Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) Council have voted to pass a motion to improve their oversight of the union.
The motion requires union officers to submit any forthcoming approved minutes to Council.
The motion, which was proposed by STEM Convenor Ruaidhrí Saulnier, aims to improve the transparency of a number of ad hoc bodies which currently have “have no formal reporting lines to Council”.
It removes two previous mandates which required officers and faculty convenors to attach any minutes of such bodies to their respective reports on the grounds that they were ineffectively enforced, replacing them with mandates that instruct officers to submit the minutes directly to council.
A vote on a second motion, also proposed by Saulnier, which mandated that missing minutes from the ad hoc bodies be recovered and submitted to council, was postponed following a procedural motion from Education Officer Eoghan Gilroy.
Both motions were seconded by third year PPES class representative and union archivist Seán Thim.
Speaking to Trinity News prior to council, Saulnier said the motions are about “filling in the gaps identified, improving the archive and improving oversight and accountability” adding that the minutes “should be easy to find on their own instead of [being] nested away into officer reports”.
He criticised the ineffectiveness of the existing mandates saying that “the only people who have followed that specific line about attaching it to reports are Eoin Hand, President 20/21, and Daniel O’Reilly, STEM Convenor 20/21”.
The two motions are tied to the new TCDSU Management System, which is designed to track convenors, class representatives, committees and executive policies of the Union.
“The Management System is something that has been many years in the making, and was only launched over the summer. As part of it, the last four years of documents were uploaded to ensure that it worked as intended, and to have an archive for the SU, in part tying in with the new Archival Committee, though they will have their own system pulling from the Management System in the future,” Saulnier told Trinity News.
