Trinity News, volume 61, issue 7

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

Jessica McKenna and Seoid Ní Laoire took part in a mock marriage ceremony organised by DU Amnesty, Q Soc and TCDSU last Wednesday ahead of the upcoming marriage equality referendum. Over 3,000 Trinity students have been registered to vote in the referendum during campus drives this year. Photo: Kevin O’Rourke Photo: Samuel Verbi

Direct action likely if looming student charges approved • College Board to vote on introduction of new and increased levies tomorrow • Resistance against remaining proposals continues despite concessions Andrew O’Donovan Deputy News Editor The incoming president of Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (SU), Lynn Ruane, has said that she would look to some form of direct action if proposed new student charges are approved tomorrow by the College Board.

Speaking to Trinity News, Ruane said Domhnall McGlackenByrne, the current SU president, would also not be averse to holding a protest against their introduction. “If the Board doesn’t negotiate [with the SU] or have a discussion, we’d consider how we might then pull together a demonstration before its next meeting,” she said.

Raft of charges

A raft of student charge increases - projected to raise in the region of ¤800,000 - had been proposed by College last June as a response to the shortfall in funding from other College revenue sources. Among the proposed levies and new charges were an increase in the commencement fee, the introduction of charges for diploma and certificate award ceremonies, an increase in the application fee for prospective postgraduates and non-EU

students, an increase in the price of a replacement student card, and the introduction of a charge for students sitting supplemental exams.

But following outcry from the SU and Graduate Students’ Union (GSU), and with the exception of the increase to the commencement charge which was approved at the time, the proposals were postponed to this academic year pending negotiations with representative student bodies.

Concessions

McGlacken-Byrne has credited the unions’ lobbying as being a deciding factor in the negotiations that delivered several concessions earlier this month.

These included the dropping of the proposal for a supplementals charge of ¤250 and the introduction of a means-tested exemption from the fees for degree commencement and diploma and certificate ceremonies, as well as the student card replacement charge.

The removal of the most controversial proposal - the flat charge of ¤250 for students to resit summer exams - represents the most significant achievement. It was said that the burden of the charge fell on many

of those who are most at risk of dropping out and that it unfairly affected science students as they are more likely to sit supplementals than arts students.

However, the rest of the proposed charges were approved by the College Finance Committee on March 12th and are due to go before the next sitting of the Board tomorrow for final approval. These include the ¤75 fee for diploma or certificate ceremonies and ¤20 charge for replacement student cards, as well as an increase in the application fee for prospective postgraduate and non-EU students from ¤50 to ¤55. The proposed increase in the charge for duplicate parchments from ¤100 to ¤105 has also remained.

McGlacken Byrne told Trinity News that, while the concessions are “significantly less damaging” than the full range of charges and levies nearly introduced in June, the “entire affair represents a cynical [and] opportunistic agenda that deviates from this university’s student-focused mission statement.” He said that widespread opposition to the charges, represented in the passing of a student referendum on whether the SU should oppose proposed levies by 79% of the vote last month, has been “a very

Catherine Healy talks to Trinity politicos about ambition, austerity and the upcoming general election

Features p.7

useful bargaining tool.”

He added, however: “I think we have made huge progress in improving the relationship with College and showing that we are worth involving in decisions.”

The relationship, he said, had progressed from a stage where Provost Patrick Prendergast was “effectively refusing to meet student representatives” to established monthly meetings with him.

Short-sighted

In a statement released the day after concessions were approved by the Finance Committee, the SU said the charges are “shortsighted” and “constitute a sorry development in our institution’s attempt to live up to the meaning of our student-focused mission statement.” The statement continued: “Significant amounts of time, effort and frustration have been wasted on this process throughout this year. Students and staff agree on far more than we disagree on; amid substantive, sectoral issues of funding, accommodation and falling academic standards, this lamentable affair constitutes energy wasted and, ultimately, opportunities for collaboration lost.” It said SU representatives would speak against the remaining measures when they are put to the Board on March 25th and that it would do all it could to “continue to oppose the principle that these measures represent.”

Ruane said that opposition to new and increased student charges was a key part of her election manifesto and that it is “something that would carry

Dee Courtney: Trinity students, it’s time to revolt and hit college management where it hurts

Comment p.14

By NUMBERS:

€75 Proposed new commencement fee

€20 Proposed replacement student card fee

Inside

€250 Proposed flat flee for supplemental exams scrapped

79% Voters want SU to campaign against student charges over” into her term as SU president. “I think there’s always room to undo things that have been brought in,” she said.

JOHN SLATTERY OPENS UP ABOUT THE ROLE THAT DEFINED HIS LIFE AND CAREER AFTER MAD MEN, MARJANE SATRAPI DISCUSSES HER STRANGE NEW VENTURE , AND WE EXPLORE THE RESURGENCE OF GRIME THROUGH RISING MC NOVELIST Trinity teams sail to Colours 2015 victory at Grand Canal Dock

‘The joy of discovery is what drives us’

SciTech p.21

Sport p. 24

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

News

2

Activist pulled out of apostasy event following miscommunication — SOFIA Maryam Namazie claimed in a blog post on Friday that Trinity ‘security concerns’ had led to restrictions being imposed on the talk.

Catherine Healy Editor Political activist Maryam Namazie withdrew from a talk on apostasy because she had mistakenly been led to believe that it would be a public event, the Society for International Affairs (SOFIA) said in a statement circulated to its members yesterday afternoon.

Individual student

The student society, which was due to host Namazie in Trinity College today, said they had agreed to oversee the talk after an individual student, who had no authority to organise such an event as an individual, invited her to speak on campus.

The student in question, the statement said, led their guest to believe that she would be speaking at a public meeting before it

had taken over as a host organisation. “When in contact with Namazie the society corrected these misapprehensions – as the society does not organise meetings on College property for the general public and instead organises meetings for the membership of the society,” the statement said. “The society had also asked another speaker for the event which it is entitled to do but had not been part of the

initial individual’s invitation.”

The society said it understood but was disappointed at Namazie’s decision to withdraw from the event as “her demands that the society change its practices cannot be met.” It added that it cannot “be responsible for the assumption as to conditions which it itself did not offer, nor responsible for the polemic and widespread commentary upon the reputation of either the College itself or of the society.”

Criticism

In a blog posted on Friday, Namazie, who is the spokesperson for One Law for All Campaign against Sharia Law in Britain and the Council of ExMuslims of Britain, claimed that

“

An individual student led [Namazie] to believe that she would be speaking at a public meeting. “security concerns” had led to restrictions being imposed on the event. College would only let the

event proceed on the condition that all attendants are student members of the society and that the event be moderated, she alleged. Its security, she said, had “claimed that the event would show the college is ‘one-sided’ and would be ‘antagonising’ to ‘Muslim students’.”

Namazie, who comes from a Muslim background but stopped practicing the religion several year ago, said that she should be able to speak at a public event as restrictions had not been placed on a talk given to the TCD Muslim Student Association by preacher Sheikh Kamal el Mekki, an alleged defender of apostasy, on February 25th. “No conditions were placed on his talk and security did not threaten to

cancel the event nor inform the association that the speakers’ position on death for apostates would ‘antagonise’ ex-Muslim and Muslim students who do not support apostasy laws,” she wrote.

In an email also published on Namazie’s blog on Saturday, SOFIA chair Aoife Noelle Ngo denied that Trinity security had asked her about the content of her speech. Security officials, she told the guest, only asked “who will be attending the event (Trinity students as per society rules and insurance reasons) and numbers for fire and safety reasons. They did not realise it was being facilitated by SOFIA and therefore were nervous about an individual hosting the event.”

Chinese ambassador warns Trinity against inviting speakers hostile to China Speaking in TCD, Jianguo Xu said the Chinese embassy in Dublin was displeased by Tibetan leader Lobsang Sangay’s 2012 visit to the Hist.

Andrew O’Donovan Deputy News Editor China’s ambassador to Ireland, Jianguo Xu, has said that Trinity may be at risk of damaging prospective partnerships with Chinese institutions if it allows guests who are hostile to China to speak before its student societies.

Speaking during a visit to the Society for International Affairs last Wednesday, Jianguo said that potential Chinese partners in higher education “would not have been happy” that the head of the Central Tibetan Administration, Lobsang Sangay - whom he dismissed as a “troublemaker” - visited Trinity College to receive an honour from the College Historical Society in 2012.

Tibet

“I would like to say that Lobsang is a representative of the separatist forces trying to split Tibet from China,” he said. “It is widely recognised throughout the world that Tibet is part of China, including [by] the Irish and the American governments.”

He added: “I can say confidently that because of this particular visit, [Trinity’s] potential [academic] partners in China would not be happy, and the [Chinese] students studying at Trinity or Chinese members of the teaching faculty would not be happy, and, in learning this news, the general Chinese public would not be happy.”

Jianguo, who was, for a time, an academic at Zhejiang University, had earlier begun his speech by saying that he “love[s] the atmosphere of a university campus and enjoys talking with university students.” China, he said, had “become a hot topic throughout the world” and the country would “definitely be an important part” of the future careers of those in attendance.

Calling China “a world leader for 1,500 years, before the emergence of the British Empire,” he said that “colonial occupation and profound humiliation [had] reduced China into one of the weakest countries in the world” leaving a “lasting imprint on the memory and character of the Chinese nation.” This history is why the Chinese “cherish sovereignty and territory so dearly.”

Ireland-China relations

He noted that the period from 1840-1949 – what he described as a “miserable century” – coincided with turbulent Irish history.

“The China-Ireland relationship has never been better,” he said, “despite the great distance between our two countries and obvious difference in size.” The two “economies are highly complementary” and an “overwhelming majority of our peoples would like to see” an increase in cooperation, in the hope of “bring[ing] tangible benefits.”

Discussing the “exceptional progress” of China’s economy since former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, Jianguo said that, in the past 30 years, Chinese national income had grown annually by an average of 9.8%, lifting 680m Chinese people out of poverty. But while the country had “laid a

solid foundation for continued growth”, it faces a serious challenge to continue sustainable growth into the future, he said.

After his speech, Jianguo took questions from the floor and answered through a translator.

Human rights

Asked how a slowing economy and aging population would affect China’s human rights policy, Jianguo said the country “attaches great importance to safeguarding the human rights of the Chinese people” and that the budget for social programmes continues to rise. “I’d like to say that it should be recognised that China, with its development and growth, has been taking greater and greater responsibilities,” he said. “Not everyone may be aware that China happens to be the greatest peace-keeping contributor among the five members of the [UN] Security Council.”

The ambassador, noting Michael D. Higgins’ state visit to China last year, praised the Irish president as a “strong and reputable advocate of human rights”

“

Jianguo said he did not any appropriateness in external forces trying to meddle with Hong Kong affairs. whose opinion he particularly values. According to Jianguo, Higgins “appreciates the differences in core pursuits between countries at differing developing stages, and recognises that in a developing country like China the most important human rights are the right to subsistence and right to develop.”

One questioner asked about the environmental documentary Under the Dome which had been viewed hundreds of millions of times before being removed from Chinese video websites.

Jianguo said that, while “not in a position to make meaningful comment”, he had seen the documentary and “admired [the director’s] courage and efforts which have successfully raised the awareness [of environmental issues] in China.” The questioner persisted, asking how removing the video was contributing to environmental awareness. “I would highlight the fact that it was accessible for some time and a lot of people, including diplomats like us working overseas, had the opportunity to watch it,” he replied. The documentary maker, Chai Jing, “cited many examples and presented data to the audience,” he said, and “I’m not in a position to tell whether those statistics were right or to be trusted.”

In response to a question about Hong Kong, the ambassador said that, “Hong Kong affairs” are considered “internal affairs” and that he “did not see any appropriateness in external forces trying to meddle with Hong Kong affairs.” Addressing the British questioner, he said, “I’d like to call your attention to the fact that, during the period of colonial occupation by the British, there was never a democratic election.” Stressing China’s commitment to abide by its agreement with regard to Hong Kong, he bemoaned that, “despite our sincerity and progress,” China receives criticism from western countries and media.

“This makes me wonder, Why?”

Andrew O’Donovan Deputy News Editor

Hundreds of spectators gathered on Front Square to catch a glimpse of the partial solar eclipse on Friday. Photo: TCD

Nearly 70% of Trinity medical students likely to emigrate, TN survey finds The results come in the wake of an NUI Galway study that found close to 90% of Irish medical students were after considering emigrating after graduation.

James Wilson News Editor A Trinity News survey conducted last week has revealed a widespread desire among the College’s medical students to emigrate from Ireland after they graduate. 67% of the 100 medical students surveyed as part of our online poll said they would con-

sider it “likely” that they would emigrate after graduation, while 17% indicated they intend to remain in Ireland and 16% were unsure. The results come in the wake of a NUI Galway study, published earlier this month, that found that close to 90% of Irish medical students were certain to or were considering emigrating after they finished college.

38% of respondents said practicing medicine in Ireland would be their first choice over any other country. The same proportion indicated they woudl prefer to work abroad, while 23% were unsure. Among those who would rather work abroad, the United States was the most popular choice, securing the top choice of 29% of respondents. The second most popular option was Great Britain, with over a quarter - 26% - of students polled hoping to work there. In third place was Australia with 23% of the vote. Canada was the next most popular choice with 6% of votes. 5% indicated that they were unsure and a further 4% opted for New Zealand. 2% indicated they would most like to work in Asia, while 1% each opted for South America or an EU country other than Britain.

No student plannign to emigrate picked Africa, the Middle East or “other destination” as options.

Factors

The most popular reason for leaving Ireland was career prospects: 77% of respondents cited better opportunities abroad as a reason for emigrating. Finance was a secondary concern, with 60% indicating that they thought they would be better paid abroad. 57% admitted that a “sense of adventure” was a factor and 55% cited the under-

funding of healthcare in Ireland as a reason to leave. 54% thought that they would be able to work shorter hours abroad, while 53% indicted “bad management” of the system as a reason to leave.

12% signalled that Catholic patronage of hospitals was a factor in their decision.

Of those who did intend to leave, 44% indicated that they “fully intend” to return and practise in Ireland one day. 10% of respondents did not envision returning to Ireland. Of those who intended to stay, 88% cited friends and family as keeping them at home. 54% said the “familiarity” of Ireland was a factor and 51% felt the “Irish lifestyle” was a reason to remain. Only 10% cited career prospects, 9% pay and 6% the government’s healthcare policies. 4% indicated working conditions as a reason and a further 3% the management of Irish hospitals.

Feedback

One respondent who provided feedback said: “I wish to give the state recompense for the investment in my education, and I will almost certainly go abroad for specialised training later in my career, as this is a normal part of medical training given how small our island and health is in the grand scheme of things. But emigration immediately after graduating is a poor career move unless you intend to return, as you won’t be registered with the medical council.”

However, a huge number of respondents were highly critical of the Irish health system.

One student said: “Why should I stay in a country where doctors are not respected for the role or care they provide? If the country wants to sort out the doctor crisis there needs to be a change in

how the public treat doctors and in how newspapers report about them.”

Another wrote: “The main reason most of my classmates want to move abroad is for better working conditions. The sheer number of patients that one junior doctor is often expected to look after here is ridiculous in comparison to other countries.

The lack of facilities is awful.

Patients have waiting lists which can be months or even years long. The media here love to focus on how much doctors earn and how ridiculous it is that they complain when other people cannot get a job. Most people I know would gladly be paid less if it meant better working conditions and a better quality of life. ” According to another respondent, a number of consultants and senior doctors have already advised one medicine class that they would need to emigrate to gain work experience.

Turn to pg. 11 for analysis and interviews with Trinity medical students.

By NUMBERS:

67%

Consider emigration ‘likely’

10%

Of those intending to stay say career prospects a factor

60%

Of those intending to leave say pay a factor

Matthew Mulligan appointed next editor of Trinity News Matthew Mulligan, the editorat-large of Trinity News, has been appointed editor of the paper for the 2015-16 academic year and 62nd volume. Matthew is the current deputy editor of tn2 magazine and also serves as amenities officer on this year’s Publications committee.

His candidacy was unopposed

and, under such circumstances, he was elected to the position barring a veto from this year’s editorial staff, which he did not receive.

Matthew has played an integral role in our production process this year and will bring a wealth of experience in student media to the paper.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

News

3

New undergraduate business course to begin in 2016-17 50 of the 75 places available on Trinity’s new bachelor of business studies will be reserved for non-EU students in its first year.

Conall Monaghan Staff Writer Plans are being made for a bachelor in business studies (BBS) to become available in the coming years, Trinity News has learned.

The new undergraduate degree will contain many of the same modules as the current BESS (business, economics and social studies) programme but with fewer electives. There will also be core modules on the topics of innovation and entrepreneurship.

BESS is currently the only route through which one can

graduate with a single honours degree in business. However, modules from all four subjects are mandatory for the first year and students are only able to fully specialise in business, the second most popular speciality in BESS, from third year.

Direct entry option

BBS will have a different CAO code to BESS but students choosing to pursue single-honours business through BESS will be awarded the same qualification as students choosing the new direct entry option, Mary-Lee Rhodes, the director of undergraduate teaching and learning

for the School of Business, told Trinity News.

She added: “We have created the direct entry option largely due to student and graduate feedback that suggests there are a significant number of students that know they want to do business from the outset. This new course will allow us to tailor the first two years of modules to the needs and interests of these students while maintaining Trinity’s commitment to building general management skills embedded in a broad understanding of the social sciences.”

Internationalisation

75 students will be admitted to BSS in its first year, with 50 places being reserved for nonEU students. “Currently we have over 1,000 undergraduates pursuing business and businessrelated degrees and this directentry programme will add approximately 300 new students once it reaches capacity,” Rhodes told Trinity News. “Given the current low number of interna-

“

The BBS will have core modules on innovation and entrepreneurship.

tional students, we would expect that the new programme will bring us to roughly 25% international students as a proportion of our student body overall - which we believe can enhance the quality of the learning experience and the network of our graduates in their future career.”

The proposal to introduce a new bachelor of business studies was first put to the Undergraduate Studies Committee on November 25th and accepted at a meeting of the University Council on January 14th. In a statement to Trinity News, Dr Gillian Martin, the dean of undergraduate studies, said it is “envisaged that [the course] will have its first entrants in 2016-17.” It is expected that the number of business undergraduates in Trinity will rise from 600 to 900 with an increase in revenue from ¤3.6m to ¤6m within four years of the programme’s launch.

Two Trinity graduates among LSE occupiers

In our most read article this year, Dee Courtney responded to the claim that the passing of the upcoming equal marriage referendum would destroy the fabric of the family with a personal account of her own upbringing by two lesbian mothers, together now for over a decade. “I wouldn’t trade my parents for any smiling hetero two-kidsone-dog couple in the Iona ads,” she wrote. “And that’s not just a political statement; my mum worked hard to make me feel that way.”

2) One in four female TCD students sexually assaulted - survey The front page story of our first issue of 2015, by Catherine Healy, reported on a soon-to-be-released SU survey that found one in four female Trinity students has had a non-consensual sexual experience during their time in college One in 13 respondents reported having been stalked or subject to obsessive behaviour while studying at Trinity, while 42% of female students and 8% of male students said that they had experienced verbal harassment. The landmark study provided the first comprehensive findings on Trinity students’ experiences of sexual assault and harassment.

Kayle Crossan Contributor Trinity graduates Sinead Mercier and Alison Spillane are two of about 40 students taking part in an occupation of an administration room at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) since Tuesday night.

Among their demands are calls for genuine university democracy, an end to zero-hour contracts and a zero-tolerance policy towards harassment.

“

Commercialisation

Speaking to Trinity News over the weekend, Mercier, who is

3) Schols is just another freebie for the privileged Trinity should not be throwing money at rich students while the grant is being cut, Dee Courtney argued in an October op-ed. that outraged many scholars. “How many scholars do you know who gave up a part-time job after getting schols, relieved that they didn’t need to work anymore?” she asked. “How many mature students and people from the Trinity Access Programme are scholars?” Her verdict: If a scholarship is really merit based, it should be equally difficult for everyone to get.

Photo: Occupy LSE studying for a Masters of Laws at the university, said she joined the demonstration in an attempt to resist the university’s commercialised approach to education. Its neoliberal agenda, she said, is mirrored in LSE curricula, which focuses all too often on “trickle down” economics.

“Universities, such as LSE, simply cannot continue to take such a hegemonic approach to economics, especially as so many who graduate with these economic degrees go onto to define governmental policy that affects us all,” she said.

She added: “It’s so important that students highlight what the university should be, and how

our degrees should be able to help humanity as a whole rather than serve a singular self-serving purpose,” she said.

Alison Spillane - a Trinity graduate studying for an MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities at LSE - told Trinity News she got involved in the occupation because of the university’s focus on employability rather than holistic education. “The intrinsic value of education is being lost as universities shift their focus to the production of perfect employees rather than individuals capable of critical thought,” she said. “With this occupation, we have created a democratic nonhierarchical space for the ex-

change and exploration of ideas and we are motivated by the belief that education must be universally accessible for all.” She added: “I think many students in Ireland share these concerns, as evidenced by the recent actions of NCAD students who are protesting against cuts and overcrowding, and we at Occupy LSE stand in solidarity with them.”

In a statement released last week, the group said that universities like LSE are “increasingly implementing the privatised, profit-driven, and bureaucratic ‘business model’ of higher education, which locks students into huge debts and turns the university into a degree-factory and

students into consumers.”

4) Whose feminism is it anyway?

Europe-wide demos

At the launch of the UN gender equality campaign “HeForShe” in September, actress Emma Watson gave a speech about the necessity of a women’s rights movement in which she criticised the fight for gender equality too often becoming “synonymous with man-hating.”

Responding to that statement, Sally Rooney argued that feminists should make room for women whose experiences have taught them that men are not to be trusted.

The occupation in LSE’s Vera Anstey Suite is one of several actions currently taking place in European universities such as University of Amsterdam and the University of Oxford. The still ongoing Amsterdam occupation, which began on February 13th, is calling for a “new university” movement with greater democracy and financial transparency.

Meanwhile, in Oxford, a group of alumni has occupied a university building since March 16th in protest at its ruling to defer a decision on fossil fuel divestment.

Former TCDSU officer likely to win USI election James Wilson

for the southern region, has the backing of three SUs.

News Editor

Trinity endorsements

Trinity student Jack Leahy is the favourite to be elected vicepresident (VP) for academic affairs and quality assurance (AAQA) of the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) at the organisation’s annual congress this week. The former Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) education officer received the endorsement of seven SUs ahead of voting at the USI gathering in Athlone, which kicked off on Monday. His opponent, Martin Lynch, the USI VP

The last college year gave us society scandals, new political campaigns and incoming TCDSU president Lynn Ruane, whose life story gripped the nation following her election. But what were the stories that most captured your attention? Based on the number of visits to each page, here are our most viewed articles since Septermber 2014 on trinitynews..ie.

1) What my queer family means to me

The student occupation at LSE is one of several ongoing actions taking place in European universities.

Among their demands are calls for genuine university democracy and an end to zerohour contracts.

THE STORIES YOU most CARED ABOUT

While some unions allow delegates a free vote in the USI elections, many mandate their delegates to vote for the candidates they have officially endorsed.

TCDSU has also endorsed Kevin Donoghue, the current USI vicepresident for AAQA, for the USI presidential race ahead of his opponent Glenn Fitzpatrick, the USI VP for campaigns. Donoghue’s endorsement by Trinity representatives came amid controversy after Ents officer Finn Murphy asked class reps not to

vote for the “radical” Fitzpatrick on the grounds that he was difficult to work with. The intervention was condemned by several class reps and led the passing of an emergency motion at the last SU council banning sabbatical officers from endorsing USI candidates on official union channels.

Donoghue also had pledged support of Maynooth SU, IT Sligo SU, Galway-Mayo IT SU, and DCDU SU heading into this week’s congress. Fitzpatrick, on the other hand, has been backed by the SUs in Cork IT, IADT, and DIT. NUIGSU’s backing for Fitzpatrick had to be withdrawn

because of a technical breach that rendered the vote invalid.

Candidates

The uncontested candidates running for the USI officer board this week are Annie Hoey, who is seeking to be re-elected VP for equality and citizenship; Aedraen Ó Dubhghaill, the uncontested candidate for VP for the Irish language; and Daniel Waugh, who is the sole candidate for the position of VP for campaigns. NUIGSU welfare officer Aoife Ní Shúilleabháin, who is endorsed by TCDSU, and CITSU welfare officer Ciara O’Connor are both running for the position

of VP for welfare.

The annual USI congress will also see delegates considering motions on topics including the organisation of a Dublin student ball, the removal of the USI equality officer’s special focus on LGBT rights in the event that the marriage equality referendum passes, and mandatory sexual consent classes for students in their first semester of third-level education. The only motion submitted by TCDSU proposes to mandate the congress to “make regulations and procedures relating to Officer Board elections readily available to member organisations.”

5) Lynn Ruane elected first female president of TCDSU in 12 years Mature student Lynn Ruane, a single parent who campaigned on a platform of equality and access to education, won a hotly contested race for the position of SU president in February. Andrew O’Donovan reported from the election count venue on a tense climax to a night of cheers and tears.

6) SU-hired entertainer ‘hypnotised’ female students into lap dancing - claims In February, Conall Monaghan reported that the SU president, Domhnall McGlacken-Byrne, had received a lap dance from one of several allegedly hypnotised female students at a class rep training weekend at the beginning of the academic year, The incident occurred during a hypnosis show performed by entertainer who went on to be hired for another SU event the following week.

7) University Times issue withdrawn as Phil members remove distributed papers The University Times withdrew its first issue of 2015 after reporting on the content of documents that had been provided to the paper on the condition that they not be referred to in an article. The decision, Catherine Healy reported, came after several senior members of the University Philosophical Society removed copies of the paper from campus locations after it printed details of confidential correspondences that had been supplied as deep background for an investigative article on the difficulties faced by societies organising events on campus.

8) We stand by our story

GMB societies at loggerheads over use of rooms Robyn Page-Cowman Staff Writer The Theological Society (Theo) has raised concerns over persistent booking issues within the Graduates Memorial Building (GMB) this year. The society which had the right to use the building’s chamber and Bram Stoker room at set times on Mondays and Wednesdays during summer negotiations - claims that its bookings were contravened on several occasions by the University Philosophical Society (Phil), with which it shares use of a room in the GMB. One of the disputes related to the Theo’s booking of the Phil conversation room for its Christmas party on December 8th.

Lorcan Dunne, the Theo auditor, told Trinity News that he

received a message from a Phil council member the night before the event was due to take place informing him that the room could not be used as planned.

The junior dean, he was told, had given them permission to revoke the booking and hold their own event in the room instead.

Paperwork

When Dunne approached the enquiries office with paperwork to prove his booking for that evening, he was told that no such permission had been given. This was communicated to the Phil, and the Theo committee, believing the situation was resolved, set up the Phil conversation room for their Christmas event with beverages, mince pies and speakers. On returning to the room after briefly leaving the building, Dunne found that “the

Phil had rearranged everything we had set up including the furniture and put all our stuff into a corner.” GMB security and the vice junior dean intervened in the matter, following which the Theo agreed to move to the College Historical Society room upstairs, as the Phil had already set up their Christmas dinner in the downstairs room.

Another attempt to cancel the Theo’s booking of the Phil conversation room occurred on January 26th, when Dunne was denied permission to use the room, having booked it in December, for a panel debate on organised religion, featuring guests including Labour TD Ruairi Quinn.

Dunne told Trinity News that he then received a call from a College security official asking him to confirm the booking, as the president of the Phil has asked

them to lock the room. the Theo, on the insistence of security, was eventually allowed to use the room, according to Dunne.

‘Unfit for use’

Dunne also said that the Bram Stoker room, which is used for Theo committee meetings and events on lunchtime every Monday and Wednesday, had been left “unfit to use for meeting or events with speaker” with “food, clothes and underwear left around” by Phil members.

Responding to a request for comment, Sarah Mortell, the president of the Phil, referred to Article 3 in the GMB agreement on conversation rooms: that “these rooms will continue to be used by the Philosophical and Historical Societies. Others may book them through the Enquiries Office with the agreement of

the relevant Society.” She denied that the Phil cancelled either event “as there were no bookings made through me by the Theological society in the first place.”

Mortell added: “No societies have an entitlement to use the Phil or Hist conversation room.

We facilitate as many societies as possible, once they comply with the procedures in place and we ourselves do not have an event scheduled.” Dunne, however, maintains that the bookings were made in accordance with the GMB agreement and enquiries office protocols.

Speaking to Trinity News, Tim Trimble, the junior dean, confirmed that his name had been cited during the situation on December 8th. He said neither party had yet contacted him to discuss the issue.

This year’s most read editorial responded to criticism of an article on an eight-month-long breach of the college network. Catherine Healy addressed claims that the article had misled readers and complaints relating to our publishing of information that could have easily identify a student involved in the story.

9) Election poll predicts clear victories in presidential and communications races Our SU election poll - carried out in the Arts Block, the Hamilton, D’Olier Street, St. James’s Hospital, the JCR Café and the GMB predicted wins for candidates Lynn Ruane, Molly Kenny, Muireann Montague, Katie Cogan, Aifric Ní Chríodáin and Edmund Heaphy.

Our figures were off the mark in only one race, welfare, where we predicted second place for Conor Clancy, now welfare officer-elect.

10) Economics teaching in Trinity needs to get with the times A new student group dedicated to challenging the way economics is taught in Trinity set out its manifesto in a February article for Trinity News. Students of Trinity for Economic Pluralism, which held its first public meeting earlier this month, called for recognition that neoclassical economic theories have for too long been taught in universities “as if it is the only worthwhile option that exists.”

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

News

News In Brief

4

Phil elects third female head in a row James Wilson News Editor Ludivine Rebet was yesterday elected the third consecutive female president of the University Philosophical Society (Phil).

Rebet, who serves as the current debates convenor (DC) of the society’s 330th session, was elected on the second count after defeating the society’s secretary, Clare Ní Cheallaigh, and its senior member of council (SMC), Fionn McGorry. The uncontested positions of treasurer, registrar, DC and stewart were announced last week with the elections of officers-elect Stepan Lavrouk, Cian Henry, Conan Quinn and Eimear Gorey respectively.

Following the announcement of the presidential result, counting to determine the winner of the race to be the next secretary

of the society began, with Phil pro-secretary, Matthew Nuding declared elected over the vicepresident of the society, Hannah Beresford. Society member, Huda Awan, was then confirmed as the society’s next librarian (PRO) - defeating pro-librarian, Aisling Crabbe.

Pro-debates convenor Rachel O’Byrne was elected schools convenor against first year Mike Dolan before pro-secretary Eoin O’Gorman was declared the 331st session’s SMC, defeating society member Emily Cusack.

Counting then resumed to determine who the 331st session’s next “members of council” or MCs would be. 29 students contested the election and six were elected using the system of proportional representation.

Second-year student Sheila Naughton was the first MC declared elected and was followed

by first years Conn McCarrick, Manus Dennison, Izzy Sweeney, Niamh Egleston and Tom Cantillon.

Following the election of the first six MCs, the council-elect of the 331st session retired to choose its new vice-president - the individual charged with organising the maidens debating competition for first-year speakers - from the six MCs elected. Subsequently, a further seven MCs were then chosen or “co-opted” to serve on the new council.

The Phil AGM is due to take place in the Graduates Memorial Building this Thursday. The annual changeover ceremony sees departing council members march out of the building's chamber at a minute to midnight, after which the new council walks into applause.

From left to right: Broden Giambrone, the chiex executive of Transgender Equality Network Ireland; Domhnall McGlacken-Byrne, the SU president, and Dr. Martine Cuypers.

Photo: Catherine Healy

College first Irish university to launch policy to support trans staff, students Catherine Healy Editor A policy document launched last Thursday commits College to protecting students and staff from gender-based discrimination.

The ‘Gender Identity and Gender Expression Policy’ document outlines new guidelines to create an inclusive college atmosphere for trans individuals, including the removal of unnecessary gender distinctions from university documents, and provision of accessible guidelines to staff and students seeking to update

their personal college records to match their gender expression.

It also recognises identification of an individual as trans without the individual’s permission as a form of harassment.

College, through the policy, further commits to supporting staff and students considering or undergoing medical procedures relating to gender reassignment.

Awareness of trans issues will also be incorporated in training programmes for frontline staff and student representatives under the new guidelines.

Speaking at the launch, Prof Martine Cuypers, a lecturer in the Department of Clas-

sics and the former chair of the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI) board, said the policy was based on the idea of “self-determination” for all staff and students.

“It would have been unimaginable to have this kind of document when I first arrived in Trinity,” she said.

