SU Sabbatical Elections

Blush_01

Oh how I miss being in lecture theatres.

No stupid vital lecture addresses by millions of candidates lying through their teeth putting forward ideas to make UCD a better place to be because they want to have a cushy year in college make a difference and where they get paid to hang out in the SU corridor and get stoned work really, really hard for the students and relevant student issues.

humbert

Blush_01 wrote:

Oh how I miss being in lecture theatres.

No stupid vital lecture addresses by millions of candidates lying through their teeth putting forward ideas to make UCD a better place to be because they want to have a cushy year in college make a difference and where they get paid to hang out in the SU corridor and get stoned work really, really hard for the students and relevant student issues.

Classic *applauds

humbert

There are morons all over the place, you'd be amazed where you can find them.

But just for the sake of clarity I said that is what the proposal means to me and I'm sure to lots of other students who read it and have used the library.

Blush_01

humbert wrote:

There are morons all over the place, you'd be amazed where you can find them.

But just for the sake of clarity I said that is what the proposal means to me and I'm sure to lots of other students who read it and have used the library.

ZING!

I had a long post typed out, but it wasn't worth the effort, some people will read but never get what they're reading. It's sad.

panda100

Havent seen any manifestos yet except Laura Greene and John Regans but the whole manifesto thing is just pointless anyway.

I make my mind up by the newspaper interviews and the hustings cos thats when you get to see the REAL candidtae and not a manifesto carefully constructed by ten different people.

I was pretty shocked at Carol Annes rushes answer to mental health in her tribune interview. She said she heared of some bloke in law who killed himself over xmas.
I actually cant believe she had the stupidity to say that. It shows a great niaveity on mental health issues and you dont pinpoint someones gender and course when they have died in a way that calls for great delicacy and fragility.
Also she's in cuckoo land if she thinks only one UCD student has commited suicide this acedemic year. Its well into the the double figures. Its just sad that its taken that many wasted lives before we finally got something pro-active like the 'please talk' campiagn.

Blush_01

I'm fully doused in apathy, but Panda, the please talk campaign? What in the hell is it going to do? To be honest, having checked out the website, there's bog all on it other web links to the people whose offices you can just walk into around campus and photos of "celebrities" supporting the campaign. It gives a list of "if you feel like this, please talk" and "if someone seems to feel like this, please listen" bullet points. If Carol-Anne's so bad as to have made you laud the Please Talk campaign, she must be pretty woeful.

panda100

Blush_01 wrote:

I'm fully doused in apathy, but Panda, the please talk campaign? What in the hell is it going to do? To be honest, having checked out the website, there's bog all on it other than "this is what we're supposedly going to do". If Carol-Anne's so bad as to have made you laud the Please Talk campaign, she must be pretty woeful.

I agree with you the please talk campign isnt the greatest but it really is something when we had nothing. We had our student adviser come into talk to us for the first time in four years this morning about who to talk too when you felt down or depressed. This is a start at least.

You can talk about your abortion etc etc but the real issue on this campus is suicide, when you've lost your friends for ever . We need a welfare office who will run not just an awarness week (we havent eevn had that this year) but a year long run campaign for this very very serious issue.
I think Vivian Rath would be more capable of doing this then carol Anne rushe,though I think neither are really great. Id rather see the money they get paid going into a full time student health liason officer.

hullaballoo

Right, I've just had to delete four posts and edit another one. I'm sorry to have to do this, but I'm afraid we're going to have to control this insatiable urge to shoot our mouths off about the characters of various candidates.

I've had a number of complaints with regard to people libelling other students either in an official capacity or otherwise. In reality, this forum is one of the worst offenders in terms of defamation on this site, with the exception of Soccer and maybe one other.

It's not on. I'm not going to say it again. You are all warned that from here on in, if you're not careful about how you refer to people, you can sit the rest of the semester out on the bench.

Kaptain Redeye, you are banned from this forum because thus far you have been the instigator of most of the complaints I've received. I'm not prepared to let that kind of a liability loose on this forum. I hope you can control your opinions on other boards for the duration of your ban from here, because if not, I will have to site ban you.

humbert, your comments were reckless at best. Please be careful in future.

Chakar, the course that someone is doing in college has no reflection on whether they have any brain cells. The Leaving Cert is based on what you can memorise. You could have the memory of an elephant and the street smarts of a pigeon and be doing medicine.

