This past Monday, the Student’s Union of UCC put in a place a boycott of the UCC Campus. The reason? It was supposed to be a stand against the reintroduction of fees into third level here in Ireland. Quite what it was hoped this boycott would achieve is something I cannot fathom.
The recent upsurge in the supposed politicisation of the student classes of Ireland has come as a bit of a shock to me. There has until recently, been little or no indication that the average Irish student was a particularly political animal. But all of a sudden it seems, we are meant to be manning the barricades, joining the picket lines and storming the Ivory Towers of the College Administrators. Wonderful. Except for one thing: we haven’t been.
I was about the UCC Campus on Monday afternoon. And it was hardly the hotbed of political activism one was expecting. The all-student e-mail sent informing us to join in the boycott, asked that we respect the picket-lines. I saw no picket-lines this Monday. It occurs to me that the average Irish student would need little or no excuse to abstain from entering their campus on a typical Monday. Of course, the problem with this particular Monday was that it was no typical Monday. It was in fact the first Monday of our “month-off”/”study-month”. Hardly the day to start a revolution.
The college library seemed to be reasonably busy, and there was many a person wandering about the grounds of campus, quite blissfully unaware of the political foment they were supposedly disrupting, and the picket-line they had crossed. Maybe they didn’t get the e-mail?
Whatever one’s feelings about the re-introduction of fees (I for one, am not entirely opposed to the idea: it may improve the dedication of this nations students. If they were paying upward of €50 a lecture – they certainly wouldn’t miss as many!), one cannot deny that if the students of Ireland were really serious about their new found political activism and radicalism then something a bit more incendiary may have occurred in the past few months. But this has failed to materialise.
I, for one, have been decidedly unimpressed by the protests and marches engaged in by the student body of this country. In spite of the fact that strikes seem to be part of the zeitgeist of society once again, the students of Ireland (and their erstwhile governing body, the USI) have hardly been invoking the spirit of previous student movements. Maybe a look at how the students of Paris took things into their hands in May of 1968 (a spirit being invoked throughout the universities of France again at this moment in time), or the students of the University of Berkeley took a stand against what they felt were the unjust policies of the United States Government. If that is too far into the past for your liking, we the students might take a look at what has happened in the Waterford Crystal over the past two months.
A militant belief in worker’s rights has, after a long unflinching stand-off yielded, if not victory, then at least a compromised victory. The factory has retained some 178 jobs, from a possible loss of a full 600. Hardly a moment in the Great March Forward you’ll agree, but proof of what can be achieved when you take true industrial action.
If the UCC Student’s Union had asked us to boycott the college during the height of term, for a day or more then perhaps the message would have been louder and more effective.
But, as things stand it would seem unlikely that the current movement of students in Ireland will one day mentioned in the same breath as any of the other movements mentioned above.