The policy, which was drawn up through consultation with staff and student representatives over the course of two years, was approved by the College Board on June 25th, and is the first of its kind in Irish third-level education.

12 societies granted full CSC recognition James Prendergast Senior Reporter 12 Trinity student societies Arabesque, Caledonian, Cancer, Enactus, French, Pool, Student 2 Student (S2S), Sociology, Student Managed Fund (SMF), Society for International Affairs (SoFIA), Trinity Economic Forum (TEF) and Voluntary Tuition Programme (VTP) - were granted full recognition at the Central Societies Committee (CSC) AGM last week. DU Clinical Therapies was granted provisional recognition.

One of the newly recognised societies, Trinity Economic Forum, which hosted its fourth annual forum this year, won Best Society Event at the CSC awards this year, while SMF won Best

Small Society and SoFIA won Best New Society in 2013.

To be granted full recognition, societies must have a record of effective events, satisfactory accounts for at least one financial year and at least 50 fully paid up members who are registered students. Treasurers of fully-recognised societies elect the officers and eight ordinary members of the CSC Executive. Candidates must also be nominated by two treasurers of fully-recognised societies. Fully-recognised societies also usually have access to a shared room on campus.

Provisionally recognised societies are not given grants for rooms expenses, society travel, or capital items, unless the Executive can be satisfied that such grants are necessary to the survival of the society.

“

[Recognised] societies must have a record of effective events, satisfactory accounts for at least one financial year and at least 50 fully paid up student members.

Ruane to hold Irish debt crisis workshop Clare Droney Online News Editor Incoming SU president Lynn Ruane is to hold a workshop on the Irish debt crisis on campus next month, it has been announced. The event - entitled 'The Irish Debt Crisis: What Happened?' - has been jointly developed by the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland, an organisation seeking to cancel Irish debt, and anti-austerity activist group Spectacle of Defiance and Hope.

The workshop - which is due to be held on April 16th in Trinity's Global Room - will enable participants to more fully understand the banking crisis and bailout, and to increase participants’ understanding of the key economic institutions involved in the events of 2008. The workshop will also explore the possibilities for writing off Irish bank debt.

According to the organisers, “Many people who have completed the workshop already have been surprised at how little accurate information they have been given regarding what actually happened after the bank guarantee of September 2008.”

They hope that the workshop will “empower participants to feel informed and entitled to engage in discussions about economic issues.”

The workshop will look at the impact of banking and government decisions on ordinary citi-

zens and communities around Ireland. As well as educating participants about the events and decisions that took place at a political level during and since the banking crisis in 2008, “the intention is that the workshop leads to some kind of positive action within the communities,” according to Debt and Development Coalition Ireland. As part

of the session, participants will “explore ways in which individuals and communities can respond to the banking crisis and austerity to bring about change.”

Overall, the organisers have developed the workshop to allow participants to “engage with what happened in an atmosphere of openness and a freedom to question.”

Contributor Trinity debaters Liam Hunt and Gavin Tucker of the University Philosophical Society (Phil) swept to victory in the final of the Irish Mace debating competition on Saturday.

As a result of their victory, they will represent Ireland next month in the International Mace final in Cork, in which they will debate against the win-

Trinity academic expelled from Mars space programme Lia Flattery Student Affairs Correspondent Dr Joseph Roche, an assistant professor in Trinity’s School of Education, has been removed from the shortlist for the Mars One space programme after voicing serious concerns about the project last week.

Mars One is a Dutch not-forprofit organisation vying with several government space agencies to be the first to establish a permanent human colony on Mars. Their intention is to send crews of four every two years to the planet, starting in 2024.

Roche was among 100 candidates shortlisted to take part in the project. Speaking to online magazine Medium last week, Roche said that his “nightmare” about the initiative “is that people continue to support it and give it money and attention, and it then gets to the point where it inevitably falls on its face.”

He expressed grave doubts about the selection process used by the Mars One group, which sees the finalists marked by a points system that is based on

how much money they can raise for the mission and how much official merchandise they buy.

Mars One had indicated that there had been 200,000 applications to the programme, but he dismissed that figure as false, claiming that the real number is fewer than 3,000.

According to Roche, the amount of contact that he had with those carrying out the application process was totally inadequate: “All the info they have collected on me is a crap video I made, an application form that I filled out with mostly one-word answers… and a 10-minute Skype interview.” He told Medium magazine that candidates were promised a face-to-face meeting with the organisers, but this had yet to happen, and that the selection criteria and training methods used by Mars One are severely lacking compared to NASA’s equivalents.

In an article published in The Guardian, he elaborated by saying, “I think that the shortcomings of the selection process, coupled with their unwillingness to engage and collaborate with the scientific community, means

that the time might have come for Mars One to acknowledge the implausibility of this particular venture. They could then perhaps turn their efforts towards supporting other exciting and more viable space missions.”

Despite these misgivings, Dr Roche hoped that his criticisms would not diminish his chances of being selected for the mission. In an interview on RTE’s Morning Ireland, he explained, “I’m not out to get Mars One or anything. I’m just raising some of the questions that I think we need to ask ourselves about the mission.” He added, “I hope that it’s the type of organisation that would embrace the concerns of scientists… The people involved surely have the right to ask for more information and more openness and transparency.”

However, a spokesperson for Mars One, speaking on Morning Ireland last Thursday, rejected Roche’s comments about the selection process and confirmed that he is no longer a contender for the mission because he had breached their confidentiality agreement.

Election of inaugural Ents committee Clare Droney Online News Editor

Photo: Kevin O'Rourke

Trinity debaters to represent Ireland at international competition Lily McKillop

Photo: Irish World

ners of the Scottish, English and Welsh competitions.

The motion for the final asked contestants to consider whether the “prophet hologram” - a never used US military project involving the projection of the image of an ancient God over an enemy capital whose public communications have been seized - is a legitimate tool of war. Hunt and Tucker spoke against the motion, raising concerns that it would lead to potential genocide, and noting that there exists

a distinction between standard war tactics that target armed defendants at war and a tactic that attacks people’s personal and religious beliefs.

First years Chris Costigan and Matthew Collins, also representing the Phil, spoke on side proposition. Their case disputed the notion of war as inherently evil and pointed out that what is truly evil are the tools used in war, rather than conflict itself.

A new committee established to assist with the organisation of social events for Trinity students was elected last Wednesday as part of a restructuring of the traditional Ents “crew”. While many Ents candidates in previous SU had pledged to revive the Ents Crew, Finn Murphy and incoming Ents officer Katie Cogan decided to replace it with the first elected committee.

“Usually the Ents crew were just chosen by the Ents officer out of their friends or active people around campus,” Murphy told Trinity News last week. He added: “I talked about fixing the Ents Crew in my manifesto but didn't really get a chance to do it for my tenure. After discussing it with Katie Cogan we decided an elected committee was the best

way forward.”

Murphy and Cogan both felt that the introduction of an elected committee would improve the structure of Trinity Ents by creating more opportunities for students to have clearly defined roles within the organisation. “The problem right now is that if the Ents officer is doing one thing then they can't be doing anything else,” Murphy told Trinity News. “By having a committee behind them, you'll hopefully see a lot more diverse events.” He added: “I think it will bring something new and refreshing to campus. Katie will be a fantastic Ents Officer next year but if she has a fantastic team behind her then I think Ents could really be brought to a new level.”

Murphy is also keen to ensure continuity within the organisation and sees the new committee as a positive step in this regard.

“Often the skill-set for putting

on big events isn't passed on and contact details for venues or relationships with bookers are lost,” he said.

The 10 students elected to the inaugural Ents committee for the next academic year are: Colm Hawkes (secretary), Grant Tierney (treasurer), Josh Kenny (night officer), Jack Marks (live music officer), Ben O'Dwyer (equipment officer), Carla KingMolina (photography and video officer), and Paraic McLean (public relations officer), as well as ordinary committee members Finnán Tobin, Róise Ní Mhaonaigh and Kevin Martyn. Other sitting members of the committee, which will be chaired

by Cogan next year are JCR entertainment officer Jonah Craig and Aifric Ní Chríodáin, the incoming SU communications and marketing officer.

ShoutOut workshop at Colaiste Eoin not yet rescheduled since ´postponement` Dee Courtney Senior Editor The ShoutOut workshop on LGBTQ bullying due to take place in Coláiste Eoin has yet to be rescheduled, despite the school’s claims that it was postponed, not cancelled, in January, Trinity News understands After the initial cancellation, when workshop coordinators were turned away from the school, the principal of Coláiste Eoin attempted to clarify the cir-

cumstances. Speaking to RTÉ in January, principal Finín Máirtín said that the school was “upset”

by ShoutOut’s statement that the workshop had been cancelled.

He clarified that the parents’ objection to the workshop had been a misunderstanding about the topic. “Both sides” of a workshop on LGBT issues would need to be discussed, but the parents would not have this objection to a workshop on bullying, he said. The reason he gave for the postponement was that parents felt that if their son did not at-

tend the workshop, he could be excluded.

The school has not been in touch with ShoutOut, an organisation founded by Trinity students and alumni, since the initial cancellation. Declan Meehan, ShoutOut’s public relations officer, told Trinity News that ShoutOut do not wish to comment on the situation any further. Coláiste Eoin could not be reached for comment at the time of print.

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Tuesday 24th March 2015

TRINITY NEWS

Features

Escaping a broken health system Tadgh Healy talks to Trinity medics about emigration and plans to make them stay in Ireland.

p11

WE BE BALLIN' In the run-up to Trinity Ball 2015, students and staff share merry memories of dancing, getting lost and getting over wardrobe malfunctions.

‘The experience is quite different as a lecturer’ I have attended Trinity Ball many times, and it’s always been great.

Of course I went nearly every year when I was an undergraduate student; and then in 1989 and 1990 I went as President of the Trinity Students’ Union – but there were also a few other years during the 1990s and early 2000s that I went as a staff member. A different experience but lots of fun too! The atmosphere at the Ball was always wonderful, not just for the music – and over my time I got to see the Undertones, the Dubliners, the Las, Desmond Dekker and lots of others. But the music was only ever part of the experience. There was so much more – getting dressed up with friends, seeing the College all decorated and almost unrecognisable, and the general carnival or festival atmosphere. I have a great memory of getting my photo taken with Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners at one Ball, but am still regretful that I never got to see Public Enemy play, or the Smiths or the Pogues – they headlined too at different Balls before my time. An older friend did get to hang out with Shane McGowan of the Pogues for one very memorable Ball, she had a wild time and still dines out on that story!

Since becoming a lecturer, I have attended a number of other Balls, and the experience is quite different. We get to hang out in the Senior Common Room bar, so we have nice toilets, and we even get ice in our gin and tonics. But despite these luxuries, as a staff member the Trinity Ball can never quite capture the same level of excitement we used to feel as students. I always remember that first moment of walking under the Front Arch as a student on a Ball night, seeing Front Square sparkling and people dancing everywhere – those are the enduringly brilliant memories of the Ball. Probably the best Ball I ever had was my final year in 1989, I had just been elected President of the Students' Union and was about to sit my final exams – I went with most of my election campaign team, we stayed up all night dancing and spent most of the following morning in Bewleys’ on Grafton Street imbibing large quantities of coffee – happy days! I hope everyone who attends the Ball this year has just as much fun as we did all those years ago.

- Ivana Bacik, Trinity College fellow and deputy leader of the Seanad

‘Picture Shakespearian puffy, off white baggy shorts from waist to groin’ I don’t know if many of you are familiar with the Wallace and Gromit cartoon characters but my 1983 memory of the Trinity Ball was definitely a case of the wrong trousers or in more recent MTV video awards parlance, a case of a “wardrobe malfunction.”

I attended the Ball for the first three of my four glorious years as an undergraduate at TCD from 1980 to 1984, 1983 was our finest! My date (now husband of 25 years, we were also married in Trinity) was an an architecture student who hailed all the way from Queen’s University Belfast.

He and his best friend were on a college work placement in Cardiff and decided with the usual archi-

tect’s flourish that wouldn’t it be great if we all went in period costume. Peter, my date, Gary, a rotund young gentleman from west Belfast and Helen, a Welsh psychiatric nurse who came along for the craic, arrived late the night before the Ball. They travelled in a brown Ford Escort on the ferry from Holyhead.

The architects had decided, seeing as it was the Trinity Ball, that we should dress appropriately and hired costumes from the 18th century Georgian period.

Peter sported a pair of pale pink velvet pantaloons with matching velvet tailcoat, complete with white stockings and black patent shoes with a silver buckle. The fair haired Garry was in matching “royal” blue which was very appropriate for a chap from the west side of the forbidden or should I say foreboding city of the early nineteen eighties . Helen and I were, we firmly believed, simply beautiful in our very girly shade of bright pink trimmed with white lace, low cut, completely unwired ball gowns. Helen being the more buxom of the two of us was definitely the more fetching.

We queued to enter at Front Gate, had our photo taken by those passing by and all was going to plan until my older and, as he believed, wiser brother joined us. He had tried to follow the lead of the Queen’s architects. However, being a mere Trinity engineer and made of less frivolous stuff, he thought he knew what he was doing when it came to most things, including costumes.

Unfortunately for him while we four were dressed in 18th century Georgian, he showed up 16th century Elizabethan. What might you ask is the difference?

The answer is about 12 inches of male inside leg covering. Picture Shakespearian puffy, off white baggy shorts from waist to groin.

Not a pretty sight but definitely a case of the wrong trousers.

Once we all recovered from the sight of so much pale engineer leg we had another great Trinity Ball night and such a laugh. To those who are going this year, enjoy it all, these are the nights you too will remember and you may never know, perhaps your date this year will be your future spouse.

- Catherine Comiskey, head of the School of Nursing and Midwifery

‘I fight back the Buckfast and garlic mayonnaise nausea creeping up my throat’ The light creeping under the bedroom curtain burns my crust-shut eyelids. I try to catch my breath, as the collar of my shirt, once so roomy at my Debs five years previous, strangles me in a death grip; while my dickybow, its clasp proving far too complicated for my bewildered brain last night, has lodged itself in my mouth like a ball-gag. My head thumping, I embalm myself under my mysteriously damp suit jacket and fight back the Buckfast and garlic mayonnaise nausea creeping up my throat. I hear a faint tap on the door. My mother, the last bulwark between my mortal soul and eternal damnation, enters, and stares forlornly at the huddled mass of blankets and shame she brought into this cruel world. “So,” she asks me tentatively. “Did you have a good night?”

Truth be told, I have no idea.

The events of the past eight hours have long since banished to the void of history, leaving me a shallow husk of my former self.

I moan in reply, and she kindly exits, allowing me to stew in my

Illustration: Natalie Duda own foul juices in peace. My chest heaving, I channel my last reserves of energy, and try to recall anything from the previous night.

Flashes of vague images rise up from the darkness of my memory.

Queuing for two hours to catch what appeared to be your man from the WiMax ads performing Ukrainian folk songs. The mysteriously wizened first year selling baggies of washing up powder.

The thoroughly confused Erasmus student angrily asking the security guard why the library is closed. The lad who snuck in by wearing his transition year Order of Malta jacket, cornered into performing an emergency tracheotomy. Assuring the tutor I ran into that “my jaw always looks like this.” Finding the winners of Trinity’s Battle of the Bands playing in a portaloo as “all the good stages were taken.” The CEO of MCD Promotions riding to the bank on a chariot powered by the outrage of students. A horde of irate revellers milling about outside, trying to hawk their comatosed mate’s ticket like it’s a Roman slave auction. The dance tent becoming so packed it successfully secedes, declaring itself the independent republic of “Gotanyyokes-istan.” Walking on Cars getting asked to leave for inciting property damage. Seeing a weeping Hozier trying to convince security that “his mates are inside.” The Provost’s abysmal DJ set (thirteen minutes of “I Follow Rivers”, what the fuck like).

Basement Jaxx cutting their set short to make sure they get into Coppers before midnight. Various members of Le Galaxie working behind the counter in McDonalds at 5 AM, taking orders through song. A mob of besuited bourgeois zombies wandering around the city centre, desperately trying to swap an essay on postcolonial theory in exchange for an after party.

I grimace, as much from the pain of remembering as the memories themselves. Slowly, I reach a hand out from my hermetically sealed chamber of regret, and blindly grasp for the stagnant pint of water to the side of my bed.

“Fucking Eucharistic Congress,” I whisper.

- Vincent Sheridan, finalyear history student

‘I was shocked at the ease with which I was able to sneak in’ There I was, shivering in my high-vis vest, walking up to the security man. I felt like our tuxes were clearly visible underneath.

It was too late to turn back now.

We kept walking, brandishing the chicken fillet roles we’d bought to make it look more like we were heading into work. "Whose team are you on, lads?” the man with the much larger high-vis vest asked when we reached the barrier. “We’re on Sarah’s team,” my companion said, before I had a chance to answer. After a short silence, he beckoned us to head into the Arts Block. We continued past it, before stashing our vests behind a bin. The looks of disgust we got from friends made up for the lost pre-drinking time.

I wandered around for about three hours, dancing with friends, observing their deteriorating coordination. At about 1:30am, it was time to leave: I had a flight to catch.

I headed down along the quays to the only 24-hour internet café I could think of. I’d forgotten to print off my boarding pass.

I paid for half an hour and took my seat, so absorbed in my task that I didn't notice a man being removed from the cafe and decided to move on. I had made it about halfway home when I ran into them. I heard them shouting around the corner before they appeared. I was in Temple Bar and it was a stag in full swing. As soon as they spotted me they began a rendition of the James Bond theme tune, before picking me up.

I assumed the joke would be short lived but this, looking back, was naive. I was cajoled into accompanying them back to their hotel. Once there, we had a few (very one-sided) conversations about Dublin life and the lads even offered me a few drinks.

After a while, I decided to have a brief rest as the possibility of doing having one when I got home was gone. After saying my goodbyes I walked the rest of the way home and packed my bag for Scotland.

With the taxi on its way, I only had time for an apple for breakfast. This still gave me enough time to reflect on what had gone on. From all the stories I’d heard of attempts to sneak in, such as the infamous one about the student who unsuccessfully spent the day in a tree or the one about the fresher who’d pulled a tin whistle out of his sleeve and claimed to be in Trinity Orchestra, I was shocked at the ease with which I’d gotten in. All it took was a chicken filly. It was almost 5:00am and my housemates had returned. In a couple of hours, one of them would wake up and get sick all over his duvet, but I wasn’t to know. I got in my taxi and left.

- Oisin Byrne, final-year geography and economics student

“

Being drunk in Trinity often leads to the belief that it might actually be possible that we are all in fact wizards.

'Am I really in Hogwarts after all?'

If you’re attending the Trinity Ball (and you’re not a guest, for whom I take no responsibility), then it’s safe to assume you’ve probably spent at least one year in college and that you have a fair idea of the lie of the land by now. Then how is it that you find yourself in the early hours of 6th April picking yourself up after falling for the second time wondering where the fuck you are?

Who moved that Campanile?

Fear not, you’re just suffering from a very common Ball ailment, alcohol fuelled spatial disorientation. Getting lost at Trinity Ball is something we’ve been doing for centuries.

Apparently Jonathan Swift based Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels on a vision he had in the foyer of the Museum Building after he suddenly found himself there lost and out of his box on pills at Trinity Ball 1684. And if Swifty did it then so will you. When you do get lost here’s how to keep calm and stumble on.

The most obvious reason for your sudden directional difficulties is that you’ve probably just fallen foul of the reciprocal Arts/ Science general geographical ignorance. For those of you unaware of the border, the Arts Bloc includes all of the nice buildings as far down as Players and then jack-knifes across to the Pav, which is also ours. I’m told everything beyond looks like office blocks and I believe is known as the Halloran (?), but I don’t know for sure as I’ve never been. If this is the reason for finding yourself misplaced then it can go one of two ways, basically depending on your degree.

If you are an Arts student and you find yourself lost down by the Halloran then you’re fucked. You may as well call it a night. You can’t go home because the gates are literally miles away at this stage. And there’s no sobering up either. Even if you could get out-

side the walls there’s no coffee down that end. There’s no water either. Well, there is but it comes in two parts Hydrogen and one part Oxygen and you’re expected to be able to mix that shit yourself. There are also no couches so you can scrap the idea of a cosy KO. You’re only option is to wait it out and sit in the cold, not having any fun. If you wait around until the Monday you’ll fit right in.

However, it’s not all bad being a lost Arts student; you do have some advantages over your employable counterparts. Not only are you probably more experienced at binge drinking you’ll also actually be able to interact with people socially and ask directions. And misquote Byron to them. People love that. Assuming you can find anyone down there.

Now, Physics undergrad. Being a science student you probably can’t handle your drink for shit so more than likely you’ll find yourself lost at some point. You may be able to calculate your position by the stars sober, but tonight you’re shitfaced, shit out of luck and in our territory, both literally and drunkenly. That bright future isn’t worth jack when you’re falling over the cobbles of Front Square, cursing their impracticality yet moved to tears by the simplistic beauty they lend the scene. Snap out of. Leave the philosophising to those of us who are supposed to be studying it.

Stay cool, clean the sick off your tracksuit and cheer up. Trinity, unlike mullets, believes in business at the back, party at the front and you have been lucky enough to find yourself lost at the front. You’ll never want to go back to the arse of college again.

For you science heads lucky enough to find yourself lost in the Arts Block, or Trinity College as it’s usually known, Paddy Prendergast has kindly decided to this year run a lost and found out of his front garden, where people can collect their drunken friends.

If you’re a Science student then you’ve probably never seen Prendergast. If you’re an arts student you’ve probably never seen him either. But I’ve been informed he is real and mad for the craic.

It is, of course possible, and in fact far more likely that you are just so gee-eyed that you find yourself lost in familiar territory.

But you’re not really lost you’re just Trinity Ball lost which means that you are still in the same place as you were last time you knew where you were, but the alcohol has caught up with you and direction was the first sense to get washed away in the rising tide of Buckfast and Druids. But we can handle this too.

There is, of course, some general advice applicable to everyone regardless of their chosen field of

academic study (and, of course, arts students). The first thing you should do on realising that you have become separated from your friends is to down whatever drink you find yourself holding.

Do this for a number of reasons.

You’ll need both hands to climb the Campanile later, but also it’ll settle your nerves. Drink up.

Whatever you do, don’t stay in the same place. That never works.

Your friends are not looking for you. They’re having the craic en masse while you’ve fucked up.

The best way to find yourself back among the living is to follow the music. Unless all you can hear is The Coronas. Then just lie down and weep. Again.

One of the most common consequences of drinking too much is that you find things start to move. This is probably how you got lost in the first place. Combine this with the number one result of finding yourself drunk in Trinity (Ball night or not), that is the resurfacing of all the Hogwarts based fantasies of first year that you thought you had successfully repressed, you begin to ask yourself, am I really in Hogwarts after all?

Being drunk in Trinity often leads to the belief that it might actually be possible that we are all in fact wizards. This would fit with the blurry memory you have of seeing the Dining Hall steps moving some time ago. Run with this idea, it will actually prove helpful. This is why you always see people sitting on the steps at the Ball. They’re lost souls hoping to be shuttled back to their friends.

Join them, you never know.

Honestly, if you do get hammered enough to find yourself lost in your own college then this is going to be the last thing you remember so I’ll end with some key pointers. If you’re going to pass out I would recommend the nice big grave slabs by the ATM. People will need money and might help you, or give you cash. If you need to get sick then go to the GMB and get sick on their steps.

Or in the letterbox. The 24 hour library is a serious re-spawning point. You can send web-texts and ask homeless people for advice on how to get by.

Look for things that are familiar to you. The Campanile rarely moves, regardless of how much you drink, so it’s a good starting point. If all else fails try and climb it. You’ll see everything from up there. And more importantly everyone will be able to see you. And think you’re a lad.

- Conor Marron, thirdyear physiotherapy student

Tuesday 24th March 2015

TRINITY NEWS

Features

7

Meet the faces of Trinity party politics What drives college politicos? What are their ambitions, criticisms and predictions for the upcoming general elections?

We talk to Trinity students involved in Fine Gael, Labour, Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and the Socialist Workers Party.

Catherine Healy Editor In the days following the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris earlier this year, black and white posters advertising a Trinity Socialist Worker Student Society (SWSS) discussion on anti-Islamophobia were pasted on to walls in campus loos, corridors and foyers. “Je ne suis pas Charlie” – as the event was provocatively named – was an attempt to discuss “why, while condemning such an atrocity, we must be wary of endorsing racism and Islamophobia under the guise of free speech,” its Facebook event page said. The discussion, held in an arts block room eight days after the massacre, was attended by over a hundred students.

This is the most active the branch has been in about 10 years, according to Rory O’Neill, the secretary of SWSS. “There’s always an audience in universities for radical ideas, for an alternative critical approach to what’s said in the media,” he says. “It just requires a committed group of people to respond quickly to events and put out an alternative line on topical issues.”

O’Neill, a first-year history and philosophy student, joined the branch’s senior party, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), two and a half years ago, after becoming interested in “more radical, left revolutionary” ideas. He describes himself as a Marxist, “someone who wants democratic control of the economy by working people.”

However, the fight to end capitalism is not just about economics, he says. “It’s about standing with all oppressed people: fighting for LGBTQ equality, showing solidarity with the Palestinian people, opposing sexism and standing for a woman’s right to choose. Being a Marxist means seeing all these things as part of one framework of exploitation, which we call capitalism.”

But better regulated capitalism, for Trinity Young Fine Gael (YFG) members, is what has saved Ireland from the brink of disaster since it took office in 2011. “In general, I think Fine Gael has led the country in the right way, and created jobs and growth,” third-year law student Richard Bonham, the branch’s secretary, tells me.

Third-year history student Ellen O’Connor, an unsuccessful Fine Gael candidate for Dún Laoghaire in the recent local elections, agrees. “[Taoiseach Enda Kenny] has brought the country back up from the mess it was in,” she says. “There have definitely been tough decisions, but I think things are starting to turn around now.”

What about the cuts to jobseeker’s allowance, the carer’s allowance and lone parent’s allowance? “Given the mess we were in in 2011, everyone was going to have to share some of the pain,” O’Connor says. “No-one in society could be left untouched – and of course I’d hope some of those cuts could be reversed over the next few years.” And increases to third-level fees? Bonham says the decision, while “tough”, must be considered in light of the maintenance grants in place for students.

The JobBridge scheme, criticised by many youth groups as displacing properly paid jobs, is a valuable way of getting young people back to work, both contend.

Criticism of coalition

Trinity Labour members are less enthused about the coalition’s record. Branch chair Killian O’Sullivan, a final-year history and geography student, describes the cut to social welfare for under-26s as “a real slap in the face”.

Both he and prominent party member Neil Warner, a postgraduate history student, are particularly concerned about the government’s mooted income tax cuts.

Warner, who is currently researching economic policy in Britain’s Labour Party between 1979 and 1997, points out: “Ireland already has very low taxation by international standards.

You can’t have good services and welfare without taxation.” Responding to public dissatisfaction with tax cuts “feeds into a very weak kind of discourse about how you solve problems,” he says.

“It’s the same economic strategy that Fianna Fáil had before the crisis: this idea that you just cut taxes instead of looking at things long-term.” O’Sullivan adds: “The recent TASC report on income inequality in Ireland [published last

month] demonstrates that the tax system is compensating for this huge problem. Tampering with it by giving people who have a lot of money more money is a very dangerous idea.”

Warner was a founding member of the Campaign for Labour Policies (CLP), a group of grassroots Labour members unhappy with government policies. It was formed shortly after the coalition’s “very regressive” first budget, he tells me. “We held meetings and press conferences to raise a more critical, adamantly socialist/social-democratic view of things. One big driving force was the 2012 party conference, where there was a sense that there wasn’t strong opposition to the budget, to the way that the party was heading.”

Was the party receptive to its suggestions? “I wouldn’t say so.

I think there’s a real problem in general in party political culture – and this is partly what we wanted to raise – that criticism is in and of itself harmful. There was a big response among party membership, though. Over 100 people came to our first meeting – there was huge enthusiasm because of the disaffection with the government and the sense of not being listened to.”

The CLP lost momentum in 2013 following the departure of several of its key members from party ranks. Why did Warner stay on? “The biggest [red line issue] for me is if I felt there was no longer any acknowledgment of criticism or any discussion within the party, if there was no receptiveness for change among party members,” he says. “Whatever the leadership is doing, I like to make the distinction between the party itself and the potential within the party and its history, as opposed to what it’s doing at a particular moment.”

But working as part of a capitalist coalition government will always end in defeat for workingclass people, according to SWP member Rory O’Neill. “Every attempt to reform capitalism throughout history has failed,” he says. “While we run elections and take part in elections, ultimately, without wanting to be too grandiose about it, we’re an attempt to build a revolutionary organisation. We believe that only a revolution of working class people from below can affect socialist change in society.”

Is the SWP’s ultimate goal, to bring about the end of capitalism, likely to be achieved in the immediate future? “The rise of Syriza and potential rise of Podemos is indicative that the struggle against capitalism is still very current,” O’Neill says. “I don’t think it’ll happen through a project like Syriza but it’s definitely a sign that we haven’t lost yet. Maybe capitalism will get through this crisis but there will be another one – that’s just how the system works – so as long as it is unable to deliver what humanity needs there’ll always be opportunities for the left to build an alternative.” The trick, he says, is to engage with the public on issues that affect them in their everyday lives. “We believe that through our struggles – through building the anti-water charges movement, trying to radicalise the marriage equality referendum and fight for a woman’s right to choose – we can win people over to revolutionary socialism.”

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Working as part of a capitalist coalition government will always end in defeat for working-class people, according to SWP member Rory O’Neill.

General election

For other youth branches, electoral politics and the upcoming general election, rather than ending capitalism, is the focus. Both O’Connor and Bonham from YFG rule out supporting any future coalition with Sinn Féin. “Their economic policies just don’t add up and their funding system is completely in shadows,” Bonham says. “They’re paid the industrial wage and yet Gerry Adams can fly to America and get private treatment there.” O’Connor adds: “There are also obviously some worrying issues that have emerged with regards to sexual abuse within the IRA.” Labour, both say, has worked well with Fine Gael and would be their preferred coalition partner after 2016.

But Labour members O'Sullivan

and Warner aren’t keen on the idea. “I do see a lot of sense in what Jack O’Connor has said about positioning ourselves with the left and against Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil,” O’Sullivan says.

Warner, meanwhile, thinks a time in opposition would be best for the party. “If there’s suddenly the possibility after the next election of some amazing left-wing government, maybe [we should go into government], but it’d be unlikely.”

Final-year law and politics student Niamh Walsh, the chair of Fianna Fáil’s Theobald Wolfe Tone Cumann, feels the same way about Fianna Fáil. “We haven’t fully rebuilt ourselves on the ground or among the electorate to effectively survive a coalition,” she says. But second-year law student Briege Mac Oscar, the Wolfe Tone Cumann treasurer and northern organiser for Ógra Fianna Fáil, would consider supporting the party entering a coalition with any party other than Fine Gael and Sinn Féin.

While other Trinity politicos may not be prepared to work with his party, Sinn Féin councillor Jonathan Graham, a third-year BESS student, says it would work with anyone as long it could form a majority in a future coalition.

“My preference would be the Labour Party,” he admits. “I think there are some very good, solid people in Labour with progressive politics. I’d find it difficult to work with some of the more dogmatic or ultra-left people in the Socialist Party or SWP because they don’t want the responsibility of governance or policy.”

Graham, at just 20 years old, is one of the youngest elected representatives in the country.

Clearly ambitious, he does not rule out running for the party in the forthcoming general election.

“If others think I have something to offer as a TD, I would,” he says.

“Fundamentally, my role is as a political activist and if that means going to the Dáil, so be it.”

Key issues

What drives him? Affordable housing, as well as equality and access to education, he tells me.

“In South Dublin, for example, we’ve over 9,000 people on a housing list, but any money available to construct housing is dependent on central government.”

And Northern Ireland? “The idea of a one-island economy attracted me. Having two economies, two education and health services on the one island didn’t make sense to me.”

Briege Mac Oscar gives a similar response, saying she was attracted to Fianna Fáil as a party that supports Irish unity, while also standing for fairness. “Growing up in the North I was always aware of the contribution Fianna Fáil had made to the peace process, with Albert Reynolds signing the Downing Street Declaration and Bertie Ahern playing a crucial role in the negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement,” she says.

Niamh Walsh, who grew up in a Fianna Fáil-supporting household, says she got involved in politics because of the responsibility she felt citizens have to engage in democratic societies. “Because I study politics – I studied a module on representation and public opinion last year – I saw that you have to be active in politics to have your views represented,” she says. “For a democracy to be legitimate, it needs people to be engaged and, at the very least, vote.

That’s one of the main reasons I got involved.”

