hurt everyone

Illustration: Mubashir Sultan

Fionn McGorry Senior Editor Everyone assumes small things about each other. When full information is not available, we use social cues, and a corpus of knowledge acquired through observation, to place people in named or unnamed categories.

This forms a useful tool in allowing us to prepare for whatever the other person may bring to an interaction. However, when we start to use these assumptions not as a facility for interaction, but rather as an impediment to it, our inclinations towards prejudice and superiority come to the fore.

Last week, there was a news story about an Irish woman in South Korea who was rebuffed for a job interview because the employers thought Irish people drank too much. Katie Mulrennan had taught English in a number of cities around the world. She applied for a job through a recruiter on craigslist for a teaching job in Seoul, and received the reply in question. As if Irish people had not endured enough, being the butt of jokes on intelligence, and with lazy caricatures of Irish people being their only representation in Hollywood films for much of the twentieth century, this example highlights the very real potential for tangible negative effects of such stereotyping. Though Mulrennan has since found a job, and insisted to various media outlets that she loves Korea and being in Seoul, it’s problematic for other Irish people hoping to travel to work, as Mulrennan was clearly experienced, skilled, and proactive, but fell victim to a tired stereotype which didn’t disqualify her in any logical sense for employment in her chosen field.

For a CV to be rejected outright on the basis of nationality, in effect, is a revival of the notions

that “no Irish need apply”, which dogged those who had emigrated to various parts of the world for decades.

Problems of stereotyping certainly aren’t exclusive to the Irish experience. I have sat on the steps at the Pav, burning with embarrassment, as a man behind me insisted to his friends that he hated all white Australians, not realising that one was sitting two feet in front of him.

His reasoning was based on the horrific events that happened in the wake of European settlement, but fundamentally misunderstood the causes and conditions of migration to Australia since then, the political environment surrounding the memory of these events, and the opinions of many people regarding successive governments and their policies. Any such stereotyping of someone on the basis of their nationality renders one incredibly small and inferior.

Instrument of oppression

Essentially, this kind of activity is an instrument of oppression. A person is made to feel as though they subscribe to these characteristics by virtue of someone else’s expectations. When they don’t, it becomes incumbent

on them to prove that they are somehow different from people that they share many characteristics with, which encourages feelings of shame for their innate characteristics, and forces them to deride their compatriots. This instrument damages our trust in a person’s potential, and encourages the perpetuation of defeatist attitudes rather than providing people with a clean canvas upon which to paint.

Personal impact

However, these same feelings exist for “positive” stereotypes.

As Oliver Burkeman wrote in the Guardian in a piece entitled “Why stereotypes are bad even when they’re good”, positive stereotypes are likely to be much more damaging than negative ones. In essence, he discussed that while those purporting to be of an open-minded persuasion may agree that negative stereotypes to be damaging, many are often happy to stereotype people for positive attributes associated with their race or other characteristics. That people assume that women are better in touch with their emotions, that gay men have a higher propensity to be style-conscious, or that black people are likely to

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16 years on from Good Friday, is it still enough for their constituents for Sinn Fein and the DUP to simply sit at the same table?

Budgetary concerns

That an Irish woman’s job application was rejected on the basis of her nationality is a worrying revival of the notion that “no Irish need apply”.

Employment

Flags, parading and now the Budget. This is a list of the ongoing crises that have been the hallmark of devolution in Northern Ireland since 1998. Up until now the people of Northern Ireland have accepted this as better than the alternative, namely a return to the violence that once took this small part of the world to the brink.

There is no doubt that the power-sharing arrangement for the governance of Northern Ireland, agreed on that historic Good Friday in 1998, succeeds in its aims. The institutions created have been remarkably successful in bringing as many different factions off the streets and into constitutional politics. Now in 2014, the Northern Ireland executive has representatives from 5 different political parties from across the religious divide. The First Minister Peter Robinson is from a party (the Democratic Unionist Party) that originally refused to sit at the same table of government as the party of the current Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness (Sinn Fein).

This was largely over the refusal of the IRA to decommission. It is without question that Northern Ireland and its devolved institutions have come a long way. However, 16 years on from Good Friday and 9 years on from St Andrews, is it still enough for their constituents for Sinn Fein and the DUP to simply sit at the same table?

perform well at sport, seems to many acceptable stereotyping.

While people may be uncomfortable with assuming negative things about someone based on characteristics they can’t control, these “positive” stereotypes are ones that encourage people to feel self-conscious, depressed, or inadequate, when they don’t perform to these stereotypes.

This stereotyping, then, both positive and negative, stops people from proving merit. Instead of our hard work being the standard by which we are afforded opportunities, it is our race, gender, sexuality, or occupation. It is therefore beneficial for everyone to judge people not on face value, but with a depth of understanding, because while it may stand to benefit you now to put someone in to a box, at some point, you will find yourself trapped in a similar box. Both parties will lose out, as qualified candidates for jobs are turned away, or potential friendships are prevented, on the basis of acquired knowledge of stereotypes.

Think then, of that box that we are trapped in, and how to get out. Taking each person as they come is a place to start.

Politics in Northern Ireland is and always has been dominated by the same issue. If we hope to truly close the sectarian divide and live in a normal country then it is up to our politicians to begin to act like normal politicians, and to deal with issues in a normal way. While this may be a bridge too far for highly contentious issues steeped in many years of tension, such as flags and parading, what about the budget?

Setting a budget is arguably the most basic function of any government. Without it, no department can operate and no policy can be implemented. Yet after months of deadlock between the parties in the North it took a deadline imposed by the central British Government for any sort of budgetary arrangement to be reached. Despite this deal the crisis continues, with the issue of welfare still unresolved.

Even with the agreement of a budget Northern Ireland’s finances are in a dire state. To avoid breaching its spending limit by more than £200 million a one-off Westminster loan was required. This will have to be repaid in the next fiscal year, and it represents a fraction of the £870 million in savings necessary for long term financial stability.

As mentioned, welfare reform is fundamental to this issue. London has mandated that Stormont adhere to changes agreed in 2013

at Westminster, meaning the merits of cutting welfare should be nothing to do with this debate. With 93% of Northern Ireland’s budget coming from Britain our politicians should instead be asking how high to jump.

There is a serious cost to failure to make these cuts; as a result the executive will accumulate fines of £87 million this year and a further £114 million next year. This means that it is in the interests of their constituents for the North’s leaders to make such changes to welfare no matter what the effect.

Sinn Fein have led the opposition to welfare reform, but since it is an area that has not been devolved it is fiscally irresponsible to do so. The merits of the changes to welfare are no longer up for debate. A decision has been made and it is the responsibility of the executive to implement the changes in the way that is best for their constituents.

Sinn Fein have maintained that they are opposed to welfare reforms purely on the issue of fairness. However, I would be inclined to agree with the view that it is a position taken for political considerations. In recent years the party has seen its support grow in the Republic of Ireland for a number of reasons, including their opposition to austerity.

It would be seen as hypocritical to oppose welfare changes in Dublin but implement them in Belfast. This is Sinn Fein’s fundamental problem: how do they reconcile being a party of protest south of the border with being a party of government north of it?

It is unfair, however, to lay the blame for the current political climate in Northern Ireland solely at the feet of Sinn Fein.

The DUP must take their share as well. It is in the interests of the two main parties to hold out in negotiations until the issue reaches a head. This disenfranchises the other parties that make up the executive while making them share the responsibility of the decision reached.

Indeed it is that last point which is crucial. At the executive table, only Sinn Fein and the DUP supported the new budget.

Anywhere else this would be completely unacceptable. It is nearly impossible, for example, to imagine Fine Gael and Labour openly disagreeing on the budget in Ireland. This brings us to the crux of the issue, namely the mechanism that establishes the executive’s membership, called D’Hondt. The end result of this mechanism is a mandatory coalition that is representative of the community.

A mandatory coalition was necessary to bring as many people to the table as possible and as mentioned it has been incredibly successful in the regard. However, it also means that there is no true opposition and therefore no alternative for the electorate.

There is no mechanism through which we may punish our leaders for their immaturity in dealing with issues and with each other.

While it would be unfair to say this has strengthened sectarian voting, a phenomenon which has always been present, it hasn’t done anything to stop it. With the rise and very quick fall of NI21 the only alternatives at the ballot box are small and extreme parties. All of this has contributed to the culture of crisis that currently exists.

The solution? While I believe that it is of the utmost importance that cross-community government continues, perhaps it is time to establish an official opposition in Stormont. In the current make up it would be a government of the DUP and Sinn Fein with the UUP, Alliance and SDLP making up the opposition. While this would mean the two parties I will never support hold power exclusively, that is a risk in every normal democracy.

Why shouldn’t it be so in Northern Ireland?

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

Comment

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Mandatory minimum sentencing needed for sexual assault The way in which we deal with perpetrators of sexual assault in our society has to change.

Niall McGlynn Contributor Sexual assault has in the last few years become a prominent issue in the media and in society generally. This trend is to be welcomed, as it is bringing into the public eye an extremely important issue facing modern society.

How society treats sexual assault, its victims and its perpetrators, plays a significant role in how it sees itself, and also in how it actually is. When it comes to sexual assault, it seems that society and culture have something of a split personality. One the one hand, society regards sexual assault, in particular crimes termed as rape, as abhorrent. In movies, on television and in mass media, sex offenders are portrayed as the worst type of criminal out there, and their crimes are treated with a mixture of revulsion and horrified fascination.

Leniency

Illustration: Natalie Duda

Why the war on drugs has failed The harms associated with so-called soft drugs are easy to avoid.

Peter O’ Donovan Contributor A recent survey by the Observer magazine found that a staggering 84% of Britons view the “War on drugs”, the now decades long campaign by law enforcement worldwide to reduce sale and use of illegal narcotics, as unwinnable and that 27% view Britain’s drug laws as not being liberal enough. These attitudes appear to be shared by the citizens of many other countries throughout the world, as evidenced by the recent decriminalization of cannabis in Colorado and Washington in the US, the legalization of cannabis in Uruguay and a World Health Organization report released a month ago advising the decriminalisation of possession of drugs for personal use.

The disillusionment that people feel as a result of the failure of current policies is apparent in the many blog posts on the internet calling for the legalisation of all drugs, sometimes due to the writer’s belief in libertarian ideals about individuals having an absolute right to do what they want with their own body, but also because of a belief that doing so will be more effective at mitigating the harms done by drugs than criminalising the sale and possession of drugs is. Leaving aside the libertarian argument for the moment, it’s worth looking at the flaws that existed in the design and application of the drug laws we currently live under, and whether betterdesigned laws might prove more beneficial to society than the legalization of drugs en masse.

Misassumptions

To me, one of the most basic flaws of the thinking behind modern drug laws is the assumption that reducing usage of all drugs is a good idea without ever articulating why. Of course, I mean in no way to delegitimise or dismiss the suffering of those who become addicted to substances like heroin or crystal meth and the physical and mental anguish that these individuals often suffer. I think that ending their pain and preventing more people from ending up in their situation is the main reason that having a functional,

effective drugs policy is so important. But there doesn’t seem to be any logical connection between “we should try to discourage people from taking heroin” and “we should try to discourage people from taking cannabis or ecstasy”. People who have taken, or indeed regularly use, so-called “soft drugs” in many cases report having positive or neutral experiences, and it seems the harms associated with these drugs are in many cases possible to avoid or ameliorate through careful use. Furthermore, the stigma against “drugs” often prevents people from rationally comparing the risks of a given drug with any other recreational activity - ecstasy use is, statistically, less likely to result in death than horse riding.