Jonny Arson

The_Minister wrote:

Johnny_Arson, when you the problem with the left candidates is that they tend to use the union for their own personal political objectives (abortion, shell to sea, etc)

Lets not forget the fact that it has been individuals from the ''left'' who have kick started vital campaigns on 3rd level fees, rip-off campus, the inefficient grants system, UCD's disasterous implementation of S&M etc. I find it very sad that this years SU have been very weak and non-existent this year on the latter 3 issues. There has been many right-wingers who have used the SU for their political careers and have done zilch for students too Minister.

Sangre

Jonny Arson wrote:

Lets not forget the fact that it has been individuals from the ''left'' who have kick started vital campaigns on 3rd level fees, rip-off campus, the inefficient grants system, UCD's disasterous implementation of S&M etc.

I honestly can't tell if thats a joke. These 'vital campaigns' did nothing afaik. Campus prices haven't changed, S&M hasn't changed. I don't think the the grant system has changed and reg fees are still going up.
What exactly have the 'left' done about ANY of these? Or are you talking in a mere 'awareness' aspect?

humbert

Well fair enough, we've had the conversation before that boards is responsible for what the posters say and there's no point in creating a kerfuffle over SU stuff.

suffice it to say that I think the proposal to make the library short loan is very bad and would make me question the judgement of the candidate that proposed it.

I also believe that even if that candidate was elected and fought hard to make it so it would never happen and this would lead me to question how much else on Mr. Shanahan's manifesto is never going to happen.

Jonny Arson

Sangre wrote:

I honestly can't tell if thats a joke. These 'vital campaigns' did nothing afaik. Campus prices haven't changed, S&M hasn't changed. I don't think the the grant system has changed and reg fees are still going up.
What exactly have the 'left' done about ANY of these? Or are you talking in a mere 'awareness' aspect?

How is it a joke?

If students never stood up to government back in 02/03 students would be paying tuition fees now.
The grants protest resulted in grants been delivered the next day and now the government is finally making steps to for a more efficent centralised system that will hopefully see grants been delivered on time, I call that progress.

The S&M and campus rip-off campaigns havent worked as the union hasn't followed up on what they did do last year as there is no leadership from the top which i stated in my post. If you think campaigning and standing up for student issues doesn't work and shouldnt be done then i'll leave you to it.

pigeonbutler

To be honest I think FF's fear of the middle class abandoning them in droves was more responsible for tuition fees not being returned than any action by students (remember how few young people vote). If FG could have gone into an election saying "Our government abolished fees. FF brought them back" FF would never have reached their 80th birthday!!!

Sangre

It wasn't the protests that stopped tuiton fees. There would have been always been protests over it. The government would have obviously known this. It was the risk of losing the parent's votes that stopped it.

Sangre

It wasn't the protests that stopped tuiton fees. There would have been always been protests over it. The government would have obviously known this.

Dontico

Jonny Arson wrote:

Lets not forget the fact that it has been individuals from the ''left'' who have kick started vital campaigns on 3rd level fees, rip-off campus, the inefficient grants system, UCD's disasterous implementation of S&M etc. I find it very sad that this years SU have been very weak and non-existent this year on the latter 3 issues. There has been many right-wingers who have used the SU for their political careers and have done zilch for students too Minister.

the campaign against rip off campus was good. it got me cheaper coffee when it was on. but what did it achieve? also i wouldnt regard it as a left agenda. however the fair trade thing is. i dont consider fair trade to be very fair. i will buy it though if its cheaper. to me thats fair.

as someone noted. it was Fine Gael that removed the fees. so it isnt a left agenda. its a perfect centred, logical agenda.

Vainglory

Dontico wrote:

it was Fine Gael that removed the fees. so it isnt a left agenda. its a perfect centred, logical agenda.

It was an Labour Party Minister for Education - Niamh Breathnach.

Dontico

Vainglory wrote:

It was an Labour Party Minister for Education - Niamh Breathnach.

fine gael led government.

Vainglory

Dontico wrote:

fine gael led government.

Which, as you well know, is not what you said.

Stepherunie

pretty*monster wrote:

Was a bit suprised by Shanahan's promise to turn the library into a short-loan-only operation.

And by suprised I do of course mean horrified.

It does sound rather odd, I mean I could see why he'd maybe say week loan - the med/ health sci library has a lot of week loan books and that works well but entirely three day loans??? Nah. Don't like that one.

