Looking back at your own election manifesto, do you feel that this year has been a success?
I think so. The main things I had was a lot about fees, and about events and the craic, which I am happy about this year. I’m shocked at the level of events we did this year and I can’t take credit for them all, very little was to do with me.
But like RAG Week, I still can’t believe it was success and the level and scale of events. We start from Hallows which was great, but we had a few issues with it. We went back to the agency, and we told them what went wrong. Then SOS blew me away. I wasn’t expecting it to be such a good production and the full week and everything that went along with it.
The last one was about being my last point was the SU being more approachable, and my whole thing of pints to the President, which I did put in first semester. But I do think we’ve brought this sort of approachability and friendliness which is really important. There has to be a culture of friendliness and community, and it’s slowly building back up after COVID. We’re only seeing now slowly but surely it’s coming back and the Students’ Union has a lot to do with that, with all the events they’re doing with the culture of just friendliness and being nice to people, it’s such an underrated thing.
What would you say is the biggest obstacle that you faced this year in your role?
It is time. It’s definitely time because you really only get to know the job in January and even then I think building relationships is really hard because there’s so many staff that you deal with and obviously you’re dealing with so many students, but the people you have to build relationships with, it takes time to be able to get the trust and to work on things properly.
So definitely time, you spend the first two months just meeting people the next couple of months, getting to know them the next few months kind of realising what the actual job is and what the real responsibilities are. And then your successor is elected and you’re gone. And the last couple of months are just trying to get projects over the line. So yeah, yeah, 100% time is the biggest.
What would you say is the biggest issue facing students under your mandate?
It’s accommodation. It’s a simple answer but it’s not a simple fix unfortunately.
From day one when we started in July, that was what we were getting hit with myself. It was an absolute disaster last year. People for the first few weeks were sleeping on couches and in hostels, and we did our surveys and not much has changed unfortunately. We’re in the same position as last year we have no additional accommodation and accommodation we have is a lot more expensive.
I mean, our own on-campus accommodation, some of it is staying the same, about 43% of it is going up. We only got the news last week about Hubble Living going up by 30%, which is absolutely scandalous.
So we’re facing another storm this summer of us and whoever takes over from us will be faced with that. It’s more of a national issue than a local one. For so long we’ve been back and forth with the Minister, with university staff, with the President. We co-signed the letter requesting funding, nothing came through.