Expanding entertainments a core focus for potential Presidents

For this year’s candidates for the position of SU President a key aim is to take the atmosphere and charitable nature attached to R&G Week and expand it across the entire college year.Whilst R&G events usually take up the majority of SU officers’ time during the week itself, Aidan Coffey believes that not only is his suggestion of having a R&G event every week an improvement on the current system, it would not take away from other aspects of the SU’s work. The current Surgeon Noonan Society auditor intends, if elected, to keep R&G Week in February, but argues “there’s no reason something like the colour run shouldn’t take place in September or October,” adding that such a move would lead to the event being more successful in raising money for charity.George Gill, however, suggested that a plan such as this may drive up the costs associated with R&G Week further, acknowledging that whilst this year’s version of the event was successful students must ask “how much did it cost?” To keep costs down and maintain the event’s success Gill’s manifesto suggests having collection buckets at the door of student venues, which was seen this year as well as introducing a student lottery which “would be cheap to run but could raise massive amounts of money.”One event that could occur next year, if students elect Eolann Sheehan, is a UCC Music Festival at the end of each term. Whilst Sheehan also supports building on the current R&G structure, he believes the SU needs to offer more entertainment events outside of the week. A similar event has been rumoured to take place in the near future, but Sheehan believes that even if it takes place this year he can use his term “to build on it” and create a marquee event.In addition to offering students better nights out and bigger events Sheehan believes the SU needs to play a more prominent role in ensuring students get home safely from such occasions, a reason why he would push for the return of the ‘Night Bus.’ “The reason why the previous service did disband was because there was no actually presence on campus during the day so nobody knew about it.”However, whilst Sheehan believes students using the bus would need to pay €2 to cover the costs of the service, Gill thinks the cost could be reduced or even eliminated if the SU pushed nightclubs to sponsor the initiative.  “We have so many connections with nightclubs that it wouldn’t be too much to ask from them, given the contracts they receive for student nights.” Coffey, however, believes that while student safety needs to be a top priority the Night Bus may not be the right way to go about ensuring this, stating that whoever is elected “would need to look at why the service stopped.”Despite the success this year’s SU experiences in fighting for extended Library opening hours, all three candidates believe that next year’s SU will potentially be under a greater level of pressure, particularly to ensure that mistakes made this year in the change to semesterisation are not repeated.The ball, however, is now in the court of the various departments within UCC, as Gill argued that this year’s SU had done everything it could. “The departments should now go to the review group with a knowledge of what clashes happened,” and bring about the necessary changes.This belief was echoed by Sheehan, who argued that “They [the SU] did everything they could,” but that many UCC departments chose to ignore the issues in the system instead of fixing them. A key problem he identified with the system was the lack of study time before the Christmas exams this year, arguing that one week was not enough and that next year’s SU would have to lobby for this to be changed.Coffey also praised the performance of this year’s SU before adding that while teething problems were expected this year with the introduction of a new system there will be no room for such mistakes next year. “It’s alright for these things to happen once, you could probably argue, but it’s inexcusable for it to happen again. At the moment there’s a Semesterisation Review Group that’s running until August... If I’m elected President I will, along with the Education Officer, closely monitor that group and put the pressure on to ensure any necessary changes are made.Regardless of who is elected finding a balance between an expanded R&G Week and providing students with the best education possible will be one of the key challenges.