Trinity’s Political Culture Is In Need of Change

After Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union’s (TCDSU) by now infamous “rapist effigy” campaign, an emergency town hall was called to discuss the events of the preceding weeks. Despite the almost unanimously critical response, SU President Jenny Maguire put on an admirable defence of a seemingly indefensible campaign, standing firm and responding to every question. The over 50 people who had joined the group chat to get involved in further action had long evaporated once supporting it became unpopular, and TCDSU Welfare and Equality Officer, Hamza Bana remained largely silent, leaving Maguire the sole defender of the intentions of those involved. What began as reasonable criticism of an ill-thought out campaign ended as a witch-hunt for someone to blame, and at the extraordinary council meeting the following day, Maguire and Bana were censured for their actions. But the customs and culture of the union which made such a miscalculation possible are alive and well, even as the leadership changes hands. What really emerged was a warning about the perils of a broken political culture within the SU and the wider student body. The seeds of the solution are to be found in the town hall that laid bare the political tensions that for too long have been left beneath the surface.

It is the opinion of the authors of this article, who come from diverging political backgrounds, that a serious course-correction is needed to rebuild healthy student democracy and political culture at Trinity. The general uproar that followed the campaign seemed like the first time student politics received anything close to mass engagement this year: despite appearing in the middle of final week of teaching with deadlines and the exam period closing in, the town hall was packed to the brim, as was the extraordinary council meeting despite the poor advertising. The formats for engagement seem designed to stultify discussion and appease, merely arenas where students could raise their “concerns” and “grievances” that the SU could consider moving forward. But what came out at the town hall was far more interesting: an actual debate, strangely formatted as it was, about College’s policies on sexual assault and the tricky dilemmas that emerge around such discussions from the dignity of victims and appropriate punishment to false allegations and the meaning of due process.

By sheer shock-factor the effigy campaign to many seemed an aberration. But as was brought up again and again at the council meeting, there was nothing special about the organisation of this campaign compared to the others that had been run to little fanfare throughout the year. The distinctly irrational course of events leading up to this near universally-condemned action stands against reason, freedom of speech and democratic discourse and was largely seen as a misstep or gross misconduct by individual officers, now resolved by due disciplining. But the mechanisms that brought it about are at the heart of the students’ union, and need rethinking. The processes of the students’ union seem designed to avoid any discussion of controversial topics like sexual assault, and the town hall was the first time the topic was critically engaged with by the student body. Through the challenges and questions, it was slowly uncovered that the proposals of the students’ union, kept in relative secrecy until then, was to get rid of the limited mechanisms for recourse for students who feel they have been falsely accused of sexual assault.

The vagueness about the campaign’s target seemed to be a feature rather than a bug – theatrics along with sweeping statements that no one could possibly oppose in defence of survivors and against rapists obscured the actual policy changes proposed. As with all issues that provoke controversy, it was easier to resort to sloganeering and established dogma than discuss the policies at hand. This is a discursive short-circuit around which reality is ordered, an invisible barrier constraining thought and action, concealing a predetermined ideological outcome. It was justified by being “on the right side”; the splinter group that organised for months was never questioned because they donned the right anti-rape credentials. Who could be against an approach that centres survivors? But ‘Protect survivors, not rapists’ became a call to practice reactionary politics that encouraged violence, intimidation and mob lynching – and shut down any discussion of the complexity of the issue. In a move towards the US-style kangaroo courts of Title IX proceedings, social consensus (about men) was substituted for due process, made explicit in Bana’s comments about STEM students. Ladies, steer clear of the Hamilton, for only creeps, pervs and rapists roam those grounds!

Instead of discussing proposals in mass assemblies with specific attention to the campus context (such as using relevant statistics, and not for example, conflating the rate of false accusations on campus with that of the outcomes of criminal legal cases), smaller and smaller groups of people, carrying out the mandate of  slogans, prepare for action. If the police, the courts and the universities are all on ‘the side of the patriarchy’ we reach an intellectual dead-end, and the only solution is to bypass these institutions. There is no alternative. The multi-dimensional nature of the issue cannot be considered; slogans are taken to their logical conclusion, overshadowing all debate. Discourse-production becomes uncoupled from reason. Thus, instead of strengthening due process or reforming procedures, the solution is to destroy due process, and ‘take matters into our own hands’, as the SU believes appropriate.. Ultimately, the goals of the campaign would have been unworkable because they would contravene the law and constitution of this country. Students do not shed their rights arising from natural law upon entering the College’s gates. But with posturing more important than results, the campaign needed no rational basis or end goal that could have been met by the College. It was merely a manifestation of discontent.

