Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) Council have this evening voted to establish an environmental committee. The committee will be made up of six students.
The new committee will support the work of the environmental officer, one of the union’s eighteen part-time officers.
The motion to establish the committee was passed by a unanimous vote of the TCDSU Council. The motion stated that the union’s environmental officer “has an increasing workload as environmental awareness becomes more and more ingrained in the fabric of College life,” adding that this workload “is becoming increasingly unsustainable for one person in a part-time capacity”.
The motion was proposed by the environmental officer, Ruby Barrett and was seconded by TCDSU president, Laura Beston.
Barrett told Trinity News in advance of tonight’s council meeting that the “idea to start the committee was in order to facilitate more discussion around environmental issues within the Union and to provide a more varied perspective of what environmentalism means to students.”
She added that she hoped the new committee “will lead to a wider array of ideas, discussions and events throughout the year”.
Proposing the motion to Council, Barrett said that she expected a very busy year as “people are waking up to” the issues of environmentalism. She added that the issue was “so multifaceted” that she did not feel she could represent the views of all students on all aspects of it.
She stated that she would like a committee “to offer ideas and help organise volunteers” throughout the year.
The role of the union’s environmental officer involves involves sitting on College’s “Green Campus Committee” as well as organising a number of environmental initiatives and spearheading the union’s activities during Trinity’s “Green Week”.
This evening’s meeting of the TCDSU council, the first of the year, was held in the Stanley Quek theatre in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI).
