ROBERT HENSON

Award Year: 2001

Course: Commerce, Accounting

Activities: Rugby Club

Occupation: Tax Partner, Mason Hayes & Curran; Chartered Accountant; Registered Tax Advisor

Going to UCD was hugely rewarding. It helped me grow as a person. I met a great number of friends from various backgrounds. The fun we had, the laughs we shared, and the Library at exam time are all memories that immediately come to mind.

Playing rugby for College was very special. At the time, with so many quality players and blokes involved, I look back with great pride at wearing the St Patrick’s Blue jersey. It was part of the reason that I got involved in helping with the administration of the Club when injury forced me to retire from the pitch. It was great to be able to give something back the Club and College and stay involved with the lads. I learned a huge amount as Club Secretary that has stood to me today. The late great Finbar Costello once said at a committee meeting “if you get what’s right on the pitch, everything else will follow”. I took from this that by looking at and striving to succeed at the bigger picture, little things will fall into place.

The President’s Award came as a real surprise and it was a great honour to have received it. I remember my time in UCD very fondly. It is true what they say: You do not appreciate what you have when you have it!

Ad Astra

Sin Ad Ingoldsby

Award Year: 1998

Course: History & Politics

Activities: Literary & Historical Society; Strauss Ball; Students’ Club Management Committee; University Observer; An Cumann Gaelach; An Cumann Drámaíochta

Occupation: Television Producer & Director

Cigarettes and Alcohol

October 1994. To a sound track of Blur and Oasis I began my stretch in UCD. In an effort to make the Arts Block seem smaller I signed up for a load of societies. Granted many of them offered free wine, but my membership of these groups taught me more over the following four years than I ever learned in the Library.

I remember sitting petrified beside the Lake chain-smoking before I was due to make my maiden speech in front of the baying L&H mob in Theatre M. The speech was a disaster but I’ve never since felt the same panic standing up in front of a crowd. The divorce debate in 1995; the 1997 Presidential debate, attended by all of the candidates, including Mary McAleese and Dana; the Northern Ireland debate, where I first heard Martin McGuinness speak in his real voice. And of course the annual Colours spectacular when a few poor Trinity Christians were thrown to the lions..

Organising the Strauss (aka stress) Ball I learned not only to waltz but thanks to a particularly slippery hotel manager, I also discovered the importance of always putting verbal agreements in writing. I had my first, and last, foray into the world of politics when I ran for election to the Bar Committee. “A Pisshead Who Cares” was my campaign slogan and my top line policy was to keep down the price of a pint. Not the last to be elected by appealing to the base fears of the economically challenged masses. Though we did manage to keep the cost to £1.70 and standing at the door with the bouncers taught me much about how to manage people. I sometimes still hear that “Are you ‘right there now folks?” refrain in my sleep.

But my personal UCD headline was the University Observer. That tiny smoke filled office at the end of the Library tunnel became my second home, with its two old Macs, the manky couch, and a hole in the wall - punched during a particularly tetchy production weekend. Back then cut and paste was done with a ruler, a razor blade, and Prit-Stick. We looked up the phone book not the Internet. I’d never even heard of the Internet. Articles were handwritten on Dunkin Donut napkins and if you could type you were sent down to the LGs with a floppy disk and a fist full of foolscap. Contributors were paid in Fosters dollars and photos were developed by the chemist in the Merrion Centre. We’d stay up for nights on end in order to make the print deadline, fuelled by Red Bull and Marlborough Lights. There were tantrums and ill-fated love affairs and I still haven’t forgiven whoever nicked my Tom Petty CD. But nothing since has matched the buzz of the papers being snapped out of my hand in the Library tunnel.

Twenty years on and still the two proudest moments of my life are the day I graduated from UCD and that afternoon in 1998 when, surrounded by my friends and watched by my parents, Dr Art Cosgrove handed me my President’s Award.

Frank Kennedy

Award Year: 2007

Course: Law

Activities: Literary & Historical Society; Law Society

The year that I spent as Auditor of the L&H was one of the most enjoyable of my life. It was 2004/05, a special year for both the College and the Society because each celebrated its 150th anniversary.

We were fortunate to have so many people who had lived such interesting lives come to Dublin and talk with a group of students, either for a serious discussion, or just chat and banter.

I remember seeing George Galloway and the former Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont, unlikely allies, sit side by side as they railed against George W Bush’s campaign for re-election. Jeffrey Archer was happy to talk about daily life in prison, as well as how his prison diaries had, apparently, been compared to those of Dostoyevsky! Bill Owens, then the Republican Governor of Colorado travelled across the Atlantic to take part in a debate on the use of capital punishment.

Occupation: Barrister; member of Dublin City Council

There can be a temptation when looking back to think only of the successes, but we had our share of mishaps that year too. One particular week comes to mind, in which all of the committee’s efforts had gone into promoting a visit from Rev Jesse Jackson. That event was one of the great nights of the year – he packed the house and gave a truly memorable performance. The trouble was that later in the same week we were also welcoming the former US Senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart.

We had omitted to publicise Senator Hart’s visit properly and I will always remember the grace he showed when we delayed starting the event for almost an hour as we waited for a crowd to materialise that was never to come, only then to have to move the event from a theatre in the Arts Block to a small classroom upstairs, in a vain attempt to soften the impact of the tiny crowd. He dealt stoically with it all and gave what one of the attendees (a group I referred to that year as the “Gary Hart 19”) described as the “best politics tutorial they had ever attended!” The numbers certainly would have been about right.

Without a doubt, the best thing about the L&H and UCD as a whole was the people I got to know. To this day so many of my closest friends remain people I first met in College. And this is no bad thing, because in the two spheres in which I work, law and politics, it’s impossible to avoid them!

Fiona Kenny

Award Year: 1997

Course: Politics

Activities: Arts Day; Students’ Club Management Committee; Women’s Aid; Students’ Union; various clubs & societies

Occupation: Online writer; trainer; digital marketer

I know people often say that you make lifelong friends in college. I did. In the years since College we’ve celebrated births, marriages, and grieved together. During our time in UCD we argued politics and music, handed out flyers for elections, shook buckets for the Simon Community, and had more fun than was sometimes good for our academic careers! I was one of the people who took the “scenic route” through college, having started as a day student out of school and later moving to studying at night with other mature students.

There are things I won’t forget. The Chaplain, Fr John Hassett, arriving up to my parents’ house, when I was nineteen, to visit my mother in the months before her death. In a large University I didn’t expect that amount of care and community, yet there it was.

UCD gave me lots of things: I was the first female Chairperson of the Students’ Club; I saw bands I’d never heard of; I sat in Theatre L to hear some of the best speakers ever, and got to meet people I might not have come across if I hadn’t studied there. It didn’t matter what your interests were; there was a club or society that valued you, and there was a niche for just about everyone. My time in the Students’ Union showed me that there are so many people who do care about what happens to others and that students are about a lot more than just partying. (Though there was that too!) I went on to get my MA and tutor in the Politics Department, which is still my favourite place ever to have worked. The President’s Award was a lovely thing to get. As I’d taken a roundabout way to get my degree, it felt good that extracurricular activities were also valued and that UCD still believed that College is more than just lectures; it’s also a place where you shape the person as well as the student.