Final-year economics and politics student Aoife Smyth, the international liaison officer for the National Young Greens, says she was attracted to the Greens as it was one of the few parties “with a really long-term term vision.

They’re thinking 50, even 100 years down the line instead of looking to the next election.That’s important to me terms of sustainable economic development.”

For fellow Green Party member Sam Torsney, who led efforts to gain college recognition for the newly formed Trinity Greens, family involvement proved to be a key catalyst in joining the party.

“It would be between Green and Labour in my house,” he says.

“But I’d describe myself as a libertarian socialist and the Greens are the only ones who I feel represent that.” The party’s “ultrademocratic” nature also appealed to him. “When I spoke at my first Green Party meeting, everyone listened to me. It’d be much more difficult in a bigger party to do that.”

Ellen O’Connor says she got involved in Fine Gael during the 2011 general election after feeling let down by the political system. “I felt I couldn’t sit around and complain, and I suppose I felt Fine Gael was the only party with a real plan to get the country back on track.” Richard Bonham agrees. “When you’re part of a society or organisation like this, you can actually try to achieve something and talk to the right people to get it done instead of talking into thin air,” he says.

From top left, clockwise: Ellen O'Connor (FG), Niamh Walsh (FF), Sam Torsney (GP), Rory O'Neill (SWP), Killian O'Sullivan (LAB) Photos: Catherine Healy That perceived ability to change things is also what attracted Neil Warner, who became a Labour member in 2007, to party politics. “I wanted to get involved at a wide, party political level, but I also wanted to do it in a way where there was a chance I could make an actual difference, so Labour seemed the obvious place to go.” Did he consider joining any other left-wing party? “After the age of 15, I never saw the Trot parties as that relevant.”

Rory O’Neill, who laughs off the “Trot” label, finds the SWP’s particular approach to campaigning most appealing. “We consider ourselves part of a tradition that emphasises socialism from below – the self-activity of working people,” he says. “It’s a profoundly anti-Stalinist, anti-authoritarian kind of socialism. That tradition really appealed me.”

But did the British SWP not handle rape allegations in a notoriously authoritarian fashion in 2013, when it “acquitted” a senior official accused of abusing a female member of the party? “The most important thing to emphasise is that they’re a different organisation and that’s significant because I can tell you that my personal opinion of what happened in the UK is that it was awful,” he says. “The way the party dealt with in Britain was totally despicable, indefensible, unforgivable.”

Jonathan Graham is more coy when asked about claims that Sinn Féin covered up sexual abuse. “Our position [on the issue] has been very clear,” he says, reciting the party line. “If anyone is aware of any instances of sexual assault, they need to go to report it to the relevant authorities. Political parties aren’t equipped to deal with these issues.” Does he fully support Gerry Adams’ leadership? “100%. All you have to do is look at our electoral performance under Gerry Adams. We’ve gone from strength to strength in the opinion polls.”

Support for party leaders

Most other party leaders are also popular among their youth ranks.

Fianna Fáil members Briege Mac Oscar and Niamh Walsh commend Micheál Martin’s role in rebuilding the party after the 2011

general election. “There’s still debate around his leadership,” Walsh admits, however. “The problem is that he’s associated with the former coalition by the electorate.

When we were canvassing [in the European and local elections] last year, people would say, ‘If you get rid of Micheál Martin, then I’ll talk to you.’”

Sam Torsney and Aoife Smyth from Trinity Greens are both fans of party leader Eamon Ryan, a former minister in the last coalition government. “I think he’s great,” Smyth says. “He’s put in a huge effort to try to keep the party going at such a tough time.”

Labour Youth’s Neil Warner, on the other hand, says the party hasn’t changed in any meaningful way under Joan Burton’s leadership. “The basic culture of the party – which is a very top down approach to leadership – is still there and very much drives the party,” he says.

Burton’s rhetoric on the issue of social welfare has been particularly disappointing, Warner says.

“One of the biggest core values for any social democratic party is the idea of a welfare state… to mitigate the power of capitalism and the market over workers.

There doesn’t seem, to me, to be an understanding of that among the party’s leadership at the moment.”

Members of Ógra and Trinity Greens are less outspoken when asked about their parties’ involvement in the last coalition government, though. Niamh Walsh – who describes her political views are centrist – says that she didn’t pay much attention to coalition policies as she was still in secondary school at the time. “Someone’s always going to think of a different way to do things,” she says when asked about spending cuts. “To me, they did what they thought was right at the time.”

Briege Mac Oscar agrees. “They faced up to the extremely difficult decisions that had to be made and I think the current government owes a lot to the decisions and plan made by those. including Brian Lenihan. at the time.”

The future, rather the past, is what Aoife Smyth and Sam Torsney from Trinity Greens say they are both concentrating on. “I wasn’t all that interested in politics at the time [that they were in government],” Torsney says. He adds: “The way I see it, they were told, ‘The economy is going to collapse if you don’t plug all this money into it,’ so I don’t know what choice they had in that situation. But the Green Party stance on austerity is that, if it has to be done, it should be done in the most progressive way possible.”

Smyth says she only began to

take an active interest in politics two years after the party left government. Ireland’s financial crisis was not the Green Party’s making, though, she adds. “It was unfortunate that it happened at that time, because that was a global crash and its foundations were laid in Ireland long before the Greens got into government. They obviously made austerity decisions with Fianna Fáil that they didn’t have much choice in.”

Like many of the other Trinity politicos I spoke to, she hopes to get involved in backroom politics after finishing her studies. Only two youth branch members – Briege Mac Oscar and Jonathan Graham – admit that they would consider running for election in the future. Niamh Walsh, while not ruling out a career in politics, says it’s unlikely. “I couldn’t imagine myself as a TD. There’s very little time for politicians to have a personal life, especially if you want to have a family.” The level of abuse faced by political representatives is also off-putting, she adds. “I understand people are annoyed but at the same time politicians give up so much of their time and are doing their best, only to be met with a complete lack of respect.”

Tuesday 24th March 2015

TRINITY NEWS

Features

8

Where budding writers come together Cave Writings is quickly becoming the focal point for Dublin’s young literary set, according to its Trinity founder.

D. Joyce-Ahearne Deputy Editor

Christopher Fettes, an honorary member of the World Esperanto Association, on his Bloomville estate in County Offaly in 2011.

Coffee, grammar and a made up language spoken by real people Irish Green Party founder Christopher Fettes, one of Ireland’s prominent Esperantists won’t try to convert you, although he’s always open to a friendly chat.

Conor O'Donovan Features Editor

Maurice Casey Staff Writer As soon as we take our seats opposite him, Christopher Fettes is sliding two copies of the best English-language Esperanto guide he’s found to date across the table.

Though he distinguishes himself from the movement’s more evangelical contingent, as a linguist Mr. Fettes never shies away from the company of Esperantists, or even potential esperantists. That being said, he is quite happy not to “suffer fools” who don’t see its obvious appeal.

Both Maurice and I have come to the café at the Chester Beatty library with different expectations. Having an academic linguist for a parent and having studied French at third level, I was sceptical. I’d been led to believe that Esperanto was rigid and overly codified. By contrast Maurice had a long standing interest in the language’s success, compared to other invented languages. When Fettes admitted that he too had been hostile to the idea of Esperanto while studying French at Trinity, I wondered if we were about to be enlightened.

There is, at least, a precedent for any potential conversion as the historical links between Ireland and Esperanto are plentiful.

According to one piece of Esperanto mythology, green was chosen as the colour of the Esperanto flag because Ludwig Zamenhof, the creator of the language, saw Ireland as a ‘hopeful’ country.

Indeed, one of the earliest Esperanto-English texts was penned by the eccentric Irish linguist Richard Henry Geoghegan. Born to Irish parents in Liverpool, Geoghegan spent much of his childhood on the lower Rathmines road before eventually studying philology in Oxford. He discovered Esperanto during his studies and remained an advocate of the language throughout his life, becoming particularly vocal when a group known as the Idoists attempted to reform the language.

In his later years, Geoghegan crafted dictionaries of Inuit languages as one of the early Alaskan pioneers. In addition to constructing the first dictionary of the Aleut tongue, he also developed a particular penchant for local “ladies of the line”. His colourful life as an impassioned proponent of Esperanto and one of the most renowned philologists in the Western world ended in the company of these female com-

panions in an Alaskan log cabin.

Fettes begins by encouraging us to study a short passage in Esperanto as he reads it aloud.

He enthusiastically points out its phonetic nature. To my ear, the placement of the stresses has an Italian resonance. Dr Fettes points out that Italian is a language of clear phonemes. Esperanto is a much clearer language still as there are no “faux amies” as there are in French. It is also much easier to ask about the words you don’t in Esperanto.

Fettes finishes our impromptu grammar session by teaching the universal verb endings for the past, present and future in “about 20 seconds.”

Irish proponents

Maurice is not quite as dazzled as I am. The final line, which affirms that Esperanto merits serious consideration, catches his attention. A parallel is between Esperanto and the Irish language.

Though Irish appears an active language by the amount of literature produced in it, Maurice notes that much of this literature is oddly defensive and discusses the dangers the language faces.

Fettes argues that Irish will survive as, much like the case of Esperanto, there are people who care passionately about it. It is the role of schools to find those who “wish to be enamoured by their native language.” Teaching everyone Irish is a waste of time.

On the subject of Irish fervour, James Connolly and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, two individuals ingrained in the Irish psyche partly through their untimely deaths amidst the events of 1916, are also claimed by Esperantists as early proponents of the “internacia lingvon”. Indeed, SheehySkeffington, as a young pacifist growing up in Co. Cavan, wrote to a local newspaper noting ‘gaelic is irretrievably dead’ and argued the nation would be much better served in taking up Esperanto.

Following the creation of the Irish Free State, a group of Trinity professors would court controversy in a similar vein, contending that the nascent state should adopt compulsory teaching of a ‘practical, universal’ language rather than Irish. As Ireland regressed into the 1930s, Esperanto dropped from its already marginal place on the public agenda. In January of 1928, Irish newspapers recorded the appearance of Esperanto on the curriculum of Blackrock Technical School. However, this unprecedented event was counterbalanced by an Irish Independent article published a month later bearing the headline “Esperanto - A Red Danger”.

Struggle for official recognition

Beyond Ireland, Esperanto continually struggled to receive official recognition. In the same year that Trinity professors provoked the Irish speaking community, a League of Nations report recommending the mandatory teaching of Esperanto in member states was defeated. The chief opposition emanated from France, a nation often perceived as being overzealously protective of their own language.

Poignantly, the history of the movement began to mirror the many tragedies of the period. Zamenhof died in 1917 as the world seemed interminably consumed by the very conflict he envisioned his language would prevent. Of Jewish ethnicity, the remnants of the his family would perish in the concentration camps of the Second World War. Remarkably, Esperantists were singled out by both Nazis and Communist regimes. Stalin termed Esperanto “the language of spies”.

As Europe moved through the twentieth century, languages across the continent struggled to keep up the pace as new terms were required for the latest manifestations of ethno-nationalist barbarism. Did these cataclysmic events serve to resign Esperanto to the dustbin of history, rendering it another Utopian dream demoralised in the face of human irrationality? Fettes’ presence in front of us would suggest not.

That said, his previously mentioned views on the learning of one’s native language are similar to his views on learning Esperanto. He is not going to force it in people’s faces, even if the benefits for those who are interested are considerable. To better illustrate these benefits in our own minds, we are asked to consider how many speakers of French there are. Outside of adding populations of native speakers, the point at which someone approaching French as a second language becomes a speaker is unclear. In Esperanto, this is not so much the case. Fettes relates how he once encountered a young Esperantist who had only started learning the language two weeks previously.

While this is an extraordinary case, it is a language that can be picked up quickly.

Fettes recently found himself in Nitra, Slovakia, where he came across 300 people our age “seriously engaged” in learning Esperanto. Despite the earnestness of these young Esperantists, Fettes is pragmatic about the willingness of the majority to learn second languages. He also accepts that most learn languages to uti-

lise them practically, such as his Russian friend who learned English to “make money”. Though many no doubt extend the same pragmatism to Esperanto, this particular Russian friend learned it to “make friends.” Fellow speakers automatically wanting to talk to you is not a trait common to all languages.

Though most of them “recognise it’s a good idea”, at least in theory, Fettes mostly discusses other topics with his friends, such as the Green Party (which he founded in Ireland), in English or French. He is quick to assure us that he will not bombard our email inboxes with further literature. A more extreme acquaintance of his had a habit of shoving Esperantist literature into the slots through which vendors would give him his train tickets.

These days, however, Fettes relates that most of those he knows in the movement are realistic in their appraisal of the language, contrary to the zealousness usually associated with the language.

This dates back he says, to the language’s association with pacifist movement at the beginning of the 20th century. He does not eulogise on the need to travel to Slovakia to immerse ourselves in the language. We can pick it up ourselves online using sites such as Lernu.

As for it the perception of Esperanto as a “boring language”, Fettes points to the extensive body of literature written in Esperanto. Zamenhof, “a man with working knowledge of half a dozen languages”, translated many works into his new language, including The Old Testament and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (which he translated from German). The trend of translation has continued, with artists as diverse as Tolkien, Tolstoi and Baudelaire getting the Esperanto treatment.

Fluid semantics

It is the fluid semantics of the language, though, that is its appeal.

Esperanto grants the poet more freedom to rearrange words to achieve different rhythmic effects than in English where meaning is bound up in the order of words.

Outside of the rarefied sphere of poetry, Esperanto has given birth to everything from clandestine Cold War communications to 1920s Erotica. However, cinematic works in the language have proved less commendable.

Incubus, the universally reviled William Shatner film shot entirely in Esperanto is mentioned.

Fettes leaves out a laugh, “What an awful film!”

I found the notion that Esperanto could be used in a nuanced,

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A more extreme acquaintance of his had a habit of shoving Esperantist literature into the slots through which vendors would give him train tickets. literary way bizarre. My understanding of the language as a creation intended to facilitate international communication had fostered a sense of sterile artificiality. In Fettes’ mind a student doesn’t pick up the nuances which make French a stimulating language to read until they are a teenager or even a young adult.

Compared to their understanding of English which was formed in infancy, my understanding of French as a second language is equally artificial.

More striking than this revelation about my own linguistic identity was Fettes’ own admission that if he met a French Esperantist his first instinct would be to communicate in Esperanto.

He recalls reading a book in Esperanto at the age of thirty-two and finding that it “just made sense.”

Rather than accepting French as the answer to the world language problem he “began to feel French was part of it.” Native fluency in a second language is rare, but less so in Esperanto, Fettes maintains.

Though I found his advocacy of the language sincere, I was not completely convinced. As we left the Chester Beatty, it became clear that our perceptions of the language were largely unchanged. I’m still sceptical of what I’ve been told is a made up language, whereas Maurice is still interested in the language’s Internationalist past. For Fettes, however, it truly is the only language in which two non-native speakers can communicate with complete equality, and forget what language they are speaking. However, despite the constant possibility of bantering with strangers, Fettes’ affinity with the language is poignantly personal: “If some strange disease wiped out everyone else who spoke the language, I would not be sorry to have learnt it” he says. “I would go on reading.”

On February 5th, in the Wine Cave of KC Peaches on Nassau Street, a group of 20 odd 20-somethings listened to each other read their poems and short stories. There was no name for what was going on until about half an hour in when someone threw out the name Cave Writings - which seemed apt. The readers read a mixture of previously published and unpublished work and everyone drank wine.

The readings started at one end of the room and finished at the other end because it was figured that it was easier to hear them there. There was a lot of figuring out on the night.

Every week since the first evening in February, usually Thursdays, what has become known as the Cave has taken place downstairs in KC Peaches. Readers get a glass of wine on the house and students (which most of those in attendance are) get a discount on wine and beer. During the interval there are canapés. Cave Writings is the baby of Fionn Rogan, a Trinity student and writer who works in KC Peaches. When the Wine Cave needed a new hook it was Rogan who saw the issue as the solution to another problem: Dublin’s young writers’ need of a focal point and free wine.

Cave Writings, Rogan says, was founded as a space for people to meet and share ideas: “We found there was no frequent gathering for young writers. You had sporadic events but nothing fixed.”

The Cave has been a weekly fixture now for seven weeks. Having grown from what was a mostly Trinity affair on the first night there are now young people from all over coming and reading, listening and talking.

Building a community

“We’re community building,” says Rogan. “It’s for sharing ideas and styles. It’s what we ourselves were after as young writers: a place to meet other writers, good company and conversation. There is an established literary community but it’s disconnected from younger people doing new things.” But he makes the point of saying that it’s not an event exclusively for young people, though it appears, and is often the case, young people are doing the most interesting things in Irish writing. “It’s mostly young people but we don’t want to limit ourselves in any way. The Cave has grown organically and isn’t dictated by any one style so this means we hear a lot of fresh interesting work. I mean in the first Cave we had a poem about the devil fucking god.”

The Cave was birthed as a literary event similar to usual readings but, as it grew, it expanded.

On the second night, there were scientific readings on the pineal gland and an argument against the reintroduction of wolves into Ireland. Science has become a staple of the reading list. Rogan sees this variety as one of the Cave’s strengths: “It’s a gathering of creatives. Literature is our bread and butter but we love hearing about new ideas. Bread and butter needs jam. I’m fascinated by people’s passions. They’re who we want speaking, passionate people.” He added: “You could have no knowledge or interest in their fields and yet listening to them is electric. We’ve had people speak on niche subjects that noone had ever been exposed to but when it’s delivered with passion it becomes fascinating. In this way people are exposed to ideas they wouldn’t or couldn’t have had.

There’s such a huge variety of human knowledge that people are closed off to because they don’t have the opportunity to interact with it. The Cave offers a space for this exchange.”

Though poetry and prose will remain the staples, the Cave is becoming more and more of an interdisciplinary space. Recently, the GUM Collective, a group of 13 artists who are all final year NCAD students, has gotten involved. On March 13th, the Collective’s Aaron Smyth and Stephen Lau presented their work and spoke to the Cave, bringing a new dimension of visual arts.

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In creative communities that flourished in the past, people needed to get drunk together, fight and fuck.

Sounding board

For writers, Cave Writings offers a sounding board for new work.

With the glut of recent literary publications that Irish talent has demanded, the Cave is a testing ground where writers can try things and seek feedback from other writers before submitting to the growing number of journals. Michael Naghten Shanks, editor of The Bohemyth, one of the most interesting of the new wave of Irish literary journals, sees the Cave as something unique: “There’s no lack of venues or events around Dublin in which people can read, perform and discuss their work but most are tailored towards a specific audience. Cave Writings offers something different to that. It’s a place for creatives of all types to engage with each other.”

Reducing the divide between the individual artist and the literary journals is part of the Cave’s project. This it hopes to do through “Cave Writings Presents...” which are nights at the Cave devoted to the launch and featured writers of a specific publication. The first of these took place last Thursday with Cave Writings Presents Icarus and TCD Miscellany. There are plans to host similar events with both The Bohemyth and the Belleville Park Pages in the future.

As well as introducing editors to new talent and vice versa, these nights aim to further build up a real world community where texts can come off the page and readers and writers can meet.

The Cave is ultimately a drive towards humanising a community that currently only really exists on paper and online.

Interactions

Cave Writings is a fixed physical space where people can come and actually engage in a community, rather than just interact with it online. At Cave Writings, conversation is not limited to 140 characters. Will Cox, the editor of the Belleville Park Pages, when discussing creative communities that flourished in the past, always insists that first and foremost there needs to be human contact: “People need to get drunk together, fight and fuck.”

There is of course a Cave Writings Twitter account and a Facebook page and also a SoundCloud account with recordings of each session. But the social media side of things is utilitarian, a means to an end. The Cave is first and foremost an event. It’s exists only in so far as it facilitates the interactions of people as they think, talk and form relationships. It’s not good enough that people should start following each other on Twitter because they saw someone mentioned through the Cave Writing’s account. As Rogan puts it “We’ve taken the online community and added a much needed dose of reality.”

Since the Cave has started at least one new journal has been started. Undoubtedly more people have started writing in Dublin. As long as people continue to create there will be a need for a space for them to discuss, debate, meet, fight and fuck. With so much going on in Dublin’s creative scene the Cave will occupy an important space, first and foremost by being a space. People need a regular point of contact to see what else is being done around them. It’s inspiring to see what others are doing around you and it incentivises writers to see that others are striving to create and thriving in the same environment as they are.

Photo: Cave Writings

Tuesday 24th March 2015

TRINITY NEWS

Features

9

IN REVIEW: TCDSU 2014-15 As the current sabbatical officers of Trinity College Dublin Students' Union head into the final weeks of their tenures, our news staffers cast a cold eye back on their election manifestos and assess their performances to date.

President Conall Monaghan Reading Domhnall McGlackenByrne’s long SU Council reports is a surefire way of inducing a headache. If you do take the time to analyse them, however, the amount of work he has done since taking on his position becomes clear.

One of the key election commitments he has delivered on is the SU strategic plan, which he described in his manifesto as providing an “overarching vision” for what the union should be focusing on over the next three years.

While it may be easy to forget how ambitious the concept of a long-term plan, along with the establishment of a board of trustees, was for the SU, the move could potentially restructure how the SU functions by making it possible for its goals to develop over the years rather than having to restart every June with new sabbatical officers.

McGlacken-Byrne has also significant work done with the Trinity Access Programmes (TAP), establishing the first ever SU access officer and approving a major funding plan to renovate TAP classrooms and resources.

Among the campaigns he excelled in was the large-scale voter registration drive that saw 3,150 Trinity students registering to vote in the equal marriage referendum in November. Many of the proposed new and increased student charges are likely to be passed by the College Board this week, but the SU did manage to remove the proposed supplemental examination fee.

Manifesto promises that have yet to be achieved include an increase in plug sockets for the Lecky and Berkeley libraries, the development of a feedback app, and an online book exchange system. While this is disappointing, the proposals were still occasionally brought up in SU Council reports, showing that efforts were at least made to bring them into fruition.

Another criticism of McGlacken-Byrne’s tenure as SU president is that the results of last year’s direct provision referendum whose passing mandated the SU to oppose the controversial system on a long-term basis - have been completely ignored. A year later, there has been no discussion of the issue as there has been with other political matters the SU has campaigned on. Despite this oversight, however, he has proved to be an effective and inclusive organiser on social issues.

Education Lia Flattery Katie Byrne’s election manifesto concentrated on promises to improve the class rep system, reform exam timetabling and the appeals process and increase student accessibility to academic resources and engagement with their course.

She pledged to cut spending on class rep training while increasing value for money by equipping reps with more practical skills.

Having successfully secured sponsorship for next year’s training, she has been working on establishing an online nomination and voting system for class rep elections and is confident that it will be up and running for the 2015-16 academic year. Plans to reduce the financial cost of the event were not tackled this year.

A training event for SU faculty conveners, conducted by Byrne, placed a strong emphasis on conveners “setting their own goals to make real changes where they saw issues within their schools,” which she considered an improvement on previous years’ training.

Her ideas surrounding reform of exam timetabling and the appeals process included increasing the amount of time that students have to appeal results by five days and ensuring that “exams are timetabled with a minimum of 24 hours between the start time of each exam and that students should sit a maximum of four exams in a five-day week.” In December 2014, Byrne told Trinity News that “serious consideration” was being given to the possibility of Christmas exams and that a review of the appeals process was due to take place this semester, however, no allusion has been made to this review in her subsequent council reports. An update for the student body on the progress of these aspirations is overdue.

She sought to expand the availability of the GradLink mentor programme, which connects undergraduates with graduate student peer mentors, to a broader range of courses and to run a series of faculty specific careers seminars for students. The GradLink programme was extended

to the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy, however, financial restraints will hinder further development for the time being.

Her proposed Trinity student blog, which would be open to all students and offer a “way to explore all aspects of their subject outside of their everyday lecturers and coursework,” has yet to materialise.

Outside of her manifesto goals, Byrne has had several notable successes. She played a key role in formulating plans for the SU’s ‘Sun Room,’ due to be developed in Goldsmith Hall and intended to provide a therapeutic space for students. In response to an influx of students seeking grinds at the beginning of the year, she arranged a partnership between the SU and online grinds service UniTuition, replacing the SU’s “inefficient and out of date” grinds database. She was also heavily involved in the organisation of the Women in Leadership Campaign, which included workshops, panel discussions and visits to the college by prominent female leaders.

Welfare Conall Monaghan Ian Mooney’s election promises were sorted under the headings of mental health, sexual and physical health, equality and support.

These buzzwords run the gamut of what a welfare officer should professionally be concerned with and Ian did manage to achieve significant successes in all areas.

His biggest achievement is arguably his handling of the accommodation crisis. According to one SU council report, it was Mooney’s idea to hand out 20,000 flyers to homes around the Dublin city area asking if they would be interested in renting out a room. This led to the procurement of nearly 300 “digs” for students who had yet to find accommodation. The accommodation advisory service also saw the amount of students requiring assistance double and few, if any, complaints were heard about its operations.

Mooney also placed a big emphasis on campaigning on issues of mental health and equality this year. The campaign weeks were well promoted and the marriage equality bill became very topical

with the help of a popular promotional video as well as push to register voters. There was also the release of a sexual assault survey that shocked a large proportion of students, finding that one in four female Trinity students have been sexually assaulted. Mooney and Aoife O’Brien, the SU gender equality officer, spearheaded the study, and should be commended for sparking a much-needed conversation about the issue of sexual consent.

However, Mooney’s year has not been without its flaws, as several of his campaign promises have not yet materialised.

Firstly, there was the restructuring of the campaign weeks, which he told Trinity News during his campaign season was the biggest thing he would like to change.

Mooney had suggested a dismantling of these weeks and a more constant promotion of the issues throughout the year. For the most part this never happened: there was the removal of SHIFT week, but aside from that all the other weeks have remained in place.

There were also promises to provide a weekly blog and an online support system. The weekly blog, as of now, has one posting but Mooney said he would try to do more. The online support system was scrapped due to time constraints Mooney cites the large amount of casework that he had not anticipated as a reason for not completing everything he had intended to and still says he would if he had more time. Dealing with the problems of individual students is of course a very important aspect of the job but working on the promises that got you elected should be too. While Mooney was an effective and forward-thinking welfare officer, the tradition of SU candidates campaigning on big proposals and then capitulating once elected needs to be addressed.

Comms Lia Flattery Samuel Riggs’ campaign promises for the role of communications officer centred around three main themes: to build upon relations between the SU and College, to improve the quality of

From top left, clockwise: Ian Mooney (welfare), Domhnall McGlackenByrne (president), Katie Byrne (education), Finn Murphy (entertainment), Samuel Riggs (communications) Photos: Attie Papas the University Times (UT) and to change the way that students interact with the SU. Riggs’ manifesto pledged to improve SU-College relations by establishing a new committee of students and sabbatical officers whose purpose would be to voice the needs of the student body to College and, in turn, keep students informed on College’s plans. While none of his monthly reports at SU council make any mention of a committee being formed, he told Trinity News in December that contact between the SU and College representatives had become more consistent.

His promises within the remit of UT editor included the expansion of the UT writers workshops, the introduction of master classes teaching section-specific writing skills and the creation of a health science correspondent. Headway was made in all of these areas.

Several workshops and master classes have taken place on campus and in Halls and the position of health science correspondent was established along with Irish language and LGBT correspondents.

This year also saw the rebranding of UT’s supplement paper, now called UT+, as well as the holding of the first ever UT hustings for the sabbatical officer elections. However, Riggs’ progress in this area came to a halt when he took a permanent leave of absence from his position as editor, having been asked to step aside from the role by several senior members of the editorial team.

UT reported that this was due to “tension [that] had arisen in the newsroom, following a series of actions” that they felt “Riggs had failed to take responsibility for,” including the publication of confidential correspondences relating to the Phil, resulting in the withdrawal of the paper's January issue.

In terms of how students connect with the SU, Riggs proposed the inclusion of monthly updates on the activities of sabbatical officers in the SU email as well as adding a live feed of information on the SU’ s latest events to their website. While Riggs admitted in December 2014 that the monthly email updates “haven’t been going so well” and that they would continue monthly after December, his subsequent emails after the Christmas break have contained no such reports. He oversaw the redesign of the SU website, but the live information feed is still nowhere to be seen.

Riggs was successful in his plans for the addition of a new tab to the website, allowing students to access information on past SU campaigns, their policies on various topics and on how students can bring motions to council.

Despite this, the transformation in the way that students engage with the SU, that Riggs dedicated himself to achieving, has yet to be seen.

Ents Andrew O'Donovan Finn Murphy, during the last SU election, implored that the student body let him entertain them.

They obliged. Did he deliver? A collaboration with Players and Trinity Arts Festival resulted in a murder mystery on a train which, by all accounts, was a raving success. The bring-your-own-beer

event with a 1920s dress code featured students from Players enacting an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery as the train trundled through the night tunes pumping from the “dance carriage”. Few other organisations on campus can hope to stage such an ambitious event, which could be the answer to the perennial question of what Ents provides that societies don’t already. Codenamed Train 2.0 until recently, MasqueRail is a follow up scheduled for April 1st as a result of the success of the murder mystery. ¤23.5k was raised during this year’s RAG week, which will be shared among 11 designated charities. Ents is commendable for staging, perhaps, the only university “Raise and Give” week in the country that isn’t a piss up. A quiz, iron-stomach competition, “favours auction” and dodgeball and five-a-side tournaments all contributed to surpassing the total raised last year by ¤1,500.

Trinity Ball, which takes place later this month, is headlined by dance group Basement Jaxx.

After receiving criticism from students not impressed by the event's distinctly electro/dance lineup this year, Murphy wrote in his monthly sabbatical report, “If you’re angry please don’t take it out on me. I tried my best to get MCD to book a strong lineup and literally could not get any more out of them.” Nonetheless, demand for tickets was as high as ever. It seems the experience of Trinity Ball is enticing enough in itself to attract enough interest to

sell out.

An election manifesto pledge was for a film festival on campus.

As excellent as the idea of a film festival was, its scale and publicity were disappointing. There was a talk with the lead graphic designer for the film Grand Budapest Hotel and a handful of film screenings.

Another idea of Murphy’s was a trip abroad that would take place during the summer. Styled as “Ents on tour,” it was to be a week-long yacht-flotilla cruise around the Greek Islands. However, despite having taken considerable effort to organise, it was eventually shelved due to a lack of sufficient concrete interest.

Or, as Murphy put it, not enough people transitioning from “Yeah, this is deadly” to “Yeah, I’ll pay my deposit.”

Together with incoming officer Katie Cogan, Murphy decided to replace what had been the inefficient and informal Ents Crew with an elected Ents committee (see our report on pg. 4). He has spoken before about having been “a lot busier in the job than I ever thought I would be” and says that a committee will allow for planning of more than one event simultaneously, thereby leading to a greater diversity of events.

While Finn Murphys’ term was not radically different from those of any of his immediate predecessors, Ents has consistently delivered good events this year and the introduction of an Ents committee may well be felt for years to come.

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Tuesday 24th March 2015

TRINITY NEWS

Features

11

On making the most out of your daily commute Blokias, lockers and tin foil are all key to surviving those longer treks into college.

Emer McGinnity Contributor As a veteran commuter from the cultural cornucopia of Dundalk, I know all of the bus drivers of the service by name, taste in radio station, and small talk topic of choice. I therefore feel qualified to advise you on how to avoid the many pitfalls involved in commuting. Whether you make the daily “trek” from “the country”, that is any barren wasteland which lies beyond the bright lights of Dublin as city kids would have it, or you board the moving hospital waiting room that is the Dart, you probably face a myriad of irritating daily inconveniences.

When these obstacles accumulate, they may threaten to reduce you to a sodden and weeping heap, the bags containing your life around you and an umbrella that has turned itself inside out one too many times clutched in your hand.

You are a special kind of student who pays the ultimate price for remaining in the enclave of magically refilling fridges and clean bathrooms, known locally as home. This accelerates the need for organisation skills that you should not be forced to develop until you are a real adult that knows how to fill out tax forms and owns their own hoover.

I wish to impart my hard-earned wisdom to you, my bleary eyed bus buddies and train chums.

Go low tech

Illustration:: Mubashir Sultan

ESCAPING A BROKEN HEALTH SYSTEM Trinity medics outline their reasons for emigrating and react to plans to make them stay.

Tadgh Healy Deputy Features Editor A recent NUI Galway study of medical students in Ireland found that 88% of respondents were considering pursuing their professional career overseas following graduation. Of course, soon after the study was published, the headline “9 in 10 medical students may leave Ireland” quickly squeezed its way into the national press, prompting a new question of Ireland’s old problem: how do you tackle emigration when some of the brightest, and frankly most employable graduates are choosing to leave?

