Road Safety Campaign scheduled for Semester Two
By Emily Longworth | Nov 29 2011
UCD Students’ Union Campaigns and Communications Officer, Brendan Lacey, aims to launch a campaign that will raise awareness of road safety among UCD students in the second semester, following an increase in the number of road fatalities suffered by UCD students in recent months.
Lacey described the campaign as one that was close to his heart, saying “since I took office in July, five UCD students have died, and four of those have been road deaths, and that’s very high compared to other years, not just for the numbers of deaths themselves, but the number of road deaths in particular is pretty shocking”.There will be no time limit on the campaign, “it will run for as long as it needs to … ideally we would have liked to do it before Christmas but the national campaign stopped any chances of that happening”.Lacey predicts that it will be “a very different and hopefully very impacting campaign”. He hopes that it will “make students not just aware when they’re driving, but also when they’re cycling and walking of what the dangers are and how they can avoid them”.Although he showed enthusiasm for next year’s campaign plans, he described the National Stop Fees campaign as taking “absolute priority” over his time so far this semester. He deemed the fees protest “a huge success”, and was equally pleased with the second day of national protests that took place on November 24th, which involved a symbolic funeral procession “representing the death of Irish education” walking through Dublin.“Obviously it had a far smaller turnout than the march but it was more of a media stunt than anything, and we got great media play from it” explained Lacey. The protest got the attention of last week’s Irish Times and the Independent, among other national media, to the satisfaction of the SU and Union of Students in Ireland.Other plans for the second semester include Lacey’s ‘mandated campaigns’ such as Rainbow Week, Environmental Week, Disability Awareness week and several others.