UCD Students’ Union have announced that a Constitutional Referendum is set to be held on Tuesday 26 and Wednesday 27 November 2024. Read our Head-to-Head Guide Below and follow The University Observer to stay up to date with developments.
UCD Students’ Union have announced that a Constitutional Referendum is set to be held on Tuesday 26 and Wednesday 27 November 2024.
Voting will take place electronically, with every member of UCD Students’ Union, i.e all students of UCD, entitled to vote.
What are students voting on?
The first question is an amendment to article 6.7.1 of the constitution which would lower the number of Union members required to vote in a referendum, in order for the result to be considered valid, from 12.5% to 10%.
The second question of the referendum would allow class reps to be elected at the end of an academic term, and remove a line in the constitution which prevents students from running in a constituency which is not their own.
This referendum was run last year, but UCDSU failed to reach the 12.5% quorum, polling at 7.7% of the student population. The most voted in sabbatical race reached 9.5% turnout.
Read our Head-to-Head Guide Below and follow The University Observer to stay up to date with developments.
'Yes'
The ‘Yes’ campaign is being led by Campaigns and Engagement Sabbatical Officer Saskia McCormack-Eiffe, who proposed the constitutional referendum at an emergency meeting of UCDSU Council on Wednesday 23 October.
McCormack-Eiffe argued, with regards to the lowering of quorum required to pass constitutional referenda by 2.5% to 10% of the student body, “It’ll just make it a bit more accessible for us to change our constitution as the students’ needs adapt over the years.”
Acknowledging last year’s failed attempt to pass a similar constitutional referendum, McCormack-Eiffe recognised “the irony of it.” She argued that the two questions now being posed to students are “the two most pressing issues at the minute that we need to kind of put forward for our constitution” and that if the threshold is passed, “there can be a whole constitutional review done, and then pass, hopefully, a new constitution in the coming years.”
When asked what a constitutional review in the future might look like, she said it would “probably [be] for next year's team to figure out”, but that if the threshold was changed to 10% it would “give next year's team the opportunity to be able to have that little bit more liberty to change the constitution.”
McCormack-Eiffe pointed to other universities such As Maynooth, and organisations such as the Union of Students in Ireland (USI), who currently employ a 10% constitutional referendum quorum. “It just brings us in line with a lot of the other universities in the country”, she argued.
Trinity College Dublin requires no such quorum for constitutional referendum. When asked if UCDSU would be in favour of removing quorum, McCormack-Eiffe responded, “There has to be something that we have to work towards. 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.”
From the opposing perspective, McCormack-Eiffe defended the proposal of lowering quorum, as the ‘No’ campaign argued that it is “the wrong direction to go.” She argued,
“I don't think bringing it down is us putting our hands up and waving the white flag. Every organisation has seen it since the pandemic. There's been a huge drop off of engagement.”
She did suggest that lowering quorum could be a temporary measure, “If we bring this down to 10%, we can work for a few years, bring our engagement back up and then maybe in two, three years time, even four or five, we can bring it back up to 12.5%.”
As for question two of the referendum, which proposes electing class reps at the end of spring term as well as autumn term, McCormack-Eiffe stated her argument. “It'll get us into training earlier. We'll be able to get into council earlier, have more councils, which means more direction on how we're going to be steered. And that classes will have more say in how we operate.”
The second aspect of question two looks to remove a line in the constitution which prevents students from running in a constituency which is not their own. “It was just contradicting it,” she argued, “For example, if a second year wants to run again at the end of the year, they can't if that [wording] doesn't change. We're removing that so they can run for the third year class rep position.”
The Campaigns and Engagement officer hopes her campaign will win against the ‘No’ campaign, and when asked if she thinks the vote will meet quorum she responded, “I really hope so.”
'No'
The ‘No’ campaign is being led by Ruairi Phelan, an English, Drama, and Film stage 3 student. Phelan does not currently hold a position in the SU, but has previously served as a class rep for two consecutive years. When this referendum was put to the student body last year, Phelan was on the ‘No’ campaign team.
Phelan makes it clear that his campaign is only lobbying for a ‘No’ vote on the first questions of the referendum, to lower the quorum from 12.5% to 10%. For the second question of the referendum, on class rep elections, Phelan’s campaign urges students to vote ‘yes’.
The ‘no’ campaign is running on the basis that the Students’ Union is struggling with a lack of engagement, and lowering the quorum for referendums by 2.5% is “the wrong direction to go.” The issue of the future commitment of sabbatical teams to solve the engagement crisis was of concern to Phelan,
“I think just naturally when you have a lower benchmark to hit, you're gonna ease off the gas.”
The ‘no’ campaign further believes that lowering the quorum will undermine democracy in the Union, and lead to a Union which doesn’t represent enough of the student body. Phelan notes that the quorum denotes a minimum standard the Union must hit, and by lowering it, the SU “run the risk of getting into something where such a small percentage of students are approving something that it doesn't reflect the whole campus body and the group of students that we represent.”
Phelan claims he is aware of a number of students who believe that the SU can run “on one type of politics”, adding “for some students that's an issue.” He says that “if we lower [quorum], and only 10% of students have shaped that constitution, then we're only representing the opinion of that 10% of people, and not the greater UCD community.”
While Phelan is proud of the policy areas the Union had worked on, in particular the SU stance on Palestine and its efforts in housing, he shared the ‘no’ campaign’s concerns that if quorum is dropped, these important stances could be blocked by only a small portion of students, “I do have a fear that if you had an issue like Palestine and the SU supported it, and it got rejected by a small group of voters, that that is something that could happen.”
Further, Phelan questions why the SU is holding this referendum again considering the high costs associated with running it, when students were given the opportunity to vote on it last year.
He notes that the Union ran a deficit of €65,849 in the 2023/24 academic year, and have budgeted a €14,856 deficit for this academic year. “We're continuing to kind of run into a deficit. Stuff like running a referendum multiple times because you don't meet quorum, you know, does hit that deficit.”
The ‘yes’ campaign have stated that lowering the quorum to 10% would bring them in line with other students’ unions around the country, including USI, though Phelan states that as the largest university in Ireland, “it shouldn't be an issue to get 10%. It shouldn't be an issue to get 12.5%.”
The irony of this referendum is raised by Phelan, who points out that for this referendum to pass, the current quorum of 12.5% still needs to be reached,
“if you do reach 12.5%, to drop to 10%, ... then the argument kind of defeats itself. If you can reach that 12.5%, why are you dropping it to 10%? You've hit that minimum level of engagement.”
He is heading into this campaign with an ironic optimism, “If I get defeated on this, I will be happy because students will have been engaged.”