It’s actually quite difficult to formulate a definition of the word “drug” that includes things that everyone thinks of as drugs but that doesn’t include, say, sugar. The justification sometimes given for “soft drugs” being illegal is that they act as “gateway drugs” that inexorably lead their users to use harder drugs, so the use of these substances should be discouraged despite their relative lack of intrinsic harms.

The problem here is that it’s tough to know firstly, whether this actually occurs, and secondly the mechanism by which it happens if it does. It’s entirely possible that the reason cannabis users sometimes go on to do harder drugs is that the process of getting cannabis puts them in contact with people who sell harder drugs, or that those who are willing to break the law to use cannabis are likely to have a personality biased towards risk taking and hence were likely to use harder drugs later anyway, making the use of “soft drugs” a symptom rather than a cause.

This lack of clarity means that the “gateway drug” theory is, at least for now, not a good enough reason to assume that all drug use is necessarily bad.

Ineffective resources

The problem that targeting “soft drugs” along with more dangerous ones causes is that, firstly, resources like police time and jail space are wasted on trying to reduce usage of less dangerous drugs when it’s unclear why one

would want to do this in the first place, and, secondly, anti-drug efforts often end up trying to do several things at once, thereby limiting their effectiveness. So, for example, a certain law or program might work very well at combating the use of speed (amphetamine), but not work to reduce LSD or cannabis use, since each of these drugs is used by different types of people for different reasons and there exist different cultures around the use of each drug. This may go some way towards explaining why modern drug laws have, for the most part, failed to reduce drug use – it’s tough to know whether programs failed because of which drugs they were targeted at or because they were just bad programs, meaning that entirely workable drug prevention programs may be dumped as a result.

The fact that the information given in drug prevention workshops and classes is often misleading and biased, aimed at making drugs look as bad as possible rather than giving accurate information, exacerbates the issues raised above. A prominent example of this is the claim that a single ecstasy pill can kill a person, which appears in several drug education programs and at least one SPHE textbook currently in use in Irish secondary schools (Minding Me 3). This claim refers to the tragic cases of Anna Woods and Leah Betts, two teenage girls who died after taking ecstasy - and then drinking huge amounts of water, causing water poisoning a.k.a dilutional hyponatremia due to inaccurate harm reduction information regarding ecstasy use. (To clarify, the advice to drink lots of water was given on the assumption that people would only be using ecstasy at raves, while these girls used the drug at house parties).

People who are simply told that ecstasy is potentially lethal, without being given the full facts of these cases, then go on to discover that plenty of perfectly successful people in life have used or continue to use ecstasy, may assume that the things they were told about the harms of other drugs were equally exaggerated, which hamstrings drug prevention efforts because it’s hard for people to tell which parts are ac-

curate or inaccurate unless they do extensive research on their own, so in many cases people just ignore the things that drug prevention campaigns say because they can’t tell which parts are true and which aren’t.

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The fact that the information given in drug prevention workshops and classes is often misleading and biased, aimed at making drugs look as bad as possible rather than giving accurate information, exacerbates the issues.

Targeting users

Another issue that may have impeded the effectiveness of antidrug campaigns is what actually happens to people who get drugs convictions. I would argue that drug laws should always target suppliers and traffickers rather than end users. If drug use has a victim in society it is surely those who use the drugs and punishing those who may be addicted or devoid of other ways of enjoying life doesn’t seem like a fair thing to do. But even if you do think that drug users deserve to be punished, an important lesson from the past 40 years of failed policies is that giving jail sentences (rather than, say, fines) to those who possess but do not sell drugs is simply massively coun-

terproductive in terms of reducing drug use. The problem is that when people go to jail, they meet other drug users and are more likely in the future to use more drugs, both because they are more likely to know where to get drugs and because of problems reintegrating into society after serving a jail sentence. Four out of five drug related arrests in the US in 2005 were for possession rather than sale of drugs. This is important factor to consider when looking at how to reform drug laws.

A final issue is the issue of racial bias in sentencing. In the US, despite white people using drugs at a slightly higher rate than black people, black people are far more likely to be arrested and convicted for drugs related offenses. It is likely that drug policies affect racial minorities in similar ways in other countries, although less empirical data exists outside of the US. The perception of these policies as being racist (because, well, they are) alienates communities from local police forces and drug prevention efforts, when engagement of these communities with such efforts is key to the long term success of any drug prevention campaign, since community stigma against selling is more effective and easier to maintain than the presence of police officers.

It’s likely that the drugs I’ve talked about and the conclusions that I’ve come to in this article are biased by my own experiences, and it’s entirely possible that the conclusions I’ve drawn aren’t the best possible way to go about reforming drug laws because of this. The most important thing is for society to acknowledge that current drug laws are hugely counterproductive (a recent UK government report admitted that there was no obvious link between the government being “tough on drugs” and a reduction in drug usage) and harmful to society. It is crucial going forward that drug laws be evidence-based and targeted towards the most dangerous drugs, rather than based around a simplistic, kneejerk belief that “drugs are bad” and that the desire for more liberal drug laws be channeled into policies that genuinely improve people’s lives.

At the same time, society seems unwilling to confront head on the reality of sexual assault in many instances, and instead tries to diminish its importance, especially where the perpetrator or victim do not fit certain stereotypes.Take for example the case of this year of the businessman accused of attacking a woman on Griffith Avenue under the influence of, his defence claimed, a cocktail of medication and alcohol. The individual was given a six year sentence with five and a half years suspended, leaving him with a total of six months in jail.

After an appeal by the DPP, the sentence was increased so that he will now spend an additional 18 months in jail. Adding in time served already means that he will spend at most two years in jail for his crime. A factor in the leniency of both sentences was that the perpetrator had offered compensation to the victim. This case raises important issues. The attacker did not fit the popular profile of of a rapist. He was a successful businessman with a family. Society does not like to believe that such outwardly upstanding individuals are capable of horrible crimes like rape, so it lets them off with suspended sentences and paying compensation to the victim.

This makes a mockery of equality before the law, as it opens the door to better off individuals effectively buying their way out of serving time in jail. As the CEO of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre pointed out, this is an option not open to the less well off. It also feeds into the social acceptance of sex offenders as long as they are nice, respectable people who don’t fit the picture society wants to construct of what a rapist is. If the attacker on Griffith Avenue had been a homeless heroin addict, it is doubtful he would have received so light a sentence.

Disproportionate

Rape and sexual assault are amongst the most horrendous things human beings can inflict on one another. It beggars belief that someone guilty of such a crime could spend less time in jail than someone convicted of robbing a corner shop. The law, and the execution of the law, must change, along with how society treats and portrays perpetrators of sexual assault. A basic starting point must be mandatory minimum sentencing. It is simply not acceptable that one person can attack another on the street and then walk out of prison six months or even two years later. Theft, drug possession and

public disorder all receive longer sentences than this, and sexual assault is an infinitely more serious crime.

A basic guideline minimum sentence for sex crimes is a first step towards changing how the law and hopefully society generally treats sexual assault. This requires no new laws. Our statute books already criminalise all forms of sexual violence. We simply need to add a minimum sentencing provision to all applicable sections. Minimum sentencing is only the start however.

Irish law provides for judicial discretion in most types of criminal cases. This is usually a positive aspect of our legal system.

It allows judges to use their best judgement when sentencing, to avoid excessively harsh sentences for crimes that don’t warrant them.

Blind spot

In the case of sexual assault, however, the opposite happens.

Rather than using their best judgement to mitigate harsh sentences, the judges appear to be conforming to society’s blind spot about sexual assault and mitigating sentences for offenders, particularly when they don’t fit a predetermined profile. Social perception is that sexual assault is perpetrated by random individuals on victims they do not know, usually in a dark alley or other suitable setting. The offender is always a monster, complete with all the appropriate traits. The truth is that one third of all sexual assaults are committed by people who are known to the victim, within families or relationships, and the perpetrator often has no history of criminal activity.

In order to change this, we the public must push for both minimum sentences and for stricter interpretation of judicial discretion. We must insist that our justice system treat rape, sexual assault and any sex crime as the heinous and unforgivable acts that they are. The laws are already at our disposal, all that is needed is the will to convict and punish perpetrators in proportion to the crimes they have committed.

Society and the legal system are linked. Once society starts to push for the legal system to appropriately punish sexual assault, this will in turn help to improve our culture’s attitude to sexual assault. The law exists to treat all citizens equally, but also to sentence them according to the severity of their crime. Our justice system has a long way to go before it treats sexual assault with the severity and firmness it needs, but minimum sentences and public pressure can help to take it there.

“

It beggars belief that someone guilty of such a crime could spend less time in jail than someone convicted of robbing a corner shop.

H CAFÉBAR

GOOD FOOD, COLD BEER, GREAT COCKTAILS. Café Bar H, Grand Canal Square, Dublin 2 Phone: 018992216

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

SciTech

19

Science in Brief Dylan Lynch SciTech Editor

Discovery of virus that makes humans ‘stupid’ A human targeting pathogen that makes its host experience loss of cognitive ability has been discovered by scientists at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Nebraska. The virus, currently known as ‘chlorovirus ATCV-1’ was thought to only attack some green algae species, but a recent study showed in a large scale human trial, 44% of patients had this virus present in throat tissue.

In tests of memory, cognitive

endurance and other brain functions, infected individuals performed significantly worse than those who tested negative for the virus. This tiny parasite can remain in a human body for years at a time, and it has been suggested that it can alter genes in the brain – including a gene related to the hormone dopamine, which is directly related to brain function.

Study into safety of e-cigarettes published

Illustration: Maria Kavanagh

Facing up to a silent disaster The spread of dengue fever has received little media attention outside of the developing countries it is quickly ravaging.

Laura Ellen Healy Contributor Sitting at the train station in Kuala Lumpur, I swat away the deadly malaria-ridden mosquitoes. They want my blood, in exchange for a well-known tropical disease made famous by Cheryl Cole. In the train station is a billboard showing an image of a person being bitten by a mosquito. It’s a squeamish photo and makes me feel uneasy. It grabs my attention, though, because instead of the malaria caption I was expecting to see underneath the image, I see the words DENGUE FEVER. A list of symptoms - severe headache; severe joint pain, vomiting, bleeding, rash and sudden, high fever - follows.

On the train, I see the headline “Dengue Death Tolls on the Rise” on the front of a local newspaper.

I arrive in Ipoh, a town north of Kuala Lumpur. There are two shopping centres in the town, neither of which had any posters

or billboards with the word ‘dengue’ printed on them. Newspapers follow the story, each one of them mentioning the seriousness of the disease and how to avoid becoming infected. But the concerns displayed on the pages of newspapers are not reflected in the town. Open drains and holes in the ground filled with stagnant water are commonplace and are often situated in parks full of people.

What is dengue fever?

Dengue fever is transmitted by the Aedes mosquito. Dengue is an RNA virus of the family Flaviviridae, genus Flavivirus. There are other not so well known killer viruses also belonging to this genus, such as yellow fever virus and West Nile virus. Dengue haemorrhagic fever, now known as severe dengue, may develop from an initial infection of dengue fever. Severe dengue was first discovered in the 1950s during epidemics in the Philippines and Thailand. Up to 100 million dengue infections

occur every year and cases of dengue are now reported all over Asia and Latin America, putting almost half of the world’s population at risk. The fever is on the WHO’s list of 17 neglected tropical diseases, which does not include malaria.

