Yes to USI Campaign Interview

As part of the USI Referendum coverage the UCC Express sat down with Laura Harmon, USI President, and Martin Lynch, Vice President for the Southern Region, to discuss the Yes to USI Campaign.An interview with a No campaign representative is available here. How do you feel your campaign is going so far?Harmon: We’re very happy with it. The majority of our yes team are UCC students so we were really happy that there was a broad base of students that were eager to get involved, with a lot of the students being involved in different areas of campus life. So in that respect we think it’s going very well. I think there’s over 1,000 votes cast today so we’d be confident that we can get that again tomorrow. The feedback has been good from students that we’ve been talking to. They’ve been very engaged and they’re asking a lot of questions which is really, really good to see. I went into one class today and did an announcement and got about 10 questions so really delighted with that as we were able to put forward the different arguments and opinions on the whole thing.A key aspect of the NotoUSI campaign has been the argument that the money spent on USI membership could, if UCC students opted out of USI, be spent on issues more pertinent to Cork students. What do you make of this claim? Do UCC students get value for their money?Harmon: Absolutely. First of all on the amount it is not €120,000, it is €86,000 that goes to USI and it’s not the Students’ Union that pays that. It comes from students and it is €5 per student, and that is something we have been talking to students about today, where their fiver goes on an individual basis. And that comes out of the capitation fee so there’s no guarantee whatsoever that, if students in UCC were to decide they didn’t want to be part of USI, that that money would be spent on something else. They voted initially for it to be spent on USI so technically if they wanted it to be spent on something else they should be asked again. I know that the No side have proposed different things that they could be spending certain amounts of money on, but there’s only one thing you can spend the money on, and it should be up to the students to decide how they spend it.

"There’s no guarantee whatsoever that, if students in UCC were to decide they didn’t want to be part of USI, that that money would be spent on something else."

 Just in terms of the value for money for the membership, we feel that €5 is actually excellent value for money. If you look at it in the broader context we’re one of the cheapest unions in the country; it works out at less than 10 cent per week per student. For that you get national representation on a range of issues, so be it on protecting student supports, lobbying the Minister for Education and Skills, representation on the Higher Education Authority (HEA),  to national campaigns. USI co-ordinated the national voter registration drive this year and we worked with you Students’ Union on it.We registered over 20,000 students to vote. Also we launched the largest student independent alcohol awareness campaign that we’ve ever seen in Ireland and that was because we were able to work with Dr. Michael Byrne here in UCC on that issue. We provide materials which are worth in excess of €40,000 to UCC students, so we provide thousands of Freshers packs, SHAG packs  and Mental Health Awareness packs, and that isn’t including the materials we would have provided to the LGBT* Society throughout the year when they’ve been running campaigns on equality issues. Also our officers have been really visible on campus and have helped outLynch: So I would have come down and spoke at class rep training at the start of the year and I would have co-ordinated campaigns with Cian [Power] and Dick [Murphy] such as the Voter Registration drive where we registered over 1,000 students in one day. I came down during the library debacle and sat with them in the library after hours. Plus, through National Council your union is bringing stuff to us all the time and we’re working on that all the time in the background. You mightn’t physically see what we’re doing but we’re arranging meetings; we’re meeting with ministers and only a few weeks ago we were able to meet with Alan Kelly and discuss accommodation issues one-on-one, which is very hard to do at the minute.Harmon: At the end of the day it’s all about being part of a national network where UCC Students’ Union can engage and they can shape the direction of the national movement... As a union at the moment we are growing and I think that we are quite influential, we would have seen that we’re very much being listened to now given the number of students that we registered to vote.Also, in relation to the marriage equality referendum we are seen as one of the leaders of that campaign. I think it’s important as there’s a general election on the cards for 2016 and we want to make education a national issue and something that’s discussed around the dinner table. There’s a huge risk now, when we have a new government coming in, that we don’t know what decision is going to be taken in relation to education so I think it’s important the students movement stays united.The No campaign has argued that USI is overly focused on issues which impact upon Dublin-based students, for example the homes.usi.ie website lists 399 properties in the Dublin region compared to just 1 in Cork. Do you feel the claims that students outside of Dublin may be forgotten about are fair?Harmon: USI certainly isn’t Dublin-centric; we have regional officers which are a testament to that. Martin has been very much present on campus, I’ve been down here several times and out VP for Equality and Citizenship has been down here several times. We worked really well with UCCSU on the Voter Registration drive and UCC had one of the largest number of registered students in the country which was amazing to see.

