Turn-Outs, Referendums, and Personality Politics; Student Elections and Political Relevance

In his debut for the blog Frank Doherty writes about the recent student union elections in NUI Galway and how these compare to how things were done in the past

Students’ Union full-time officer elections took place on Thursday, 7^th March. At the same time, a referendum of the SU’s position on women’s reproductive rights and the on-going national struggle to provide access to abortion for all women was balloted.

UCD Disaffiliation from the USI: a Mistake

– Alán Camilo Cienfuegos weighs in on the USI Disaffiliation debate, arguing that left-wing students should remain committed to working with and within the USI.

The decision of University College Dublin to disaffiliate from the national Union of Students in Ireland is utterly foolish. In a time when the efficacy of the various organisations of working people and the disaffected in Irish society are being blunted by the ever-useful government tactic of divide-and-conquer (public vs. private sector, etc.), to have one of the largest universities in the country break with their student’s national union and essentially go it alone is nothing but a victory for those whose interests lie in seeing unions in general broken up and emaciated, namely the government and wealthy they serve. That the campaign in favour of disaffiliation was spearheaded by the likes of Young Fine Gael, the lapdogs of their parents in government, should be evidence enough of the motivations for such a move, but to see leftists standing in the same camp as such vermin is, to say the least, surprising.