There are four distinct serotypes (distinct variations between species of microbial life, such as bacteria and fungi) of dengue: DEN-1, DEN-2, DEN-3 and DEN4. Each of these contain different genotypes. The “Asian” genotypes of DEN-2 and DEN-3 have associations with severe disease accompanying secondary dengue infections. Severe dengue is named so due to complications involving plasma leaking, fluid accumulation, respiratory distress, severe bleeding and organ impairment.

If proper medical care is not taken shortly after experiencing these symptoms, the result may be fatal.

Infection and recovery

Once infected, humans serve as a

source of the virus for uninfected mosquitoes, allowing speedy transmission via infected blood.

This makes infected humans the main carriers and multipliers of the virus. The symptoms are visible after a four to 10 day incubation period, after the person has been bitten by an infected mosquito.

If a human recovers from infection of one dengue virus, they are protected by lifelong immunity against that particular virus serotype. It does not include protection from the other three serotypes and evidence suggests that repeated infections increase the person’s chance of developing severe dengue. There is no vaccination or specific medication to take once infected with the disease.

There is currently only one way to control dengue virus transmission. This is through integrated vector management (IVM), which includes the improvement of water storage practices to prevent egg-laying female mos-

quitoes from accessing water in human communities. It is vital that local authorities here make the first steps in destroying these breeding sites.

Dengue awareness

For a disease to get global recognition, it unfortunately seems that certain countries need to be threatened by the disease, or indeed certain people. The most famous dengue sufferer is Rihanna’s father and the most famous person to die from dengue is a surfer named Andy Irons. The list of malaria sufferers is strikingly different. It includes JFK, Genghis Kahn, Mother Teresa, David Attenborough, Christopher Columbus, Michael Caine and Cheryl Cole. Dengue fever has become a growing problem in the Caribbean, a holiday destination favoured by many Europeans and Americans. It has begun to get some of the media attention it deserves since its increase in popular tourist destinations, but the same cannot be said for countries

A study into recently popularised tobacco-free alternative cigarettes has found that so-called e-cigarettes can deliver very high levels of nanoparticles, which can cause inflammation of the sensitive lung lining and have been linked to asthma. These batterypowered devices have a voltage adjustment setting, which controls the heating element. It has been proven, however, that at higher and more desirable voltages (3.2V to 4.8V), an e-cig will produce as much formaldehyde (a kind of carcinogen) as a tradi-

tional cigarette.

A separate study published earlier this year revealed that e-cig smoke often has exceedingly dangerous levels of heavy metal ions, such as chromium and nickel.

Even in minute doses, these can be extremely toxic. It has been theorised that these ions are actually coming from the soldering joints and casing of the vaporiser itself, rather than the liquid.

US lobbyists push for coffee to be labelled a carcinogen The Council for Education and Research on Toxins (CERT) in California has begun a legal battle to force large chain coffee companies, such as Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, to advise customers that coffee contains cancer-causing compounds.

Acrylamide, an organic substance generated when coffee beans are roasted, is a known carcinogen that mainly affects the male reproductive system. The group is pushing for minimum fines of $2,500 (¤2,006) for each day that

a company does not label its beverages as carcinogens.

However, coffee companies have a strong defence. Laboratory results and trials in rats have shown that for a dangerous dose of acrylamide to be ingested, a consumer would need to drink 100 cups of coffee per day. Statistically speaking, the average coffee drinker consumes one small cup of coffee per day and it is unlikely that this lobbying will yield any law change.

America may have axed research into thorium reactors in the 1970s due to it being unsuitable for nuclear weapons, the idea was rediscovered in 2008 and world leaders seem to be catching on. In 2011, the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced that it will finance the development of a programme to develop a thorium-fuelled molten salt reactor (TFMSR).

This is the first of four “strategic leader in science and technology projects” that the Chinese Academy of Science will be supporting. The Chinese Academy of Sciences claims the country now has “the world’s largest national effort on Thorium”, employing a team of 430 scientists and engineers, a number planned to rise to 750 personnel by 2015. India also has abundant thorium reserves and the country’s nuclear-power programme, which is aiming to supply a quarter of the country’s electricity (up from 3% at the mo-

ment).

So watch this space. Thorium may be the fuel of the future, the answer to all our prayers. But make sure you know your facts and rid your mind of bias against nuclear power. Because, ultimately, these negative connotations will prevent funding going ahead for future nuclear projects, prevent the government from investing in them and prevent Ireland from advancing into the future of clean nuclear energy fuels. It will not happen overnight, but possibly in the future our children will have a completely different take on the word ‘nuclear energy’. It will be viewed as a concept to be embraced instead of feared.

Could nuclear power solve our energy crisis?

Nuclear power may be the only solution to the world’s energy crisis. But is it really viable source of alternative energy?

Kate Reidy Contributor Energy crisis, greenhouse effect, fossil fuel emissions, lack of natural resources, rising oil prices: these are just a few of the phrases you may have heard thrown around in the last few years. Inevitably, you will have talked about, heard about or read about the need for us to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, quickly.

The majority of the world’s current energy supply is obtained from coal, gas and oil. All of these resources are non-renewable, severely depleted and the rate of usage increasing day in day out. It is estimated that gas reserves will run out somewhere in the next 50 years, and for oil we’re given a deadline between 2025 and 2070. The cut-off point for life as we know it is drawing ever closer. Even though a lot of efforts have been and are being made to switch to renewable energy sources, we can see our time with fossil fuels is running out.

So the answer is simple: renewable, clean and safe energy; right?

We all know the pros and cons of renewable energy sources such as solar, hydroelectric and wind energies. These forms are expensive and require lots of land space.

There is never enough power generated and you also cannot rely on them 24/7, being doomed to a blackout when the sun goes down.

However, a renewable source rarely thought about is nuclear power. Nuclear power is the most underrated, under promoted and most mistrusted of all clean energy sources. Nuclear power facilities can produce energy at a 91% efficiency rate all day and every day; a rate that solar, wind and hydroelectricity could never even dream of accomplishing. It could be the answer to the world’s energy needs we’ve all been waiting for.

But unfortunately the word ‘nuclear’ has become a sort of taboo. The negative connotations associated with the word, from nuclear bombs to Chernobyl to the more recent Fukushima, have turned us off nuclear as an energy source, a bias that could ultimately cost us a lot of time, money and resources.

What is nuclear energy?

Nuclear technology uses a method called nuclear fission to create energy. It was first developed in the 1940s during the Second World War and research initially focused on producing bombs by splitting the atoms of either uranium or plutonium. Fission is a method of splitting an atom into two smaller atoms, which don’t need as much energy to hold them together as the larger atom.

The extra energy is released as heat and radiation. Fission of the uranium creates heat that is used to boil water to steam inside a reactor vessel. The steam then turns huge turbines in magnetic

fields that drive generators that in turn, make electricity for your smartphone and coffee machine.

What are the problems?

The problems in nuclear energy lie in the choice of fuel (uranium) and the choice of a water-based reactor. Basically, the uranium releases enough heat to boil the water to 300 degrees celsius. We all know that water turns to vapour at 100 degrees celsius, so how do we keep it in liquid form for it to be able to turn the turbines and generate electricity? The answer is to keep the whole chamber at an extremely high pressure so the water is in essence ‘squeezed’ into staying as a liquid. This chamber needs a coolant around it to stop the plant from overheating. Now imagine what happens when there is a natural disaster, or a power cut and this cooling system stops working: a high pressure chamber heated to 300 degrees celsius, with a radioactive source spells catastrophe.

For most people, that is why nuclear energy is not seen as a viable energy source, and it was the same with me. It is not safe, and I do not want it near me or my country. But thenI stumbled across a TED talk by researcher and scientist Kirk Sorensen, founder of Filbe Energy. He describes advances into a new fuel source called thorium that could eliminate all these problems.

Why thorium?

Thorium is element 90 on the

Periodic Table. Thorium reactors use molten salts instead of water to drive the turbines. These stay liquid at much higher temperatures, thus eliminating the need for high pressure chambers and virtually eliminating all possibility of disaster.

Thorium is far more abundant than uranium, with one gram of thorium on average in every cubic metre of soil, though some places far more abundant. It is found nearly everywhere in the world. It is such a concentrated energy source that you could hold enough thorium energy to last you a lifetime in the palm of your hand.

Because thorium is so much more energy dense than uranium, it also creates much less waste.

For every 250 tons of uranium radioactive waste, the equivalent energy produced in a thorium reactor only produces one tonne of waste. Not to mention the fact that uranium radioactive waste takes 10,000 years to decay, whereas in 10 years 83% of thorium fission products are stable. It is a cheap energy source; $50,000 (approximately 39,584) of thorium can create as much energy as 1.5bn dollars (1.2bn euro) of oil. So why are we not using it already?

Here comes the sad story. We should be and we would be if it were not for nuclear bombs. Nuclear energy was first pioneered by the military in World War II with the hope of making nuclear weapons. Uranium was the obvious choice as it is more reactive,

more unstable - and more likely to cause an explosion! The unfortunate side effect of this was that its cleaner and more efficient fuel alternative, thorium, was forgotten about when it came to transferring these nuclear technologies over to energy. It is largely a result of wartime politics. Cold Warera governments backed uranium-based reactors because they produced plutonium — handy for making nuclear weapons.

The repercussions of this are that the reactors are built for uranium only. Although it would be possible to switch today’s commercial nuclear uranium power plants over to thorium fuel, it would be at great cost. This is a cost that countries are not willing to pay for a fuel that still holds so much negative bias from the public.

Future

However, all is not lost. Although

20

SciTech

Evolution’s solutions to hooking up The world of student dating and mating is not too far removed from practices in the animal kingdom.

Niamh Byrne

Contributor Are you a competitive male or a showy peacock? It’s not difficult to think of college as a breeding ground. We’re all desperate to be loved, searching for the perfect partner and hoping that, when we do find them, they somehow consider us to be perfect too. But what methods have evolved for us to demonstrate our own perfection?

Take a seat on the steps of the Exam Hall and observe the swarms milling about Front Square, or recline on the slope of the cricket pitch and examine the flocks gathered around the Pav, the campus watering hole.

See the alpha males put down their cans for a brief wrestling match? Notice the cool-looking, long-fringed boy: a crick in his neck from swishing his hair out of his eyes and penguinshuffling in his super skinny jeans to arrive to class on time?

We are animals, after all, and as much as we like to believe we are more psychologically developed than mere beasts, these occurrences are disturbingly familiar to acts of sexual selection known in the animal kingdom, acts which are used by animals to exhibit themselves to the opposite sex.

Sexual selection

Sexual selection is a form of evolution that involves the success of certain individuals of a species (or failures of others) at securing mates. There are two types of sexual selection: intrasexual selection, which involves competition between individuals of the same sex, usually the males, in order to drive away or kill their rivals for free-reign over the females; and intersexual selection, in which males vie for the attention of the females, who then have the pleasure of choosing the more agreeable partner.

Competition is a shared experience of living things. Where resources such as food, water or homes are scarce, animals compete to get the best deal. This is the same when selecting a mate. Imagine you are a young adult stag, sipping at a lake of Pražský outside the Pav, when you see an incredibly sexy doe across the cricket pitch. Unfortunately, your bestie saw her too. You got first dibs and yet he’s willing to break the bro code and fight you for her, and before either of you know it the horns are out. He’s stamping the ground ready to charge, and all you can do is grapple in this primal battle for dominance. Too late, you remember your opponent has been playing rugby for Blackrock for the last six years, and he comes out

the alpha male. Male deer, and other such animals, develop their antlers and horns to be used as weapons in combat with other males to earn the right to mate with the females of their group.

