Everything you need to know about what went on at the first meeting of the year of the Trinity College Dublin Students’s Union (TCDSU) Council.
1. Emergency motion on no-deal Brexit
Council passed an emergency motion proposed by TCDSU President Laura Beston to signify the union’s objection to a no-deal Brexit. TCDSU became the first student union in the Republic of Ireland to sign up to a document from NUS-USI opposing a no-deal Brexit. NUS-USI is a joint organisation between Irish and British national student unions that represents students in Northern Ireland.
2. Environmental Committee
Council voted unanimously for a motion to establish a new environmental committee within the union’s structures. The six-person committee will support the work of the TCDSU environmental officer, one of the union’s part-time officers. The motion was proposed by the current environmental officer, Ruby Barrett and seconded by TCDSU president Laura Beston.
3. Mature Students Committee
Council also voted to establish a mature students committee. The nine-person committee will include the SU Mature Student Officer, the SU Student Parent Officer, the auditor of the Mature Student Society, the President of the Graduates Students’ Union (GSU) and mature students elected at this evening’s council. The committee will stand to further support mature students during their time at Trinity.
4. New Convenor positions
Council voted to create two new convenor positions within the union. Convenors coordinate the work of class reps within a particular school or faculty in College. The first new role is the “science programme convenor”, who will sit as an undergraduate representative on the Trinity Science Program Management Committee. The second new role to be created was a convenor for Biological and Biomedical Sciences course, which has the largest class size of any single class outside of joint honours.
5. Report on online voting system failure
Daniel O’Reilly and Matthew Henry, who operated the online class representative voting system, reported that the online system misidentified a number of names during the Class Rep elections. These names were subsequently passed on as the official Class Reps. The issue was found last Monday and students involved with the voting system immediately worked towards amending the error. They found that votes that were accurate in every other part of the online system were misattributed due to the order of the candidates being mistakenly shuffled within the system. Despite testing the system multiple times, O’Reilly and Henry explained, this issue could not have happened until the system was used on this large of a scale. Both O’Reilly and Henry were apologetic to those who were impacted by the error.