A closer look at NUIG’s study reveals that the situation is not quite as ominous as the headline might first suggest. Slightly over 2,000 students across Ireland’s six medical schools were surveyed, however, 1,519 of these were Irish. It’s fair to assume that the quarter who are not Irish are more likely to practice outside of Ireland when they graduate.

Nevertheless, even if foreign students are discounted, Irish medics still make up many of the 34% who said they definitely plan to emigrate, and make up the majority of the 54% who said they are considering emigration. It may not quite be 9 out of 10, but the significant majority of Irish medical students are considering emigration.

Push factors

The question is what is pushing them away from Ireland, or indeed pulling them towards Australia, Canada, and the United States. Irish medics typically train for five years, and then complete an intern year in Ireland. Traditionally, they have been encouraged to then go abroad and gain practical experience, and the assumption has always been that one day they will return. Now there is real worry within the medical community that they won’t. The NUIG study put the most popular reasons for this under three broad categories: career opportunities, working conditions and lifestyle.

Dairé Rothwell, a final-year medic in Trinity, does plan to emigrate after his intern year. He says, “[This] is the case for most of my class I would imagine.” However, he sees himself returning to Ireland in the long term. For him, the “allure of travel” is the impetus behind his intention to emigrate temporarily. “It’s not as if for most of us we feel driven away by an arduous system.” However, Rothwell does concede, “Certainly after intern level there’s still a perception of very long working hours and limited training opportunities.”

“

Forced contracts set the precedent that the state wants to see purely an economic return on its investment, rather than appreciate the social benefits of a cohesive, caring medical profession.

Eoin Murphy, a second-year medical student also in Trinity, does not believe the tide is turning fast enough. He describes his shock when he heard of doctors in Irish hospitals campaigning for a 24-hour maximum shift to be implemented nationwide: “The prospect of working longer than this frightens me, as I would have reservations about my ability to care for patients - the raison d’etre of the medical profession.”

This is one of the main reasons why Murphy is himself seriously considering emigrating. “It seems balancing the rota is more important than ensuring optimal care for people, and I’m not sure if this is a system I would be comfortable working in. The HSE has ignored, and continues to ignore, the 13-hour EU shift limit. This is the law and covers doctors’ (and other healthcare professionals’) rights as workers. The bare minimum of a system would be to respect these rights.”

Indeed, the subject of Murphy’s criticism has not been ignored by the EU. The advocate general of the European Court of Justice, in an opinion published on the 19th March, said that Ireland was in breach of its working time directive, and as a result the Irish Medical Organisation has said the government may face fines of up to ¤100 million. The European Court has yet to announce its verdict, however, in almost all cases it upholds the opinion of the Advocate General. Speaking to The Irish Times, Eric Young, assistant director of industrial relations at the Irish Medical Organisation, claimed that 33% of non-consultant hospital doctors were routinely required to work in excess of the legal 48-hour limit.

Plugging the shortage

Unsurprisingly, these claims are indicative of a shortage of doctors and a culture of emigration.

Moreover, this culture seems to have spread to medical students, even though they themselves often have had little exposure to professional working shifts. With Irish doctors increasingly relocating abroad and those in training planning to follow suit, Ireland is attempting to plug to shortage with doctors trained overseas.

34% of doctors currently practicing in Ireland were not trained here. This is one of the highest proportions within the OECD nations and the trend is increasing.

However, this fact often makes the professional lives of doctors even more difficult. Those trained outside of the EU face significant challenges in pursuing their careers in Ireland, which are not encountered by those trained in Ireland or Europe. To qualify for trainee positions, non-EU medical graduates must first pass a pre-registration examination, but also possess a ‘Certificate of Experience’. This certificate is effectively proof that the doctor in question has completed an internship equivalent to what an intern in an Irish hospital would complete. Yet, crucially, the Medical Council only considers graduates from New Zealand, Australia, Pakistan, South Africa, Sudan and Malaysia to have a Certificate of Experience equivalent in standard to one issued in Ireland. This means that non-EU doctors not trained in these six countries cannot apply to trainee positions in Ireland, even if they have a number of years’ experience working in Irish hospitals. Not only does this damage the careers prospects of doctors whom this country is reliant on, but also provides a disincentive for doctors to travel and work in Ireland, where in fact they are in high demand.

The emigration of Irish doctors is not only an Irish problem. Despite the barriers they face, many foreign educated doctors travel to Ireland in search of higher salaries. The faster Irish educated doctors emigrate, the greater the demand to fill the gap. Dr. Diarmuid O’Donovan, a lecturer who supervised the NUIG study, has picked up on this phenomenon: “Not only is this a problem for Irish recruitment, but we need to be mindful of World Health Organisation guidelines on international recruitment and taking skilled personnel away from countries that have medical staff shortages.”

Although Ireland does have its own problems with a lack of healthcare professionals, the situation is even more acute in other EU nations. The Polish city of Radom has one of the fastest shrink-

ing populations in the country, and what has been termed “Euro-orphans” is a serious problem there and across other areas of Europe. Many parents are leaving their children in the care of grandparents so they can work abroad where they can command a higher salary and send home money. Speaking to the Observer, the director of the local job centre in Radom, Jozef Bakula, said, “The city is 10 GPs short. The situation is paradoxical because we have absorbed the cost of their education and training and often their upkeep, and then they go abroad and we’re no longer the beneficiary of their skills or the GDP they’re creating.”

By NUMBERS:

Return on investment

83%

Dealing with the problem of emigration from Ireland then, may also decelerate the rate skilled workers are leaving other countries. The question of how to deal with it has frustrated governments, industry and service sectors, and families for years. However, increasingly there is a sense that emigrating doctors should be held to a higher standard than other Irish graduates. Proponents of this view make a similar argument to Bakula. The UCD economist Cormac Ó Gráda has argued that because the cost of educating every doctor is so high relative to many other graduates (he estimates ¤300,000), the state should be entitled to a return on its investment. The argument is that medical students should feel obliged to care for those people whose taxes have contributed to their education. The idea being floated is that Irish graduates should be required to practice medicine in Ireland, at least until they have offset the cost off their third level education.

This approach is one that Rothwell and Murphy are equally critical of. “With regard to the argument we should feel shackled to the Irish health service, frankly I find that concept offensive,” Rothwell says. “Especially when one considers we will virtually all at least do our internship here and many, if not most of us, will go abroad and gain experience that we will later come back with.”

Murphy agrees with Rothwell that it is unfair to single out medics: “Plenty of people from all walks of life emigrate from Ireland. Many graduates who benefitted from taxpayer-funded third level education have studied dentistry, mathematics, engineering and commerce.” He also makes the wider point: “There are graduate and foreign students who pay fees and it would be remiss to bind them in a contract.” His argument is particularly applicable to EU students. While non-EU students meet the ¤32,000 cost of

88%

Medical students considering emigration

85%

Cite career prospects among factors influencing decision

Considering emigration cite working conditions NUIG study , March 2015 their tuition fees, students from all over the EU pay the same student contribution as Irish medical students. Ó’Gráda’s argument would therefore imply that EU students are also obliged to practice in Ireland and reimburse the taxpayer.

"Also," Murphy continues:, "the he notion of paying back our economic cost to the state sends a disturbing message. Is the value of having motivated compassionate doctors solely an economic one? Forced contracts set the precedent that the state wants to see purely an economic return on its investment, rather than appreciate the social benefits of a cohesive medical profession, enabled to provide care.”

Other critics of Ó’Grada’s proposal have similar objections, arguing that to halt the emigration of doctors we should try to engineer a healthcare system they want to work in, rather than chaining them to the current one.

In a letter to The Irish Times on March 14th, Eoin Feeny, a consultant physician in infectious diseases at St. Vincent’s Hospital, wrote: “Proposals to charge people more for medical training or stop them from leaving would be extremely counter-productive.

Instead may I suggest an attempt to deliver better working and training conditions, and an improvement in relationships with health service management?”

Murphy puts it this way: “When you have invested in somebody (financially or emotionally), I would hope the reaction to their leaving would be to ask why they are upset, not how can I stop them.”

You may feel like a dusty relic worthy of a spot on Reeling in the Years if you don’t have a smartphone, but there are many benefits to having a phone that has proper buttons and a version of Snake. Smartphones are like babies: they need to be recharged multiple times a day, they’re constantly making jarring noises, and will unpredictably shut down or go berserk at the most inopportune times. You have enough to deal with without doing laps of the library looking for a spare socket. Same goes for laptops, they are not worth the weight.

Have some retro fun and take notes with vintage items like a pen and paper. For the first few days your handwriting will look like a drunk person did it with their foot, but soon you’ll return to your peak penmanship.

Resign yourself to a hunchback life

After one year of commuting, my older sister could not stand up straight without grimacing. Now, this is partly because she doesn’t believe in pain killers and mistrusts all health professionals, including physiotherapists, like bush hippy that she is, but carrying everything she needed for a day’s work and play on her back like a snail didn’t help either. This is my third year as a commuter, and standing up from my chair now releases a snap, crackle, or a pop like from the spongyy depths of my rice krispie-like bones.

Embrace grunge

If, like me, you like to think of a single phrase for each day’s outfit, with pirate break dancer or parachutist from the 80s entering your daily vocabulary, grunge will be your new definition. I more often than not have yesterday’s eyeliner crusted to my face. There will be the remnants of a club stamp on my hand, the ink bled into the criss cross thicket of my skin, because the soap in the arts block is ineffectual and smells like Turkish delight. Dreadlocks borne of excessive dry shampoo use are bang on trend and infinitely more bohemian than ones that you pay for.

Tin foil your life

Assuming you are commuting because of financial reasons, you probably bring a packed lunch to college. Although bringing a lunch box of nutritious and moist pasta salad seems like a good idea to keep you going, it is a path with many pitfalls, all of which occur after the cold slime makes its way down your gullet. Lunchboxes fill a considerable space in your bag that could instead be used for Babybels, loom bands, bubbles and other items a college student needs. The longer you go without washing your various smeared containers, the more likely it is that there will micro-organisms there. There are few things bleaker than a lunchbox that used to house mushroom pasta supporting the life of an altogether less appetising fungus.

Avoid the temptation to whine

Few things are as satisfying as the sympathy you get when people find out you get up at 5:30am.

The awestruck faces, the assertions that “I seriously could not do that” and the compliments about how perky and “put together” you always are. However, commenting on how beautiful the sun rise was this morning is far more productive than complain-

“

Few things are as satisfying as the sympathy you get when people find out you get up at 5:30am. ing that your hair is falling out from exhaustion. Seeming serene and grateful for life will get you so much more head pats and tummy rubs than being a slumping bore.

Every nice thing that people say to me will be followed up and reinforced with “AND you get up at 5:30am!” to which I demurely nod and shrug in humble admission of my own greatness.

Also, picking a wake up time based on the shock and awe factor is nothing to be ashamed of. I lay in bed pivoting in my warm cotton membrane until 5:40am this morning, but I would never say I get up at 5:40am. 5:40am is a reasonable time that organised people like mothers who exercise get up at, something to admire but it does not entice people to literally pat you on the back or say “No seriously, I’ll get your coffee.”

Get a locker

If newspaper regulations allowed it, I would put this one in bold and italics and underline it and make it a size 30, and I would maybe actually go so far as to put it in Comic Sans, the glue-sniffing children’s TV presenter of fonts.

Really though, I know that the temptation is strong to ease yourself back into the year and not start off on an early morning to queue for a locker, but you will sorely regret this in the least figurative way possible.

The contents of my locker currently are: several bottles of wine, spare underwear and tights, my text books, magazines, non-perishable snacks, and five board games. Not only has my social life improve immeasurably this year (see above list), but my stress levels and stabbing back pain have accordingly levelled off. The Hamilton is prime real estate because it’s open 24 hours a day and because I have yet had to wait for someone else to finish bumbling at their lockers to access mine. Be warned though, there are always sports bags and related paraphernalia on and around my locker, because science students, unlike arts block kids, are healthy and have long-term life plans that do not involve choking to death on a menthol filter at a gluten free spoken word event at the ripe old age of 27.

Embrace your non-committal side

Live like the various dimensions of himself that Matthew McConaughey played in all of his films before everyone started taking him seriously, and commit to nothing, including extracurricular responsibilities. Your CV may be sparse compared to those of your peers, but it is better than taking on too much and getting so stressed that you eat all of the Oreos on campus, vending machines included (a cathartic and bloated moment in my personal development.) Get used to being a flakey friend that does not confirm (or cancel) social arrangements until that morning when you text the person at 5:50am. The fact that you sent the message at 5:50am usually makes people more understanding of your chronic rain checking. Do not commit to wearing new items of clothing during the week, as you may inadvertently sentence yourself to a night out wearing shoes that make your feet look like messily dissected fish.

Above all though, try to make the most out of your situation.

Had I moved out when I came to college, I would have missed out on a lot. My love life would have developed at a much slower rate without the use of the undeniably pragmatic request to “stay in yours tonight because I have a class at 9am tomorrow”. I would not have a bookshelf heaving with diaries that I have filled in my hours spent barrelling up and down the motorway. My indispensable skills of falling asleep in cramped conditions and of packing for a weekend with 10 minutes to spare and one bag would be nonexistent. So, grubby, yawning friends, remember to use your time spent travelling through the speeding grey vortex wisely. That may mean staring out of the window pretending to be in a Damien Rice music video, or drawing your fellow passengers without getting caught staring while you try to capture the lines of their slack mouth, and the way that ooze of saliva catches the stiff tentative light of the dawn.

Tuesday 24th March 2015

TRINITY NEWS

Features

12

SOCIAL MEDIA PROVIDES AVENUE FOR RESISTANCE IN STONEYBATTER The use of social media as a political platform has played an important part of the anti-water charges movement, but it is just one aspect of a dynamic campaign in the heart of Dublin’s north inner city.

Photo: Stoneybatter Against the Water Tax

Conor O'Donovan Features Editor Eric was on holiday in Spain during last October’s Right2Water march, the first major rally against water charges held in Dublin. Taken aback by the size of the “colossal” crowd that marched on that autumn weekend, however, he was quick to get involved in the mobilisation that subsequently took place in Stoneybatter upon his return.

The campaign that was forming now was different, though many people he knew from other protests were involved. In October, information stalls were set up on Stoneybatter’s Manor Street as the movement prepared for the installation of water metres. Eric observed anger similar to his own in the reactions of other residents as they realised they wouldn’t be able to afford to pay the tax.

There were working people, as well as those on benefits.

The increasing pressure put on those whose income is diminishing is a “violent act”, as people lose their ability to feed or house themselves properly, he says. The response to the water charges is a focused attempt to reverse the debilitating trend of austerity pol

icy. That these sentiments resonate so strongly is part of the reason the independent protest have established themselves so quickly, following the “spark” created by Right2Water’s initial mobilisation. Mark Malone, a freelance journalist and TV producer specialising in activism, suggests that the “immediacy of the installation of the metres and the possibility of not paying the bills” presents people with tangible action in a way that other recent policies have not. Eric also states that the campaign hinges on convincing enough people not to pay. He is optimistic and perhaps he is right to be: as Malone points out, water charges target a much larger social group than many recent policies.

It’s a matter of strength in numbers as the campaign attempts to render punishment for unpaid charges “impractical” for the government to implement. Thus far, it seems everything is working in the protesters’ favour. Eric points out that a door-to-door poll carried out by the movement demonstrates that the majority of Stoneybatter residents say they will refuse to pay. Each week, Eric and other volunteers knock on approximately a hundred doors.

Only a small number of these

answer, but it is this activity in tandem with the public protests and meetings that makes up the “multi-faceted” campaign that, in Eric’s view, is too strong to fail.

‘Stoneybatter Against the Water Tax’ Another facet of the campaign is its use of social media. Social media allows groups such as Stoneybatter Against the Water Tax, which has one of the most well-subscribed pages of its kind on Facebook, to circumvent traditional channels in the media, such as corporate newspapers and press releases, states Malone. It also affords the groups a chance to challenge the narrative created in the mainstream media. Aspects of protests that are misrepresented can now be reappraised.

The tactic of filming has also been deployed against the protesters. Though they’ve had some “scary moments with masked unidentified people”, Eric says he and others remain undeterred.

Having been filmed by masked security, or even people posing as protesters, he sees the tactics as somewhat desperate. Malone on the other hand sees as more symptomatic of social discontent.

Though it is intimidating for pro

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Social media allows groups such as Stoneybatter Against the Water Tax, which has one of the most well-subscribed pages of its kind on Facebook, to circumvent traditional media channels. testers and the footage may be used in court, it is a “very normal aspect of privatised policing” rather than a sign of desperation.

Solidarity

Malone also speaks of how the use of social media can alter the “psycho-geography” of a protest. Be-

ing able to see content and share ideas makes people feel less isolated in areas where they may be less numerous in that it creates “a very real community which they can feel a part of.” Though this may not be entirely the case in an urban area such as Stoneybatter, there are some similarities. Eric’s opposition to the charges is based on “self-defence”, he says, and his attending meetings and knocking on doors is an “instinctual” response. Of the images of the “colossal” Right2Water march, he says they showed that “everyone felt the same way.”

On the Stoneybatter movement’s page, sharing photos in which groups as far as away as Detroit show solidarity suggests the feeling is not confined to Stoneybatter or even Ireland. That Stoneybatter Against the Water Tax and the others groups in Dublin and around the country took inspiration from the Right2Water march but are now mobilising forces in their own right is, to Eric, the protest’s great strength.

The content on the Stoneybatter Against the Water Tax Facebook page is moderated in an “informal, yet effective way” over Facebook messages as members see videos or photos and then deliberate on their worth quickly,

says Eric. Similarly, public protest and larger meetings are coordinated and publicised online.

Social media presents a low cost medium for protesters to mobilise themselves and others. Yet, Malone is quick to dismiss the notion of “technical determination”, that the protest is being driven by social media tools. Their deployment come down to the “agency” of the people in utilising them.

Public meetings

One of the most recent posts on the movement’s page is an event for their next public meeting on March 31st, which will centre around a talk on “what will happen when I don’t pay my water tax.” At the groups previous three public meetings in the Parish Hall, items such as how the nonpayment phase of the campaign can be built have been put to the floor. These sort of public meetings are important, says Malone, as they allow the finer details of the campaign to be teased out.

Having an active social media platform is important, but it may well “begin to seem like broadcast.” Though a social media presence grants the movement the opportunity to control their own narrative, the large amount of content being produced also al-

lows other outlets to emphasise the campaign’s negative aspects such as the harassment of state officials.

Much like Eric said, however, the social media presence is just one part of the campaign. Both agree that the campaign’s most crucial moment is around the corner with the arrival of the first bill from Irish Water in April. Though the Right2Water campaign are not campaigning for non-payment, it is widely believed that this is the only way the campaign will succeed. Malone points out that a successful non-payment campaign is strategically sound as it would “invalidate the government’s performance” in the eyes of Europe.

However, though it is an important moment, it does not signal a change in the Stoneybatter movement’s focus. Though they will be looking inward to maintain the solidarity they have built up, they will still be publicising themselves and protesting in public as it is “crucial that all these things happen at the same time.” Even talking to student press is an important measure.

What I learned from an evening with the Dublin activists picketing JobBridge businesses The Work Must Pay campaign has gathered momentum in recent months by naming and shaming Dublin businesses taking on JobBridge interns.

Conor O'Donovan Features Editor It’s a chilly evening as I make my way along the quays to meet with the Work Must Pay picketers before their protest. At first it seems I may have the wrong place. It’s a relief to find, upon crossing the river over to Connolly Books in Temple Bar, that things are running a bit behind schedule. The demonstration against free labour would go ahead as planned once an unwell picketer had a chance to finish their Lemsip.

I use the time to introduce myself to the other picketers. They were a diverse group, including a secondary school teacher and a mature second-year Trinity student. Two others had to leave early to go back to work. Since the inception of the Work Must Pay campaign after a meeting in November between members of Unite Youth Dublin and the Connolly Youth Movement, co-ordinating the protests on a part-time schedule has been difficult.

Communicating the intent of the protests has also presented a challenge; a comparison is made between a recent protest at Decwells Hardware and the episode of Father Ted in which the priests’ attempts to dissuade patrons from seeing ‘The Passion of St. Tibulus’ have the opposite effect, with many passersby heading into Decwells to investigate their wares. Having a journalist come along to a picketing is something of a novelty.

According to the first hand accounts I receive at Connolly Books, the earlier protest at Decwells got off to a subdued start before the group settled into a rhythm of more striking chants.

The opening of today’s picket, this time outside Yamamori Sushi, is also slightly muddled, with one

picketer decrying “free exploitation” instead of “free labour.”

Another picketer asks passersbys if they would work for ¤3.75 an hour. “Shouldn’t that really be on the leaflet?”

The protest soon gathered momentum, however, as the picketers continued to get the attention of pedestrians. A troop of school girls stopped briefly to register their vocal support and several passing motorists honked in solidarity. Many others, including a man one of the picketers enthusiastically insisted was an offduty guard, were visibly engaged, if only momentarily. Others on their way home from the office were less than ecstatic to be asked whether they would “work for free”, although most of them still took leaflets.

move the incentive for doing so.

“It is not a purely negative campaign,” Eoghan says. “Business that don’t sign up to JobBridge, we will promote that.”

Most of the movement’s social media presence thus far focuses on its success in persuading businesses to move their JobBridge postings, but this is perhaps understandable as it relies on its successes to maintain momentum. In fact, the movement have been cautious about publicity up until this point, in order to build up support first. “We have several steps and templates so that anyone can start a work must pay, in the hope of creating a wider network,” Eoghan says. Preliminary preparations have been made to establish similar movements in Cork and Galway.

Purpose

Confrontation

The grievance the Work Must Pay Movement have with the businesses they picket is that they are exploiting the JobBridge scheme for “free” labour. It seems the skills requisite to fulfill many JobBridge adverts would not take six to nine months to learn. They may even be skills the applicants already have in which case they should be paid a living wage for them. The Work Must Pay movement intends to target the businesses taking advantage of JobBridge and force them to remove their JobBridge posts. “People say that they are just trying to expand their business. If you’re business plan is based on exploiting one worker than its not a very good one,” says Eoghan O’Neill, the secretary of the Connolly Youth Movement.

The protests hinge on the notion that bad publicity will force businesses to reconsider their use of the JobBridge scheme. The only way to prevent young workers from being exploited is to re-

After about 40 minutes of protest at Yamamori Sushi, a member of the picketed business’ management emerges. There is something of a confrontation as he enquires about the aim of the protest. The members of Connolly Youth Movement explain their stance on the business’ current use of the JobBridge scheme. The business has posted an advert looking for several JobBridge interns to be employed in a culinary capacity, positions they have probably already undertaken training for. There is a brief exchange concerning the intricacies of the business’ JobBridge post. There seems to be a slight discrepancy in the manager’s alternate use of the terms traineeship and internship, a discrepancy which is picked apart by the picketers on the way back to Connolly Books. The applicants have already undertaken training; letting them work for a living wage is the upshot.

The Work Must Pay Facebook

Photo: Conor O'Donovan

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24 hours [after the picket], the advert was taken down, as promised. page and WordPress blog are on the first page of its Google results.

The #workmustpay hashtag displays a chronology of naming and shaming businesses with screenshots of JobBridge adverts. The Twitter account describes the movement as “a small network campaigning to end JobBridge”, yet it seems it is the simplicity of the movement’s picketing and its detailing of the removals of adverts following pickets that are garnering most attention.

The Connolly Youth Movement, who, along with Unite Youth Dublin, co-ordinate these protests, were recently described in this paper as “would be” revo-

lutionaries who would have little impact on the reformation of the Irish political left. Recent posts on CYM’s Facebook page show solidarity with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as well as opposition toward the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. On their website, CYM recognised the outcome of the Greek general elections as a step in the right direction, but “gave full support” to the KKE’s anti-parliamentary stance. Their involvement with the Work Must Pay movement represent a cause more tangible to the Irish left.

The movement demonstrates an anti-establishment sentiment in its desire to the end the JobBridge scheme, but seeks to achieve their greater goal with realistic short-term goals.

Importance of education

When I ask Eoghan about the politics of the Connolly Youth Movement, he places an emphasis on education. “I would rather have five critically thinking individuals than a room full of people along

for the protest,” he says. This sentiment is reflected on the CYM’s website where visitors can take the ‘Working Man’s Introduction to Communism’ which includes articles on anti-imperialism and the role of women.

Eoghan also appeals to students to politicise themselves.

While large turnout at events such as the Right to Education march is positive, the lack of any focused objective at these events precludes sustained engagement, he says. The advertisement of potentially exploitative JobBridge internships extends even into Trinity, the picketers are quick to point out to me, with the Institute of Neuroscience currently seeking a research assistant for a nine-month internship, targeted at individuals who have a master’s degree in the subject.

After a brief interlude, the manager emerges once again. This time, he tries a different tack.

He’d just googled Work Must Pay and said nothing had come up. He announced the JobBridge post would be taken down the follow-

ing day, but that this had nothing to do with the protest. There had been a lack of response as people seemed quite happy to stay on benefits, he says. There was considerable dispute over this last remark, but names were exchanged and the management even invited the picketers back the following afternoon if he didn’t keep his word and take the advert down. It would be peak business time and there would be a lot more people coming in and out of the shop.

On the way back to Connolly Books, the picketers briefly debate whether they can count this as another victory. 24 hours later, the advert was taken down, as promised. Whatever the reasoning of the management at Yamamori was, one less business in Dublin are hiring JobBridge interns, and this may not have been the case had there been no picket. A long term victory is that much easier to imagine after today’s success, but further struggle is still to come.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

13

Comment EVERYONE ON MY MASTER’S IS AWFUL How I learned to

come to terms with my sins

My English M.Phil course is happier to defend straight white men against accusations of racism, homophobia and intolerance than address uncomfortable prejudices head on.

Even when we leave our Catholic faith behind, the old moral preoccupations and worries often remain.

Clodagh Bergin Contributor Pope Francis was pontificating recently about the number of Catholics who were sinning every day. The sin that bothered him this time was disrespect of the elderly. Neglecting the elderly can have “hellish” effects, he warns.

My initial thought after reading this was “great, another sin to add to my list.” Since arriving in Trinity in 2012, one thing that I have severely struggled with is my morality. Coming from a small, quaint, but mainly backward town my conception of morality (and often normality) can sometimes be slightly skewed.

Everyday, I find myself facing the same struggles over and over again. My internal strife has a name: ‘hamartophobia’, the fear of sinning.

Perhaps this is ever so slightly narcissistic, but the more people I meet from more urban areas, the more surprised people seem to be by my Catholic upbringing. I’m accustomed to apathetic stares from The Sacred Heart as I eat my breakfast. My mother often blesses herself before leaving in the car and blesses me at night before bed. The angelus is observed, Sunday is day of rest (despite including a 10am start for mass) and sinning means that you won’t see your parents in heaven, as my mother occasionally orates.

Anonymous Going into my English M.Phil course, I expected to find myself surrounded by people who were excited about and interested in popular literature, popular culture and contemporary debate.

I hoped to spend each class discussing the high/low culture divide critically and considering the various classed, raced, and gendered prejudices that accompany genre fiction, devoting equal weight to the complexities of chick lit and the global appeal of The DaVinci Code. Instead, I was disappointed that the majority of my classmates carried the sort of snobby literary hangups I had hoped to escape through this master’s course.

Students reluctantly refer to Fifty Shades of Grey, one of the biggest publishing phenomenons in recent memory, as if it’s heresy to even mention it in a popular literature classroom.

Comments are frequently prefaced with statements like, “I hate to bring up Fifty Shades of Grey, but...”. This is a book that almost none of the class have read (“Fifty Shades is not worthy of my study”, one student scoffed when asked about it), and whose only engagement with the text appears to be mocking older women who enjoyed the series.

Losing my faith

Cosy consensus

These attitudes unfortunately haven’t changed much over the course of the year, seemingly because no one wants to have their views challenged. A possible reason for this is that academia, at least in TCD, has proven to be quite a cosy, conservative, selfpreserving environment, more concerned with defending its past than embracing the future, and largely unwilling to listen to dissenting voices.

It’s potentially a reflection of Trinity, or academia, in general, that students consider themselves unquestionably progressive, but have revealed themselves to be shockingly conservative. Because they consider themselves to be in a liberal setting, it’s assumed that they too have adopted the liberal attitudes Trinity supposedly bears.

However, hiding behind the academic terminology of their selfprofessedly “liberal” arts education is an ugly bias. Students are quick to announce “I identify as a feminist!” but would soon after begin anxiously worrying about whether Beyonce is a suitable role model for young women: “I just don’t think she’s challenging anything. Her ‘feminism’ isn’t what I think feminism should be, and I don’t like that.” When

Illustration: Robyn Page Cowman pressed on whether Beyonce’s feminism might not necessarily apply to a white woman, a classmate argued, “Well it’s not very coherent”, a claim which was soon supported with dubious comments about “rescuing” “streetwalkers” and porn stars.

Coded prejudice

Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ageism, ableism, and many other forms of discrimination operate on a different level in the classroom.

People consider this kind of intolerance to be embodied in very blunt, visible acts of violence and slurs, but prejudice doesn’t work that way in academia. It works in a carefully coded and covert fashion. It exists in a student prefacing their comments with

words like, “racism aside, this is actually a very good book”, or “transphobia aside, just for a second, there is some brave stuff in here”, erasing the lived realities of trans folks and people of colour. It manifests in a lecturer, and a group of students, justifying Raymond Chandler, “When he uses the n-word, he’s doing so in a very complex way. He’s using racism subversively,” and reminding us “not to confuse Chandler and [fictional detective] Marlowe”, rather than studying a writer of colour’s account or experience of racism.

It is there in a student calling The Da Vinci Code “the kind of book you see fellas on the Luas red line reading in their tracksuits”. It is visible in the dismissal of romance writing as “trivial”

and romance readers as “not able to read critically”. When students interpret BDSM sex as rape, “whatever about ‘consenting adults’”, while complaining that scenes of incest and the rape of a 15-year-old girl “aren’t sexy enough”. When students demand chick lit author Sophie Kinsella provide a solution to the financial crisis at the end of The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic, but say of the unresolved social problems in James Herbert’s eco-horror, “They don’t need to resolve social problems, they’re just entertaining and that’s fine. If they had to resolve it, it would become really boring and preachy.” When a lecturer apologises for the behaviours of a brutal serial rapist and murderer, “It may be upsetting to think of men as potentially violent.” It seems that M.Phil students, and Trinity lecturers, are happier to defend straight white men against accusations of racism, homophobia and other intolerance than address those uncomfortable prejudices head on.

Frustration

“Of the 44 authors on my course this year, Marjane Satrap was the one writer of colour.”

This subconscious bigotry has pervaded my master’s on a structural level as well as in the discussions each week. Of the 44 authors I studied on our core module this year, only one was a person of colour, Marjane Satrapi, whose autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis was applauded for the “Western-ness” of her text and its ability to provoke their unexpected interest in her experience. Of course, it’s unsurprising that a reading list on popular literature would include primarily white authors, but there was never time taken out of the course to address this.

When I spoke to friends outside of my course about it, a sociology student observed, “I have a second wave feminist teaching me gender theory in 2015 and

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Subconscious bigotry has pervaded my master’s on a structural level as well as in the discussions each week. telling me transgender people are ‘annoying’, ‘with all their pronouns’. The research these lecturers based their careers on isn’t holding up any longer, but no one wants to find failing in their own work, so they instead choose to obfuscate that and defend that against any challenges.”

Similarly, when I tweeted about my frustration, a postgraduate student on an entirely different course, in an entirely different country, shared my frustration in her own classes.

What I’ve learned is that academia may not be the best place for me. Although I wasn’t expecting to be in class with the next Judith Butler or Kimberlé Crenshaw, I had expected and hoped for more from my master’s. After spending a year sitting in the same rooms and talking to the same people, it’s become clear that the drawbridge is well and truly up. Literary and cultural criticism are vital forces in the appreciation of art, but if academia continues along these lines, as it is almost sure to, it can only become more and more isolated.

Around the age of 12 (after I had made a small fortune from my confirmation), it slowly but surely dawned on me that I would in fact not see my parents in heaven, nor would they see theirs. It is difficult to see someone in a place that does not exist. Following a number of bereavements and having always been a fan of literature, I slowly began to think of God as being a less exciting work of fiction. Platform nine and three-quarters became a closer reality to me than purgatory, and, to make the transition easier, the spells were generally both in Latin. Nonetheless, I was still dragged to mass and forced to receive communion. At times, I really did sway between believing and pretending, but Pascal’s Wager seemed too much of a commitment to me and eventually I let my capacity for reason and reality take the fore, thus casting God from my belief system and landing in a peaceful realm of reality known as atheism.