Good genes

Some men are clear survivors, while others need to dress to impress. Instead of fighting, the males of other species have found different ways to display their quality. Judging a book by its cover is essential in the wild, because sitting down for a romantic dinner to get to know your potential mate is a really easy way to get yourself eaten. Morphological traits called ornaments have developed by evolution to impress, charm and show off good genes to females. The term “good genes” refers to traits that make an individual the best at surviving, producing offspring that survive well, too.

As a female in the wild, reproduction and child-rearing cost much of your precious time and energy, and you only have a limited number of eggs. You want and deserve the best if you can only afford to raise a few offspring per year, so you must be picky. This is why choosing a male with good genes is so important, as your kids will be born with a genetic superiority and increased chance of living to adulthood. With bad genes they may just end up dying on you, making the whole exhausting experience a complete waste.

Think of the peacock, with his ostentatious plumage and eyecatching colours. His delicately maintained appearance took time and effort, and may barely resemble how he looked the same morning. This sort of display is proof of good genes. It cannot be faked or lied about, since a sick (or hungover) guy, full of bad genes, might not have rolled out of bed early enough to get himself looking so dapper. This concept is known as the good genes hypothesis. Similarly, no one wants to end up lab partners with the greasy guy who smells like last week’s gym bag, let alone go on a date with him. Unbeknownst to you it’s not only the smell, but a well-groomed male points to his greater disease resistance and efficient metabolism. And if those genes aren’t good enough for you, you need to rethink your standards.

Fashion

Males can be driven to extremes to advertise themselves, so if fashion dictates that tight jeans and good hair are essential features of a girl’s future boyfriend, how far will the boys go to live up to this standard?

If long tails are this season’s big thing, the male long-tailed

Illustration: Sarah Larragy

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Competition is a shared experience of living things.

widowbird owns it. They can have an ornamental tail up to one metre in length, but seems to be in fact detrimental to their flight. This is a bizarre circumstance of evolution, which inherently states that the best skills for survival of a species are selected and passed on from generation to generation. So how did this bird develop such seemingly bad genes, while trying to impress the ladies with its good genes?

There are two theories for how showiness could overcome usefulness in a case such as this. The first is Fisher’s runaway process, in which sexual selection drives the females of a species to choose a longer tail,

at a point where it was a benefit to the species. Thus the bird with the longest tail gets the most matings, passing down long tails to its sons. The following generations of females are wired to go nuts for longer and longer tails, and so even when the long tail evolves to the point of being obtrusive, it will still be chosen. This process will go on until the detrimental effect of the long tail is so strong that the bird doesn’t make it to the mating stage at all.

Like this, you may prefer guys who wear skinny jeans, but if you pick the guy wearing jeans so skinny he can’t get out of them when you make it to the bedroom, you’ll discover the

sad fact that he’s an evolutionary cul-de-sac (which is, for sure, the biggest mood-killer in the animal kingdom).

The second theory is Zahavi’s handicap principle. Think of the lad with the thick fringe covering half his face. He’s almost blind, yes, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping him.

In fact, his ability to function adequately despite the handicap of his blindness just about proves how incredibly good he is at surviving. This happens in the wild with male signals such as bright colouring, mating dances and birdsong, all of which attract predators, and show the ability to survive regardless of this major threat.

Whether it’s a runaway effect or a handicap, as long as the cost is outweighed by the advantages to breeding potential, both principles will drive males to be extreme show-offs.

We can find examples of animal behaviour amongst ourselves in unexpected places, but in some cases it appears as though humans have outsmarted evolution. Sometimes the beta male sprawled on the ground with a broken nose gets the sympathy from the girl, while the alpha male looks like a jerk. And since we have developed contraception, we thankfully don’t need to consider every suitor as a parent to our potential children.

Sexism remains an everyday challenge for female science students Dylan Lynch talks to Mieke Guinan, the Trinity student who coordinated College’s first ever Women in Science Week last week, about academic sexism and gender representation.

Dylan Lynch SciTech Editor When Mieke Guinan, a secondyear medicinal chemistry student and the current treasurer of the Dublin University Gender Equality Society (DUGES), finished a difficult maths assignment well before a deadline last year, her male colleagues couldn’t believe a woman had worked it out alone.

“They claimed that my boyfriend at the time, who studied maths in college, had done the work for me and I had slapped my name on the top,” she said. “They set out to prove me wrong, without allowing me to justify my work. It’s little things like that. Even now if I ask a female colleague for help, one of my male colleagues will butt in with the answer instead.”

Outreach

Ms. Guinan is one of the coordinators of last week’s first ever Women in Science Week.

The goal of the week was “to provide an insight into the scientific work carried out by women,” she told Trinity News. “We want to reach out to female students studying general science in particular, and show them the range of opportunities available to them. We hope to encourage discussion about sexism in science, and cause people to question their own bias.”

From the week beginning November 10th, lecture theatres in the Hamilton building were occupied by female lecturers from many different scientific disciplines. The lecturers spoke for about 15 minutes, during which they relived their own encounters with sexism and how they overcame it in their field of work. The event was not solely run by DUGES: Maths Society and Physics Society had also

lined up their speakers for the week.

“The core aim of women in science week is empower and educate,” Ms. Guinan explained.

“These issues are never raised in College. Most science courses are equal in terms of gender, but the problem lies further down the line; masters programs and PhDs.” Statistically more women finish an undergraduate degree in the engineering, maths and science (EMS) faculty, but there is this huge drop-off of progress after graduation. Men dominate PhD programs and industrial internships. Worldwide, only 30% of researchers are female. In Ireland, the figure is 32%. “It’s not to do with a woman’s ability, rather what is expected of her in society; family and children. Bias is still so inherent that men get chosen over women even with the same qualification”.

Statistics

There is a huge lack of action in remedying the gender gaps in many science departments around the world. Dr. Natalie Cooper from the School of Natural Sciences highlighted one source of the problem in her public lecture on gender inequality in science last year: many people think that women are the minority, and that the focus should be on larger minorities.

“Women are not a minority, in fact we make up roughly 50% of the population and so we should occupy 50% of the positions,” explained Dr. Cooper. Even now, there is still a huge wage gap in EMS employment. In a 2012 study carried out by Jo Handelsman and her research team in Yale University, a board of evaluators in the fields of biology, chemistry and physics at six leading

universities were given résumés from potential candidates and the evaluators would have to recommend a salary for the candidate.

What they didn’t know was that the application was modified randomly to change the name from ‘Jennifer’ to ‘John’, without altering any other details. On average, ‘Jennifer’ was awarded a salary worth 12% less than ‘John’, for no conceivable reason: the only difference was the gender of the applicant. Moreover, the 12% gap only applies for white women.

Female scientists of colour make considerably less. “Many people don’t think they are actually part of the problem, and they don’t realise their own gender bias at all,” Ms. Guinan says.

“

They claimed that my boyfriend at the time, who studied maths in college, had done the work for me and I had slapped my name on the top.

One anonymous graduate from another Irish university spoke to Trinity News about how she had great difficulty in finding a job after college, even though she had graduated with first class honours. “I started sending out my résumé at the start of last year, but I was getting no replies or interviews, even after five months,” she said. “I asked my colleagues to have a look at the CV which I had been sending out, to see if there was a major issue with it that I couldn’t find. They all recommended that I stop using my first name and instead just use

my initial, as then an employer wouldn’t know my gender from the top of my CV. I took their advice and changed my CV. I started getting interviews and I was employed by the end of October.”

What is College doing to change things?

Shifting the focus back to College, I ask Mieke about the past science-based gender equality projects. “The topic of sexism in science hasn’t come up much in DUGES,” she said. “Interaction with the EMS faculty is and always has been very low, which

makes Women in Science Week all the more important. However, Trinity itself is definitely combating the issue. There is a gender equality officer in the Students’ Union, College now has a gender equality commission and International Women’s Week has been incorporated into the academic calendar. Just last April, College hosted Soapbox Science; an event where female lecturers stand up on actual soapboxes in a public place and give short speeches about their field of work. The event has been running in the UK for a few years but

last year was the first Irish instance.”

Apart from these events, there are scholarship awards reserved for female students, such as the Women in Physics scholarship which awards outstanding junior freshman women.

The current state of affairs is still grim with regard to gender bias in science, but with progressive events like Women in Science week it is hoped that equal work will soon actually yield equal pay.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

21

SciTech

Scientists create artificial black hole in a lab Recent research has gone a long way towards verifying Stephen Hawking’s black hole theory.

Katarzyna Siewierska Staff Writer The laws of physics are universal. No matter where you are in the universe, you can be pretty sure that all laws of physics are the same. This allows physicists to boldly go where no woman or man has gone before. Indeed, physicists can explore places extremely large distances from Earth or in far back in time, using mathematics or by carrying out experiments here on Earth. However, the laws of physics have their limitations. They can break down in places with extreme conditions. One famous example of such place is the inside of a black hole.

Black holes

What is a black hole? It is a region in the universe from which nothing can escape, not even light, hence it being black. They are often formed when a large star runs out of fuel. Such stars spectacularly explode and if what is left of the star is about three to four times the mass of our own sun, it will most likely be crushed under its own weight to a black hole.

This large mass is crushed to a relatively small size making the black hole extremely dense. All of these facts come from one of the most beautiful theories in physics: general relativity.

This theory, developed by Albert Einstein, has been tested experimentally many times and never failed. It is very important that all theories agree with experiment, but they need to also agree with each other. However, the theory of general relativity and another theory called quantum mechanics are incompatible.

Quantum mechanics is a theory that describes the behaviour of objects at very small scales, such as electrons. It has also been tested many times and never failed. However the bottom line is that both theories cannot be correct. Since quantum mechanics is a more fundamental theory, theoretical physicists have been applying quantum principles to general relativity. This led to many interesting results, one of which is called Hawking radiation.

Hawking radiation

In 1974, it was proposed that black holes are not completely black. Indeed, once something gets into a black hole it cannot escape. However, consider the following situation: quantum mechanics tells us that everywhere in the universe special pairs of particles form and destroy very quickly all of the time. These particle pairs come into being and destroy each other when they touch so quickly that they cannot be detected. Suppose two such particles form very close to the surface black hole, the event horizon. It is possible that one of the two particles falls through the event horizon into the black hole, where the other can materialise and carry away some of the energy of the black hole away. According to the most famous physics equation E = mc2 escape the black hole loses mass and shrinks until it disappears. The particles that are emitted from the black hole are known as Hawking radiation.

Does Hawking radiation actually exist? Detecting Hawking radiation is a very difficult task. The particles involved are very small; the radiation is weak and is therefore completely overwhelmed by cosmic radiation (the free particles travelling through the universe). But, as I’ve said, all laws of physics are the same everywhere.

Could physicists come up with a way of generating Hawking radiation, without creating a black hole on Earth?

The first attempt to produce Hawking radiation was published in 2010 by F. Belgiorno in his paper on Hawking radiation from ultrashort laser pulse filaments.

Belgiorno claimed to have generated Hawking radiation using a laser, block of glass, mirrors and a cooled detector. However, the paper raised some concerns and other physicists had serious doubts whether the radiation detected was Hawking radiation.

In October 2014, Jeff Steinhauer from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology published a paper on self-amplifying Hawking radiation from ultrashort laser pulse filaments, which describes a way of creating the event horizon and looking at how laser light present at this event horizon behaves. In agreement with the theory of Hawking radiation, the light escapes from this generated event horizon. Unlike the paper from 2010, this paper makes me really excited because it could be the first legitimate proof for the existence of Hawking radiation. Why? In order for this paper to appear in the journal Nature, it had to go through a strict peer reviewing process before being accepted and published. This means that people who are experts in the field consider this as a reliable result. Others will work to duplicate the results and if they do we can be sure Hawking radiation exists.