Pythia

Most of the SU campaigns have done very little except waste time and money.
The problem at the end of the day is that student politics is generally ineffective. (and before people say I'm a hypocrite, I'm not interested in student politics, I'm interested in politics as a student and a young person, not 'student politics'. I see a big difference there). Student unions have a reputation for being lefty complainers who can't see reason. Most politicians don't want to have to deal with that.

scop

pretty*monster wrote:

Was a bit suprised by Shanahan's promise to turn the library into a short-loan-only operation.

And by suprised I do of course mean horrified.

I actually had no intention of voting, but I will RON everyone just to vote against whoever put forward such an ill-advised idea such as this.

HappyCrackHead

"Student unions have a reputation for being lefty complainers who can't see reason. Most politicians don't want to have to deal with that."

Well i dont think thats an accurate description of our union. Ineffective and wasteful. The one campaign that was run, the voter registration was faulted from the get-go. Other campaigns were needed that an actual left wing union would have pushed through. since the left wing members were pushing for them all year.

Unfortuneately the will wasnt there with the rest... or with them really, mostly final years.

Chakar

hullaballoo wrote:

Chakar, the course that someone is doing in college has no reflection on whether they have any brain cells. The Leaving Cert is based on what you can memorise. You could have the memory of an elephant and the street smarts of a pigeon and be doing medicine.

I understand your point but I don't agree with John.John hasn't even met him!

panda100

hullaballoo wrote:

You could have the memory of an elephant and the street smarts of a pigeon and be doing medicine.

Did you not mean the memory of a panda? :P

Blush_01

Stepherunie wrote:

It does sound rather odd, I mean I could see why he'd maybe say week loan - the med/ health sci library has a lot of week loan books and that works well but entirely three day loans??? Nah. Don't like that one.

That depends entirely on your course and year. Final years with FYDs and postgrads probably couldn't manage with mere week loans.

Vorsprung

People moan about a lot of stuff in UCD like the facilities, food on campus, atmosphere etc. But tbh I think the biggest joke is the SU and the politics behind it. I've seen people addressing lectures with empty promise after empty promise for the last 4 years (I have a bit of a break at the moment so I'm not in for this year's bull****). And even last year, the SU didn't have voting stations available to let Nursing, Med , Physio and Rad students in Vincent's and the Mater vote.

So I won't be voting, and even if I did happen to have the pleasure of being addressed and in Belfield, I wouldn't. The same class of clowns will replace this year's selection, we'll get the same empty promises. And I'm still not happy that I'm paying for a building that I'll ever use :mad: :mad: .

Red Alert

ditto what big jim said. it looks like they just drag up the same templates with the same empty promises on them year after year, and just slap a new name on them.

Stepherunie

Blush_01 wrote:

That depends entirely on your course and year. Final years with FYDs and postgrads probably couldn't manage with mere week loans.

Oh I don't agree with it, I just said I can see why he'd say it possibly. There are far better solutions to the ones he's suggesting. Like if there are multiple copies of a books in the library making more of them week loan rather than having them all long loan so as to boost circulation. Thus you still retain long loans for those who need them and keep up circulation. This shouldn't just be one decision and that's the end of it. It must be remembered that the library are actually pretty good at listening to students. I've seen it happen a lot over my last 2 and a bit years here that the library will take on board students comments about too many copies of a particular book being in short loan or long loan and move them as appropriate.

A far better idea would be to engage in consulation with students and the library and identify books where the usage of them could be improved. Yes it would be more time consuming and take effort on the parts of the SU, Library and students themselves but if it makes the library more efficient wouldn't that be a good thing?

panda100

bigjimthefirst wrote:

People moan about a lot of stuff in UCD like the facilities, food on campus, atmosphere etc. But tbh I think the biggest joke is the SU and the politics behind it. I've seen people addressing lectures with empty promise after empty promise for the last 4 years (I have a bit of a break at the moment so I'm not in for this year's bull****). And even last year, the SU didn't have voting stations available to let Nursing, Med , Physio and Rad students in Vincent's and the Mater vote.
.

I asked the returning officer last year about this numerous times by phone and email and never got a reply. I have tried explaining how there is well over 1000 students between the Mater and vincents but from what I gather the intrest isnt there for it.
Manifestos are just a joke to me at this stage.I only read the intresting bit about the person cos that the only think that is unique and truthfull in the whole manifesto.
Stephen Quinlivans experience stood out a mile and viv rath won wexford person of the year!Thats so cute!