My parents are fantastic, understanding and compassionate people but my mother particularly struggled with this and liked to lament (daily) how she would never see her only daughter in heaven. My sins were too great, and the list got longer after I wound up in Trinity: idolatry (I am a huge Wittgenstein fan), blasphemy, rebelling against my parents and, of course, the killer, fornication. Despite my own personal rejection of faith and of Catholic teachings in particular, as time goes on I still find myself feeling deep, torrential pangs of what can only be described as God-fearing guilt.

Fear of sinning

Trinity offers one so many new and exciting experiences such as: a high turnover rate of relationships, Holi festivals, Hist bullying scandals, Troutopia, and the institution that is Trinity Ball. However, in spite of the variety of all these events and occurrences, my morality and self-esteem always seems to take a bashing. Despite not being cowed by the wrath of God, sinning and fear of sinning is a daily feature of my life, which often leads me to question whether or not I’m a good person, whether or not I deserve good karma and whether or not my parents could ever be proud of me because of my transgressions.

The fear of sinning has been instilled in me from such a young age and with that follows crippling guilt. If I told lies, God would know. If something bad happened, it was punishment from God. Certainly, I’m not saying that this is the same in every Catholic home and, indubitably, the form of Catholic morality I was exposed to seems to be Catholicism on steroids. This doesn’t diminish the manner in

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The liberal ‘enjoy the ride’ atmosphere fostered in Trinity is totally at odds with the conservative and often fundamentalist attitude in my hometown.

which it has truly affected my personality and my experience in Trinity.

The liberal “enjoy the ride” atmosphere fostered in Trinity is totally at odds with the conservative and often fundamentalist attitude in my hometown. Same sex marriage and pro choice are taken as a matter of fact in Trinity, whereas they are seen as morally perilous to my parents.

One-night stands are run of the mill for many college students it is seen as impure and unclean to many of the Christian faith.

These are the struggles my own personal morality faces. Sex becomes a traumatic experience, infidelity sets my soul racing and tittle-tattling amongst friends sends it plunging to the fires of hell. However, these are all part of experiencing college- so how does one position their morality without retarding their own college experience?

Childhood guilt

Even today, I often still find myself sitting in pews staring at an altar after my feet somehow shimmy me inside a church.

How could any God want his followers to feel such guilt? I’m sure this experience of guilt and self-doubt isn’t an experience particular to me. Some of the greatest works of literature draw on this motif between the struggle of your old Catholic soul and your new and pronounced atheist soul. Sometimes, it can be difficult to even believe that there was a time when you believed. It is as though you cannot recognise your past self and yet struggle to let go of it too. Your current morality is inextricably linked to your childhood and parents. Your past is inevitably entangled in your present, even if you have formally abandoned your old way of looking at the world.

My mother anxiously awaits her reward in heaven, and it comforts me to know that in any moment of perplexity, she finds contentment in praying to a God whom she believes will await her in the afterlife with opening arms. Nonetheless, I have confidence in the life we have here on Earth. The world works in mysterious ways and humans have more than enough to worry about without adding an extra afterlife on top of that. I fully respect any faith but the element of guilt involved in Catholic morality must not be something that is instilled in young children. The first baptisms were fully grown adults, who chose that guilt for themselves. Pope Francis should be more concerned about promoting the basic doctrines of the church, rather than giving one guilty hamartophobe another thing to worry about.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

Comment

14

Time for Trinity students to revolt If the biggest achievement we get from trying to work with college management is to see fewer negative changes, we need to change strategy.

Dee Courtney Deputy Comment Editor It began in Amsterdam, it took hold in London and now it’s reached Dublin. Hundreds of students protested the cuts and overcrowding at NCAD this week and have threatened more protest if their demands are not met. The students that occupied the arts building of UvA (in Amsterdam) shouted the slogan, “No ifs, no buts, no education cuts” – sound familiar? The same slogan was chanted marching through the streets of Dublin at the Rally for Education. The difference is that the Rally was a short parade that coordinated with law enforcement to block minimal traffic, and the UvA protests are an occupation. The Rally didn’t come with a list of demands or even concrete aims. The Union of Students in Ireland (USI) just wanted to show the country that students value their education enough to march down the street with a few megaphones.

Do we not value it enough to do more than that?

Need for change

WHY I’VE DECIDED TO DITCH MAKEUP Not being able to feel my own painted face was a reminder that it was not really mine.

Naoise Dolan Online Editor It’s happened before, usually by accident. I’ve forgotten my bag, run out of a given product, or decided a particular occasion wasn’t worth the effort. But this is the first time since the start of secondary school that I’ve deliberately gone without makeup for weeks on end. In its natural state, my face looks like a veiny bleached potato: rough, blotchy, translucent skin through which every blemish and blood vessel merrily jumps out. My pores are so distinct they practically possess discrete legal identities. The amount of acne I still have in my 20s is actually profane (actually, though). My point? Frankly, this is the sort of situation they make foundation to deal with.

Notice the assumption buried in that sentence, though: that my face is a “situation” of the kind that needs fixing. It’s difficult not to see it that way myself: because I’m so pale, you can tell very easily when I’m tired (hey, bags under eyes, how’s it going?) or stressed (hey, spots, pull up a chair!). I feel part of my long-standing makeup addiction has sprung from a sense that my complexion makes me look weak. Now, many things about you make you look weak when you’re a five-foot-three vegan, but I felt it was best to at least control for the controllables.

Hateful routine

All the cheap foundations are orange, or look orange against my waxen skin, but I accepted this as the way of things and slapped them on blithely enough. Then came eyeliner, which apparently goes on quite smoothly if you

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I don’t mean to suggest that my decision to wear makeup wasn’t heavily influenced by what happens when sexism stumbles into capitalism’s apartment at 3:00am and does things both will later regret. warm it up first by sticking it in your bra for a bit. I could never remember to do that and always ended up with a jagged sooty line.

Next up, mascara: this was easy enough to apply, but no matter how assiduously I kept my lashes separate, they’d always clump together unbecomingly the moment I blinked. Last, lipstick: because my upper lip is nonexistently thin, I went through a phase of painting on an extra few centimetres. Eventually, I realised that this was fooling no-one and was making me look

like a sad clown. Which probably went for the whole routine, to be honest. I lacked manual dexterity, and the dermatological hiccoughs that made my skin desperately in need of makeup also made it a somewhat challenging surface to apply makeup to. Still, I just kept wearing it. And then something just gave.

It wasn’t that I got wiser to how expensive makeup is, how impossible it is to get a brand that doesn’t contain health-menacing chemicals, how my sad-clown-lady look wasn’t even an aesthetic improvement on my bleachedpotato-lady look. All those facts had come to my attention well before I stopped wearing makeup. I’d just stored them in the place I put all sorts of disagreeable truths, like “A bus that takes 40 minutes to get into town will not get you into town in 20 minutes”, “Drinking now will make you feel bad tomorrow”, and so on. It was all filed under Useful Information I Will Never Act On. I think I’d just realised that I didn’t like wearing makeup and there was no-one making me do it.

Expectations

That second consideration warrants a bit of unpacking. In a panoramic sense, plenty of people are making you wear makeup. Study after grim study shows that your co-workers think you’re neater and more professional with your face greased up. From modelling to sex work, many jobs require it. Advertisers line up to remind you that your face is a site of public scrutiny, an open forum where strangers like them can spit opinions at you.

All of the things wrong with you (of which, by the way, there are a lot) have a dermatologically tested solution, and if you don’t avail of it then your life will be terrible and it will be all your fault.

So I don’t mean to suggest that my decision to wear makeup wasn’t heavily influenced by what happens when sexism stumbles into capitalism’s

What I’m really thinking: the final-year student Everything feels like a special moment when your time in Trinity is drawing to an end.

Orlaith Trainor Staff Writer When I started university, my first lecturer pronounced to the class that we had found our best men and bridesmaids in those

sitting next to us. He said it with such strength I didn’t believe him. Now final year is nearly done. I’m torn between hugging the Romanesque pillars in front square or seizing books in the history library to cry into their wonderful yellowed pages. I

can’t soak it in enough. The grass is dewy, the mornings are brightened with a hub of promise and I get closer and closer to the end.

Everything feels like a moment.

Like the tangy sadness of a final album.

I’ve been given the same privi-

apartment at 3:00am and does things both will later regret. But in a more individualistic sense of coercion - in the sense that no-one has directly intervened in my choice - I am free not to wear makeup. Which means I can touch my face. I can rub my hands all over it when I’m tired or cold, or scratch my nose when it’s itchy. A lot of people touch their faces when they’re feeling nervous; I’m one of them, and for years, I’d had to be careful not to smudge anything. A lot of people scrunch their eyes up when they smile; I’m one of them, and for years, I’d felt a layer of dried orange liquid turn to cake around the creases.

Not being able to feel my own face was an encroaching little reminder that the face isn’t really mine. So are the adverts telling me what I should be doing about that face. So are the comments people make to me about other women’s faces. ‘It doesn’t belong to her’, was always the premise.

‘Her selfhood depends on what she slaps on every morning, and here are my thoughts on that.’

You can’t remove yourself from external attitudes like those, but enjoying the full use of your own body is a nice place to start.

Even better: I don’t have to monitor how my face is doing, whether the eye makeup has started smearing southwards, whether my orange second skin needs a top-up. There’d been something about checking and checking throughout the day to make sure I still resembled a human that had made me feel like a rickety pretend-person, liable to collapse. I look in the mirror a lot less often now.

By the way, I’m under no illusion that I’m special or brave for doing this. I know plenty of women who go mostly makeupfree. I also know a good number of women who enjoy wearing makeup and don’t carry around the baggage I associate with it.

But then, it was never anyone’s contention that societal expectations worm their way uniformly

into every woman’s consciousness. Internalised misogyny doesn’t manifest itself identically in everyone. It would be weird if it did: women are people, people are complicated.

Sometimes, I get into arguments with men about makeup and they throw some inchoate evolutionary biology at me something about it being natural for women to try to look healthy to advertise our fertility. Let’s get one thing clear: if I were biologically destined to try to make myself reproductively appealing to men, perhaps the ability to be attracted to them would have been a start. Sorry, every armchair Darwinist ever, but queer women do sort of throw a rainbow-coloured spanner into the works of reproductive determinism. But that’s another gripe for another day.

lege as Edmund Burke and Mary Robinson. I’ve feasted on the memories of O’Connell and Tone. Trembled with the wonder of classicalism. Felt trapped in Renaissance portraiture. Pursed my lips at the power of a Patrick Geoghegan lecture at 9am. Padded out of Front Square at 3am more alive than I can articulate.

Spent hours on Dublin bus waiting for my eyes to interlock with those black gates entwining a special world in between. Waited on the printer to encase my essay in delicious post production reality. Felt stupidly alone in the arts block. Felt alone everywhere. Spent aeons of time on level three sitting on the mossy green carpet. Enjoyed that perfect moment entering college in

the quiet of morning when it was just me for a split second in the stillness.

Anticlimax

On relinquishing makeup, then: while it’s nice to be able to rub my eyes when I’m sleepy, the whole affair has been somewhat anticlimactic. I don’t feel smarter, earthier or more in touch with my inner self since going plain-faced. Maybe my expectation that I should is a weird ideological transposition onto what should be the bare material act of putting coloured liquid on my face. In order for going without makeup to be a big change from wearing it, the reverse would have to be so as well. If stripping something off makes a difference to you, then painting it on must have made a similar scale of difference in the first place.

It is gross to blame women for fixating on our appearances when we’re taught to link it both to our self-esteem and to our concrete life prospects. It is also naive to think that we can always shrug off this burden the minute we feel like it. But I’ll say this much: it is nice to have discovered at least one pocket of notcaring-how-I-look.

Change

It is hard to say how Trinity has changed me. In my graduation speech for secondary school, I wrote about how we were leaving those blue doors behind us.

In Trinity, there were no doors - just wide open spaces with no one saying you can’t. It has felt like every email could take you somewhere new and exciting.

I’ll miss that feeling of spontaneously emailing yes to everything.

The language in those emails - words like mentor, leader and volunteer - propelled you explore something new. T All it took was a yes and you became a

Whenever Trinity’s draconian policies are brought up at SU Council or a town hall meeting, SU officers tell us that protest is a last resort. That we need to try compromise, cooperation, that we need to work with college.

College administration tell us that the government is to blame and they agree with us, so we need to work together. We can say we’re working with college all we want, they need to work with us too. Undergraduates have been nothing more than a cash source for Trinity for years.

And since Trinity’s government funding has been cut, their response has been to take more from us. If students send Trinity the message that we will pay their fees, lose our resources, and watch our rankings drop without a word of complaint, they will keep taking. So we negotiate, we say we’ll give a little, they nod and smile and come back for the rest later. We never refuse them anything and they can take what they want.

The biggest progress we’ve seen in Trinity negotiation this year is to put a stop to the proposed introduction of a massive fee for supplemental exams. Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed with the sabbats for that. But if the biggest achievement we get from trying to work with college management is to have fewer negative changes, we need to change strategy. All we’re getting right now is a slower descent into a more expensive, poorer quality institution. Students aren’t satisfied with the way Trinity is now.

The postgraduate bathrooms are inadequate, the library’s hours aren’t long enough, exam timetables come out too late and the administration is a bureaucratic nightmare. We should not be fighting to preserve the status quo, we need actual improvement. If our biggest successes are to slow down the introduction of charges, this is a bad sign for our relationship with Trinity.

The reason students don’t want to protest is that they feel it will burn a bridge, destroy our relationship with college. What do we actually get out of that relationship? Is it really a healthy relationship when college hands down directives and we follow them?

Why protest would work

If you agree with protest in principle, the only thing left to discuss is how to make it work.

Students can’t refuse to pay our fees. It might work if everyone got on board, but people won’t be convinced to take such extreme measures until it’s clear that other forms of protest won’t work; look at how long it’s taking to organise any protest at all. If a small group of students refused to pay their fees, college would cut them off, refuse to let them sit exams, and they would officially be within their rights to do

better version of yourself in two seconds. I think of the hard work and the long summers waiting on September to come around.

Then All-Ireland Sunday would swing around and the city would welcome me back with the electricity of possibility. Dublin has been like an old friend that I’ll always want to learn more about.

Community

However, for me, it’s all been about the people. The eyes and minds of everyone I’ve gotten close to have offered a tropical mindscape within the heavy concrete structure that college can be. I’ll miss seeing them every day. Trinity has been ours for four years and now it is time to hand it over. We were always

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If student societies agree to prevent Trinity from using its materials – its photographs, videos and publications – to raise money, they lose donations and potential students. so. We need to choose something public and easy to get on board with. There are things that we can do to leverage college, and we should be using them.

Hitting them where it hurts

There are forms of protest that could cost the college money in a very immediate and obvious way.

If we block the gates of Trinity so that tourists can’t enter, the college loses funds. If the student societies and CSC agree to prevent the administration from using its materials – photographs and videos of events, publications – to raise money, they lose donations and potential students. Even if we can’t cost them much money in the short term, the college thrives on its reputation.

The Prendervost wants to bring in funds by marketing Trinity to international students. It’s easy to make Trinity look good from far away. International students will likely not have many (or any) friends and relatives to ask for reviews. They don’t have access to all of these That means the board and the Prendervost are able to market college in a way that works for them. You’d think that rapidly falling rankings would be enough to convince the board to change their priorities, but they are convinced they can fix everything later if they bring in money now. So they build the business school and rebrand, trying to plaster over the college’s reputation. That’s where protest comes in. LSE and UvA’s reputations are in tatters at the moment, and will be until there’s some sign of compromise. The only reason that can happen is that media attention is focused on those universities now, the kind of attention that only comes out of a dramatic statement. If international students see Irish students vaguely protesting once a year, they think that we have the same problems students face in every developed country. If they see Trinity occupied, they will know that the university’s ability to cater for its students is shutting down, and that the college will have to respond. The board care about the college’s reputation. That’s one of the few things we have the power to change.

But even if you believe that the college isn’t at fault and that the government is the problem, writing letters and organising the Rally for Education just aren’t enough. Whatever your opinion of the water charge protesters, they’ve been incredibly successful. Last year, there was talk of shutting off the water for people who wouldn’t pay the charges.

Now, it’s become clear that that people won’t even face basic fines for non-payment until the middle of next year. The protesters have nudged the government into a public opinion crisis. We can do this to Trinity too and if occupy movements take hold in more of the Irish universities students might finally be taken seriously. The water charge protesters wouldn’t have achieved anything by only marching once a year and we won’t either.

on borrowed time. I wonder if Trinity has absorbed any of us in return? Maybe it has or maybe it will jest with some in the future when those awful college profiles are compiled for staid broadcasters or politicians trying to be appealing, saying they smoked a joint on campus.

Yet we don’t need this ‘remembrance’. We should be ready to use our departing memories as a springboard for all those dreams we’ve put off since we got tangled up in education. We will leave college with something so fragile and new: our potential. So don’t wait until tomorrow, don’t please your mother and don’t waste your promise. Those cobbled stones are a carpet to somewhere incredible.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

Comment

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What Netanyahu victory says about Israeli politics Oisin Vince-Coulter Staff Writer The Israeli election last Tuesday put the final nail in the coffin of the idea that a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians is possible through goodwill and hopeful feelings. In the final days of the election Benjamin Netanyahu appealed directly to the most right wing elements of Israeli politics by saying, in an interview with daily newspaper Maariv, that a Palestinian state will not be established while he is in power - in other words, the two state solution is dead. He went further on polling day in saying in a video directed to his voters that “right-wing rule is in danger” because the “Arabs” were voting in “their droves”, being bussed to polling stations by the left.

The most important thing to be taken from these comments is that they worked: Netanyahu’s Likud won 30 seats (12 more than the last election) with 23.40% of the vote compared to the ‘liberal Zionist’ Isaac Herzog whose Zionist Union took 24 seats with 18.67% of the vote. The result was a shock, as polling right up to election had foreseen a victory for the Zionist Union.

Context

Photo: joanburton.ie

LABOUR HAVE NOT PROTECTED ‘CORE’ WELFARE RATES IN GOVERNMENT The very notion of “core” welfare rates has its roots firmly in the neoliberal doctrines that the Labour Party have lapped up.

William Foley Comment Editor When asked to justify their role as a junior coalition partner, Labour Party ministers and TDs usually argue that they have protected “core” social welfare rates, which otherwise would have presumably been slashed

by Fine Gael. It can’t be denied that Fine Gael possess almost Jack the Ripper levels of depraved enthusiasm for cutting up vulnerable people. But how much have the Labour Party really protected “core” rates? Joan Burton has held the “social protection” portfolio since the current government took office.

Since then there have been four budgets, with a net reduction to the social protection budget of almost ¤900m. Of all the budgets, only one saw an expansion of welfare spending: Budget 2015 saw a ¤198m increase in welfare funding, still less than the ¤226m cut of the previous year. Overall, there has been a net reduction of spending on social welfare of 4.5% since Burton took over.

Total cuts

Still, these cuts were just to the more superfluous components of the welfare budget, right? Well that all depends on what your definition of superfluous, and, for that matter, “core” is. Cuts have been made to child benefits (including back to school allowance), jobseeker’s allowance, one-parent family allowance, carer’s allowance, means-tested fuel allowance, and to pensions.

Cuts to child benefit for third, fourth, and subsequent children were made in Budget 2012. Further cuts to the benefit were made in Budget 2013 for first and second children. A small increase in child benefit was introduced in 2014. This increase did not reverse the total cuts, and there have still been substantial net reductions.

As a result of these austerity measures, a three-child household will receive over ¤500 less in child benefit in 2015 than it did in 2011, a reduction of almost

10%. A four child household will receive over ¤1,000 less, a reduction of 13.5%. In further cuts to child welfare spending, the back to school allowance was cut in the 2012 and 2013 budgets from ¤305 to ¤200 for children aged 12 and over, and from ¤200 to ¤100 for children under 12. The children’s charity Barnardos estimates the basic school costs for a first year secondary school student in 2014 to be ¤735. These costs consist of clothing, footwear, school books, classroom resources, and a voluntary contribution. Even if the voluntary contribution is removed, the cost is still ¤615, much higher than the ¤200 allowance.

Various cuts to unemployment benefits have also been implemented. In Budget 2013, the duration of jobseeker’s benefit was reduced from 12 to nine months for recipients who had paid made over 260 PRSI contributions, and from nine to months for recipients who made less than 260 contributions. In the following year’s budget, cuts were made to jobseeker’s allowance (a different payment to jobseeker’s benefit). People between the ages of 18 and 24 on jobseeker’s allowance had their payments cut from ¤144 per week to ¤100 per week, and payments for 25 year olds were reduced from from ¤188 to ¤144 per week.

Other cuts include a reduction in pension rates in Budget 2012 for recipients who had made less than 48 years of PRSI contributions, and a reduction of six weeks of the period of fuel allowance provision. Fuel allowance is a means-tested payment designed to help pay winter fuel costs which is “paid to people who are dependent on long-term social welfare and who are unable to provide for their own heating needs” (from www.citizensinformation.ie). According to the most recent CSO data on fuel deprivation, 12% of people were in households who had “gone without” heating at least one time in the previous 12 months, and 8% were in households who had been unable to afford heating at all at least one time in the previous 12 months.

So over the lifetime of this government, a Labour minister, and the current tánaiste and party leader, implemented three successive austerity budgets (and one budget with small spending increases) which made substantial cuts to child benefits, unemployment benefits, and to fuel allowance. Its difficult to see these as anything other than cuts to “core” welfare services. The results of minister Burton’s actions are not hard to imagine. More children will live in poverty and

suffer deprivation experiences, especially those in one-parent households (where the at risk of poverty rate was 31.7% in 2013).

More young and unemployed people will struggle to scrape by or be forced to leave the country, something that is especially problematic for smaller, rural communities. More older, sick, and poor people will shiver and freeze over the winter period.

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What’s not documented in the statistics is the human story of deprivation, misery and humiliation.

Human story

What’s not documented in the statistics is the human story of deprivation, misery, and humiliation: what it feels like to go to school in the morning with an empty belly and shoes with holes in them, or what it feels like to not be able to buy your kids a treat at the end of the week, or what it feels like to sit at home, alone, every evening because you can’t afford to go for a drink or to the cinema. Of course, statistics can’t document these stories. The media can, but are so integrated into the contemporary capitalist ideology that they have effectively dehumanised the entire working class. Only the rich, and the powerful are seen as subjects worthy of sympathy or human interest. Hence, Joan Burton’s discomfort at having to sit in her car for two hours is portrayed as a Dostoyevskian ordeal worthy of serious Garda investigation, whereas the protesters are portrayed as a vicious, irrational mob. The repossession of homes is ignored unless the house happens to be a solicitor’s Killiney mansion, in which case some media commentary comes across like it was written by the most shameless sycophant in Louis XVI’s court.

A recent article in the Irish Independent’s “News” section drooled lasciviously over Blaise O’Donnell, the daughter of said solicitor: “Daughter Blaise, a name that could have featured in a Dorothy Parker novel as a gal with ‘potential’, dresses like she is part of Stella McCartney’s cool Notting Hill clique (though

it could be Zara). Think lots of money spent on clothes that don’t look like it. The money is in the taste, the quality and the expensive, understated label. Every day, Blaise dresses in beautifully cut, tailored pieces that outline her curvy figure and give her “presence”. It is her legs that reveal the “real” Blaise: skinny jeans, leggings, black opaque tights, all scream 21st-century female who isn’t going to conform.”

Neoliberal logic

The same kind of neoliberal ideology has been more and more nakedly espoused by high-ranking Labour party figures. Alan Kelly, the party’s deputy leader, has sounded more and more like a Tory cabinet minister from the 1980s. In comments made to the Irish Times last month, he claimed that “there are a certain amount of people who believe in not making a contribution to society but allow for taxpayers to fund this indulgence.” This joins Eamon Gilmore’s comments, in relation to dole cuts for under 25 year olds, that “the place for any young person is not permanently in front of a flat screen television” at the pinnacle of the slurry pit of neoliberal rubbish which Labour have been spewing out over the last few years.

This kind of rhetoric is clearly designed to suggest that the unemployed simply can’t be bothered looking for a job, as if a laziness epidemic rather than a massive recession exacerbated by savage austerity measures is responsible for the large-scale structural unemployment that we are seeing. Such complete and utter bullshit sophistry is massively disingenuous and also a despicable insult to the hundreds of thousands of people who are forced to choose between an ever diminishing dole and the JobBridge free labour scheme which has had the added effect of driving down wages and undermining working conditions.

And this leads on to another important point. Because while even on their own terms Labour’s pathetic claim to have protected “core” welfare rates is blatantly untrue, the very notion of “core” welfare rates is a dubious notion which has its roots firmly in the neoliberal doctrines which Labour have lapped up. What the social welfare system actually is is not state-funded charity but, in fact, a massive programme of social transfers. It’s a redistribution of money carried out with the aim that no-one fall into unacceptable standards of poverty. It is a programme which is particularly needed in Ireland where,

By NUMBERS:

€44

Cut in weekly jobseeker’s allowance for 18 to 25 years olds

€100

New weekly jobseeker’s payment for under-25s

13.5%

Reduction in yearly child welfare for fourchild households since 2011

€900m

Net social welfare budget reduction since 2011 according to Eurostat measures from 2013 (the latest available), almost half the country (49.8%) would be at risk of poverty before social transfers. Greece was the only EU country with a higher rate. This is a testament to the weakness of Irish capitalism, the pervasiveness of low-pay and precarious work, and the deep underlying inequality of the Irish class structure.

It is also a testament to the absolute necessity of the social welfare system as a whole.

Labour, with all their rhetoric about protecting “core” rates, have undermined this system. In the context of falling real wages, high rates of unemployment, and increased taxation, Joan Burton has cut welfare provisions. Burton has even ruthlessly slashed the “core” rates that she vowed to protect. Labour have drank deep from the neoliberal kool aid and are now beyond redemption.

Lets hope that the victims of Burton’s “social protection” overcome their dehumanisation at the hands of political, economic, and media elites and push her and her treacherous party out of government as soon as possible.

Some context is necessary to understand the early election, which was called in December of 2014 after Netanyahu’s coalition government collapsed amid infighting. The governing parties disagreed over the budget and a proposed “Jewish State” bill, which would have further enshrined Israel, a state for the Jews (and was accused of relegating non-Jewish citizens to being second class).

The election itself was then fought mostly on economic issues, with 53% of Israelis in a poll placing cost of living and social issues as their primary concern.

House prices have jumped 55% between 2008 and 2013, and the number of Israelis living in poverty has doubled from 1992, going from 10.2% to 20.5%. 20 families control half of the total value of Israel’s stock market, leading to warnings of monopolies and unsustainable inequality.

There is a close, though often under examined, connection between economics and the occupation of the West Bank. Israelis struggling to find affordable housing can move to the illegal settlements in East Jerusalem or the West Bank, where housing is cheaper and the government offers subsidies. As a result of this, the government reduces pressure on the property market (and themselves to resolve underlying issues), while increasing the population of the settlements and tying poor Israelis directly into the occupation.

Regardless of the economy, Netanyahu’s remarks at the eleventh hour appealed directly to Israeli insecurity about Palestine and Arab citizens, and considering the stark contrast between polls and the final result his victory can mostly be attributed to them. It’s noteworthy that Netanyahu’s increased vote share came mainly at the expense of other right wing parties, The Jewish Home who lost four seats and Yisrael Beiteinu who lost seven. These more extreme satellite parties of Likud have long been controversial for their extreme right wing, sometimes borderline fascist rhetoric.

Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of Yisrael Beiteinu infamously said that Israeli Arabs “who are against us” should be beheaded in comments before the election.

Shift to the right

What Netanyahu has done is essentially erase the differences between his own party and those further right than him, and as a result left Israel to be governed by someone who engaged in race baiting for electoral victory and has been clear that peace is unimportant to him. For the past decade a constant refrain in Israeli politics has been that they have no “partner for peace” – that the Palestinians do not want a just solution. Now, it’s impossible to claim anything but the opposite. The Israelis have voted for someone whose victory relied upon putting peace in a grave. The reasons for the Israeli political shift to the right are complex, but it’s possible to give a brief overview. The foundational moment in the “peace process’” between Israel and Palestine was the Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995, which sought to fulfill “the right of the Palestinians to self -determination”. They came after the first Intifada, or “uprising” of the Palestinians in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a primarily peaceful move to demand an end to the occupation.

However, the peace process (for various reasons) stalled and failed to reach an agreement acceptable to both. What the 2000s brought was unending rounds of peace talks with Camp David in 2000, the Road Map of

2003 and finally the American led Mitchell (2010-11) and Kerry (2013-14) talks. All of these have failed. Concurrent with them was a steadily increasing amount of violence on both sides, with the second Intifada in the early 2000s followed by a series of wars in Gaza. For the sake of outlining the Israeli shift to the right, it’s necessary to focus on the impact of the violence upon Israeli civilians though also vital to note that Palestinians have been victims of Israeli violence overwhelming more than the reverse. The second Intifada saw the current generation of Israeli voters face suicide bombings in Israel, and the periodic wars in Gaza see ineffective though very frightening rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel.

Hardening of public opinion

The result has been a hardening of Israeli popular opinion. Peace, for many Israelis, is simply no longer a major political issue.

This has been compounded by the situation in the Middle East in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Iraq and Syria are both in the midst of civil war, Egypt has returned to military rule and is battling an Islamist insurgency and Lebanon teeters on the brink of a return to its own horrendous civil war.

This has fed into a common narrative in Israeli politics: that the Palestinians simply cannot be trusted with their own state.

That it would inevitably fall prey to Islamists who wish to destroy Israel, that Gaza proves the Palestinians cannot be trusted and so must be controlled. To use an Israeli quote from the Gaza war in the summer of 2014, occasionally the “grass must be mown”, but beyond that the problem should be ignored.

If I’m honest, I find Israeli fears understandable and I sympathise with them. However, though the fears are real, so is the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Just on Thursday Israeli forces entered the waters of Gaza, before shooting and killing a fisherman off the coast of Gaza for no reason: he was within the chokehold the Israelis enforce around Gaza fishing areas.

The ramifications for Israel voting to continue the status quo are scary to think about. Amid mounting violence over the summer, there was talk of a third Intifada – another major uprising

by Palestinians who have grown tired of a perpetual occupation, which seems destined to continue. An Intifada would mean thousands dead, mostly Palestinians, and considering the outcome of the previous two would likely not directly lead to positive results (though one cannot deny the right of the Palestinians to resist the occupation under the circumstances).

However, perhaps the most important result of Netanyahu’s political manoeuvers has been a growing coldness towards Israel from the American political establishment. Netanyahu addressed the US congress in the run up to the election, directly against the wishes of Barack Obama, which combined with Netanyahu’s race baiting and comments on the two-state solution have seen the US hinting that they may consider taking a stronger stance with Israel unless a serious effort is made to achieve peace.

In Europe, even before the election there have been growing calls on governments to sanction Israel, to end arms deals and limit trade – calls which governments across Europe have proven more and more willing to listen to. The final ramification is likely to be the continued growth of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which calls for disengagement, and sanctions upon Israel until it complies with international law.

Israeli politicians have begun to openly discuss the possible damage of BDS, and have taken moves to try and weaken the movement through “hasbara” or “propaganda”. Taken together it looks as if Israel, if it continues with the status quo, faces international isolation and internal economic woe. Short term, these effects will likely lead to a hardening of it’s position, as no one likes having policy decisions dictated to them from abroad. But in the long term, as South Africa showed, no country can maintain a system of apartheid without support from and trade with the international community. This time last year, in this paper, I called for Trinity to adopt boycotts, divestment and sanctions and I have no qualms about doing so again. We should divest and boycott Israel immediately, or else we are complicit in the crimes they commit.

Although I cannot foresee a just peace soon, solace can be drawn from the knowledge that like oppressed peoples all over the world, eventually the Palestinians’ day will come.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

Comment

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Time for student bodies to get serious about providing alcohol-free spaces If student representatives are really serious about preventing alcohol abuse, they need to do more than run campaigns.

The common advice given to those struggling with self-confidence does not work for everyone.

Doireann Ní Chonghaíle Staff Writer We’ve all heard the advice before – If you’re lacking in selfconfidence, self-esteem, or are plagued with doubts about your own worth, all you need is this one simple trick: pretend to be confident, and eventually everyone, including yourself, will believe it. Fake it ’til you make it. It’s ridiculously easy, too, once you realise that most of the people you interact with will know no better. They have no idea that this person, who’s always smiling, or joking, who seems unshakeable, is not you. It’s like a cheat code for introverts – you can skip actually learning to believe in yourself and go straight to a successful and fulfilling life.