“

If Hawking radiation exists, this will seal the fate of all the black holes out there.

Implications

If Hawking radiation exists, this will seal the fate of all the black holes out there. Sooner or later, they will all die out. There is nothing more special than witnessing how a theory that someone came up with 40 years ago is being proved to be true in a rigorous experiment. The author of the theory here is Stephen Hawking, an English theoretical physicist, who is also one of the most well-known physicist of our time. He featured in many physics programmes on the Discovery Channel and made appearances in popular shows such as The Simpsons or The Big Bang Theory. He has published many books on popular science, including The Brief History of Time, which is a wonderful book for all physics enthusiasts. If people obtain the conclusive proof that Hawking radiation exists, it would not be surprising if Hawking was awarded the Nobel Prize in the next few years.

To summarise, this is a very exciting time in cosmology. The proof of the existence of Hawking radiation is a very important advancement in our understanding of black holes. This remarkable discovery is the success of the team of experimental physicists led by Jeff Steinhauer and the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. Just like the discovery of the Higgs boson led to the Nobel Prize in Physics for Peter Higgs, this discovery may also lead to a Nobel Prize for Stephen Hawking.

Illustration: Maria Kavanagh

Bringing dead animals back to life Any specie that has gone extinct in the last 100,000 years could be resurrected as a result of recent research.

Patrick King Contributor We are living in the midst of a mass extinction event known as the Holocene extinction. In 2002, the prominent biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that half of all higher organisms could be gone by the year 2100. A 2014 study estimated that animals and plants are disappearing at 1,000 times the normal rate. It is largely because of our technological progress that we have been able to alter the climate and exterminate hundreds of thousands of species.

However, new tools are now being developed that can help us save species on the brink of extinction, or even bring back those we had thought lost forever.

Candidates for resurrection

Any specie that went extinct in the past 100,000 years is a potential candidate for resurrection. This includes pre-historic animals such as the four ton giant ground sloth, the Irish elk with antlers measuring 3.65 metres across and the iconic woolly mammoth, as well as more recently vanished creatures such as the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon.

Methods

De-extinction can be achieved by three different methods: cloning, back-breeding, and genome reconstruction. Cloning was tried in 2003 when DNA from the last Pyrenean ibex was implanted into the egg cells of an ibex-goat hybrid surrogate parent. It took 60 attempts for one live birth and the resultant ibex died within minutes due to congenital lung defects. This failure did not come as a complete surprise as cloning by this method has a low success rate, even when conducted using intact DNA and with the same species as the surrogate – many embryos were lost in the making of Dolly the sheep.

Back-breeding refers to taking a domesticated organism and selectively breeding for the traits of its wild ancestor. This method is being used by the TaurOs pro-

ject to bring back the extinct Aurochs (a type of large wild cattle).

Back-breeding has the advantage of being cheap,however it is slow and only feasible when the genes of an organism have been diluted but not lost. This makes it suitable for all the ancestors of domesticated organisms and some species which interbred with other extant species before going extinct. As a result we could in theory use back-breeding to produce neanderthals from human populations with neanderthal ancestry, equally they could be brought back using the most state of the art method of de-extinction: genome reconstruction.

Genome reconstruction is currently being explored as a means to resurrect the woolly mammoth and the passenger pigeon. In the past decade there has been an explosion in our capacity to sequence (read) DNA at low cost, now we can even sequence the DNA of organisms that have been extinct for thousands of years.

Of course, knowing the DNA sequence of an extinct organism does not give us an extant organism. In order to use this information for the purposes of resurrection biology one needs two things: a living species that is as closely related to the extinct species as possible; and the means to edit the genome of that species.

Many extinct organisms have left behind closely related cousins. The woolly mammoth and the Asian elephant are more closely related to one another than the Asian and African elephants, suggesting that they would be able to produce live offspring. Genome editing has been made possible by a technique known as the CRISPR/Cas system.

This system evolved in bacteria to grant them immunity from the dangers of viral DNA, but it has been adapted to allow the rapid deletion and insertion of DNA in target cells. The Harvard geneticist George Church has already inserted genes for longer hair growth, cold resistant blood and extra fat tissue into Asian elephant stem cells. An Asian elephant with these features could be born in this decade. Through selective breeding of such elephants and the continued ad-

dition of ancient DNA, the herd would become more mammoth than Asian elephant. This use of back-breeding with genome reconstruction is prudent as genome editing is in its infancy and there is a risk of incompatibility between cow and calf.

Genome reconstruction and cloning can also be applied to prevent extinction as opposed to reversing it. Critically endangered species such as the Gaur and Mouflon have been successfully cloned; however these animals have yet to produce offspring of their own. Genome reconstruction offers us the opportunity to introduce genetic diversity into a species that has lost much of its own. For endangered species this could mean the difference between complete recovery and population collapse as a result of inbreeding.

De-extinction has been the stuff of science fiction since Jurassic Park was written in 1990; it is now becoming a reality. The dinosaurs (excluding birds) are not viable candidates for de-extinction as their DNA has degraded

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Potential candidates [include] the four ton giant ground sloth, the Irish elk with antlers measuring 3.65 metres across and the iconic woolly mammoth.

over tens of millions of years. Instead, we are presented with the opportunity to resurrect species which were exterminated by us and our ancestors.

Implications

The question remains: is this a good idea? Have ecosystems moved on since these animals died out such that they could not be successfully reintroduced?

Could these creatures be taught behaviours that were passed on for countless generations and then abruptly lost? Some conservationists consider de-extinction a frivolous expense that distracts us from preventing extinction in the first place. Others fear that invalidating the slogan ‘Extinction is forever’ will reduce the pressure on people and policymakers to protect endangered species.

When grey wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after almost a century of absence, elk were forced to abandon valleys where they were vulnerable. As a result shrubs and willows were able to take root on riversides. Bears and beavers benefited from the new vegetation, which also had the effect of increasing silt deposits from the river, changing its shape over time as more bends were introduced.

There is now no doubt that these effects and others benefitted the park’s ecosystem. Resurrection biologists hope that bringing back extinct species would have similarly positive results. No doubt this would depend on the species being resurrected, which brings us back to the mammoth.

Mammoths survived for millions of years through constantly changing climates. As is often the case for large animals, the fossil record shows that mammoths were less sensitive to subtle environmental changes than smaller specialist species. Today the Eurasian steppe ecosystem favoured by mammoths is far less densely populated than the habitat of the endangered Asian elephant.

It has even been suggested that mammoths could extend the steppe ecosystem further north by removing trees that compete with a variety of grasses, this would have the effect of suring

up the Arctic permafrost which stores two to three times as much carbon as the world’s rain forests and is currently eroding at an alarming rate.

When it comes to the lost behaviours of the species, mammoths are again good candidates.

The gradual transition from Asian elephant to mammoth will allow the developing species to gradually learn what extra skills it needs as it is guided north over the generations.It is hard to determine whether or not resurrection biology will serve as a distraction from conservation biology. Certainly we can expect the cost of bringing back an extinct organism to continue plummeting as the technologies needed are developed for research and medicine, but what of the threatened status of permanent extinction? My hope is that excitement and optimism generated by responsible de-extinction will outweigh any lethargy it could facilitate. Flagship species such as the Siberian tiger already drive conservation efforts as their survival necessitates the protection of their entire ecosystem. Surely resurrected species such as the woolly mammoth would serve as powerful flagships.

Finally, there is the less tangible objection that bringing back an extinct species equates to ‘playing God’. This is a vague complaint which is perhaps unsuited to dialogue in a secular society. Strangely environmental destruction and extinction are not considered playing God, perhaps because these acts are more familiar and less purposeful. Nonetheless these acts have permanently altered our planet and continue to do so. Regardless of one’s religious beliefs it is clear that we are not passive creatures on God’s earth whose only responsibility is to avoid interfering with his or her or their plan. We are the most powerful force of agency on this planet and not only must we stop destroying it, we have to decide what the reconstruction will look like. I for one think that every tool at our disposal should be used build the wild anew.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

Sport

Gavin Cooney interviews Iain Macintosh, the coauthor of Football Manager Stole My Life, at the recent Dublin launch of the 2015 game.

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From left to right: Meabh Downey, Nicole Owens, Aine Haberlin, Michelle Peel, Sarah McCaffrey, and Amie Giles. Photo: Huda Awan

Representing college and club Trinity News talks to members of the Ladies Gaelic Football team who also play at senior inter-county level. older girls on the team had been trying to win it for a few years previously so it was an amazing feeling. We had a great bunch of girls who worked so hard for it all year so it felt great to reap the benefits. I can’t even describe the week of celebrations that followed – one of the best weeks of college life so far!

Alicia Lloyd Sport Editor The giant of Irish sports journalism that was Con Houlihan once said: “I have great respect for people who go into the arena and seek glory while risking humiliation.” This goes some way towards describing my feelings about Trinity’s GAA players who so admirably balance their time between representing this university and their respective home counties in a sport demanding skill, mental determination and hard work in equal parts. Being selected to represent your county is no small achievement. Intercounty ladies’ football is played to the very highest level of this amateur sport. Competition is fierce.

Demands are high. But love for the game drives those who manage to rise to country level. Trinity should be proud to call each of these players our own. Their dedication to a game, at times lacking the support it deserves, is commendable.

I sat down with Trinity students and country players Amie Giles, Aine Haberlin, Caitriona Smith, Sarah McCaffrey, Meabh Downey, Michelle Peel and Nicole Owens to talk about their experiences and thoughts on the game.

Amie Giles, SS Pharmacy What position do you play?

Centre half back or fullback depending on the team.

What home club do you play for?

Coralstown Kinnegad.

What is your favourite memory of playing with Trinity?

When I was in second year, we won the Lynch cup (Division 3, Colleges All Ireland). We had lost the final the year before and the

What has been your best moment playing for Westmeath?

Westmeath ladies won the intermediate All Ireland the year before I joined the senior team so firstly I’m raging I missed out on that. But since I started, we’ve gotten to the Division 2 league semifinal in 2013 and the final in 2014 so hopefully we’ll have another crack at it this year. My favourite moment, however, wouldn’t be in the league but probably my first time playing senior championship. I can’t even remember if we won or not but I recall just feeling delighted to be representing my club and county.

What are the demands of playing county football?

It is physically demanding. I remember after my very first core session with the seniors I came home and told my dad that I didn’t think I was cut out for this county stuff at all. But I think everyone can deal with this part of it because at the end of the day it’s more enjoyable playing when you are at your fittest. But what is most challenging is the time commitment. It’s absolutely great during the summer when you are finished college and at home - I’d always look forward to training.

It can just be difficult, however, during the college term as you’re trying to juggle a college course, three college training sessions per week, three county sessions and then a social life somewhere in between. The county league games all happen during the second term of the college year so almost every Sunday for a decent period involves travelling around the country playing matches.

Do you feel as though it’s worth it?

Yes, 100%. Even though I often complain about the amount of time I give to training or having to miss a few nights out when we’ve matches the next day or the following week, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’d probably crack up if I wasn’t playing. What’s more is that you’re playing as part of a team that are such good

friends so that makes it worth it.

Is it ever difficult to balance playing college football with county football?

It is impossible to be in two places at once and to keep everyone happy. During the college term I would always generally make it home for two out of say three county sessions per week.

I’ve been lucky though that my managers and the girls I’m playing alongside over the last two years with both college and county were always every understanding and took into account that even when you didn’t make their training you were still training hard elsewhere.

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You’re trying to juggle a college course, three college training sessions per week, three county sessions, and then a social life somewhere in between.

