Editor Oisín Gaffey analyses the upcoming Constitutional Referendum proposed by UCD Students' Union
At 8am on Tuesday 26 November, students will be sent a mass-circulated email with a link to vote in the aforementioned Constitutional Referendum. That is, if issues regarding student-wide emails, whereby emails from the SU have been going straight into spam folders, has been resolved. Similarly, polling stations look set to be erected in the atrium of the student centre, UCD village, on the concourse and on the Smurfit campus. Polls will then close at 8pm on Wednesday 27th.
The timing of this referendum is far from ideal, a sentiment which the Campaigns and Engagements officer shares. She explained that the team has never held a referendum before Christmas, and felt that separating the constitutional referendum from Executive elections would be beneficial. Whilst one can understand that a separate campaigning period may have its advantages, this referendum falls at a bad time for the Students’ Union.
The country will head to the polls on Friday 29 November to vote for their next government, which is understandably dominating discourse and attention these days. McCormack-Eiffe acknowledges, “It will be a bit of a challenge to keep people engaged on both issues”, but argues “It’s out of our control when that [general election] got called. So all we have to do is just promote the people to vote.” Whilst the union had no control when the general election would be called, the two possible dates of November 22 and November 29 were widely known for weeks prior to the official calling by the Taoiseach.
McCormack-Eiffe admits that the SU “had originally decided earlier in the month,” but due to a mistake in the wording of the motion to be submitted to Council, the C&E officer asked to put it to an emergency council, held one week later on Wednesday 23 October.
To add to the already unfortunate timing, both campaign teams have an extremely tight campaigning window. Hustings will take place this evening, Tuesday 19, via Google Meets, The University Observer can confirm, however it has not been advertised publicly by the SU.
In our interview with McCormack-Eiffe, she highlighted Thursday 21 November as the date when students can expect to see posters plastered across campus. Manifestos are also expected to be published on Thursday as well. This leaves just five days, two of which are Saturday and Sunday, for students across the campus to be persuaded to vote one way or another, or at all. McCormack-Eiffe admits, “It's a very, very tight turnaround.”
Last April, when students were asked the same quorum question, 2,868 students voted. This equates to just 7.7% of the student population. This falls well shy of the newly proposed 10% quorum for constitutional referenda. Indeed, the most voted in race at last year’s executive elections, the Presidential race, saw 3,518 students cast their vote. This total still falls short of the newly proposed quorum, registering 9.5% of the student population. Last year’s sabbatical elections saw the best engagement since pre-Covid levels, but still fell short of the 10% they now propose. Could an argument therefore not be made to campaign to lower the quorum further so as to allow for change? “There has to be something that we have to work towards. And I think by not having a threshold or a quota at all, it'll just lead to a more lax approach towards the democracy of the union,” McCormack-Eiffe responds.
If a quota is the only motivating factor for the union to engage with its students, then we have a serious problem.
Questions are not solely related to the first question of the referendum. The wording of question two is intricate. The second amendment in particular requires unpacking. McCormack-Eiffe argues that the simple removal of the words ‘or in a constituency of which they are a member’ will allow the first re-wording question to function. When asked if hypothetically this could mean a Medicine student could run for class rep in Agricultural Science, McCormack-Eiffe responds, “No, it's at the returning officer's discretion with the constituencies.”
When elaborating, she highlights the difference between ‘class’ and ‘constituency’, which raises more questions. “We did have that issue this year where someone was like, oh, there's only three in my class. So that's why their constituency, instead of being stage 3 genealogy, it was stage 3 biology. So they would have the chance for anyone in stage 3 biology to nominate them.”
The change would see Stage 2 students be able to run at the end of the year for their Stage 3 constituency, though McCormack-Eiffe notes that the SU reviews and sets the constituencies each year. This raises the question, why do you need a constitutional referendum to change it, if it's already functioning in a way where you can bypass the ‘in a constituency which is not your own’ clause? If the constituencies were reviewed to allow someone from biology to represent a class in genealogy, then this particular part of the referendum feels redundant.
It appears that this constitutional referendum raises more questions than it answers, one of which is how much extra this is expected to cost the union for campaigning material and voting systems.
It is hard to foresee a scenario in which this referendum meets the 12.5% quorum, considering students will be cramming for exams and assignments, whilst they are also more focussed on the upcoming general election.
I am happy to be proved wrong, but even if I am and the quorum of 12.5% is met, and the ‘Yes’ campaign wins, the irony writes itself.