Maybe it works perfectly for some people. Good for them. But “faking it”, as with most things, can be taken too far. Because pretending to be confident when you’re not – which is all the time, for some of us – isn’t self-improvement. You’re not actually making yourself more confident; you’re creating a whole other persona, a character, a facade, who you wear every day like an old shirt you know you should throw out. It’s not pretty, but it does the job. Until it doesn’t.

Rachel Graham Online Comment Editor The Union of Students in Ireland (USI) last month launched a campaign, Mental Drinking, which aims to change students’ attitudes towards alcohol. It has been welcomed as an alternative to the Diageo-funded Stop Out of Control Drinking campaign.

It is striking that two campaigns launched almost simultaneously have chosen to take a similar slant on Irish drinking problems: that of providing an example for younger people. Stop Out of Control Drinking’s take on the issue is very provocative, while the tone of the Mental Drinking website is relatively unsensational. It details the effects of alcohol on young people and their development, with a focus on psychological and behavioural consequences, and asks students to examine the example they give to their younger cohorts.

A banner across the homepage reads “You might be the only hero your younger brother or sister has”.

Most people see the necessity of efforts to tackle Ireland’s alcohol problem, but does it make sense to suggest to college students that they should lead the way in providing an example of healthy alcohol use to the next generation? Being careful to speak sensibly to young people about alcohol is to be commended, but ultimately it’s your actions, and those of society as a whole, that they’ll be replicating.

Encouraging students to provide this example, considering they spend their time in arguably the most alcohol-saturated environments there are, seems a rather ironic move.

Corporate sponsorship

Drinks advertising and sponsorship are often cited as issues that need to be tackled in order to discourage alcohol-dependency. These things are powerful because they link the notions of specific events and alcohol consumption in people’s minds, making it difficult for people to go certain places without drinking. Drinks sponsorship is not allowed in most university contexts, but the positive and relentless association between all manner of events and drinking is entrenched in the social life of college.

This does not just come about because the students themselves like drinking (although in most cases we do!). It is encouraged and legitimised in Trinity by continued support and funding by the SU and Central Societies Committee (CSC) of alcoholcentred events and free alcohol, and by other relevant bodies in other universities. When the siblings that the Mental Drinking website seeks to remind you of come to college, they will be invited to take part in five days of heavy drinking. Freshers’ Week will be their initiation into college life, their first chance to make friends and a promise of what the coming years have to bring. For some people, it will be a formative experience of Dublin, binge-drinking, and ‘going out’. There’s nothing wrong with going out all week and getting locked – but to expect that ethos not to shape how people see the

Facing up to reality

Illustration: Emer O’ Cearbhaill social life of a college would be naive. When you couple this with the fact that so much of college’s events, even those without a social focus, provide free alcohol to guests and are indeed often advertised for on that basis, it seems like students are being set up to fail with regards to developing a healthy relationship with alcohol.

Importance of education

Campaigns that try to educate students about alcohol are not useless. When I checked out the drinks calculator on MentalDrinking.ie, I was genuinely surprised to find out how little I “should” be drinking to avoid damaging my health. But education and awareness only go so far –nutritional information has been included on food labels for years, but most of us still eat more than the recommended daily amounts of sugar, salt and fat, because of our eating habits and the fact that the food most readily available to us is not conducive to a wonderful diet. To further this analogy, suggesting to students that they stick to recommended drinking habits is a little like telling people to remember the food pyramid when they live in a town full of McDonald’s. People need to be empowered to make healthier decisions, rather than just being reminded that they should be doing so. Initiatives by students’ unions and other bodies to promote a healthier society should be encouraged – at least insofar as they aim to educate and support people to have a choice

about their health choices, and not just to shame or coerce them into changing their lifestyles.

It seems to me that students unions and other educational bodies have a lot of potential to enable people to be more in control of their drinking habits, due to the nature of influence they have over where and how young people spend their time. I just think a more grassroots, active approach by students unions themselves is where most of this potential lies.

Central to the development of healthier drinking habits is the provision of alcohol free spaces.

Ireland has a notable lack of such spaces, meaning social life is incredibly dominated by alcohol. Examples have popped up in Dublin lately in two locations: the Morning Gloryville morning raves invite customers to dance on coffee and smoothies alone, while the Happenings group organised an alcohol-free St Patrick’s Day event amid the madness of Temple Bar this year.

Events such as this provide a space for people to meet, socialise and celebrate without alcohol having to come into question.

This is an unusual opportunity for people to experience being sober without having to weigh up the choice with themselves, justify it to others or tolerate the drunkenness of others, all of which are common motivations for drinking when one might not do otherwise. The approach of the alcohol-free event might seem strict and a little dry. But in a city where people aren’t usually provided with a choice between spaces in which alcohol

Grieving my beloved dog Seeing your old pet dog being put down is heartbreaking, especially when her life is caught up with so many childhood memories.

Stephen Cox Staff Writer Joey hadn’t really been herself for a while. She could still run in and out of the garden nearly as fast as when she was a puppy, but in the past few years you could see she didn’t have the same manic energy as in earlier times.

What had been a healthy interest in food turned gradually into a full-blown obsession. Worst of all, she didn’t have that much time for any of us anymore, pre-

You might convince others if you try to fake it ‘til you make it - but you’ll never convince yourself

ferring to keep to herself on a chair that she’d colonised in the front room.

15 years is, really, a long time for a small dog to live. I was seven when we got her, and so she’d been around for most of my life.

When I was younger I’d thrilled to running around the park with her; in recent years, however, worsening health meant that she started refusing to be walked, preferring to curl up on her chair, fairly oblivious to my affectionate efforts at petting her.

Furthermore, with college taking

up most of the day, I might only see her briefly in the morning when I let her out, and then later on when I’d come home, and she’d be sleepy anyway. Both my sister and I spent time studying abroad at different points in our college careers; a friend of hers knowingly compared Joey’s lack of enthusiasm at our respective returns to a kind of Argos-in-reverse, where Odysseus’s ancient hound is the only one in Ithaca not to recognise the returning hero of the Odyssey.

dominates, and ones in which it doesn’t, completely alcohol-free spaces can be an effective way in which to explore alternatives and get out of the social = drunk rut.

Lack of alcohol-free student events

The two actors best placed to take this initiative to Trinity are the SU and the CSC. The Ents office has been criticised for its narrow and alcohol-focused event schedule, a criticism that it does not wholly deserve. In the past few years, a range of interesting musical events have taken place under the header ‘Ents Live’, and this year saw the introduction of the Trinity Film Festival. However, there is a dearth of SU-sponsored social events that don’t follow the “get really drunk, and then drink some more” model, something which Conor Parle mentioned in his Ents campaign as something he would like to change were he elected. There’s a lot of potential within this office to experiment with small and large-scale, alcohol-free events which would be visible to the whole of the student community.

The CSC is the other body with influence over college social life, as it organises funding and support for all (non-athletic) societies and sponsors special weeks such as 4th week, in which societies can apply funding to put on large events with a view to attracting new members. It is the CSC that funds the free alcohol societies have at their events. This is isn’t a bad thing in itself, and helps to promote a

Good-natured until the end

However, all of this might give an unfavourable impression of a dog who was always pleasant and good-natured in temperament.

While she definitely underwent a change in character in the last five or so years of her life, it was always good to open the front door to Joey’s tail wagging softly, with her gently standing on her hind legs, reaching up to your knees to greet you.

Heart problems plagued her from the age of thirteen or so, which was when the steady descent into old age became most apparent. It is difficult to convey what a sprightly dog she’d been up to the age of ten or so, and even then it took a while to notice any real difference in movement and behaviour. In a way, it’s remarkable that she lasted as long as she did with heart disease, but it was kidney failure, in the end, that did for her. She’d gone very quickly from being slightly doddery on her feet and more reserved in nature to visibly emaciated and unwell. The vet said there was nothing else to be done.

lively, casual social atmosphere on weekday evenings. It does make alcohol difficult to escape though, as anyone attending a talk or debate on mid-week is likely to be confronted with a table full of free wine on their way out the door. It’s this kind of drinking that caught me off guard in first year, and still does to some extent. Drinking two small glasses of wine at each of two evening events adds up to around eight UK units, and that’s before you’ve gone to a pub, club or party. This makes it difficult for people to monitor their drinking and strengthens the mental link between alcohol and any kind of socialisation.

Something the CSC could do to promote a less alcohol-centric atmosphere on campus would be to introduce a week in which societies could receive extra funding to put on alcohol-free evening events, and regular nonalcoholic events such as Stitch & Bitch would be promoted. If it seemed like it wouldn’t be too unpopular, a completely alcoholfree society week could be introduced.

This is just one of the ways in which students could be encouraged and helped to develop healthier drinking habits, without resorting to prescriptive or patronising methods. Healthy drinking campaigns can be hard to take seriously, in part because there is a feeling that everybody knows that alcohol is bad for you. Providing an environment in which that knowledge can be used to inform decisions is what the USI and individual SUs should be focusing on.

I hadn’t even planned on being there, initially. We were told on a Wednesday morning, so I thought that I could take my leave of the old dog that night, without thinking too much about what would be happening to her the following day. Then the vet called again to say that that wasn’t a good idea, and that we really should do it sooner rather than later to ease the poor animal’s suffering. It hit home then that I was being selfish, and that it would be too easy to let my parents handle it all invisibly. So I left the library early, and we all went to the clinic together that evening.

Watching an animal be put down is curious—it’s all controlled, calm and humane, but you still get a very definite sense of a life being extinguished.

Joey, curled up on the surgery counter, started to wilt a minute or so after the first, tranquillising injection. The vet explained that there’d be an interval of five or so minutes between the first and second doses, and that the second, fatal injection could provoke violent spasms in some

It’s not an epiphany, as such – more of a gradual awakening to the fact that your trick isn’t working quite as well as you thought.

There were clues, if you’d been able to pick up on them. All those times you made a stupid, sarcastic joke, when you didn’t even find it funny. When you kept dodging personal questions with witty (inane) quips, then wondered what would have been so hard about just answering them. All those times you could have been sincere and personal, and went for proud and impenetrable instead – as if you even had a choice. Gradually, and then all at once, you realise that this person – who everyone thinks is you – is brash, loud, antagonistic.

And you don’t like them.

Imagine you’re an actor, and you’ve been trained to play this one very specific part whenever you’re in a social situation that might make you nervous (which is somewhere between “some” and “most”, generally). It’s an automatic, almost Pavlovian response to feeling terrified and small, so when someone makes an attempt to talk to you properly, it’s not you that answers, it’s the part you’re playing. And they don’t have any answers, because they’re a shallow, one-dimensional character you created to provide what you were lacking, and their only trait is overconfidence. This character, who is empty and insubstantial, forms what you once thought was a suit of armour around you, but is really just a cage. Every day, you lock yourself into that cage, and it’s so, so, frustratingly hard to leave it.

Impact of social media

Issues of self-confidence are hardly new or specific to our generation, but they do seem to be exacerbated by social media.

We feel under constant pressure to perform to our Facebook friends or our Twitter followers, to be witty and observant and likeable, to rake in likes and retweets, and feel validated. Every tweet, status or email involves deciding how you want (potentially hundreds) of strangers to

dogs. What happened was even more heart-wrenching to see, though fitting, even so: Joey’s dying movement was to wag her tail, weakly.

“

Joey’s dying movement was to wag her tail, weakly.

Last remnant of childhood

The death of a beloved family pet, upsetting as it may be, must surely pale in comparison to other, more serious ordeals that people go through. I count myself accordingly fortunate in never having suffered from mental health problems, or losing an immediate family member, or undergoing any of the infinite number of traumatic things that happen to people. Nevertheless,

perceive you, even if you’re just making a point about your favourite TV show. It’s constant, it’s exhausting, and it’s lonely.

Because that person, the one who gets a hundred likes on every status, or has a thousand Twitter followers, is not you, not really. They’re the same character you play when you go to a meeting or a party, only now you have to play them all the time, even inside your own home, the one place you shouldn’t have to act. You’ve been faking it, turning on this other persona for so long, you can’t really remember how to turn it off anymore. It’s like being a method actor, except that filming goes on for your entire life, and viewers only know you as the character you play. We see ourselves through other peoples’ eyes, and filter our own perception of ourselves through the opinions of those we love and respect. So it’s a little bit shattering to realise that they don’t even know you, and so, you wonder, can you really claim to know yourself? Which bits of you are actually you, and which bits have you just gotten so used to faking you don’t even know if you can tell anymore? When you strip away what you know is fake, do you even like what’s left?

Nothing to lose

The plus side (if you can call it that) to realising the awful distance between who you think you are, and who others think you are, is that, after a while - after plenty of self-loathing, selfdoubt, and anger at yourself for letting this happen - you realise that you have almost nothing left to lose. Because, at that moment, no-one could possibly think as little of you as you think of yourself, and a perverse kind of self-confidence grows out of that realisation. You’ve tried faking it, and that got you hyperventilating while curled in the foetal position at the bottom of your bed. Losing that fight, as shitty as it is, can give you the strength to try something different – like instead of trying to constantly impress others, trying to impress yourself. It sounds inane and cheesy, but think about it like this: If you were asked to sign a lifetime contract to live with someone you hated, you’d think that was insane, right? But you have to live with yourself – both the self you know and the one you present to the outside world – forever, so you should probably make some effort to get along.

Faking self-confidence doesn’t get you anywhere good, even if it seems like the only option available to you for getting through stressful situations. But whether it’s a successful strategy depends on what your own idea of “making it” is. If you’re happy to have to pretend all the time, potentially for the rest of your life; if it doesn’t bother you that it means keeping most people at an arm’s length, or that their perception of you is completely skewed, then great. You’ve made it. But if you’d rather be able to walk out your front door every day without having to put on a virtual suit of armour, and not feel the need to perform for anyone, including yourself; if you’d like to be able to look at all your decisions and say “Yes, that was me. I did that because that was what I wanted.”

– then this is not for you.

Can you do those things? Can you show the world who you are, and not be ashamed of it? Then congratulations, you’ve made it.

that night in the vet’s affected me more than I thought it would, which was, at the time, difficult to admit. I kept going over how long we’d had Joey, how young I was when we got her, and how used you get to a dog’s presence at home. Two weeks later, I still do a double-take at not seeing her on her old chair.

In the context of a creature’s death, words from St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians—with his call ‘to put away childish things’—appear harsh. That said, Joey dying seemed like the last remnant of childhood definitively being laid to rest. Granted, I wasn’t a child, as such, for much of her life. It would not be accurate to say, either, that my dog’s death has brought a forcible end to some kind of prolonged infancy, or arrested development. Rather, I’d prefer to echo the words of the novelist John Galsworthy, who noted that ‘not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.’ Happy years, admittedly, but years nonetheless.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

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What it’s like to be asexual The lack of awareness about asexuality leaves many feeling just as I once did: broken and wrong.

Hannah Deviney Contributor

Why the ‘depressed genius’ is a lie Our cultural conception of the depressed artist as a non-consenting participant in a Faustian bargain, their skills purchased at the cost of their mental health, is helping no-one.

Naoise Dolan Online Editor Depression: the illness that launched a thousand lazy armchair-opinions from people who’ve never experienced it.

Among them is the idea that it’s a natural correlative of artistic talent. From Virginia Woolf to Robin Williams, we’ve rolled out a medically illiterate, criminally insensitive notion that for the creative see-saw to tip so ‘high’, the creator’s mood must dip correspondingly ‘low’ from time to time.

I’m an artist of sorts who was diagnosed with clinical depression six years ago, and there hasn’t been much brooding inspiration involved. Largely, it’s been an inglorious hamster-wheel where I stay in a tiny space and run myself into circles so quickly that it looks like I’m standing still.

There do exist many examples of artists who have depression.

That is because there exist many examples of people who have depression – at least one out of every 10 adults in Ireland, and they’re just the ones we’ve managed to diagnose.

Perhaps there are features of art and writing that might attract

disproportionate numbers of us to those fields: perhaps the value placed on introspection, the fact that you don’t need to be consistently happy and functioning, the fact that the social demands placed on you are comparatively low, might draw us in.

Setbacks

On the other hand, there are many aspects that could be seen as peculiarly off-putting to people who have my illness. Having to retain a sense of faith and purpose in yourself and the thing you’re doing; the lack of direction and the need to keep shouldering on in rejection; the isolation; the biting comments from strangers; the expectation to share your story when, in your daily life, you can barely look your friends in the eye or answer questions about how you’re doing with any degree of candour.

Even the factors that make an artistic career attractive to people handling their depression poorly – not having to talk to people, not having to get out of bed by a certain time every day – could easily render it anathema to people coping well or aspiring to cope well. Several healthcare professionals have urged me to do things that ‘get me out of

the house’, even if I see no other purpose in them. People with that aim would be better off in an office job.

Stereotype

Think of the stereotypical languishing-martyr-to-own-brilliance. They’re usually drinking too much, aren’t they? And working all night and agonising over tiny details. If they did that minus the ‘artist’ title, it would be recognised as self-destructive behaviour that no-one could comfortably glamourise except at an absolute distance from the condition a depressed person lives with. Speaking for myself – and when it comes to mental illness, yourself is the only person you should ever claim to speak for – my depression flattens my creativity.

Debilitating impact

It doesn’t necessarily heighten my feelings or even, in a looser sense, my perception. Often, I end up inured to every last internal or external factor of my existence besides the sensation of someone driving a thousand tiny nails into me. It’s outside vocabulary, outside verbalisation. I tell people that I have a headache, or that I’m tired – and though I

“

Having an illness does not help me create things know full well I’m lying through my teeth, it’s because I don’t know what the true thing to say would be. Nor can I compress my experience and articulate it better when I’m feeling well again.

I can only comprehend it while it’s happening. My imbalanced brain chemistry, alas, cannot be put in a tupperware lunchbox until I feel like coming back to it.

Having an illness, in short, does not help me to create things. The inanity of even having to articulate this is striking – are diabetic poets ever put in the position of clarifying that they, and not their diabetes, write their poetry? But as Seán Healy recently wrote in The University Times, there is an ongoing perception that my illness, though it functionally debilitates me, doesn’t ‘count’ as a

medical issue.

Elitist trope

Perhaps any vaguely positive representation of depression is better than writing off the people who live with it. But as a rehabilitative trope, the “depressed artist” is also beyond elitist. If you don’t get published, you’re not a tortured genius: you’re a depressed person with no job.

Cleaning bathrooms for minimum wage isn’t an instantiation of noble melancholy, because somewhere between Shelley and Byron, we decided that the artist-figure should have unique agency and selfhood under capitalism. Only a tiny subset of the labour market are able to “copyright” their work or have it understood as “their” notwithstanding the fact that someone paid them to do it. Funny that they should be the ones we care about valorising.

Celebrating artistic talent is good. Crediting depressed people with the ability to live productive lives is good. But our cultural conception of the depressed artist as a non-consenting participant in a Faustian bargain, their skills purchased at the cost of their mental health, is helping no-one.

Reflections on Terry Pratchett’s passing The recently departed Pratchett was often dismissed as just a funnyman writing in a silly genre.

But besides being droll and imaginative, his works are also generous and unexpectedly wise.

Doireann Ní Chonghaíle Staff Writer JRR Tolkien is often credited with legitimising fantasy as a genre, and turning it into something that could be taken seriously by readers and critics alike.

He gave us orcs, and hobbits, and epic quests. But it was Terry Pratchett who took that “legitimate” genre and made it into something more - something that was accessible, heartwarming, and most importantly, fun.

Where Tolkien gave us majestic eagles and huge bloody battles over the fate of mankind, Pratchett gave us stupid wizards and giant space elephants, because he didn’t care about being taken seriously. In fact, if there is any one message that could be taken from his works, it would be that being taken seriously comes last in the list of things you should care about.

Following the announcement of his death on March 12th, social media was flooded with praise of this man whose books had touched so many people, of every age, sex, and nationality, a man who could take the strangest concepts (like a disc-shaped world, carried by four elephants, on the back of a flying space turtle) and make them so wonderfully ordinary that you often forgot that he was writing about a different world at all. Fantasy is probably the most harshly criticised genre in all of literature,

and a notoriously difficult one to do well in. Its many detractors will complain that it’s too unrealistic, too far-fetched, or that they’d rather read something set in the “real” world.

Lessons of fantasy

Pratchett was, obviously, aware of these criticisms. He once compared fantasy to an exercise bike - it won’t take you anywhere, but it’ll tone up the muscles that can. But his stories did so much more than that. His works teach you much about your own world, as all good fantasy should, but his wisdom was so much more poignant for being unexpected.

It was almost like he tricked you - you went into one of his novels expecting to read a silly story about some witches, and somehow came out of it with huge revelations about the nature of humanity. He had this incredible knack for taking the most complex, nuanced issues, such as war, racism, good and evil, and distilling them down to something so simple, so ridiculous, that you wonder how you never saw them like that before.

In one of my personal favourite examples, from the opening of The Carpet People, he sums up the problems with human relations in a few simple sentences: “They called themselves the Munrungs. It meant The People, or The True Human Beings. It’s what most people call themselves, to begin with. And then one day the tribe meets some other People or, if it’s not been a good day, The Enemy. If

only they’d think up a name like Some More True Human Beings, it’d save a lot of trouble later on.”

Sense of humour

What became clear in the days following his death, and the tributes and obituaries came rushing in, was that his readers valued, above all else, his incredible sense of humour – not only in his fiction, but in real life as well. Even people who had never read Discworld, or Good Omens, or The Carpet People, could appreciate this man in a silly hat, with his particular brand of selfdeprecation, who often wore a T-shirt that read “Tolkien’s dead, JK Rowling said no, Philip Pullman couldn’t make it… Hi, I’m Terry Pratchett” when invited to to conventions. Some might claim that he was almost too irreverent, or that there was no depth or substance to his works as if making people laugh wasn’t a worthwhile achievement in itself.

There was something incredibly generous about this sense of humour of his. This was a man with an imagination of almost unparalleled scope, who, when creating the character of Death (who appears, ominously but realistically, in almost every one of his novels) could have made him terrifying, or intimidating, or creepy, like so many other authors before him. Instead, Pratchett’s Death (or DEATH, as he’d prefer to be called) is a darkly funny and incredibly sympathetic. He likes cats. He rides a huge, magic war-horse, whose

“

It was almost like he tricked you - you went into one of his novels expecting to read a silly story about some witches, and somehow came out of it with huge revelations about the nature of humanity. name is Binky. Words are powerful things, as Pratchett often said himself, and rather than use his power to create the kind of horror and despair that genres like fantasy thrive on, he chose to give us a world in which everything, even death, was slightly ridiculous, and was nothing to be afraid of.

As a teenager, and even as an adult having a bad day, every little mishap or setback can seem like the end of the world, and relatively simple problems feel

insurmountable. At times like these, few things are more valuable than a sense of humour, and a sense of perspective like Terry Pratchett’s. Nothing - not death, not even the literal end of the world - is so horrific that a change of attitude can’t make it seem okay. Life is strange, and complicated, and often inexplicable. Things can and will go horribly wrong, and even if they don’t work out how you expected, it’ll be (mostly) fine. Sometimes life sucks, his books tell us, but why should that bother you?

Facing death

Even towards the end of his life, as his health and his mind deteriorated, he never lost that sense of humour that made so many readers fall in love with him. He referred to his awful degenerative condition as an “embuggerance”, and only complained that he couldn’t choose to end his life on his own terms and meet his old friend Death at his own convenience. Despite being faced with the prospect of an early and likely difficult death, he never seemed to be afraid of death itself - perhaps because he’d spent so much time in his presence already. He was only afraid of living in a world where he could no longer write, or even remember his own stories - where he could no longer help others to be as brave as he was.

Anyone who has read a Terry Pratchett book is better for it. We can only hope that, when Death came, he was exactly how he imagined him.

I hate coming out. I’m sure everyone does – coming out is scary, and in many cases it’s a huge risk to take. You can never be sure how someone will react, if they’ll accept you. And, if you’re coming out as one of the more “exotic” flavors of the LGBTQIA+ alphabet soup, you can’t even be sure if they’ll know what you’re talking about. In my case, they usually don’t. I hate the half-hour long vocabulary lesson and the invasive questions which follow coming out. I hate the rejection, the dismissive gesture, the disbelieving look. I hate that I can’t just come out once and be done with it – every time I meet someone new, I have to figure out how they’ll feel about this information about me; if and when and how I’m going to tell them.

Some days, I just want to scream it out from the rooftops so that I can stop having these individual conversations; others, I wonder why I bother telling anyone at all – it’s nobody’s business but mine, after all. Today is one of the former days. This is my rooftop. Here is your half-hour long vocabulary lesson, and a little about my experience, and why you should even care. Here’s my once and have done with it. Hi everyone. My name is Hannah.

I’m a first year CSL student. I grew up in Virginia, in the US. I knit while watching movies. I’m a cat person. I make really excellent banana bread. Oh, and I’m asexual.

The vocabulary lesson

Asexuality is defined as a lack of sexual attraction. Of course, people are more complicated than that, so everyone who identifies as asexual has their own idea of what asexuality means for them.

Some asexuals are sex-repulsed, some are indifferent, some enjoy sex. Some asexuals are also aromantic, others desire a romantic partner in their lives.

Sexuality, like more or less everything else, is a spectrum. On one end, we have asexuals (aces); on the other, allosexuals (those who experience sexual attraction). But there’s still a bunch of space in the middle! People along the middle areas of this spectrum may identify as demisexual (demi) or gray-asexual (gray-a).

And some people choose to eschew labels all together. Asexuality is not linked to trauma or mental illness. Please don’t confuse asexuality with celibacy, which is where someone feels sexual attraction but doesn’t act on it. Sexuality is an orientation, not a choice.

Okay, so now that you know what asexuality is, we’re going to go ahead and skip a large number of questions that are generally considered to be in bad taste.

Or rather, we’ll skip the answers, because it’s important you know not to ask these questions to people. Seriously, guys, why would you ask anyone these?

Some questions you should never ask an asexual • • • • • • • • • •

“So… you’re like an amoeba?”

“Have you ever had sex?”

“So, you really want to have sex, but you just, like, don’t?”

“If you’ve never had sex, how do you know you’re asexual?”

“Do you masturbate?”

“Are you sure you’re not just gay?”

“Have you had your hormones checked?”

“Were you, like, abused?”

“Don’t you think you’ll feel differently in a few years?”

“Why do you feel the need to be a ‘special snowflake’?”

My experience

I started self-identifying as ace around the beginning of high school, which is about age 14.

This is a huge oversimplification, so let me expand on how, exactly, I came to identify this way. I think it’s really hard to describe this process I went through, why it was so important, to allosexuals, particularly to straight people, but I’m going to try.

Puberty is pretty much universally awful. Your body goes through changes without asking you, and suddenly you have all these new urges and feelings.

At least, you’re supposed to. I never did. That’s how it’s taught, year after year, in health class, or sex ed, or “family life education” (actually what my state refers to it as, no joke). “Someday soon, you’re going to be looking at someone, and you’ll want to do things with them. You will.” Generally, they encourage you not to do these things, but the underlying assumption is that, deep down, you must want to.

But it’s not just taught in schools.

Think about all the media you consume. How many movies have you watched in the last year that didn’t have a romantic subplot? Sex sells. Relationship drama is considered necessary to a complete narrative. And rep-

resentation matters – all these things that are shown to you, time and time again, are coded as “normal”. Not wanting them means that something must be wrong with you.

Over and over, that is what I was told – by my teachers talking about what made a healthy relationship, by the media playing image after movie after love song, by friends giggling together over crushes, by my parents gently teasing me about any boys (and, later, some of the girls) I hung out with. These things are all meant well, of course. But over time, pressure begins to build up. “Late bloomer” begins to look more and more unlikely.

Words like “frigid” and “prude” start to get tossed around. I spent some time seriously considering whether I might be gay – but kissing girls sounded just as gross as kissing dudes.

Why didn’t I want these things that everyone else wanted? Why was the idea of sex in the abstract fine, but enough to induce nausea and panic when I tried to add myself into the equation? Fortunately for me, the internet was a thing when I was in high school, and I managed to stumble across asexuality.org. I don’t remember what I was looking for originally, but I do remember what it was like to click on the FAQ page and realise, this is me.

Finding this word is one of the best things ever to happen to me. Having the vocabulary to describe the things I felt was liberating. Suddenly, I was valid. I was a part of a community. There were other people who felt the way I did, and they were – for the most part - happy. There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for my existence. I wasn’t broken.

“

Why was the idea of sex in the abstract fine, but enough to induce nausea and panic when I tried to add myself into the equation?

Fortunately, the internet was a thing when I was in high school.

Why you should care

If the rest of this article hasn’t made it clear yet, most people have no idea what asexuality is – which is kind of surprising, because most estimates put asexuals as being about 1% of the population. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it means there are probably about 46,000 of us in Ireland, with possibly over a 150 attending Trinity. The odds are good you know someone on the asexual spectrum.

This lack of visibility is really harmful. A lot of aces go much longer than I did without discovering the community (which is mostly online), or never find it at all. They feel the same way I did: broken and wrong. And even once you know the words, it can be really hard to say them when you’re not sure if people will understand. You have to worry if they’ll believe you; you have to worry if they’ll smirk and say something inappropriate. In some cases, you have to worry about whether or not they’ll still want to date you when anything beyond cuddling and kissing is off the table, and honestly you’re not too enthusiastic about the kissing, either. You’ll have to worry about other people assigning a lower value to your relationship, because in their minds, sex and romance are permanently fused.

Nothing hurts worse than trusting someone with a piece of yourself, and having them laugh in disbelief. I’m generally really happy with my life. But that doesn’t mean that everything is easy. I’ve been really conflicted about publishing this with my name on it, because I’ll be honest with you: I’m scared. I’ve faced enough rejection to be perfectly willing to crawl into a hole and never come out. Every time I hear someone say something that, essentially, doubts my existence and validity, I want to cry.

But I think that these things have more meaning with a name and a face. Asexuals don’t just exist in the abstract, we’re here.

We’re real people, just like you.

And there’s nothing wrong with us.

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TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

Editorial

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Saying goodbye to the paper I love

“ Catherine Healy Editor

My time with TN - as a staff writer, news editor and now as editor has defined my college experience, and taught me more about writing and resilience than any experience.

As the end of my three-and-ahalf year relationship with Trinity News draws to close, I would like to offer an epilogue to what has been a defining year for the paper. I am proud to leave our Mandela House newsroom as a digital-first operation, breaking stories as they happen. Our monthly print issue this year, I hope, has informed, entertained, and set the standard for student-led news and analysis.

Staff numbers have reached new levels, our profile has grown both within and beyond campus, while our online presence allowed us to reach more readers than ever before. Our aims - to produce daily online content, develop new talent and hold figures in positions of authority to account - have been realised. I am especially proud of the number of strong female writers who have joined our ranks this year and come to define the voice of a paper dominated for so long by male students.

With the end of this chapter in sight, I wish to offer my thanks to those who have worked so hard on behalf of Trinity News over the past year. I thank my editorial staff for their energy and dedication, for putting up with my late night phone calls and often unreasonable requests with good humour. Their presence in the office this year has made my job infinitely more enjoyable. I thank my predecessors, Elaine McCahill and Ronan Burtenshaw, and my first news editor, Manus Lenihan, for training me as a journalist, generously advising me and always believing in me. I thank our staff writers and illustrators for dropping essays and social commitments to write and draw for us. Their commitment to and pride in this paper drives me more than anything else.

Heartfelt thanks are also due to my family and what friends I have left for their support during a year in which contact has been

minimal. My boyfriend deserves a special note for his endless encouragement and understanding. Finally, I wish my successor, Matthew Mulligan, the best of luck with his editorship. He brings a wealth of experience in student media to the position and is a fitting custodian for the position.

I began writing for Trinity News in January 2012 with an article submitted under the email heading “awkward attempt at a journalistic piece”. My subsequent time as a staff writer, news editor and now as editor of the paper has defined my college experience, and taught me more about writing and resilience than any experience. It has been the honour of my life to edit the 61st volume of Trinity News. To all who supported us this year - our staff, alumni and readers - I offer my genuine thanks.

EDITORIAL STAFF

Editor: Deputy Editor: Online Editor: Editor-at-Large: Contributing Editor: Multimedia: Art: Photography: Design: News: Deputy News: Online News: Investigations: Student Affairs: Features: Deputy Features: Online Features: Comment: Deputy Comment: Online Comment: SciTech: Deputy SciTech: Online SciTech: Sport: Deputy Sport: Online Sport: Business:

Catherine Healy D. Joyce-Ahearne Naoise Dolan Matthew Mulligan James Bennett Daire Collins Natalie Duda Kevin O'Rourke Mariam Ahmad, Kevin Threadgold James Wilson Andrew O’Donovan Clare Droney James Prendergast Lia Flattery Conor O’Donovan Tadgh Healy Michael Lanigan William Foley Dee Courtney Rachel Graham Dylan Lynch Aidan Murray Luke McGuinness Alicia Lloyd Gavin Cooney Louis Strange William Earle A'Hern

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

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.