How is confidence in the Trinity squad at the minute for the coming season?

The year has gotten off to a great start with the introduction of our new manager Davy Burke and his selector Jonathan Burke. Games are improving all the time and everyone is giving 100% in training. Ultimately, we want to win the Giles cup (Division 2, All Ireland College Championship). Not only do we have a bunch of really talented players but we have a desire to win. From the final years point of view, there are a lot of us for whom this will be our last year playing college football and, having experienced the feeling of winning in second year, it would mean the world to us if we could do it again.

What are Westmeath’s hopes for the coming season?

This year, there will be new management so this means everyone will have to start from scratch and prove themselves which is always a good thing as it creates healthy competition for places. A huge aim this year will be to win the Division 2 league. Since we play senior in championship, we really need to be playing Division 1 football earlier in the year during the league in order to be able to compete with the likes of the Dublin and Corks of this world when the championship comes around. I was away playing football in San Francisco this summer so I missed the championship but the girls were only knocked out of the championship by Mayo after being beaten by only a point. This is a huge improvement from the previous year so I hope we can push on from there.

We have gone through the highs of winning and losing together, pains of training together and not to forget the nights out - our college team motto is “teams that drink together win together”! We have a tight bond which is hard to put into words until you are part of it.

Do you think that lazy stereotypes still exist for girls playing sport at a high level?

Well if they do still exist I honestly don’t pay any notice. At the end of the day, anyone who plays Gaelic football does so because they love the sport. If it so happens in the process that you are lucky enough to get to play at a high level and represent your club, county and college, then it is just a bonus.

Do you have a role model in football?

I can think of a lot of girls I’ve played alongside that I look up to and the common denominator between all of them was work rate. I don’t rate skilled players who are lazy as I think it is an awful waste of talent. Instead, I have respect for any player who works hard, has a never say die attitude and always gives their best.

How do you think that support could be increased for ladies football?

Anyone who really watches high level ladies’ football can’t deny the fact that many of the women are just as skilful as men. However, men’s games are obviously more physical, intense and have a faster pace so it stands to reason they will get a better following. This is an inherent fact which isn’t something to be addressed.

But the case for ladies’ football is not helped by the severe lack of funding and promotion received by the ladies. No comparison can be made between the treatment that men and women’s county teams receive. Having said that, I do think the promotion of ladies’ football and camogie is improving with the likes of TG4 showing good coverage of games.

How would you describe the bond that exists between you and your team mates?

Some of my best friends are ones I’ve met through playing football.

Part of the reason I love going to trainings, away to matches and so forth is because we have such fun.

What would you most like to achieve as a footballer and athlete?

Ideally, I’d love to play in an All Ireland in Croke Park, or any match in Croke Park for that matter! In terms of college football, as a final year I would leave Trinity a happy woman if we won the college Giles cup this year! As an athlete, I used to do long distance running at a high level and would really like to complete a marathon someday.

Aine Haberlin, JS Law What position do you play?

Midfield.

What home club do you play for?

St. Conleth’s.

What is your favourite memory of playing with Trinity?

It has to be the bus home from Jordanstown this year after winning one of our league games. We must have sang the whole way home (well I know I did anyway).

It was great craic altogether. I really felt sorry for the management and anyone else who was listening - I’m sure we were a bit pitchy to say the least.

What has been you best moment playing for Laois?

Winning an All-Ireland with the minors in 2013 definitely has to be the best moment. It was such a close game and when the final whistle went, it was just unbelievable to be on the winning end of the result. It’s a moment I’ll always remember. Everyone just rushing onto the field. To celebrate it with my teammates, friends from home and family on

the pitch directly after the game was such a great feeling.

What are the demands of playing county football?

It means training three times a week and then you’re also missing club trainings which is difficult.

It’s hard as well to have the same social life as your friends. Every bank holiday during the summer, all of my friends would be going out on the Sunday and I always seemed to have a match on the following Monday, so going out the night before was unthinkable.

You just have to keep saying to yourself that all these sacrifices will pay off. It’s not a big sacrifice really as long as you have friends who understand what inter-county football means!

Is it ever difficult to balance playing college football with county football?

I think it really depends on the county manager. I’ve heard of some managers getting the college girls to come back home for midweek trainings, which is hard.

This year, our manager knew we were playing football up in college during the week so the two sessions at the weekend would be the ones that we’d get to. If you were to come home during the week for county, then you’d have to sacrifice your college football, which is not really that fair.

Overall, I think the college football this year will complement the county, or at least I hope so.

It would be great to be ahead on some core and conditioning so you wouldn’t feel it as hard once the county football starts up. The more football you get in, the better you will be. Just as long as you don’t get injured.

How is confidence in the Trinity squad at the minute for the coming season?

There is a really positive atmosphere this year in the squad. We are all getting along really well and the influx of the new first years has helped strengthen the squad up. We have done well in the league so far but our eyes are set on the Giles cup and I really think we have a solid chance. The management are positive and hardworking, which makes the players want to put extra effort in too.

What are Laois’ hopes for the coming season?

The championship during the summer was full of ups and

downs. We got to the Leinster final but unfortunately it didn’t work out for us. We can’t focus on what went wrong last year so we are going to drive forward this year and put in a solid performance in the league. To hopefully make it to the Leinster final and win it would be an objective for this year.

Do you think that lazy stereotypes still exist for girls playing sport at a high level?

No, not at all, and if they were to exist I don’t think any reasonable person would take them seriously, to be honest. The whole nation knows the capabilities of female athletes and takes them just as seriously as male athletes. Obviously, Katie Taylor is the prime example and it’s great to have her blazing the way for women in sport. I do find that that some of my male counterparts are surprised when I say I play football and you get the occasional “girls, playing football?” comment, but it doesn’t bother me. Anyone who knows football would never say that. I think the whole stigma has kind of died off. The younger girls in my club just think it’s a normal part of growing up to play it - just as they would be into Irish dancing or whatever.

How do you think that support could be increased for ladies’ football?

It’s difficult to say, this question has been so prevalent in the promotion of ladies’ football for the past few years and to be honest I don’t know why there isn’t the same interest in it as in men’s football. If anyone was to watch the All-Ireland this year, they would see just how entertaining and genuinely enjoyable a match is to watch - unless you were from either of the teams playing; then it just would have stressful. But it is a problem and it’s annoying to not have the same recognition as the men, even when we put in an equal amount of work.

How would you describe the bond that exists between you and your team mates?

What strengthens the bond are the 7am gym sessions for sure.

We all suffer together as one and I think that’s what brings us closer together. Just looking around at everyone’s faces after the session is hilarious but, to be honest, I’m not one to talk. I’m usually conked out on the floor by the end of it.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

Sport Continued from page 22 What would you most like to achieve as a footballer and an athlete?

To win an All-Ireland is always the ultimate goal.

Do you have a role model in football?

I’d say Juliet Murphy from Cork would be someone I’d look up to as one of the best midfielders I’ve ever seen. Her determination and drive are what make her stand out. She has won so many AllIrelands and has five All-Stars. It’s something to aspire to anyway.

Caitriona Smith, SS Occupational Therapy What position do you play?

Corner forward.

What home club do you play for?

Killygarry.

What was your best moment playing with Trinity?

Winning the Lynch cup when we were in second year.

What has been your nest moment playing for Cavan?

Winning the intermediate AllIreland in Croke Park in 2013.

What are the demands of playing county football? It’s quite time consuming. It can take up a lot of your weekends with trainings on Fridays and Sundays. Then when the league starts, most games are on Sundays and you could be playing anywhere.

Do you feel as though it’s worth it?

It definitely is when you’re winning. When you lose a few games in a row it can be hard to see why you’re putting in so much time.

But definitely when you’re doing well and things are going right it’s well worth it.

What are Cavan’s hopes for the coming season?

This year, we have new management so we’ll be hoping to push on from last year. This year is just our second year as a senior team so we’ll see how it goes.

How do you think that support could be increased for ladies football?

I’m not really sure. It is slowly increasing and there definitely is more media coverage of it which is definitely helping.

How would you describe the bond that exists between you and your team mates?

There is a great bond in Trinity ladies. We are a very close team both on and off the field. We definitely take it seriously but there is room for the odd night out of course.

What would you most like to achieve as a footballer and a female athlete?

Just try and win as many competitions as possible whether that be club, college or county.

Sarah McCaffrey, SF TSM French and Psychology What position do you play?

Midfield.

What home club do you play for?

Clontarf.

Favourite memories of playing with Trinity?

The bonding sessions.

Best moment playing for Dublin?

Winning the under-21 All-Ireland final in 2014.

It must have been heartbreaking to have lost out to Cork so narrowly in the All Ireland final. As a squad, how do you move on from that mentally?

Yeah, it was. I don’t think any of us are over it yet, but we’ll just have to regroup and use it as a driving force for next year.

23 What makes Dublin such a formidable side?

I think the intensity that is brought to everything we do, on and off the pitch, is unique to Dublin.

Is it ever difficult to balance playing college football with county football?

Not really. The managers are great. They make sure we keep them in the loop and that we aren’t overtrained. Obviously juggling college work, training and in some cases a part-time job is hard, but it’s worth it.

Do you think that lazy stereotypes still exist for girls playing sport at a high level?

I don’t think so. There seems to be a new emphasis on fitness in general nowadays among girls so I think people respect women as elite sports players.

How do you think that support could be increased for ladies’ football?

Maybe with increased media coverage and more supporters at matches if possible.

How would you describe the experience of playing in an AllIreland final?

It was an experience I’ll never forget. I think any of us who had never been there before would have learned from it. Hopefully, next year, we’ll drive on and be able to make up for this year’s loss.

How would you describe the bond that exists between you and your team mates?

There’s a brilliant atmosphere within the Trinity team at the minute. We all get on really well and look forward to training sessions - which is sometimes (or often) hard to do when they are at 7am.

Meabh Downey, JS Pharmacy What position do you play?

Wing half forward.

What home club do you play for?

Na Fianna, Co. Meath.

Best moment playing for Meath?

Reaching the All-Ireland under-21 final in 2014.

What are the demands of playing county football?

Although playing with the Meath senior ladies is probably not as time-consuming as playing with some of the other counties, it does come with some demands. There is training two or three times during the week and once at the weekend. It usually takes 30 minutes or more to get to training from home. On days when there are games on, it can take the entire day, depending on how far you have to travel. And, of course, playing any sport at a high level also has an impact on your social life!

Do you feel as though it’s worth it?

When I have to train in the freezing cold or in the pouring rain, it’s hard to remember why I bother when I would much rather be anywhere else in the world than on a GAA pitch. But on the big days, championship game days, Leinster final days, All-Ireland final days, all the effort that was put in is definitely worth it.

Is it ever difficult to balance playing college football with county football?

Last year, I found it very difficult to balance college and county football as there was very little compromise between the two management teams. My county manager expected me to put Meath football first, while the college manager expected me to put college football first. As a result of trying to please both, I ended up training at least five if

not six times a week. This year both teams have new managers so I am hoping a more cooperative approach will be taken.

ing to the pubs getting bags of ice for the ice baths and the night out after even without the cup was a great finish to it all.

How is confidence in the Trinity squad at the minute for the coming season?

Confidence is very high among the Trinity panel for the coming season. Compared to last year, there seems to be a lot more drive and motivation among both players and management to succeed.

There is real competition for places and as a result the intensity at training is always very high.

What are the demands of playing county football?

The demands are high. It’s generally three trainings a week.

You’re trying to eat healthy for it with the occasional drinking ban thrown in. It can be really hard to keep the motivation up year after year but wanting to beat Dublin helps.

