Finn Hallwood, a Junior Sophister mechanical engineering student, is one of four candidates running for the position of Entertainment (“Ents”) Officer in this year’s sabbatical elections. The candidate who wins the race will be responsible for the organisation of all key student social events in the 2025/26 academic year, from Freshers’ Week to Pav Fridays to Trinity Ball.
Hallwood is currently captain of the Swimming Club and Head Tracker for DU Amnesty’s Jailbreak, Ireland’s largest student-run charity challenge, and has been involved in event organising for much of his college years. Hallwood cites three experiences in particular which lead him to consider running for Ents officer: his time as director for Jailbreak 2024, which raised 10,000 euros; helping organise Amnesty’s Songs Against Apartheid gig in aid of Palestine; and Sports Co-Ordinator for the cross-society Movember 2024 charity ball. Hallwood explains: “It’s kind of through those three [events] that I developed a love for running things, and doing that full time seems like a natural progression.”
Hallwood’s manifesto outlines five main aims: diversifying Ents; accessibility, support for causes, transparency, and safety.
Under ‘diversifying Ents’ Hallwood intends to increase support for societies and to work with them to curate a larger variety of events both day and night. Clubs and societies “define the student experience” says Hallwood, and he promises to meet with the heads of society committees at the start of each semester to encourage dialogue between clubs and the Ents office. Hallwood’s vision involves the Ents office supporting societies with their own events as well as Ents-society collaborations, and pushing for a wider range of event locations across campus.
One goal Hallwood is particularly set on is the creation of an Ents and societies events timetable each semester, covering any and all weekly society events as well as special days or weeks taking place during term. Communication with society committees about the events they would like included on the timetable would be facilitated in the start-of-semester meetings described above. Such a timetable would be a useful centralised way to spread the word about student events ahead of time, and Hallwood also hopes it would help students with additional needs by including accessibility information alongside each event. Students would thus be able to see what extra supports they might need and allow those supports to be organised in advance.
Transparency in all areas is key for Hallwood, and that starts now with the elections. His campaign will be funded by a continuous charity fundraiser so that students can clearly see where the funds from ticket sales go on purchase, rather than waiting until after the campaign to release funding notes. He promises to publicly release the minutes of all Ents meetings, such as the meetings with society heads, for the student body to read.
Hallwood feels that in-person conversations between the SU and the student body can be more impactful for transparency and accessibility than online feedback forms, so an important responsibility for him will be to make sure he has a presence as a “friendly face” around campus and at events as Ents officer. Ents office hours will be increased to make communication with students as easy as possible. Hallwood intends to hold those office hours at various locations across campus so that all corners of the student body get their say, and that students know the Ents door is always open.
An important goal in Hallwood’s manifesto is to increase Ents’ focus on events in support of charities and cultural causes, with particular emphasis on larger multi-day or month-long events such as RAG week or Movember. The hope would be to set up subcommittees for each large event in order to get the most out of Ents’ organising power. “Getting all of that energy pushed towards a single committee I think you could do an incredible amount of work,” Hallwood says, giving the example of the 2024 Movember charity ball which raised 5000 Euro as a multi-society collaboration.
Another multi-day event that falls under this category would be Éigse, College’s week-long Irish language festival. Irish is not mentioned in his manifesto due to size-constraints, but when asked about his plans Hallwood says he would love to have more large-scale céilís and traditional music events on campus throughout the year. Trinity News previously wrote that Hallwood is from London, but while he was born there, Hallwood in fact grew up in Dublin. Talking about the place of the language in Irish culture, Hallwood says: “Incorporating [traditional music] and by extension Gaeilge is something I have a very keen interest in,” he says. “It extends further than music, but I think music is the entryway for a lot of people to get into a language.” As such, Ents can play a key role in fostering Irish language interest among students.
Hallwood also intends to make free welfare training available for all students, with at the very least one session per semester, hopefully a good bit more depending on logistics. In tandem with the training sessions, Hallwood wants to set-up a speaker series on safety topics like mental health and sexual wellbeing, which students could attend either separately to or in parallel. “It’s incredibly important for people to actually figure out how to treat people and how they want to be treated,” Hallwood says. “Doing those kinds of trainings will make the environment at different events safer and make people more conscious and look after each other.” The speakers series and trainings would complement each other and hopefully encourage students to go between the two, broadening the reach of Ents’ safety work.