"It showed that we were coming up with a solution to the problem as opposed to just complaining about the problem."

In terms of the accommodation issue, that website was a national website and it was available and promoted nationwide. Every Students’ Union across the country was promoting it and we had home-owners across the country registering. It was a brand new initiative and was something that USI had never done before, and it showed that we were coming up with a solution to the problem as opposed to just complaining about the problem. And we did have home-owners from Cork that registered and did rent out their rooms to students. And, we saw in the budget that the rent room relief scheme where you can rent out a room for up to €10,000 per year tax free was increased to €15,000 so that [homes.usi.ie] was certainly something that was taken on board as it was working. But certainly we are not a Dublin centric organisation.Lynch: It should be noted as well people who listed properties were encouraged to remove them as soon as they were filled so it could have been the case that a lot more properties were originally available. Also, we had Pink Training here, the biggest LGBT* event in Europe, and it was in Cork so it’s very hard to argue that everything is Dublin-centric when the biggest LGBT* event was held in Cork.The fairness of limiting Pink Training to USI members has been brought under question during the referendum build-up. Given that the event is designed around the idea of inclusivity do you feel such a step is just?Harmon: With Pink Training it’s such a popular event, we were inundated with requests for spaces, so it would have been unfair from our perspective if we were to give spaces to non-USI members. We need to prioritise the people that we are working for, and that’s the reality behind it. We were also delighted to host the event here in Cork, and it was really great to see that UCC worked with CIT as well to co-host it. I think it shows that Students’ Unions in local areas can work really well and those two unions have worked really well together since they’ve both been in USI.In relation to this referendum the idea of financial transparency within USI has been a recurring issue, ultimately leading to the USI updating the transparency section of its website. What was it about this referendum which led USI to release the most recent set of accounts online.Harmon: I think referendums are good because they highlight the issues that students want and it’s great to get that feedback. USI is an unincorporated organisation so we’re not actually required to publish our accounts but we do. We present them to our annual congress every year where student reps have an ability to have an inexhaustible Q&A session with USI and with our finance committee. We’ve always been transparent in that regard. Nobody has ever asked us to put our accounts online before so I made sure with our accountant and finance committee that doing so was permissible, so the most recent version of our accounts is online, and after our congress this year I’ll make sure the newest version of our accounts is put online. We are a very, very transparent organisation, we provide quarterly financial updates to our national council, and they approve our budget as well at the beginning of every year. Every decision we make about where we spend our money we involve student reps from around the country, so UCCSU has a role in holding us to account and that’s what happens at national council.

"After our congress this year I’ll make sure the newest version of our accounts is put online."

Is the fact that the USI has hired lobbying consultants an indictment of the union’s institutional knowledge and ability to lobby?Harmon: If you look at any organisation that’s influential and succeeds in getting what it wants from government and in budgets they always have experiences lobbyists working for them. USI should be no different. I feel that students deserve the best when it comes to getting outcomes from budgets and we’ve seen, since we’ve worked with professional lobbyists this year and last year, that we’ve actually had a very good success rate from our pre-budget campaigns. We feel it was worth everything that we put into it. It’s good to get that expertise, and again when we worked with those lobbyists that would have been a decision that was approved by our National Council. We don’t just go away and say we’re going to work with these people. We have to consult with our member student unions.Any closing remarks?Harmon: We’re delighted to be here and to be engaging with UCC students over the course of these two days.The interview with a representative of the No to USI campaign can be found here.Main image by: Conor McCabe Photography.