Conchúr Ó Cathasaigh is not at all naive about the responsibilities he would acquire if elected as an Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) Education Officer. Having served last year as Chair of Council on the Electoral Commision (EC), Ó Cathasaigh has had a front row view of the inner workings of the union.
Now, after running last year’s elections, Ó Cathasaigh steps to the other side of the net, entering the race himself for the union’s second most senior position.
Asked how it feels to run as a former EC Chair, Ó Cathasaigh said, “It’s a bit strange, yeah”.
“All of those decisions that I might have made last year. I was like “oh”, now sort of getting the other side of things.”
He admits even as Chair the rules were not always easy to follow but he is, however, glad the rules are there: “It’s good in many ways, because it gives almost everyone a level playing field.”
“I think it allows a lot more people to run, and gives a lot more people the opportunity to be involved in the election process than there otherwise would have been.You saw that last year, and obviously this year as well, with so many candidates running now which is great and getting a lot of different voices and perspectives involved in the student unions is always really good.”
When asked if his experience on the EC would give him an edge in the education race, Ó Cathasaigh said that “it’s definitely a very different skill set”.
“I think it’s good in the sense that you know the administrative side of things. So you know candidate announcements are going to be on this date. You need to submit stuff by a certain time. They need to be submitted in a certain way. You sort of have an idea of how the process will evolve over the next two weeks.”
“But, taking that knowledge of the rules, how do you translate that into running a good campaign?” he said.
“So, yeah, I suppose that there’s definitely some benefit to be gained from having previously been on the EC, but I definitely don’t think I have an extreme advantage, if that makes sense.”
The fourth year Maths student has been a TCDSU staple since his early college days and over the years he has witnessed first hand “the impact the SU can have in improving students’ lives”.
Being tasked with representing students for academic matters, few TCDSU officials impact the day-to-day lives as much as the Education Officer, something which Ó Cathasaigh has learned both in his time on the EC and through his current role as Maths Convenor.
“I’ve seen a lot of what the education officer does, and a lot of it is so important,” he told me.
This year, in addition to being Maths Convenor, Ó Cathasaigh also served as student representative on the undergraduate studies committee, a role which saw him work closely with the current Education Officer.
Asked for his assessment of Gilroy’s performance in the role, Ó Cathasaigh praised his work in formalising the postgraduate representation into the union, an area which Ó Cathasaigh hopes to build upon himself next year.
“A lot of the structures before, like last year and the year before, were sort of interim, and they didn’t really work. And he’s done a lot of work in terms of starting to formalize that structure a bit more.”
“We’re still not really there in terms of fully integrating post grads into the Union. So one of my manifesto promises is to formalize that bit more, and put stuff explicitly into the Constitution.”
Another area Ó Cathasaigh would like to focus on if elected is the ever evolving issue of generative artificial intelligence.
His main concern currently is that many schools still lack a comprehensive policy on the matter: “Schools should have sort of clear guidelines and what they expect and don’t expect. A lot of times, particularly in stem I’ve noticed, that schools just don’t bother having a policy at all. And that definitely creates a lot of confusion.”
He also warns against the “knee jerk response” to AI, fearing schools may be tempted to transition back to entirely in-person assessments “which only test one type of skill”. If elected, he plans to push college to retain varied forms of assessment, “so we don’t go backwards to how things used to be”.
Ó Cathasaigh is a strong advocate for the Irish Language (the issue takes up quite a bit of space on his manifesto) and despite the introduction of a full time Irish Language Officer he still believes that other Sabbatical Officers “have a role to play” in the matter.
“I don’t want to be too cliche, but you can’t just put the Irish language in a box and go ‘the Oifig na Gaeilge is over there in the corner’,” he said.
“While we have that role, [Irish] affects every role. It’s the President, it’s welfare, it’s education, it’s comms, it’s University Times, or it’s ents running Irish language events.”
“I definitely am of a firm belief that we all have a big role to play in that, and that’s why it takes up, as you say, a big part of my manifesto, just because it’s so important, particularly when it’s classified by UNESCO as being critically endangered. And giving people more opportunities to use their Gaeilge in college from an academic point of view, is what I’d be interested in focusing on.”
Ó Cathasaigh’s self described “most ambitious” manifesto promise is to work with college towards the creation of a pilot scheme that would allow students in certain schools to complete assessments through Irish.
“It’s certainly ambitious and, to be honest, it’s likely not to be done while I’m in college,” he said.
However he is fairly optimistic that college would be willing to work with him in good faith to achieve such a policy.
Another much less ambitious but certainly as important goal of Ó Cathasaigh is to update the Students’ Union’s website to provide answers to commonly asked questions about academic matters.
“A lot of the stuff on the SU website doesn’t get updated very frequently,” he said.
“It’s not that we don’t have some of this stuff already, it’s just a matter of providing up to date and relevant information, even if some resources already exist, building on, and improving on stuff that people might have done before.”
Ó Cathasaigh is well aware however that as vice president of the union the role “is not just about the educational side of things”.
“Focusing on, as boring as it may sound, the internal union stuff as well is important and I have a good understanding of how the union works as well from being on the EC.”
Despite the heavy responsibilities that come with the role, there was never a question in Ó Cathasaigh’s mind about which position he would run for: “If I was going to run, I was always going to run for education. It was just a matter of if I thought I would be a good candidate”.
Ó Cathasaigh may come across as less flashy and more pragmatic than many recent Sabbatical Officers but no one could doubt his level of experience. For him, this year was all about life beyond the EC and “finding out if [he] would be good at actually representing students”.
And from his experience as Maths Convenor and sitting on the undergraduate studies committee Ó Cathasaigh has come to find that he “can do that job quite well”.