What are Meath’s hopes for the coming season?

The hope for Meath this year, as it seems to be most years, is to gain promotion from Division 2 and win a Leinster final. Realistically, at the moment, winning a Leinster final does not seem achievable as Dublin are, and have been for a number of years, on a level totally above the rest of Leinster.

When I hear of the training that the Dublin panel is doing and compare it with the training we do, the gap is enormous.

Do you think that lazy stereotypes still exist for girls playing sport at a high level?

I think that society has progressed to a point that girls playing sport at a high level are recognised, perhaps not to the same extent as their male counterparts, and are respected for the time and effort they dedicate to the sport. There are still those, however, who will use stereotypical descriptions to label girls playing sport, but unfortunately there will always be some ignorant people in society.

How do you think that support could be increased for ladies’ football?

I think it is important that the girls support each other. If we don’t support ladies’ football ourselves by going to matches, how can we expect others to support the sport? I also think that the prices charged in to see ladies’ football games should be reduced. I know in my own county, the cost of attending some of the club games is far too high, which results in people being put off supporting ladies’ football. In an ideal world, there would also be more televised ladies’ football games.

How would you describe the bond that exists between you and your team mates?

When you spend so much time with the same group of girls, a real sense of camaraderie always develops within a team. In Trinity, I think this bond is especially strong, as we only have the opportunity to play with each other for a very short period of time (three or four years) and we really want to make the most of it.

Do you have a role model in football?

Fiona McHale, the Mayo player.

Michelle Peel, SF Occupational Therapy What position do you play?

That changes a fair bit, but mostly centre half back.

What home club do you play for?

Donaghmore/Ashbourne.

What is your favourite memory of playing with Trinity?

The bonding nights out were great craic.

What has been your best moment playing for Meath?

My favourite moment was last year when we got to the under-21 All-Ireland final against Dublin.

Now the result is a different story, thanks to McCaff and Nicole. But the lead up was so exciting and we were so determined to win it.

We did so much preparation for it, like heading to the beach, go-

Do you feel as though it’s worth it?

It’s so worth it for the big matches and the girls on the team are some of your best friends, so as much as I might complain about going to training especially in the dark dull winter nights I’d miss it too much if I stopped.

Is it ever difficult to balance playing college football with county football?

It can be hard because you just don’t seem to have any free evenings but preference for each team is at different times of the year so you can focus more on each of them at different times How is confidence in the Trinity squad at the minute for the coming season?

We are pretty confident as the team bond is strong on and off the pitch. This makes such a difference in the parts of the match where everyone is so tired. But you don’t want to stop, because not only are you doing it for yourself but also for the girl beside you. We have done about a kilometre of bear crawls at this stage so we are all putting in such an effort. As our coach Davy always says, “Trinity Ladies are the hardest working team in Giles”.

What are Meath’s hopes for the coming season?

We have a new manager, Diane O’Hora, coming in, who is a former All-Ireland winning captain with Mayo and has had plenty of experience coaching, so we’re looking forward to seeing what she has to bring. A huge goal is to get to and win the under-21 All-Ireland final this year and do ourselves much more justice than our league and especially championship campaign last year for senior.

How would you describe the bond that exists between you and your team mates?

I have made lifelong friends from all the teams I have played with and the bond in Trinity this year is so strong. We all get along so well, from helping each other to get up for the 7am trainings and surviving the ugly sprints. Coppers is where the friendships are truly formed.

What would you most like to achieve as a footballer and athlete?

This year I need to win at least one final. I can’t even count how many times I have been runner up. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride!

Nicole Owens receives June’s Croke Park Hotel Player of the Month Award.. Photo: St. Sylvesters What makes Dublin such a great team?

The depth of the squad and the back room team, which allow us to prepare to the fullest for every game.

What are the demands of playing county football?

They’re both physical and mental. From getting up early on a Sunday morning and the constant sore muscles, to missing nights out with friends.

Do you feel as though it’s worth it?

In the end, it is.

Do you have a role model in football?

The Cork team in general. I wouldn’t be able to pick one player from it but they never give up as you could see in the ladies’ final this year.

Is it ever difficult to balance playing college football with county football?

Managers tend to understand that there’s a need for a balance or players will get burnt out, so thankfully it isn’t too difficult.

Nicole Owens, SS TSM Spanish and Sociology

How is confidence in the Trinity squad at the minute for the coming season?

I think it’s pretty high. We have a great new manager and there are a lot of final years like myself who are determined to go out on a high.

What position do you play?

Corner forward What home club do you play for?

St. Sylvesters What has been your best moment playing for Dublin?

Reaching an All-Ireland final

Ladies GAA head into a crucial league semi-final this week after confident displays this season.

Contributor After a disappointing championship campaign last year, Trinity Ladies GAA has begun the 14/15 season with an intensity enviable of any top-class college team.

Two out of three league wins so far have placed the senior team in a league semi-final against I.T. Tralee this Thursday, 20th November, in Tipperary. The second team has seen some outstanding performances but unfortunately is not in a position to claim some silverware, though it no doubt will bring the experience gained from these encounters into Donaghy Cup preparations.

But the outlook is promising for Ladies GAA as they attempt to make their mark on the college football scene and hopefully qualify for a spot in the Giles Cup. This year brings an injection of enthusiasm in the form of the newly-appointed managers, brothers Davy and Jonathan Burke, current members of the Dublin Ladies’ senior management team. The team has also seen a great bunch of over 60

freshers sign up this year and retained most of the old dedicated faces - which is always a positive sign. It says levels of commitment and dedication are at a new high for the club with large numbers attending training in Clan Na Gael Fontenoy two nights a week and multiple morning sessions at 7.15am in the college gym.

Opening victory

The first game of the year on 16th October saw Trinity ladies take on St. Patrick’s College on their home ground in Drumcondra.

The St. Pat’s side was not up to the intensity of the TCD girls and they secured an easy win with a final score of 6-14 to 0-04. A solid defensive effort kept the teachers almost scoreless. This was built upon with some wonderful movements by the forwards creating plenty of scoring opportunities An impressive 3-3 haul from Aisling Reynolds had a huge impact on the scoreboard. Nicole Owens slotted a hat-trick of goals showing why she was player of the year for the Dublin U21 side this year.

Adding to that, a solid display from Ailbhe Finnerty claimed her Player of the Match through a host of scoring opportunities and

tough off the ball work. The outcome of the game gave the girls much to work on and the confidence to build on the win as they faced UUJ the following week.

After a debacle with regards time and venue, the TCD and UUJ sides eventually played in Jordanstown home turf on November 3rd. Travelling long distances before a game is never easy with heavy Belfast traffic increasing the time spent on the bus but in the early stages it was clear this had no effect. An impressive 1-01 - 0-00 lead after two minutes gave the girls a great giant head start.

Again, Trinity Ladies’ intensity was well above what UUJ expected and the slightly unstructured UUJ side lost out on a final score of Trinity 9-15 UUJ 3-5.

Strong efforts from Meabh Downing on the half forward line and impressive fielding from Sarah McCaffrey added to the Trinity side’s hold on midfield, and Aisling Byrne impressed with her ease and comfort between the posts with reliable kickouts and confident saves. A brilliant performance from free taker Nicole Owens contributed 4-6 to the girl’s final tally. Michelle Peel also displayed outstanding composure

at centre back which deservedly earned her player of the match.

Mid-way through the second half saw a revival from the UUJ side.

They launched an attack gaining them three goals. However, it was too little too late for the UUJ girls.

This flash of potential would caution against writing them off as a championship threat though.

Setback

The following Wednesday, 6th November, saw the girls take on NUI Maynooth, in Clan Na Gael Fontenoy, Ringsend.

Despite having played only two days before, the girls showed no sign of faltering in their determination, and were missing several players from the previous Monday’s panel. Having led 4-6 to 2-3 at half-time, the girls were narrowly defeated by two points on a scoreline of 6-8 to 5-9. Monday’s effort caught up on the team and they struggled to keep out three late goals from NUIM. The loss left TCD with plenty of work to do and corrections to make.

Semi-final

But the team are in a good position heading into this Thursday’s semi-final and will seek to take

it a step further after losing to a strong Carlow IT side in last year’s league semi-final where Carlow clawed back to secure a five point win. The other side sees the unbeaten Maynooth take on Mary Immaculate College, Giles Cup 2014 champions. The games are likely to be exciting encounters with top-class displays.

Several key players are yet to return to playing with Trinity, notably Petra McCafferty who is heading into an All-Ireland Club semi-final with her Donegal home club, Termon. The team is also looking forward to the return of Kerry ace Sinead O’ Sullivan, a postgraduate student, after her time spent working abroad.

But the club is growing again this year with commendable efforts from all the players, committee, and management and, of course, with the continued support from DUCAC. The team has gone from strength to strength in recent years and so far this year has shown no sign of slowing down.

How would you describe the experience of playing in an AllIreland final?

It was unbelievable.

How would you describe the bond that exists between you and your team mates?

I would say that there’s a great amount of camaraderie between all the players on the Trinity team. We all suffer through 7am gym sessions and soaking wet cold training so it would be hard not to develop some sort of bond.

What would you most like to achieve as a footballer and athlete?

A senior All-Ireland, obviously, but it would be nice to achieve some of the recognition and support that the male county players receive.

Do you have a role model in football?

It’s tough to pick one role model from all of the great teams I’ve been lucky enough to play on, but I guess from the current Dublin team it would have to be Sinead Goldrick, just for her tenacity and complete athleticism.

Do you think that lazy stereotypes still exist for girls playing sport at a high level?

Of course.

Strong season so far for Trinity Ladies GAA Rachel Ni Horgain

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If we don’t support ladies’ football ourselves by going to matches, how can we expect others to support the sport?

How do you think that support could be increased for ladies football?

By increasing knowledge and visibility of ladies’ games, not just the final.

Previous results: Trinity 6-14 St. Patrick’s College 0-04 Trinity 9-15 UUJ 3-5 Trinity 6-8 NUI Maynooth 5-9

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 18th November 2014

Sport

24 Alicia Lloyd interviews the county stars of Trinity Ladies GAA.

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FIFA’s tragicomic circus act nearing implosion In the wake of FIFA’s contentious report clearing Qatar and Russia to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, Louis Strange examines the organisation appearing corrupt to the core.

Louis Strange Online Sport Editor

Football Manager: the game that steals lives?

Gavin Cooney interviews Iain Macintosh, the co-author of Football Manager Stole My Life, at the recent Dublin launch of the 2015 game.

Gavin Cooney Deputy Sport Editor Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano writes lyrically in Soccer in Sun and Shadow that “I’m attracted to soccer’s capacity for beauty. When well played, the game is a dance with a ball.” Football; the poetry of motion. The trademarked beautiful game has its legions of devotees across the world, a following large enough to spawn numerous subcultures.

One of these subcultures has a following just as obsessive as fans of regular football. That subculture is a computer game entitled Football Manager.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it allows players to simulate an experience of the titular occupation by recruiting players, giving press conferences and choosing tactics. The game is a phenomenal success. It has led to a book, Football Manager Stole My Life, and a documentary that opened in 47 cinemas in Britain, and has since been subtitled in nine different languages.

The company manufacturing the game, Sports Interactive, employs 60 full-time staff, devoted to developing the game, along with over 1,200 researches worldwide who volunteer their time to scout players in order to add them to an incredibly deep database of more than 600,000 players. The game’s scouting network is at least 10 times larger than the network of any professional club in the world.