Regrettably, the energy unleashed by this scandal was then transformed into an equally uninformed witch-hunt. Most of the aftermath avoided the issue itself and looked for a culprit. This engagement, only about the allocation of blame, is devoid of meaningful exchange. A society which can only participate in political discourse when the pitchforks are out is one that is on a dark path. It is a negative philosophy, which seeks to negate, and seeks the destruction of the individual responsible – flooding social media with personal attacks, motioning for censure and calling for resignation as the only way of producing accountability. In this proceduralist culture, discontent can only be expressed through process and collective expressions of dissatisfaction. In a Union where no one can really be defeated at the ballot box because no one runs for re-election, political accountability is replaced with empty signalling. The positive aspect is missing, which seeks to sublate, where the political conflict between actor and critic drives the dynamic forward. Instead, the motion to censure halts any emerging conflict in its tracks, by merely denouncing the controversial action as unrepresentative. The policy issue at hand is lost in process and symbolism. The response is just as unproductive as the original action.

Moreover, the insistence that the campaign based on ‘lived experience’ was quickly revealed as epistemic suicide. This ‘lived experience’ acts as a tool to silence rational discussion on the topic. Lived experience should be respected but it should never be the sole basis for policy-making. The town hall was a brief window for rational discussion, but at the council meeting, ‘lived experience’ returned and became the foundation for arguments both for and against the motions for censure, and the hollowness of mere lived experience as a foundation for argument was revealed. Both before the action in closed committee rooms, afterwards as a defence for the campaign and in its opposition, the same stifling ‘lived experience’ reigns as a tyrannical force. It leaves no room for dissent unless you have ‘lived experience’ of your own, but even more worryingly, you must be willing to share that private experience with a packed room of students to one-up your opponents. Sharing your trauma has become the pre-condition for engaging in the political debate.

This points to the wider issue of a lack of constructive and coherent political culture among students. The futility of lived experience was once again illustrated by the USI Congress 2025 controversy where a student felt “unsafe” on the grounds of their British identity during a discussion on the Irish language. This was rightly condemned by the SU, but of course, these expressions are only mocked when they come from perceived opponents. The SU’s counter-complaint was just as safetyist, not opposing the identity-based argument on principle, but countering it with a similarly identitarian concern about an “affront to our Irish identity”. What should be a battle of ideas about the place of the Irish language in student politics became a battle of who could claim most psychological harm on the grounds of their identity.

Similarly, when College officials or student societies invite people to speak on campus, it is often no more than a performance, rather than open dialogue. Speakers are vetted and discussed with various interest-groups before they can be invited, warnings are issued to groups that might be offended by their presence – the whole ordeal is predicated on student fragility. When controversial speakers are finally invited onto campus, from Mohammed Hijab to Eamon Ryan, Q&A’s are filtered so that audiences only hear their vetted views on predetermined topics. Anyone should be allowed to speak on campus, but students should likewise be offered the right to challenge them in free exchange. It misplaces the power of controversial views, and constructs a world of fake politics and leaves students unable to engage with the politics of the real world. The SU presents us with this dynamic in its most egregious form: It takes its own positions for granted, and demonstrably, has offered no avenue for student participation in its campaigns. Once the campaign was launched, over 50 students who agreed with it joined a group chat. It should have been the reverse; students get together and discuss, in a democratic forum, how to tackle sexual assault, and engage in heated and controversial discussions.

The passionate age – where once campuses were hotbeds of discussion on all sorts of contending viewpoints – is long gone, and sloganeering and collective shaming dominates. This trickles down to the political action organised on campus, inside and outside of the SU, which without challenge become increasingly unrepresentative, out of touch, and impracticable. Over the decades, campus has fragmented into different political silos, each with their own ideologies that are held as sacred and untouchable. Debate and discussion is bypassed by design, leaving an illusion of agreement and a united front until moments like this ill-conceived campaign when the fragile coalition explodes; as a result of the lack of democratic scaffolding around the SU, a singular moment ‘potentiates’ the student body into this strange dynamic where the pendulum swings from complete support for its actions to unilateral condemnation. How can we escape this trap?

A culture of free speech and open discussion cannot be mandated with more rules or procedures, it must be cultivated and encouraged within the student body. The SU has now elected to become a political body – but it lacks a political culture that could make it an effective and genuinely representative organ of student politics. In its current form, all political expressions become for or against, and devolve into legalistic formalism where opposition is best expressed through complaints and claims to harm rather than political opposition. If the SU wants to stay relevant, it must drop its sneering attitude towards those who disagree with it, not just on style but on substance. When we shy away from interacting with our political opponents, and creating spaces that welcome those interactions, our ideas atrophy, and the dialectic is destroyed. We hope next year’s SU leadership takes note of the failures of grievance politics and proceduralism, and embraces the messy and unpredictable world of contemporary politics. This way, student politics could be a powerful and genuinely representative and transformative force for change.