ACTIVISM AT UCD

yesterday must have been some momumental event in the history of UCD student consciousness. It started off with postering bright and early for the coke referendum. (coke was banned on campus about a month ago, but there was a call for a second referendum since not enought students were offically registered at the time) I couldn't tell you if anything enchanting happened between 9-5 since I was at work, but it was the evening that will always be remembered. At 6 there was a candle light vidgual for the anti-deportation campaign. It got about 60 students out, not too bad considering it was raining at the time. Then at 7 there was a council meeting for student union. One good thing came out of it, actually it could have been much better if the second thing had gone through.

The good thing was a motion was passed to support the protest in London today and provide a small amount of funding for students who wanted to head over with the student union banner. The funding would cover two studnets completely, but they decided to go with four students paying 50%. I was going to be one of the four, but I am holding a public meeting today for the safe space campaign, and if you are the one holding the meeting, it is advisable that you show up. Joe the crazy GR guy from my program is going allong with the boy (ready) and a few other guys. It would have been great fun.

The bad thing was ready and I had put a motion in to have the union support the alliance for choice protest that is happening next week. The way motions work is that you have to hand them in a week before the council so the secritary and such are aware of them. Well our motion "went missing" so the chair and secretary "didn't see it" in time. We found this out and try to hand in the motion as an emergance motion. But as it seems the chair and secretary are both pro-life. Actually many people on council are, including the welfare officer . . . so our motion was not even brought up. We argued it, but they had the control in this situation. We will bring it back up for next council, but it will be after the protest, so we will ask the council for a general support of the alliance for choice and it aims. The debate should be heated . . .

This is where things get interesting, UCD has been having cut backs to services such as the library. It closes at 5 on Fridays and saturdays and is not open on sundays. During the week it is open till ten. They are not planning to extend hours during exam time. The union planned a sit-in in the library. The plan was to stay exactly one hour after closing time with a group of students silently sitting and studying. After the council meeting we went over to the library, ready and I made these little flyers to hand out to studnets already in the library encouraging them to stay. We ran around flyering - when I got the location in the library dedicated to the protest I was overwhelmed - there were 200 students sitting reading. It was really beautiful to see . . . the energy was great. We decided that if nothing is done that we will be back next week but this time for 2 hours. And if nothing is done after that we will go the following week for the whole night. I really think that this could get big next week, the buzz after leaving the library was great, I'm sure all of them are going to be telling there friends and so on.

On a high from the library we heading over to the counting of the coke referendum ballots. There were about 30 of us on the ban the coke side of the room and about 5 on the other side. Those numbers wouldn't show you the demograghics of the voters, but rather the left-right devide in the union itself. The chair would announce the results by subject of study leaving the art students till the end (since they can make or break the results with there huge numbers). In the mean time they also were announcing students who won elections on the education council and accidemic council. What was brillant was this guy DAvid Murray won both of the positions. The deal with him is, he is in jail right now. He was part of the bin tax protest and was given notice that he could no longer protest. When he was caught peacfully protesting he was brought to court and was given a three week jail sentence and 1500 euro fine.

A few weeks ago at council there was a motion to support him and support the right to protest. These results showed that not only did the union support him on some ideolgical level, the student body as a whole supported his fight. The energy kept getting better and better . . . the final results were announced at midnight. There was 22% turn out rate for voting, the no vote (which was our side to continue the ban on coke) got 56.5% of the votes!!! We won!! the energy was great, peopel were jumping hugging cheering and generally caring on. We all went to a party at the women officers house.

Everything that happened that night will be remembered for years to come. UCD has set a presidnet on the coke ban and colleges around the country are now running there own campaigns. It was quoted that UCD is doing more for human rights in columbia then any other orgnaization in the world right now. I don't know if I would push it that far, but hell we are doing something all right.

I'm off to my public meeting on the safe space campaign . . . I hope lots of people show up, you can never tell with these things. I must be off . . . .