UCD vote is second morale boost for troubled USI

Students at UCD have voted to return to the Union of Students in Ireland, bringing the organisation's membership to its highest ever. The development is the second major morale boost for the USI in less than a fortnight, and will add momentum to its campaign to retain the student unions of NUI Galway and the University of Ulster when they go to the polls later this year.

UCD students voted to disaffiliate from the national union in November, 1997, by a margin of fewer than 10 votes, shortly after an EDUCATION & LVING investigation which exposed deficencies in the procedures which USI officers used to claim expenses.

However, before the Belfield union's membership lapsed at the end of the last academic year, the union's officers pushed through a number of motions reforming the structure of the national union at the USI annual congress. The reforms, which included downgrading the posts of women's rights officer and lesbian, gay and bisexual rights officer in order to pay for the appointment of permanent research and finance officers, were hotly debated and caused internal splits among the membership of USI which still show no sign of healing.

Tensions between USI welfare officer Siobhan Fearon and president Dermot Lohan over the union's change of direction recently boiled over in public during the union's campaign to get UCC back in the fold.

The new full-time officers have yet to be appointed, due to financial restructuring within USI including the move to new headquarters and the sale of the organisation's share in USIT, the student travel company. This has provided ammunition for political opponents of Lohan and the USI president's supporters still fear will the local student union officers opposed to his policies will launch an impeachment process.

Despite the reaffiliation of UCD and UCC, Lohan's allies predict the impeachment process will go ahead in order "to cause the maximum embarrassment and inconvenience" to the USI president before his successor is elected in March.

The Belfield students verdict came after a lacklustre campaign dominated by the pro-USI side. The student union's president, education officer and entertainments officer favoured reaffiliation, though the union officially adopted a neutral stance on the matter.

The welfare officer, John Moynes, who recently narrowly survived a vote of censure, described USI during the campaign as "a group of bickering thirdrate students, who have a large pool of money to waste."

Entertainments officer and former `Students Against Corruption' member Scott Millar told the College Tribune that "UCD helped mess USI up with Fianna Fail hacks" but that he would nonetheless favour reaffiliation. Even the most enthusiastic advocate of a return to USI, education officer Charlie McConalogue told the University Observer that if the £30,000-plus affiliation fee to USI had to come out of the union's coffers, he might have had "to consider the matter differently." It is the college authorities, rather than the student union, which will pay the affiliation fee on the students' behalf.

Controversy has also surrounded the decision of the SU to have a second referendum on the matter in the space of just over a year, rather than allowing the union's council to decide whether to reaffiliate.

UCD Student Union president John Nisbet, who questioned the wisdom of holding a referendum so soon but campaigned in favour of reaffiliation, said he was delighted with the result. It represented "a vindication of the reform process."

He said he would like to meet with student union members opposed to the reform agenda of UCDSU and Dermot Lohan and "explain where we come from. We don't want to do anything that will cause USI trouble." UCDSU would remain members of Federation of University Students Unions, he added.