A final positive note The Trinity News and tn2 magazine teams shared one final production weekend dinner on Sunday. Photo: Catherine Healy

Looking to the future

“

Adventure becomes hard graft in a city with skyrocketing rents and an almost chokingly Matthew Mulligan small Editor-at-Large atmosphere.

At the time of writing, I’ve a dissertation due in less than two weeks, a month till exams, another summer spent in Dublin and then I’ll take up editorship of this paper. After three years spent meandering around Trinity and a first year in Maynooth, my college experience will be over. In that time I’ve been on the committee for four different societies, written for four different newspapers and a magazine, and tried my hand at debating, mentoring, poetry and photography. It doesn’t feel like long enough though, and I don’t think it could ever feel like enough.

My friends have mostly carried over from that year in Kildare, staying with me as I transferred university and made roots elsewhere. They were the older, cynical final-year students I buzzed around as a fresher and who left Maynooth at the same time I did, seemingly ready to start their new lives and new adventures, degree in hand and smiles blazing across their faces.

But after a while the degree finds its way down the back of the sofa, the smiles fade and adventure

becomes hard graft in a city with skyrocketing rents and an almost chokingly small atmosphere.

Their headstart on me, though, has taught me what will come next. Dinner parties replace going out to clubs, and the half an hour you used to lose dry heaving on the curb gives way to feeling satisfied and tipsy after a few cans. You can get up and make something, find the brilliant, lonely, post-Tiger spaces being taken over by other young people and join together to tell your stories and experiences. Watching the evolution of the Dublin art and performance scene from the safety of College Green can make you realise just how much of a distance there is between you and them, between the people you wasted hours in the SU bar with and those whose faces you see on stage at festivals.

The marriage equality referendum will take place in less than two months and there too I see people making a name for themselves in a new Ireland that mightn’t have even been imaginable when I started college.

Young politicians getting elected

and young people fighting to fix the situations they’ve been left with by the people who sold us everything. There’s an excitement and a sense of change on the horizon. NCAD students are revolting and TCDSU has just elected a mother of two as their president.

When I look around at classmates and acquaintances I hear talk of what summer will bring with internship opportunities and travelling for master’s interviews. A friend I spent Thursday nights with in first year recently got accepted to a prestigious writing course in the States. It’s a far cry from the trepidation and nevers we all feel when we start off on our journey. However long ago it was, it led to something which is happening now. And when I think of what will happen in the next few days, months and year I know I’ll still be here, in Dublin and maybe still doing the same old thing I have been for the last while. But being here is a thousand miles away from where we first started, and that’s the change that means the most.

Staff, students must work together

James Bennett Contributing Editor

This Thursday, the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies will hold a staffstudent forum in the Synge theatre. The poster for the event describes it to students as an “opportunity to express any concerns you have regarding teaching and learning issues in the School.” This is another positive development following on from the staff-student meeting held to discuss the future of TSM, which I wrote about in an earlier editorial. Communication between students and teaching staff is vital right now. Funding is being cut from various programmes and departments without debate, and a privatising agenda is being strong-armed through the governing bodies of College.

Students and teachers are the backbone of any university, and

if they do not communicate with each other about what is negatively affecting them both, then there is no chance that they will be to stop it.

We all experience frustration with Trinity as an institution during our time here. While teaching and administrative staff are often very helpful and sympathetic as individuals, there is a sense that College as a whole does not care about us, or even purposefully makes our lives difficult. This can cause division between staff and students. To some disillusioned students, staff can come to represent all of Trinity. They become the face of an institution that wants to take our money while offering very little academic support in return. This is an easy trap to fall into, but it has a negative effect on every-

one. Teaching staff, especially those in smaller departments, are suffering hugely because of the funding cuts in recent years.

It is wrong to blame them for the problems faced by students.

They are being overworked and this is impacting negatively on the quality of education that they can deliver. Many of them are very vocal about this in private, but hesitant to speak out against College publicly.

If staff and students continue to come together to discuss the problems that they have in common, we can create a sense of support and community which will hopefully lead to more people speaking out against College when they do not agree with changes that are being made. It is much less scary to challenge those in power when you know

you have the strength of a group behind you. Hopefully staff-student forums like the one being held this week by the SLLCS will continue to occur throughout all of next year. Ideally they would be occurring at department, school and faculty level, with input from the SU and teaching unions. There are enough dissatisfied people in Trinity to begin a participatory movement of real significance. All they have to do is start talking to each other and realise how much they have in common. It is very easy to push through harsh cuts when students and staff are not convinced that they can achieve anything together. If we can begin to move towards some kind of unity, Trinity will begin to look like a very different place.

D. Joyce-Ahearne Deputy Editor

“

Transparency and accountability usually come at the expense of someone who wants the opposite.

The editorial page of the last Trinity News of an academic year is always a space for reflection: to look back at the year, usually the positives, and to hope for more in the year to come. But most positives we experience will have a corresponding negative for someone else. This is the nature of conflict.

On May 22nd, we will vote to amend the constitution so that there is marriage equality in Ireland. I hope the vote is a resounding yes and this will lead to, at best, thousands of disappointed no voters. What will be a positive for me, and I believe the country, will be a taken as a negative development by others.

But I hope it passes because not only do I think it’s positive but I believe it’s right.

It’s hard to be positive without being divisive and so then how can you write a positive editorial without grandstanding and backslapping at the expense of others? You can’t. Several of our biggest stories this year, always ones we believe are worth putting into the public forum, left bitter tastes in the mouths of many. But we stand by our decision and believe that to have left them unreported would have meant a less informed student body, and as a newspaper, we believe ignorance is always a negative.

Another positive to reflect on, and to look forward to, is the election of an SU that looks like the most dynamic and interesting I’ve seen so far in Trinity. As my representation I hope the SU makes life difficult for College as I’m sure next year will continue the worrying trend of disregard for the student body that we’ve this year from the powers that be. I know Trinity News will make life difficult for the SU if we find they’re not acting with the students’ best interests at heart.

I can’t write a positive editorial on the successes of Trinity News this year without being divisive.

And we won’t be successful next year unless we continue to step on people’s toes, get in people’s faces and strive for transparency and accountability which usually comes at the expense of someone who wants the opposite. What I can do is reiterate that we believe we’re striving, as an institution, to have a positive effect for the right reasons and with integrity and that we don’t seek to have a negative effect on anyone unless it’s the price of a greater good. This is the nature of good journalism and one that we have always, and will continue to, adhere to.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

SciTech

Tracking everyday lives Staff Writer “LIFELOGGING – Do you count?”- the new exhibition at the Science Gallery Dublin - explores the many ways our lives and the world around us are tracked everyday. There are many interesting pieces that try to capture the direction society is heading, exploring the possibility of selling information about yourself and tracking down Justin Bieber at a click of a button. Here is a taste of some of the pieces I saw at the opening night.

Ground floor

The first piece I thought was pretty interesting is called “Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc” by Jennifer Lyn Morone. In this piece, Jennifer puts a value on things like her own identity, her demographics, what she eats and drinks – information now available to be bought by companies.

The idea is that can know everything about her for just ¤8,000.

She describes the piece as “a protest to the exploitative nature of late capitalism, with increasing surveillance states and the growing data industry.”

The next piece nearby - “Medical Notebook” by George Reynolds – contains the artist’s personal health information from 2003 onwards, useful data for doctors and the health-conscious. Over to the left is a piece by Stephen Cartwright, a three dimensional graph that correlates the average wind speed at his location with the average time spent engaged in self-propelled locomotion.

As you approach the stairs, you can’t miss “Lifelogging Products of the Future” by Karl Toomey.

The piece comprises a collection of objects that can track and record various data. It includes a Justin Bieber tracker and a neck lace with a big black cross with a camera in the middle, for a priest to potentially keep an eye on what mass-goers are doing.

Heading upstairs

A whole wall on the first floor is covered with tiny images that you can look at with a magnifying glass as part of Alberto Frigo’s “Images of the Artifacts used by the Main Hand”. Each image captures an object Alberto used with his right hand – often his phone and computer – and images are printed on panels in rows. Each row is a day and each panel is a month. Alberto started his project in September 2003 and it is still ongoing.

In the middle of the gallery space is a large wooden box with

“

[Morone] describes the piece as ‘a protest to the exploitative nature of late capitalism, with surveillance states and the growing data industry.’

a laser burning a pattern in a panel of wood. This piece by Daniel Palacios, “Whatever Happened, Happened”, considers the gallery as a living organism that evolves in time as people come and go.

The installation tracks the movement of visitors in its vicinity and burns concentric rings in the wood that represent this movement.

Another piece representing personal information is the “Feltron Annual Report” by Nicholas Felton, a piece of work ongoing since 2005. Nicholas has tracked almost all of the aspects of his life and used data visualisation techniques to produce an annual report about himself. The report consists of graphs, maps and charts detailing hiis most personal data.

The last piece that really caught my attention was “Bad Trip” by Alan Kwan, located in a small dark room on the second floor. Alan has documented his life since November 2011 with a camera attached to his glasses.

He then created this mindscape where people can explore his memories and dreams. Using a game controller, we can enter and explore the artist’s mind and look at snapshots of the places he has been to.

There are many other pieces that I will leave for the reader to discover. The Science Gallery is also running weekly workshops that explore different aspects of the theme of LIFELOGGING. These are free, but booking is essential.

LIFELOGGING runs in the Science Gallery until April 16th.

Science in Brief Dylan Lynch SciTech Editor

New figures: Trinity awarded most national funding in ERC awards Figures released last week show that Trinity College Dublin received the highest number of EU European Research Council (ERC) grants than any other institution in Ireland. Seven researchers in College have been awarded grants worth more than ¤12 million for excellence in research.

A total of four out of seven ERC consolidator grants, which allow researchers to develop their re-

LIFELOGGING - a new Science Gallery exhibition - explores the many ways our lives are recorded in a moden age.

Katarzyna Siewierska

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search and consolidate their research teams, were also awarded to Trinity-based researchers These researchers include Dr. Wolfgang Schmitt (¤2 million) and Dr. Ruth Britto (¤1.9 million), both of whom are also lecturing freshman courses this year in Chemistry and Maths respectively. These grants will fund the researchers for another 5 years each.

‘Data Identities’ by prota/meta . Photo: Science Gallery

Student-run academic science journal launched

‘Images of the artifact used by the main hand’ by Alberto Frigo. Photo: SG

Newly published students along with professors and academic staff met to celebrate undergraduate talent in College’s Dining Hall in Front Square at the launch of the first annual edition of the Trinity Student Scientific Review on March 10th.

Of the 20 writers published, five were selected to receive awards. Senior Freshman student Kate Reidy received the prize for ‘Best Freshman’ and Shelley Stafford received the ‘Best Chemistry’ prize for her review. Commenting on the launch, Clive Williams, the

current Dean of the Engineering, Maths and Science (EMS) faculty and Professor of Chemical Biology, said the journal is “a challenging and innovative initiative of our science undergraduate students.” He added: “Trinity is committed to the enhancement of the learning experience of each of its students and the TSSR provides a platform in the Faculty for our students to develop the critical academic and literary skills of modern day scientists”.

Photo: TSSR

Trinity welcomes world famous chemist

‘Confession Cross’ from Karl Toomey’s ‘Lifelogging Products of the Future’. Photo: SG

The internationally renowned inorganic chemist Professor Karl Wieghardt, an expert in the field of bioinorganic chemistry, visited College on March 6th to deliver the 2015 Cocker lecture. The Cocker lecture is named after the former Head of School and Chair of General Chemistry, Professor Wesley Cocker, and celebrates chemistry disciplines.

Professor Wieghardt, who was the founding director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Bioanorganische Chemie (1994 – 2010) in Germany, spoke about how the disciplines of co-ordination chemistry and bioinorganic chemistry have grown since the days of Alfred Werner.

Photo: DUPA

End-of-year roundup: Trinity scientific research in bite size-chunks Dearbhla Murphy Contributor There have been plenty of scientific discoveries and achievements here in Trinity over the last year, with major chemical breakthroughs, awards for creative campaigns and a landmark biological discovery in the area of Parkinson’s disease.

Chiral chemistry

One of the biggest discoveries of the academic year, in December 2014, was in the Trinity’s Chemistry department, under the leadership of Professor Stephen Connon. The discovery has been referred to as the ‘cracking of the chirality code’ and could have a big effect on drug production in the future. Trinity chemists essentially discovered a way of working with peptides, a compound consisting of two or more amino acids linked in a chain, to create useful proteins which have important applications in drug development. The term ‘chirality’ refers to the left or right handed asymmetry of some molecules, often referred to as the ‘handedness’ of a molecule.

Amino acids, which are the molecules which Connon was working with, are usually asymmetric in form making either right or left handed molecules.

Both ‘hands’ in the amino acids

function in a similar manner to one another on their own, however, they tend behave differently when in the presence of another handed molecule. This poses great difficulty in drug development as the drugs affected by amino acid chirality are highly specific drugs with a low toxicity. This makes them very effective on patients, but, due to the chirality of amino acids, they may have unwanted side effects too.

Connon and his team believe that may have found a way to work around this and their findings could therefore play an important role in drug development in the future.

Parkinson’s research

In November 2014, Trinity biologists made another important breakthrough discovery in our understanding the protein ‘Parkin’, which regulates the repair and replacement of the nerve cells within our brains. Due to this discovery, we have a new outlook on how nerve cells die in patients affected by Parkinson’s disease. The College research group, led by Professor Seamus Martin, the Smurfit professor of medical genetics, has just published their findings in the highly renowned and internationally recognised Cell Press journal, ‘Cell Reports’.

Although it’s been known for many years that the mutation of Parkin can lead to an early onset

form of Parkinson’s, our understanding of what the protein actually does inside cells remained a mystery. Now, however, Professor Martin and his colleagues have found that Parkin can set off the self-destruction of ‘injured’ nerve cells, when responding to specific types of cell damage by undergoing a controlled process of ‘cellular suicide’ known as apoptosis.

Using funding from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and new research procedures, Professor Martin and his colleagues have found that the damage to the mitochondria, which act as ‘cellular battery packs’, triggers the activation of Parkin. This results in two different scenarios; the self-destruction or repair of the cell. Each outcome depends on the amount of damage inflicted on the mitochondria.

These new findings suggest that one of the problems in Parkinson’s disease may be the failure of a patient’s body to clear away damaged nerve cells with faulty mitochondria and make way for healthy replacements. Instead, dysfunctional nerve cells could accumulate, which would effectively prevent the recruitment of new, healthy replacement cells.

DART of Physics

The Biology and Chemistry departments weren’t the only ones to achieve great success this academic year, as the European

Commission honoured Trinity scientist Dr Shane Bergin, an investigator at Trinity College Dublin’s School of Physics and nanoscience institute CRANN, for his work on the ‘DARTofPhysics’ project in November 2014. Dr Bergin was awarded the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (MSCA) achievement award, recognising his contribution to communicating science in a fun and attractive manner, and inspiring the next generation in science.

The ‘DART of Physics’ project was based around a poster campaign about physics on Dublin’s DART trains - a mass outreach effort involving over 300 students and 50 scientists. The eye-catching posters caught commuters’ attention by inviting them to visit a website run by the project team so that they could begin, or continue, their ‘physics journey’.

Funding

There were numerous other exciting achievements in Trinity this year, including Dr Valeria Nicolosi’s nanotech grant, which she received to aid her in bridging the gap between nanotech research and the development of associated commercial applications. Another big event in the science calendar this year was the launch of a huge COMPADRE Plant matrix database of plant life histories in November 2014,

which Trinity botanists played a leading role in putting together. It is believed that the database will have a leading role in our understanding of how climate change is affecting our world and also how increasing human populations are

rapidly changing plant distributions.

Finally, Dr Shaun Bloomfield, along with a group of fellow research scientists, received funding for FLARECAST, a very advanced solar flare forecasting

service. With this forecasting service, Dr Bloomfield hopes to accurately predict solar storms through extensive research into their origin. (You can read Trinity News’ interview with Dr. Bloomfield on our website.)

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

SciTech

21

‘The joy of discovery is what drives us’ Professor Luke O’Neill of the School of Biochemistry and Immunology talks to TN about the discovery of a molecule that could lead to a new treatment for inflammatory diseases.

Anthea Lacchia Staff Writer

This marvel molecule was discovered and made by the drug company Pfizer. Chris Gable, who was working for Pfizer, found it could block i01- the consequence of the pathway- but he didn’t know the mechanism. Then Pfizer dropped it. We know it went into humans and was pretty safe and [that] they saw signs of efficacy in arthritis.

Then our job in the lab was to show it blocked NLRP3. I got that idea because I knew NLRP3 had been discovered by this stage and that it was really important for all these diseases. [Dr] Rebecca Coll led the whole thing while she was a postdoc in my lab. We discovered it could block this pathway perfectly and got fantastic results.

What really got us going is that it worked on three completely independent systems and, if you’re a scientist, you love independent lines of evidence: it worked on the MS model, on a model of infection and then, thirdly, it worked in a very rare human disease called Muckle-Wells syndrome, where patients get arthritis, liver inflammation and skin rashes. We could cure the mouse model and suppress the inflammation in blood

Professor Luke O’Neill works in his lab in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute. Photo: Catherine Healy samples from patients. I knew at that moment: this is extremely exciting. That’s what provoked us to try Nature Medicine and after some toing and froing it was accepted. It’s very tough to get into, worse than Time magazine!

Why is there such a dire need for new medicines in the first place? Is it due to lack of research?

It’s because discovering a new medicine is more difficult than climbing Everest backwards! The reason is the body is so complex.

Many drug companies spend billions of dollars trying to discover new medicines and fail, because drugs often have side effects, the model systems we use are not perfect and a drug might work for one person and not another.

It’s extremely expensive, time consuming and difficult to get to the point of having a new medicine, but the ultimate reason is we don’t know what causes these diseases and that’s why we need to do research.

There are tens of thousands of people committed to this and the good news is we are making progress. Our work in College is part of that and we’re adding a little piece to the puzzle. Our dream is that we might have found one of the key pieces.

How long will it take for this to become a medicine and what will your next steps be?

The timelines won’t be that long because it’s been tested in humans already. First we’ll look at acute inflammation such as gout, where you can give someone the drug for a week with less worry about side effects. Chronic diseases are the problem: if you

take a tablet every day and it has some side effects that could be very damaging. We’re looking at two years at least for diseases like Muckle-Wells and, for other more complex diseases like MS, five to 10 years. Our model at the moment is to form our own company. We’ve made derivatives of the Pfizer molecule and we’re trying to get patents on those.

Drug companies often come under attack in books such as Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre.

What do you think of this?

Great book. One of his main gripes is that they don’t publish negative data for commercial reasons. He’s right: we need to publish negative data. Another issue is their overzealous concern about intellectual property and secrecy. You’ve got to have good regulation. Ben [Goldacre] is a key champion of more regulation in the sector, which is a good thing. Ultimately this is about trying to benefit patients and treat these diseases. There’s no doubt that you’ve got to be fair and honest, disclose negative results and be less secretive. As academics, we’re in the business of discovery, so we depend on drug companies to help us, and then the venture capital people to invest in companies. But we’ve got to be aware that these are businesses, they’re not charities.

And in science in general it’s very important to publish negative results. Do you agree?

Absolutely. The publications racket is disastrous. Our profession is under threat because who would want to become a scientist at the moment, with the pressure

to perform? It’s horrific. We need to change the whole publishing system. When I was a student, one paper every three years was a big success, and that’s the way it should be because discovery is very difficult. I worry about the publishing business and the pressure on young people. There are fewer jobs as well, which makes it even worse, and the big elephant in the room is lack of reproducibility, which is driven partly by rushing things and leaving things out. This is a big problem now, which is growing, and if that continues the whole edifice could collapse.

So do you think open access publishing is the way forward?

Open access for definite. I think we need to reconfigure the profession and reevaluate what success means. Success isn’t publishing three crappy papers that nobody can reproduce. Success might be to publish three welldone, control papers that are negative, because that’s science as well. Our expectations on young scientists are too high: one good paper in a PhD is a success.

Leading on from this, what advice do you have for students who are thinking about pursuing a career as a scientist?

I wouldn’t want to be discouraging. It’s one of the greatest jobs you can ever have, but it’s up to us as the leaders to look after young scientists more and care for them, otherwise the system is threatened. But in our lab our mission is to discover things that will be relevant to human diseases. The joy of discovery is what drives us

forward and if you can combine that with making a difference, that’s what makes it very appealing as a profession.

Do you think science communication is important for researchers and why?

Essential. It’s a recruitment policy. To get people to become scientists you have to get them interested and they might decide to join the effort. Secondly, you have to tell the taxpayer what you’re doing because they’re funding you. But the main reason is just the joy of it: because I’m a huge Beatles fan, I could easily stand up and talk about the Beatles as well! If you have an enthusiasm, it’s a great honour to be an academic in a sense, because you have a captive audience.

So do you think enthusiasm is the key?

Enthusiasm, excitement and passion. If you’re not going to be enthusiastic about it, you’re going to put people off. The danger with this is that you’re going to dumb it down and it’s going to become a show. It can’t become entertainment either. It’s in a strange interface between entertainment and information and complexity.

I do think the minimum requirement to be a lecturer has to be interest and passion and enthusiasm and to convey that somehow. Humour is a great way, I think, to convey things to people. Another thing that has been shown is that people will never remember a fact you give them or a piece of information, they’ll remember how they felt. So if you can provoke some sort of emotion or feeling to people, then they are going to remember that.

Trinity research has revealed that ancestors of yeast used in brewing lager may have been transported along ancient trade routes.

Staff Writer Seasoned brewers know that behind every successful beer, there is a very precious yeast at work.

When it comes to beer – from ale, to stout, to lager – yeast is a crucial ingredient used to ferment sugars into alcohol.

A new study by a team of researchers from Trinity and UCD has uncovered new links between the yeasts used to brew Ireland’s iconic stout and those used to brew lager and ale. The team studied the genomes of yeasts sourced from distilleries, bioethanol plants, bakeries, laboratories, as well as natural environment sources such as coconut water, in an effort to obtain a clearer picture of yeast evolution.

Discovery

It took nearly two years to complete the necessary lab-based experiments and computer analyses of DNA, but now Chandre Monerawela, PhD student in the School of Genetics and Microbiology at Trinity and first author of this study, can finally breathe a sigh of relief, as he has just seen his results published in the FEMS Yeast Research journal.

He looked at the genomes of 76 groupings of yeasts with

Scientists are well accustomed to the ‘publish or perish’ maxim, but they are now being urged to communicate their work in ways that stretch beyond the A4 boundaries of a scientific paper.

Changing public perspectives

Lager yeast DNA tells tales of eastern voyage Anthea Lacchia

Staff Writer

Academic publications have acted as purveyors of knowledge for hundreds of years, but their liberal use of specialist and inaccessible language and their often hefty subscription fees beg the question: should they be the only ones who hold the keys to science? And should they remain the sole outlet scientists turn to in order to disseminate their hardearned findings?

Andrew J. Wright of George Mason University thinks not. In a paper published in January in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, he urges scientists to engage with audiences wider than those typically reached by academic papers, or, at least, to get some help in the art of engaging.

He argues that it is time for scientists to step out of the ivory tower and participate in everyday discourse, taking the time to correct scientific misconceptions in the media and ensuring that their findings reach key decision makers. His is a call to arms, inviting the foot soldiers of science to act by taking a few minutes out of their busy day to speak to a science journalist or attend a science communication workshop.

Inflammation links all these diseases. Could you tell me more about this?

This marvel molecule was already known. Is that right?

Anthea Lacchia

Keys to science

New research led by scientists at Trinity has uncovered a molecule that could lead to new treatment for inflammatory diseases including multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, gout, asthma, diabetes and Muckle-Wells syndrome. This marvel molecule, called MCC950, is capable of blocking a compound, called NLRP3 inflammasome, which is a key driver of inflammatory diseases. This could lead to new, non-invasive treatments for these diseases. The research, resulting from a collaboration of six institutions, has just been published in the journal Nature Medicine.

I’ve always worked on inflammation as a process. It’s very important because the body repairs itself through inflammation, and it also happens through infections, so a cut on your hand will get red and painful and so on.

The trouble is that process goes out of control for some unknown reason, which is really the puzzle we work on, in diseases like MS, arthritis, Alzheimer’s and diabetes. They all involve the same cells or molecules going out of control. The big mystery is why: we still don’t know why. What we have learned is the nuts and bolts of what goes wrong. We’ve always known one main process would become dysfunctional and the diseases differ in the part of the body that is affected.

So we knew there was a main pathway and then this NLRP3 inflammasome was discovered in 2001 by a Swiss lab and it turned out to be a driver of many of these diseases. It drives an inflammatory signal called i01 and I had worked on that since 1985. We’ve got to a point now where we have a drug that might actually interfere with this pathway.

Scientists, engage or die

similar characteristics- known as strains- and compared them, in an attempt to uncover the origins of lager yeasts. “I looked at specific DNA regions to see if they were present or not,” says Monerawela.

Lager yeasts are classified as either Group I or Group II. The team of researchers was surprised to discover that Group II lager yeasts share DNA with stout yeasts and, interestingly, with strains that are used to brew a South Indian brew called ‘Toddy’.

Not only does the yeast used in brewing stout, which attains its dark colour thanks to the use of roasted barley or malt, turn out to be one of the parents of lager yeast, but it is possible that colonial connections contributed to the exchange of yeast strains between India and England.

Lager yeasts are known to be hybrids born out of a fusion of two different yeasts and one of the aims of the study was to find out where these two different yeasts came from. The researchers were able to show that Group I and II yeasts arose by independent fusion events with a yeast species that was discovered in 2011.

This species, Saccharomyces eubayanus, was identified in Patagonia, South America, and, just last year, it was found in China and Tibet, but never in the wild in Europe. So why is it present in some of our beers?

Yeast cargoes

Around 500 years ago, trading ships carrying precious goods from the New World and China into Europe may have transported something less obvious, but no less precious in their cargoes: the ancestors of lager yeasts.

“It is possible that this yeast strain was brought back into Europe through trade routes along the Silk Road or possibly through exploration of the New World,” says Dr Ursula Bond, associate professor in Microbiology in Trinity and one of the researchers behind the study.

This would have coincided with the introduction of laws in Bavaria in 1553 that restricted the fermentation of beer to the winter months. “These laws led to natural selection of yeasts that would grow and ferment at low temperatures, and it turns out that this new species, this hybrid, is very good at fermenting at low temperatures.” Indeed, while ales are fermented at temperatures between 20 and 30°C, lagers require colder temperatures, between 8and 15°C. Another difference is that, in ales, yeasts rise to the top after fermentation, while in lagers they sink to the bottom.

“So this study suggests that when this new yeast arrived in Europe it didn’t just fuse once, but there were two fusions that happened around 500 years ago,

one with an ale-like yeast, which is similar to the ales you find in central Europe, and the other with a stout yeast. But since stout is only really brewed in the British Isles, what that means is that when this other yeast came into Europe, it must have met this British Isle yeast or a yeast that is now used in the British Isles,” explains Bond.

Another unexpected connection to arise from the study was that of stout yeast and Indian ‘Toddy’ yeast. “The South Indian drink is brewed from coconut water,” explains Bond. “If you get a tender coconut it has sugary sap inside and yeast can get at that sap and then convert it into an alcoholic beverage.”

Once analysed, those yeasts fell into the same category as the stout ales. But why would yeast in India be similar to stout yeast?

Perhaps it is linked to colonial connections between Britain and India, but further research is needed. “That’s something we’re looking into now. We’re going to sequence the ‘Toddy yeasts’ and compare them to the stout yeasts and see if there is any connection there,” says Bond.

Evolution in action

These yeast species are probably only about 500 years old- a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.

Despite this, changes are hap-

pening in their genomes and this study was able to highlight some of these very early-stage evolutionary processes.

“These genomes are really dynamic. They are changing all the time. One of the things that happened is that the two genomes coming in from the two parents have actually recombined to create a new set of chromosomes.

Another process we see is that you nibble away at the ends of chromosomes and genes get lost as evolution comes about. It’s really interesting that you can study something that’s very early on in the evolutionary process,” says Bond.

Future work on yeast genetics will involve looking for yeasts from different parts of the world and comparing their DNA. Already, projects such as the “1001 Genomes Project”, whereby groups are getting together to sequence 1001 yeast strains, are expanding our collective knowledge of yeast evolution. “Eventually we hope to have thousand of strains for analysis,” says Bond. “This involves not just looking at what we have in our collections but going out into the wild and starting to look at other yeasts that are in the environment.”

In a world full of potential sources of misinformation, where scientific mistrust is rife and it is often difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from the real thing, the way in which researchers communicate their findings to others merits careful consideration.

When scientists engage with the public, it is a win-win situation: not only do decision makers and society at large benefit from this interaction, but, with criteria such as outreach and public engagement starting to appear on grant application forms, scientists would be foolish not to. However, when confronted with public misconceptions of topics such as climate change and vaccines, scientists are quick to point the finger at the media.

Shouldn’t they instead accept more responsibility? This is the view held by Bryony Graham, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Oxford. In a blog post recently published by BioMed Central, she invites fellow scientists to verify publicly available information whenever qualified to do so. Not only will the ability to help disseminate findings strengthen grant applications, but it is also, she says, a responsibility shared by all scientists.

Communication

Of course, scientists are not trained in public engagement or journalism, nor should we expect them to be naturally gifted communicators. The ability to translate scientific concepts into plain language without losing impact or meaning is not -and should not- be expected of scientists.

Participating in science festivals or writing a blog post should be a choice. Speaking to a press office or emailing a journalist need not be.

Indeed, these are likely to become daily tasks, on an equal footing with analysing raw data from an experiment or completing a final leg of fieldwork. Whether scientists will be quick enough to catch on is another matter. One thing is certain: the ways of communicating science are evolving and, soon, ‘engage or die’ may replace ‘publish or perish’ as the ‘sink or swim’ dictum of the scientific world.

Profit over people: why R&D is broken Dylan Lynch SciTech Editor New discoveries are made every day of the week. While institutions and laboratories around the world always seem to be reporting on a new cures to diseases, there are still plenty of terminal illnesses, new bacterial infections and viruses that seriously harm the human race. Why don’t these findings ever seem to go anywhere?

Money talks

Plain and simple, research and development (R&D) is severely flawed all over the world, including in Ireland. Money in the form of state funding and grants makes the research happen, and this opens the process to a huge amount of abuse by the wealthy people supplying the funding.

One of the sectors in which this happens most is climate change research. Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is one of the most cited climate change deniers. He claims that global warming can actually be explained by fluctuations in the Sun’s energy levels rather than man made climate change.

However, in late February this year, a Freedom of Information Act by famous NGO Greenpeace into Soon’s funding showed that he accepted nearly $1.2 million (¤1,109,052.18) from fossil fuel companies over the last decade, and failed to disclose the information in any of his 11 papers published since 2008. Furthermore, he received $131,000 from a multinational oil corporation, Exxonmobil, to study the Sun’s role in global warming. Dr. Soon declined to comment on the matter to any media sources.

Big pharma

In a lecture to his senior freshman course earlier this month, Dr. Tim Foster of College’s microbiology department spoke about why we are in the midst of a ‘discovery void’. In Ireland in particular, large scale pharmaceutical companies have pulled out of research and development on anti-infectives and antibiotics.

Foster explained how there is so much misuse of antibiotics that resistance is likely to develop very quickly, and so a new drug might only be worth money for a short period of time. He went on to detail how companies can make much more money from other medicines, and have turned their back on antimicrobial research. Even if a new infectious disease is running rampant through human population, big pharma is unlikely to act unless there is monetary gain involved.

Governments have begun to intervene in the problem across the world. In 2012, the US government out the GAIN Act into place. GAIN, or the Generating Antibiotics Incentives Now Act guarantees a company an extra five years of market exclusivity when they develop a new antibiotic. Similar strategic plans such as the National Strategy for

Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria were also launched last year, however there is yet to be a large scale plan implemented in Ireland to stimulate research.

Ethics

Potentially one of the biggest obstacles to research and development in Ireland and indeed the world is the ethics process. The ethics board of universities and research institutions try to ensure that experiments are carried out in the right conduct, however quite often they can become restrictive and limiting of the research potential. Quite often, our personal affections towards animals can cloud judgement on whether or not they should be used for experiment, and these emotions can severely affect the effectiveness of research protocol.