Addiction

Football Manager has transcended mere hobby to become an addiction. Anecdotes abound of players suiting up for cup finals and shaking hands with doorknobs, imagining their brass was British royalty. It has dispossessed players of days of their lives, and has been cited as a reason for 35 different cases of divorce. Unlike other computer games, however, Football Manager users are not invested with the power of physically controlling its players and playing the game of football.

The game is essentially a game about administration, micromanagement and human resources.

Where is the poetry in that?

To probe the addiction, I spoke to Iain Macintosh, football writer and co-author of Football Manager Stole My Life along with Kenny Millar and Neil White at a launch event for the 2015 edition of the game in Dublin. Macintosh is a self-confessed Football Manager addict, and I asked him how exactly the game had stolen his life. “I first came into contact with the game when I was 15. I played all the Football Manager games preceding it, like the original with

tiny stickmen, Tracksuit Manager. I was always addicted to these things anyway, but when I played the first Championship Manager (the original title for Football Manager) it came along and blew everything else out of the water because the first time you played it you could see it was not a world created for you and you played one game at a time. It was a world created and you were only just invited into it; you weren’t allowed to stay without proving yourself.”

It becomes evident that the sheer depth of Football Manager has spawned an alternate universe, one in which players would have to consistently prove themselves in order to stay in the game.

“The Football Manager game, it was obvious from the start, was completely different. It created a universe for you to go in and you were not necessarily allowed to stay there without proving yourself; if you got sacked it wouldn’t just invite you back, you would have to start again at the bottom.

The constant incentive to prove yourself was part of the addiction process.”

Within the Football Manager realm, those who did prove themselves had no issue celebrating the fact. Comedian Tony Jameson bought a ticket for an open top bus tour of Newcastle to celebrate winning the cup with Blyth Spartans. In lieu of actual silverware, Jameson brought his laptop. Jameson has subsequently toured Britain with a stand up show about the game, in which he revealed he has also stood outside his bedroom for a match-day as a result of incurring a touchline ban. Other players have become similarly entranced by the game.

The book contains myriad anecdotes of other players whose lives bear the imprint of the game.

One player had his wife come across him in the middle of the night, dressed in a suit and staring blankly at a computer screen.

When asked what was wrong, he told his wife that he had just been sacked. He took a few agonising minutes to clarify to his pregnant wife, that, having recently taken out a mortgage, he had merely lost a virtual job rather than his actual one. Another player broke up with his girlfriend by virtue of her taking his laptop and Football Manager disc in order to play Farmville. Macintosh explains that one of the reasons for writing the book was to “make people feel that weren’t alone”.

For the book, Macintosh visited a psychiatrist to help explore the nature of the game’s addiction.

“He pointed out the nature of the addiction. If you are an alcoholic, you drink because it feels good.

There is a certain personality type clearly, that gets their feel-good factor, for want of a better word,

from winning a game on Football Manager”. Macintosh believes, however, that it is an addiction that can prove helpful in his job as a football journalist. “The two things are quite different, but I do think that there is so much the game teaches you that goes on to help you, from micromanagement to balancing different requirements. As a football journalist, I found that it is the awareness of players. If you were covering a game involving Dnipro, and you know nothing about them - because you are a normal human being with normal interests - the first thing I would do would be to boot up FM and play a pre-season as them before doing the research in the old-fashioned way. Suddenly the players’ names wouldn’t look so unfamiliar. Obviously I wouldn’t say that ‘oh, that bloke scored six goals for me so he must be good’, but I would know that he is a goalkeeper, and he is the young talent with great promise.”

Depth of research

The game’s greatest strength is the depth of its database of players. There are assistant researchers across the world scouting players and filing their attributes into the system. “The guys who do the database and research are absolutely incredible. A lot of them are actual scouts in their own right. Every time you play and see certain names makes you aware of the people to keep an eye out for real life.” The game began in humble surroundings in 1985, in the bedrooms of brothers Paul and Ov Collyer. The first incarnation of the game allowed players manage any of the clubs across the top four English divisions and compete with 150 ingame managers. The database was originally developed by sending letters to the editors of club fanzines, asking those editors to rate their club’s players under a number of headings and mailing their results back to the game’s developers.

In the past, the game has predicted the rise of a vast range of superstars. Former Glasgow Rangers manager Alex McLeish recalls in the documentary Football Manager: An Alternative Reality how he discovered Lionel Messi as a 13 year old. McLeish was advised to sign Lionel Messi by his son, on the basis that Messi thrived in an early version of Football Manager. Barcelona rejected McLeish’s subsequent attempts to sign the Argentine. Real-life managers have also utilised the game’s database. In 2008, David Moyes licenced the game as Everton manager in order to explore the database before anyone else could. Former Chelsea and Tottenham manager Andre Villas Boas would start a game,

immediately resign and simulate a number of subsequent seasons in order to discover which players became most prominent in the future. Ex-Republic of Ireland manager, Giovanni Trapattoni, while manager of Italy, asked his player Demetrio Albertini for information on opposition players as a result of Albertini’s playing of the game. The database is not infallible, however. Some of the players whom they tip for stardom lose their way in real life. Mentions of names like Mark Kerr, Cherno Samba and Freddy Adu at the launch event draw wistful nods from most of the audience; players who attained legendary status for managers in the game, only to fade into obscurity in reality.

“

If you got sacked, it wouldn’t just invite you back.

You would have to start again at the bottom. The constant incentive to prove yourself was part of the addiction process.

Blurring reality

Macintosh has worked hard to ensure the lines between his real and virtual work do not blur.

There are however, the odd such incident. “On one occasion I heard that Davide Santon had signed for Newcastle, I found myself saying to my mates that is a brilliant signing! Halfway through talking about him, I came to the realisation that I don’t know what he looks like, I have never seen him play football. I had no idea outside of the fact that he was very good when I signed him for Newcastle in Football Manager in 2009. Such moments are few and far between, however”.

Others have endured similar incidents. A Sky Sports touchline reporter gave Portsmouth Captain Tal Ben Haim a cold stare in the tunnel pre-match, asking him what he was doing playing for Portsmouth. Ben Haim was the reporter’s captain for Burnley on Football Manager. Comedian and

Manchester City supporter Jason Manford retrospectively realised he was rude to Micah Richards once as the defender had been late for training on Football Manager on a number of occasions.

Football Manager is a 20th century phenomenon that has succeeded exponentially in the 21st century. Football subculture in England spread following Italia 90 and the foundation of the Premier League two years later.

Football entered the mainstream with all-seater stadia and wider television coverage through BskyB. The sport’s success led to the development of subculture as supporters wished to attach cult status to something. Along with the rise of David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s Fantasy Football League came the Football Manager computer game. Perhaps the poetry in Football Manager is in its simultaneous inclusivity and exclusivity. While it opens the world of management to anyone willing to buy the game; successful players must learn a large amount about football tactics and the identity of swathes of obscure footballers across the world in order to compete. The perseverance required to win imbues its players with pride. Jameson said in an interview to The Guardian last year that “I’m a comedian, but like most lads I dreamt of being a footballer, or being involved in football, and Football Manager gives you that hope of making it. There is a genuine sense of achievement when, for instance, you complete your first giant-killing in the FA Cup despite the fact that essentially all you’ve done is defeated a load of pixels on a giant spreadsheet.”

Iain Macintosh also treasures his greatest achievement in the game. “When I was at university, I wasn’t the best student. I went out a bit too much, I stayed up a bit too much and I played CM97/98 a bit too much. And I didn’t get my degree. I didn’t get it and I have no-one to blame but myself.

I paid a heavy price for that. I didn’t have the options I wanted when I came out into the real world. I had to make some tough decisions, take some tough jobs.

I’ll never forget those cold mornings on the building sites. Nor will the memories of selling black bin bags in North London leave me easily. But you know what? It wasn’t a complete loss. Because I won the UEFA Cup with Southend United. They’ll never take that away from me.” Eduardo Galeano has said that “history never really says goodbye, history says see you later.” Thousands of people across the world have a similar relationship with Football Manager.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” The Great Oz’s plea, equal parts desperation and authority, gets to the very heart of what performance is. The act only works if the audience believes in the fantasy; otherwise, the illusion is destroyed and the entire structure comes crashing down.

So it is with FIFA at this moment in time, their reputation balanced on a knife-edge, the farce threatening to get too real.

On Thursday, FIFA published a summary of the report looking into alleged corruption involved in the bidding processes for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, won

by Russia and Qatar respectively.

Despite former FIFA executive committee member Mohammed Bin Hammam being caught redhanded bribing other officials and expelled from the organisation, and despite the Russians actually destroying computers containing information crucial the investigation, FIFA concluded that there was no wrongdoing of significant enough a degree to strip either country of the right to host their respective World Cups. The English bid was also heavily criticised for its behaviour.

Report

The original report was drawn up by Michael Garcia, a former New York DA (and a very important lawyer-type generally speaking) who spent a year and a half investigating these allegations, interviewing almost 80 individuals in the process. Garcia’s report, which ran to 430 pages, has yet to be made public. In its place, all that is currently available in the public domain is a 42-page summary – a summary which was, significantly, not written by Garcia, but by Hans-Joachim Eckert, chairman of the adjudicatory chamber of the FIFA ethics committee. The adjudicatory chamber is one half of the bicameral ethics committee, FIFA’s (apparently) independent body which effectively exists to brush these uncomfortable issues under the carpet, the other half being the investigatory chamber, of which Garcia is the chairman.

Corruption

What has happened is that a body charged with keeping tabs on corruption, and which itself had already been split in two in an attempt to stem the tide of corruption, has become a tool for the perpetuation of the very thing which it was meant to stamp out.

In other words, the structure put in place to stop corruption is, ironically, facilitating it.

This fresh controversy comes mere weeks after it was revealed that a former FIFA executive, Chuck Blazer, was, reportedly, blackmailed into spying on other FIFA big wigs for the FBI, bugging conversations with a microphone embedded, James Bond-

style, in a key-ring which he would casually chuck on to tables during meetings.

A picture is being painted of an organisation corrupt to the core.

Not just one rotten apple, but an entire warehouse of apples where all of the apples are rotten and even the few, only semi-rotten apples have themselves become infected by the rot, until all you have left is a uniformly rotten mountain of apples. Or something.

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The structure put in place to stop corruption is, ironically, facilitating it.

Repercussions

This particular FIFA scandal, however, may have more significant repercussions than the normal, run-of-the-mill FIFA scandal. Because this time, it may be those in charge who suffer the consequences – specifically, Sepp Blatter. The FIFA executive committee has not entirely fallen into line behind their glorious leader; there has not been unanimous backing for the very abbreviated version of Garcia’s report. Although Michel Platini has been just one of many calling for the full 430-page report to be published, his voice represents one of the strongest in the football world, and probably one of the only men capable of standing up to Sepp Blatter. Despite having declared himself out of the race for the FIFA Presidency, Platini’s public decision to call out FIFA (and by analogy Blatter) is not to be taken lightly.

FIFA cannot tread water forever. They do not, as they seem to believe, live in some malleable virtual reality, a Matrix which Blatter (in this scenario playing some sort of “Neo” figure with the ability to shape its very fabric) can manipulate as he sees fit. Behind all the jokes, behind the endless parade of laughably covered-up scandals, reality will, inevitably, break through. Allegations of corruption are not a joke.

Messing with a former New York DA is not a joke. Being bugged by the FBI is not a joke. Sooner or later, things will catch up with FIFA. Once the illusion is shattered, no-one cares about the performance anymore. At the end of the circus, all you’re left with is one drunk clown sitting on his arse in the middle of the ring, wondering where it all went wrong. One day, Blatter may be that clown.