Ents to hold non-alcohol events before exams
By Katie Hughes | Apr 11 2012
UCD Students’ Union Entertainments Officer, Stephen Darcy, is planning on holding several non-alcohol events in the two-week lead-up to exams, as part of what has been provisionally labelled as ‘Craic Week’.Possible events include paintballing and airsoft trips, as well as go-carting, five-a-side football, an ice-cream van, and possibly buskers on campus, although Darcy admits that the latter is unlikely, “they may not allow that because people are studying.”Darcy admits that non-alcohol events had not been his priority for the year, although he insists that it was something he had aimed to do “once the summer months came along”, as some of the events were not suitable for the winter months, “the paintballing I had originally planned for January but you can’t really do that in the middle of winter because that’s just painful.”The week had originally been scheduled from April 2nd to 6th, but was put on hold as, according to Darcy, “the UCD Ball has had to take preference at the moment.”Darcy explained that one of the main reasons that non-alcohol events were going to be held was the poor ticket sales Ents has experienced in the past six weeks. “It’s been really hard to sell tickets to events, particularly in the last six weeks because people are starting to panic for their exams and they’re studying a lot … [I’m] solely basing it on non-alcohol stuff and not to take up their whole day and not have people out late at night so they can still be up and studying the next day … then again, everything is dependent on people actually wanting to go and on there being enough demand for it.”He also acknowledges that it is very late in the year to be holding such events, but maintains that “there’s just not enough weeks in the year, it’s the one thing I’ve realised this year. We’ve had more events this year than Ents have ever had before, especially in Semester One.”Darcy states that this high volume of events was the reason the Mystery Tour did not go ahead this year, “during the summer months, I had planned to put the Mystery Tour on in October but we had ticketed events, [going to all of which would cost] sixty to potentially eighty euro for October alone so there’s no way students can afford that … I put it back to Semester Two just after the mid-term but then I realised that it’s going to be really hard to sell 500 Mystery Tour tickets when people are on their mid-term break so I put it off to the following week but … we weren’t confident that it was going to sell.”According to Darcy, a survey will be sent out to students to gauge the demand for a Mystery Tour on the Monday or Tuesday following the end of exams.