One of the highly contested areas where ethics and research clash quite severely is using psychoactive drugs to treat illnesses.

Hallucinogenic substances found in magic mushrooms have a huge potential for treating addiction and anxiety in terminally ill patients. Research presented by American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) at an annual meeting in 2012 showed that psilocybin, the active hallucinogen in magic mushrooms, can treat anxiety in terminal cancer patients by allowing them to work through the feelings behind their distress. Furthermore, the substance has been shown to help quit smoking in the correct doses.

Another famous illicit substance, LSD or lysergic acid diethylamide, has been shown in several studies to severely reduce chronic alcoholism. In a large scale meta-analysis conducted

by Norwegian scientists in early 2012, a single dose of LSD helped chronic alcoholics dramatically cut back or quit their drinking completely when used in conjunction with therapy. The therapy proved to be over 20% more effective when used in conjunction with LSD, and drugs used to combat alcoholism are now based on this research.

Unfortunately, red tape surrounding the importation and utilisation of these substances is extremely restrictive and only allows for very limited trials to be carried out. In most cases, scientists end up using research chemicals such as 251-NBOMe which are far less characterised and not as readily available and well understood as certain natural psychedelics. Due to the lack of any tight regulation surrounding these novel chemicals, they are also easily sold to outside buyers for recreational use which is one of the main reasons for such tight regulation of hallucinogens in the first place.

It is evident that drastic reform in the R&D sector is needed if we have any hope of leaving the discovery void, removing false research and bettering human life around the globe. However, the means by which we get there and what we choose to enhance are only the beginning of a long and lengthy process.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

Sport

22 Angus Lloyd reports on DUFC’s tense victory against Oxford. p.24

Victorious Trinity rowers reflect on success and training DUBC and DULBC made college history on March 14th when they beat UCD in four out of four Colours races.

We spoke to both clubs shortly after the annual showdown.

Seán Healy Staff Writer

How does this set of races differ from the rest?

Michael Corcoran, Dublin University Boat Club (DUBC) Gannon Cup crew: Colours is certainly a grudge match, but it doesn’t necessarily have a reflection on the season to come. UCD always have a good senior crew, but there’s always better out there, be it from Galway or England, and beating UCD alone won’t guarantee a National Championship or a respectable show at Henley, which is the real goal.

What is it like competing at an event like Colours?

Sally O’Brien, Dublin University Ladies’ Boat Club (DULBC) captain and Corcoran Cup crew member: Colours has always been one of the highlight races of the season for both DUBC and DULBC. A win against our biggest rivals, UCD, on the banks of the lower liffey in a colours clash will remain one of the defining moments of a DUBC or DULBC members’ experience rowing at Trinity. The atmosphere is electric, the noise of cheering supporters is deafening, the;whole experience is surreal. Nerves will hit in as you paddle around Heuston Station heading towards the starting zone, but as soon as the starting umpire says, “Attention, go!” a surge of adrenalin pulses through your body.

Everything in the middle of the race will become a blur, and it is only when you cross the finish line in the leading position that you actually begin to comprehend what’s going on. The sea of trinity supporters on bikes and buses at the finish line will continue to cheer as you sit in the boat after the race. You take in the moment, congratulate your crew members – these feelings will remain with you every day of every season, and you utilise them to train harder and harder each year. There is nothing worse than losing a Colours boat race, but nothing better than winning one either.

Can you explain UCD’s recent dominance in the Gannon?

Corcoran: Looking at past race results, there are long runs of wins by each college on several occasions. Clubs have their ebbs and flows, and our club is just coming out of a bit of a poor patch. Yesterday’s win was the result of well over a year’s work and training from a large panel of rowers, not just the eight in the boat.

Unlike the Gannon, Trinity’s results have been mixed in the Corcoran, as well as the Dan Quinn and Sally Moorhead races. Do UCD and Trinity differ in how they distribute resources?

Patrick Moreau, DUBC Gannon Cup crew: Exceptional young rowers are drawn to UCD by the availability of scholarships.

Hence they generally have more experienced rowers than DUBC/ DULBC at senior level. At novice level, neither club has an advantage as both crews begin as inexperienced rowers.

Novices, why did you join rowing?

Conor de Courcy, DUBC Dan Quinn Shield crew: I believe that most of the lads didn’t begin the college year with the notion of joining DUBC. Most of us would have been recruited during the initial weeks of college; we are all very competitive so rowing presented the opportunity to take on an entirely new challenge.

There is a huge appeal to the fact that you begin the year with no knowledge or experience in the sport and by the end of the year can be representing the college at an international level.

How did Trinity novices prepare for race season? de Courcy: For most of us this was our first time rowing. This meant that we had to face a steep learning curve to be able to row at a competitive level. Initial train-

ings were very much focused on getting the basics right and learning to row in unison with each other, which was no easy task, considering each individual had their own stroke to worry about, along with the erg sessions – trying to attain the fitness levels required for rowing. The Christmas break brought a week long training camp down in Blessington where we could begin to feel the boat moving. The conditions were atrocious, but it was definitely a great deal which then prepared us for some of the rough conditions we would face in the Lagan and Erne head races.

How did training change ahead of the Colours match? de Courcy: In preparation for colours we upped the ante with morning sessions before college.

These sessions really paid off as we began to gel as an VIII. You know the lads are committed when you are out training with ice on the oars! There was big competition for the colours boat so everyone who got a place was racing just as much for the rest of the lads. A huge thanks goes to the coaching staff, Charles Cunningham and Mike Ryder for taking us from bunch of hapless individuals to victory in the Dan Quinn Shield. We look forward to the rest of the race season and to building on this solid start.

What do you do to cope with the pressures of competition?

O’Brien: To be honest, I love the thrill of racing and winning races. The pre-race nerves that are inevitable before each race are never really a result of pressure but more of anticipation for what the result of the race will be. Even in the large scale races, such as Colours, Henley, National Championships, there is so much riding on the result of the race, yet I never really think about the end result, but more on what I am going to do in the first stroke of the race, then the second, then the third, and so on.

Splitting the race up into small sections, and striving to maximise yourself in those parts more often than not gets the most out of you as an athlete, so rather than thinking about the end result, I prefer to think about the process that will get me there.

Training changes drastically before Colours, with greater emphasis placed on nutrition, boat placement, or in the case of coxes, all things surrounding the piloting of a race boat even down to weight. Was this a difficult change?

O’Brien: We are well used to balancing higher intensity training and nutritional changes.

The main point is to ensure that you constantly fuel and hydrate yourself. Higher intensity training means shorter sessions on the water; however this doesn’t mean eating less or drinking less because you aren’t training for as long. It is the opposite in fact.

You have to almost eat, drink and sleep more than ever to make sure you recover properly from each session, and will be able to perform to the same if not higher standard the next day and the next day, until race day finally approaches.

How do teams ensure effective transport of equipment to training sessions at Blessington Lake?

O’Brien: We are lucky to have a panel of coaches between both clubs that are always willing to transport boats to and from Blessington week in week out to ensure that all members get the best possible training.

Rowing being a mechanical sport, what technical preparation and knowledge is necessary to ensure an efficient race boat?

O’Brien: It can take years to get perfect technique, and for many, they will never actually get “perfect technique”. The main thing in a crew boat is to maximise your technique to work in unison with the crew – eight people rowing

Top: DULBC seniors competing in the Corcoran Cup. Bottom: DUBC seniors prepare themselves for the last Gannon Cup race of the day.

Photos: Tony O’Sullivan together will get a lot more boat speed than eight people doing their own thing.

How are rowers and coxes prepared before competitive racing or training for the accidents that do occasionally occur in rowing, e.g. flooding, steering malfunctions?

O’Brien: These kinds of accidents are rare, but have happened in the past, so we can never guarantee that racing will run without a glitch. Coxes are always wearing a life jacket so should always be safe, even when wearing loads of clothes to keep warm. Rowers generally are experienced enough to handle most situations within racing, so if an accident were to happen, rowers will be able to deal with these situations in due course.

In a sport requiring equipment, what financial supports do the club rely on?

O’Brien: DUCAC support, alumni donations, donations from the Trinity Association and Trust, and mainly club fundraising.

Rowing is probably the most expensive sport to run in college, so

smart fundraising and kind support from others helps us to get new equipment and to maintain the equipment that we already have.

What brings you back after exhausting training sessions?

O’Brien: Knowing that the last session probably made you faster, so you have to go back for another session to see how much you actually improved.

DULBC, how did you come back from trailing three quarters of a boat length behind to winning the race by a two second margin?

O’Brien: We knew that with the south station, the second half of the course was going to be our advantage area, so it was vital that we didn’t give away too much to UCD in the first 1,000m. It took a lot of bravery from the crew to push on harder than ever in the first half of the race so as not to fall behind, and then even more bravery to follow through with the race plan and to take our advantage when it came. Really, it was only on the last stretch from the blue bridge that I thought we could have a pop at winning, and within three big strokes, we had extended into a lead of half a length.

What does winning mean to Trinity’s boat clubs?

Moreau: Without winning, the sport would be a lot harder to en-

joy. If you are on a losing streak, it becomes more and more difficult to drag yourself to training, as there is no apparent success at the end of the tunnel. Beating UCD has the extra edge of getting one over on our closest of rivals, but we must remember that there will be big races in Ireland and abroad to come later in the season.

“

The atmosphere in the clubs when crews are winning is electric, and makes rowers want to train even harder to see how far they can push their boundaries.

O’Brien: Winning is huge for the clubs, not just for the title of saying you are a champion of whatever race you won, but for club morale, commitment and enjoyment. When a crew is winning,

not only does that crew begin to find the love of the sport again, but the other crews within the club also feed off the positive attitude and good vibes of that boat.

The atmosphere in the clubs when crews are winning is always electric, and almost makes the rowers want to train even harder to see how far they can push their boundaries.

Winning is the only reward we get for the endless amount of hours we put into our training week in week out. When we win races, all of the early morning double sessions before a full day of college become worthwhile.

We begin to get the sense that our boat speed is improving and that we are getting faster as a crew.

Ultimately we strive to make the boat go as fast as possible.

How have the DULBC and DUBC social events been so far this year, and what other ways do the clubs attempt to break up difficult aspects of the competitive sport?

O’Brien: As ever, the rowing social nights out are always a big hit. There are very few occasions throughout the year that the whole club will get to go out together, as nights out always seem to clash with either college or training. However, we always try to have at least one big night a month where the two clubs go out and think about things other than rowing. Between the DULBC Halloween Massacre, Boat Ball, Christmas Commons, Twelve Pubs, Table quizzes and a few

random other nights here and there, both clubs have managed to find that important balance between the enjoyment of training and the social side of rowing.

What will be the next step for DUBC and DULBC? O’Brien: For DULBC, we will be moving forward with racing preparations; we will soon have back to back weekend racing, starting first with Neptune Regatta, followed by the University Championships, Skibbereen Regatta and of course our home regatta, Trinity Regatta. The ultimate goal is to win as many championship titles at both the University and National championships (July), so the training will continue right up until the middle of July until racing season is complete.

Corcoran: The Senior DUBC crew still has a lot to work towards. We’ll compete in the Eight’s Head on the Tideway in London, where rowing standards are a lot higher than in Ireland.

Then Henley Royal Regatta takes place in the first week of July, in which we compete against universities from all around the world in knockout one-on-one races. Following that are the National Rowing Championships in Cork, where we’ll look to win the senior 8 trophy we narrowly missed out on last year.

Additional reporting by DUBC and DULBC.

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

Sport

23

Trinity hurlers enjoy successful championship The Trinity Hurling Club’s Ryan Cup victory over QUB was the climax to a hard-found season beginning in late January.

Cian O’Dulaing Contributor It was a momentous weekend for the Trinity College hurling team when they celebrated a historic victory over Queen’s University Belfast in the prestigious Ryan Cup on February 28th. For captain Jesse Kennedy, it was the culmination of five years of hard work, and he was delighted to lift the elusive trophy in front of the Gaelic Grounds crowd in Limerick.

It was a dominant championship campaign for Trinity, winning their four games by an average of 11 points, and, with a strong freshers’ contingent, the future looks strong for the team. Fittingly it was Queen’s, perhaps the team’s biggest rivals, who were vanquished in the final, and it was fitting too for Kennedy as his first game for the college was against the Belfast college all those years ago. All in all, it was a magical weekend for Trinity Hurling Club as they secured the Ryan Cup for the first time in their long history, and hope to build the success for the future.

Tallaght IT

The campaign started in earnest in late January on a snowy Tues-

“

Pat’s had given a weakened Trinity team a trimming in the league, so vengeance was on its mind. day in Tallaght as the team defeated Tallaght IT by a scoreline of 6-12 to 4-11 in a scoreline that flattered the opposition, Fresher Conor O’Carroll from Kilkenny showing signs of things to come by netting an excellent 2-4 from play.

The final group game was more of the same as the team sent Tralee IT packing in Ringsend by a scoreline of 6-15 to 0-9 in a very one-sided game. O’Carroll continued his amazing form with an astounding four-goal salvo that left the Kerry outfit with no chance.

Notable other performances in the game came from Paul

Third-year student Danny Sutcliffe, seen here with Provost Patrick Prendergast, scored a crucial five points in Trinity Hurling’s Ryan Cup final victory last month.

Coughlan who netted a superb solo effort, and Conor McDonnell from centre-back who marshalled his troops with his usual levelheadedness.

St. Pat’s Thurles

And so, the team topped their group and would face St. Pat’s Thurles in Limerick on February 27th. Pat’s had given a weakened Trinity team a trimming in the league, so vengeance was on its mind. Management team Eoin

O’Leary, Brian Dervan and Paschal Conboy did a commendable job in keeping the team’s feet on the ground after their facile passage into the semis, and the team went out completely focussed on the job at hand.

Trinity started like a house on fire, with goal from Kerry import James O’Connor after great work from Dub Brian Fitzgerald giving them a six-point lead. Great second half performances from Collie O’Neill and Captain Kennedy

led to the team running out 1-14 to 2-6 winners.

Comfortable win

And so all eyes turned to the final the next day, in Limerick’s Gaelic Grounds. The weather was harsh, to say the least, with a gale force wind supplementing a driving rain that made hurling very difficult. Queen’s won the toss and elected to play with the wind, and led by three points at the break.

Crucially, that man O’Carroll net-

ted a super goal which kept Trinity in sight.

At half time the dressing room was upbeat, and the team went out with fresh impetus and a wind at their backs. Quickly they established a huge lead, netting 11 points in a row. Contributions came from all parts of the field, with full-back Michael Doyle landing a huge free from his own half, half-back Coughlan popping up with a point, and midfielder Danny Sutcliffe scoring a crucial

five points from play in a tour-deforce performance. Man of the match was Collie O’Neill, another fresher who no doubt will be a club stalwart for years to come.

So on to next year, and the club goes from strength to strength, establishing itself as one of the most successful teams on campus.

The team owes it success to great management and leadership from within the team, a tight-knit group , and that made all the difference.

Changing rules to suit elite football teams endangers competition Finding its top clubs struggling in European competition, the Premier League might react by easing the strain for them on the domestic front - but this will only reduce their competitive edge.

Louis Strange Online Sports Editor The Arsenal blogger Andrew Mangan (better known as Arseblog) made an excellent point recently – upon Arsenal’s inevitable elimination from the Champions League at the hands of Monaco – about the way wealth is distributed (and redistributed) between the haves and the have-nots of the European footballing landscape. As some were clamouring for measures to be brought in to help ease the (apparently) onerous burden on Premier League clubs – seemingly exhausted and down to the bare bones, having to compete in more than one competition at once – Arseblog pointed out that the Champions League misfortunes of the Premier League’s so-called “elite” – Chelsea being knocked out by Paris Saint-Germain, Arsenal by Monaco, Manchester City by Barcelona and Liverpool failing to escape their group – had little to do with structural inequalities or systemic differences between different European leagues.

Premier League clubs just did not perform: Chelsea’s talismanic captain fantastic John Terry running into his fellow defender Gary Cahill led to a PSG goal that saw Chelsea eventually leave the competition; Manchester City were outclassed over two legs by a far superior Barcelona side, with a renascent Lionel Messi pulling the strings; Liverpool have suffered this season fighting on more than one major front, and losing Luis Suárez to Barcelona has obviously not helped; and Arsenal were, well, just Arsenal, for which there never seems to be any coherent explanation.

Money no object

It could be argued that, taking even the case of Suárez, Liverpool losing a player of that level and City being undone by a player of that level is no coincidence: financial behemoth Barcelona made full use of their stature and muscle to pry Suárez from Liverpool, and this was possible because of the way in which television rights are distributed in La Liga in comparison to how this works in the Premier League. But the fact remains that in the case of Manchester City and Chelsea in particular, finances are no object and should provide no excuse; the same could be said, albeit to a lesser degree, of Arsenal

and Liverpool.

However, the point which Arseblog was making is that there is no real basis for using the poor Champions League performances of these four clubs (and, if you like, add Manchester United to that group if we are going to look at the situation over the last few years) to tip the balance even further in the favour of the Premier League’s elite clubs. There are several arguments trundled out: Could the League Cup’s format be altered to better accommodate the “bigger” (ie. richer) clubs?

Could a winter break be introduced so as to ease the burden on the fragile Mesut Özils of this world, unaccustomed to playing through the harsh winters without any respite whatsoever?

While this might help the top clubs, it does little to nothing for the smaller clubs. In fact, all it arguably does it give the top clubs a better chance of putting seven or eight past relegation fodder on a Saturday, despite being thoroughly beaten when they face a Bayern Munich or a Barcelona in the Champions League. The odds are already heavily stacked against any club not in the aforementioned “elite” group: even Tottenham, who – bless their cotton socks – have been trying so hard to break into the Champions League for a considerable period of time, have spent hundreds of millions of pounds and not managed to find a place at Europe’s top table, let alone have any slight chance of winning the Premier League or achieving real success in the Champions League. Bending the structure to suit those at the very top risks breaking the competition altogether, warping it beyond all recognition. That is what happens when you bend things too far: they snap.

Lack of real competition

The problem in La Liga is that this precise model – serving solely the interests of the top clubs and piling all of Spanish football’s eggs into the twin baskets of Real Madrid and Barcelona – has resulted in a league that is so stultifying in its almost complete lack of real competition that it is beginning to strain the credibility of the competition. Atlético Madrid’s La Liga title last year was nothing more than an anomaly, an upset, and now normal service has been resumed. In France, Lyon and, to lesser extent, Marseille, are providing real competition to PSG, but again this is something

of a surprise occurrence, brought about by a particularly strong generation graduating at just the right time in Lyon’s case. Liverpool’s title tilt last year in the Premier League has by this stage been revealed as nothing more than a less-than-monotonous (I hesitate to use the term “exciting” here – after all, Liverpool are not exactly the poor relations of European football) blip which has come and gone, replaced now by a Chelsea-Manchester City axis of evil league domination. And this brings us to the kakapo.

A bird’s predicament

The kakapo is a small, flightless bird native to New Zealand, and very close to extinction. (Bear with me here.) The reason that it is very close to extinction is that, in order to attract a mate, the male kakapo digs a shallow, bowl-like hole on a remote hillside and begins to emit a low, thumping, bass beat. The problem with low frequencies, though, is that they may carry far across the neighbouring valleys, but for that same reason they make it incredibly difficult for the female to locate the male at close range.

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and later a passionate conservationist, who travelled the world seeking out rare animals on the verge of extinction, identified the kakapo’s predicament: the kakapo, finding itself struggling to attract a mate, resorts to its most basic natural instinct – the thing it is really good at – and goes at it more than ever before, as this is all it knows. But it is this very behaviour which proved to be the source of its struggles in the first place, and so it ensnares itself in a vicious circle, edging ever close to extinction.

The danger, for Premier League clubs, is that both the elite clubs and the league itself might become caught in a similar vicious circle: finding its top clubs struggling in European competition, the Premier League might react by easing the strain for them on the domestic front, thus reducing their competitive edge.

Seeing their competitive edge diminishing, Premier League clubs will ease the pressure on the elite even further, until, eventually, they find themselves stranded, alone atop a hillside in New Zealand, desperately doing the same thing over and over again, without success.

Professor Alan Renwick UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science Expert in Agricultural Economics

OVER 7 BILLION MOUTHS ARE FED BY JUST A HANDFUL OF CORPORATIONS This globalisation of the food industry has its positives. We have our pick of high quality produce, regardless of the season. But it’s the farmers who pay the price, feeling the squeeze from both suppliers and customers. It raises the question: is it possible to create shared value in our food chain?

If you can learn this much here, imagine what you could learn with a taught masters.

Experts aren’t born. They’re taught.

Find out how at ucd.ie/masters

UCD Masters

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20/03/2015 11:14

TRINITY NEWS

Tuesday 24th March 2015

Sport

24 Victorious Trinity rowers talk Seán Healy through their training regime and plans for the future. p.22

SPORTS IN BRIEF Trinity players shine at Dubai beach frisbee tournament Rory Maccanna Contributor

TRINITY TEAMS SAIL TO VICTORY Trinity Sailing faced eternal rivals UCD with gusto in their annual showdown at Grand Canal Dock.

Amelia O’Keeffe Contributor The annual Sailing Colours competition was won by Trinity this Saturday at Grand Canal Dock.

The weather was ideal for sailing, with a strong easterly breeze and

lots of sunshine. TCD6 and UCD6 took to the water first in a best of five head-to-head. UCD secured a win with three races won to two.

Then it was TCD5’s turn to take on UCD5, where Trinity secured a great victory with a 3-0 win.

Due to time constraints, the competition then moved on to

best of three racing, with UCD4 beat TCD4 with a 2-0 victory.

Next the third teams took to the water and managed to win their first two races securing another win for Trinity. TCD2 vs. UCD2 saw the racing return to best of five, which TCD2 won with a 3-1 score.

The next two sets of races were the traditional alumni and ladies’ races. UCD Alumni beat TCD 2-0 in a best of three and UCD Ladies beat TCD Ladies with a 1, 2, 3 in a single race. The last racing of the day would be the decider of the winner of Colours 2015 when the

two first teams raced against each other. TCD1 won the first race with a 1, 3, 6, following it up with a 1, 2, 5 finish in the second race.

UCD fought back in the third race, securing a win with a 1, 2, 6.

Everything was very tense as the teams crossed the start line for the next race. Trinity managed to start with an outstanding 1, 2, 3, finishing with a 1, 2, 4 securing the title for the second year in a row of Colours’ winners.

There were plenty of spectators gathered on the quays to watch the day’s racing and listen to music from Nick Nowlan and Chris

Left to right: TCD1’s Richard Roberts, captain-elect; and Trinity teams 2, 3 and 5.

Photos: Trinity Sailing Raymond. The annual Sailing Colours competition traditionally takes place in Dun Laoghaire harbour, but after the success of last year’s match - which took place on the River Liffey - Trinity decided to take the event to a new location.

Historic Giles Cup success for Trinity Ladies Ladies GAA team took home the Giles Cup this weekend after a tight final in Cork.

Rachel Horgan Contributor Trinity College Ladies GAA team completed their 2014-15 campaign in style on Saturday when it added the Giles Cup, never before won by Trinity, to its silverware.

Overcoming Athlone IT in the final meant the TCD side have now succeeded in defeating all the college teams in their league and championship divisions.

The ladies travelled to Cork IT grounds on Thursday night, confident that their efforts since September would pay off. They

had drawn IT Tralee for the semifinal and the Kerry side got off to a cracking start by scoring a goal within the first five minutes.

Trinity swiftly responded with a point from centre forward Aisling Reynolds and a goal from Rebecca McDonnell. The TCD ladies then took firm control of the game with Nicole Owens scoring 1-6 and Aisling Reynolds, Caitriona Smith, Rebecca McDonnell and Sarah McCaffery exchanging points. Two more soft Tralee goals could not rescue them as the Trinity forwards placed six goals to secure their place in Saturday’s final. Substitutes Petra

McCafferty, Marie Murphy and Ailbhe Finnerty showed the absolute depth of the entire panel when they came on. The final score was TCD 6-17 to ITT 3-7.

Athlone IT denied Patrick’s Drumcondra of a place in the final with an outstanding comeback in the last 15 minutes of their semifinal. The final began with strong displays from both sides, which saw the lead changing hands on five separate occasions. With Trinity holding a fragile 0-6 to 0-5 lead at half-time, substitute Stacy Flood’s second and yet another Reynolds free gave them breathing space and then Aisling Reynolds found Nicole Owens with a perfect pass, allowing the Dublin star to slot her shot in the back of the net. The lead had stretched to 1-13 to 0-7 when Athlone got a boost as they converted a penalty and scored a point. Seven min-

utes remained at that stage and while Athlone were able to mount attacks as they sought to salvage something from the game, the Trinity defence was solid and they could not find a goal. Trinity’s superior fitness saw them hold off any AIT attempts and secure the win.

Dublin Senior Sarah McCaffrey was exceptional at midfield for Trinity, scoring two points while Cavan Senior, Caitriona Smith also made her presence felt on the scoreboard. Nicole Owens took home the player of the match. Seven second-half points from Aisling Reynolds certainly helped Trinity College to claim the Giles Cup. Team captain, Michelle Peel was outstanding all year and displayed her impeccable defensive skills all weekend.

An unsung hero in goals was Aisling Byrne whose kickouts and

Five Trinity frisbee players were among the Irish side to take part in an international ultimate frisbee beach championship in Dubai earlier this month. Trinity student Sam Mehigan cocaptained the team of 33 that represented Ireland in the mixed and open men’s divisions of the World Championships of Beach Ultimate between March 9th and 13th.

The Irish mixed team won most of their group games quite comfortably, losing only to the USA and to Portugal in a nail biting one-point game in which they came back from a five-point deficit at half-time to draw level at 12 all, before Portugal got the winning point. This left them in third position, qualifying them for the quarter-finals, where they faced Canada, one of the traditional powerhouses in ultimate frisbee.

After losing to Canada, they then lost the sixth place play-off to Sweden in another one point defeat before going on to beat Russia 9-4 in their final game and finish in seven position.

The open beach team took a while to find their stride in the

Top student athletes honoured Tadgh Healy Deputy Features Editor

“

saves throughout the campaign were crucial to the team’s success.

In the end the dedication and hard work put in all year by the whole squad was rewarded with the ultimate prize: league and championship success. Manager Davy Burke and selectors Jonathan Burke and Paul Kennedy have shown what a strong management team can do with a committed group of players.

Trinity Camogie overcomes DCU in shield final

The Giles Cup has never before been won by Trinity.

Tense showdown sees DUFC romp to victory over Oxford The win came on the back of a strong season for the club in the Ulster Bank League.

Staff Writer Trinity Rugby (DUFC) came out top in their annual showdown against Oxford University in College Park last Wednesday, walking away with an easy 34-3 victory.

DUFC had a strong start, working their way up the pitch into the opposition before being rewarded with a penalty within kicking distance. The students opted to kick to the corner instead in keeping with the traditional running rugby played between these two sides. From the lineout just inside the oppositions 22, the students set up a rolling maul from which Lloyd sniped to put the young fly half Tommy Wittle under the posts for the opening score of the day. Fullback Kearns added the extras. Tommy Wittle was forced to come off immediately afterwards with a strained hamstring.

The remainder of the half was a messy affair with both sides looking to play but inevitably forcing the play, resulting in a lot of errors both sides. Each side added a penalty to leave the score standing at 10-3 to the home side at halftime, after which the game

turned in the home teams’ favour. From some good continuity featuring Prop Andy Keating and hooker Jack Boland carrying strongly up the right hand side of the field, the ball was then moved quickly wide left through Brian Slater, Conor Kearns with Michael Courtney putting wing Tim Maupin in for a well constructed try.

Oxford came back after this score to mount some serious pressure on the Trinity line but the home team defended stoutly to keep the Dark Blues out, in what was the only real pressure they faced all game. Trinity were now finding their rhythm and they piled on their own pressure.

They continued to attack from all over the field. After several phases down the right hand sideline, Conor Kearns cross kicked to his left wing Killian O’ Leary who was totally free out wide, the ball took an unfortunate bounce, but O’Leary did well to reclaim the ball and pass to his captain Paddy Lavelle in support. Lavelle took it to the line before returning the ball back to O’Leary who finished the score.

It was then time for flanker Brian Du Toit to show his sidestep-

all awarded Pinks.

Speaking to Trinity News, Quinn said he was “delighted” after hearing the news. “I’m in the final year of my PhD [mechanical engineering] so it was great news to get when I was struggling away in the lab.” Quinn is the fifth recipient of a Pink in the ultimate frisbee club’s 20-year history.

Last year, he was voted Irish male player of the year and puts his Pink down to this individual accolade, as well as the national success he has enjoyed with his club, Ranelagh, who have now won three consecutive All-Ireland Championships.

Seven Trinity students have been awarded a University Pink, the highest award Trinity can give for achievement in sport. At a captains’ meeting on March 19, the Dublin University Central Athletic Club (DUCAC) announced that Susannah Cass (ladies boat), David Fitzgerald (climbing), Maxton Milner (fencing), Omar Nouhi ( judo), Cian Quinn (ultimate frisbee), Sacha Shipway (netball) and Conor Short (orienteering) were

Sarah Cunneen Contributor

Angus Lloyd

pool games and began the tournament with some disappointing losses but towards the end of the tournament had some very close games losing narrowly to Germany and suffering a one point defeat against India. These bitter defeats increased their determination and provided them with valuable experience which they carried with them into their penultimate game against Kenya to win a really close game 8-7. However, this was not enough to see them through their final game which they lost narrowly to Singapore which left then in 14th position.

Both the mixed team and the open team relied heavily on some of the current Trinity players when it came to getting goals.

Daniel Purdy on the open team and Sarah Melvin on the mixed team were both the top goal scorers on their respective teams, with Purdy finishing the tournament with an impressive 23 goals and Melvin finishing with 16. Purdy was the sixth highest goal scorer in the entire open division, while Melvin was the fourth highest female goalscorer and the joint 13th highest goal scorer overall in the entire mixed division.

Trinity Camogie took home the silverware in a tense Fr Meachair shield final against DIT in DCU on March 14th. Strong passages of play from the throw from Trinity’s Aoife Dooley, Rosanna McAleese, Niamh O’Meara and Katie Browne threatened the DIT goal throughout, with the score of the game eventually coming from a lively Trinity puck out to sprightly sweeper Orna Hennessy. Hennessy skilfully flicked the ball to a waiting Lora Smith who quickly delivered to centre

forward Sarah Cunneen. A moving Aisling Maher was found accurately by Cunneen and made no mistake in rattling the DIT net with one of her signature handpassed goals.

Trinity remained strong in defence until the final whistle with Alison Stenson and Helen McMillan taking charge in the full back line. A dependable trio of Fiona Fogarty, Allie Kelly and Bríd Doran at half back ensured that Trinity would come out on top, while Aisling O’ Reilly was confident between the Trinity posts despite being under fire from a determined DIT team.

College health and sports week launched Catherine Healy Editor

Photo: DUFC ping skills, when he avoided the “would be” tacklers with a step to coast in under the posts. Trinity were now in full flow, and going through all their moves in front of large home Student crowd. From a scrum out wide the backs conjured up one more set play to put Tim Maupin in under the posts for a well executed try.

The result was pleasing but a lot must be improved upon for the next outing on Saturday next against Galway Corinthians. With only two games remaining in the Ulster Bank League and the top two finish within their sights the students need two big performances in order to have a shot at promotion to 1A.

The win came on the back of a strong season for the club in the Ulster Bank League. Having lost the opening three games of the competitive season, DUFC have courageously turned the tides with a 13 match unbeaten streak where promotion hopes were dented with a loss at home to Garryowen three weeks ago.

College’s annual health and sports week, now in its eleventh year, was launched yesterday with the opening of the newly upgraded 1km outdoor fitness trail on campus.

Among the free fitness classes available in the sports centre this week as part of the event’s programme are touch for health kinesiology (tomorrow at 2pm), high-intensity interval training (tomorrow at 6pm), express cycle (Thursday at 7:30am), core strength (Thursday at 8am), and meditation (Thursday at 1pm).

Free blood pressure checks will also be provided by Trinity health

service nurses between 1pm and 2pm on Wednesday (in the Arts Block) and Thursday (in the foyer of the Dining Hall).

In one the programme’s highlights, Trinity student Jack Kavanagh, who was paralysed from the chest down during a summer holiday accident in 2012, will be giving a talk on overcoming adversity at 1pm on Thursday in the Global Room.

The Trinity catering department will also be providing menus with healthy eating combinations in all its campus outlets this week, Customers who purchase a main course will receive a free piece of fresh fruit, while student and staff buffet centre tables will display fruit all week,the department has said.