The freshman cometh

The post of President of the Union of Students of Ireland is an increasingly prestigious one; invariably, occupants of the post go on to occupy prominent positions in Irish politics and public life generally. Previous USI Presidents have included recently retired Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte, his likely successor Eamon Gilmore, and Liveline presenter Joe Duffy. Other notables such as Maxine Brady, Ivana Bacik and SDLP leader Mark Durkan have also established their reputations through involvement in USI.
The current incumbent Richard Morrisroe, was elected in May and commenced his one-year term on July 1st. A Cork native, he went to UCC in 1999, but dropped out because "there weren’t enough girls on the course". Following stints working for a security company and in the construction industry, he returned to UCC to study Psychology, thrived, and became increasingly involved in student politics, culminating in his recent election as USI President. Intense, articulate and affable, Morrisroe explains his manifesto to Hot Press and emerges as a committed libertarian with a keen social conscience. Read on...

CRAIG FITZSIMONS: As per usual, there’s a huge accommodation crisis looming as the college year starts, with thousands of students stuck for a place to live…
RICHARD MORRISROE: There is, of course. It’s not quite so bad outside Dublin. It’s mostly a Dublin issue. You have the usual rush for accommodation, which always happens at this time of year and has come to be seen as inevitable. It’s indicative of a wider problem with housing – this doesn’t just affect first-year students. I’ve been talking to a mate who’s just graduated, and all his mates have another year to go in UCD. They can’t find a room anywhere for less than E550 to E600 a month. How many students can realistically hope to afford that?
Which is one reason why a lot of students get part-time jobs...
In order to even put food on the table, they’re going to have to get part-time jobs and put some serious hours in, or beg from their parents. It’s a huge issue and it needs to be looked at long-term. The tax (on building apartments) breaks will start running out soon, from 2009. This is going to get much worse. I must emphasise that it’s mostly a Dublin problem. Cork and Galway are okay, and Belfast’s not too bad. Rents in Limerick have gone up by 10%, but not from as high a base, so students there wouldn’t be as badly off. But in Dublin, it’s shocking.
When did you decide the situation was serious enough to warrant a protest outside Leinster House?
The whole accommodation protest grew out of Eastern Area Council demanding that we do something on this, so we went for it and it got an awful lot of coverage, which is good. They’ve got 100 to 150 people calling in every day, looking for accommodation which simply isn’t there. Meanwhile, something like 20-25% of private houses in the State are unoccupied.
What measures could the Government take to alleviate the problem?
Right now, there’s nothing they can do. What they could do, though I don’t think they will, is activate the provision that’s there in the housing legislation, which would allow them to take unused housing stock and redistribute it to other people. It’s exceedingly unlikely, though. What we’re looking for, realistically, is a Task Force on the lower end of the accommodation market, focusing specifically on students. Because we can’t come up with all the solutions. We can work with the other people involved, Threshold and all the voluntary and statutory agencies, and there’s potential there. We’ve been lobbying about this since before the election, and we did get a commitment from the Green Party that they’d look at it if they ended up in government, which they have. We can only hope that, now they’ve got the Environment ministry, they’ll follow up on that promise.
You’re strongly opposed to the re-introduction of tuition fees…
Totally. If you look at Britain and America, which have tuition fees, they act as a deterrent to poor and middle-income families. The entire point of the no-fees system is to enable people from lower-income backgrounds to enter university on the same terms as the middle class. This is very much worth defending. I’ve done plenty of international research on this, and it backs up my point. UK college applications collapsed by 46% in the year after they brought in tuition fees. What’s ironic is that the very people the Government are trying to get into college – mature students, disabled students, travellers, ethnic minorities, those from deprived areas – are the people who’ll be put off by a loan system. Nobody who isn’t that well-off in the first place wants to saddle themselves with debt. This whole assumption that graduates earn far more over their working lives than other people – it’s not actually true across the board, and increasingly, young people are tempted to get a trade or a job which will pay them straightaway, even when they’ve got the points required for prestigious courses, rather than take their chances in college and be quite skint for a few years.
Can you blame them?
Not at all. People have choices. But they’re actively being deterred from higher education, which is crazy. If you’re going to have a third-level education system, it should be for everybody. I heard this girl once, a student at one of the bigger universities, saying, "Oh, I wish they’d bring tuition fees back, then I wouldn’t have all these other people competing against me for good jobs." It was one of the most sickening things I’d ever heard. You’d have to give her top marks for honesty, but I felt like smacking her – not literally, of course, but you get my drift. People go on about university being the preserve of the middle-classes – why is that? It’s because the grant just doesn’t provide enough money to live on, unless you’ve another source of income. If you want to go to Cork, Dublin, Galway or Limerick, the grant just will not cover you. It’s one of the things that needs to be looked at: if you want to go to Tralee, the grant’s probably good enough because accommodation is an awful lot cheaper there. So maybe there should be some sort of premium, whereby you’re subsidised according to the cost of living and accommodation.
Quite a few commentators have suggested that the abolition of third-level fees was a retrograde step; that it might have been better to invest heavily in primary education in deprived areas. Have they a point?
To a certain extent. Of course, the more money you put into education and the earlier you do it, the better the rewards. But I don’t see why it should be a case of taking one from the other: I think we should raise both. I think we should spend at least 5% of our GDP on education, full stop, if we want to be a knowledge-based economy and a cohesive society. The reasons should be obvious. People who attend third-level education have much lower rates of crime, much lower rates of illness, and much longer lives. Obviously, you can’t tell how much of that is a result of pre-existing privilege: it’s difficult to distinguish cause from effect, chicken from egg. I think the Government is trying to put more money into schools in deprived areas, and they’re going to need it, because there are now thousands of kids who don’t speak English as their first tongue, and that clearly isn’t sustainable. In fairness to Mary Hanafin, she has put an awful lot of remedial teachers in there to deal with the problem, and then she gets a kicking from the Opposition, saying, "Ah, you didn’t keep your promise on class sizes". She hired enough teachers for that, but they were all in different areas.
So you’d expect to see an improvement in deprived areas?
I think there’s already been an improvement in disadvantaged schools, the access programme is really good – but it does start in childhood, and we do need to look at how we’re going to provide education from age three till age 18 and beyond. That’s a fifteen-year cycle, and we’ve only had free fees and the access programme for about ten years, so realistically we’re not going to see the full extent of the benefits for another five years at the very earliest. I see my role as agitating for education generally: obviously with a focus on third-level, those are the people who’ve given me a mandate, but you can’t look at third-level in isolation. The education process begins in childhood, and we should look at it from childhood on, and give all the nation’s children the chance to get to college, and try to break the cycle of poverty and disadvantage.
Is that achievable?
I think it’s starting to happen. An awful lot of people, who wouldn’t have ever considered going to university ten or fifteen years ago, are now sending their kids there – that’s a great thing for society. There’ll always be pressures on the public purse, but hopefully we can keep it up, because education generally is such a worthwhile investment. Look back at Donagh O’Malley, introducing free education up to Intermediate level, and free school transport. He didn’t consult with his Cabinet and (then Finance Minister) Jack Lynch, he just did it, and I’ll bet you there were people giving out about it at the time. No one would say a word against it now, and I hope people will have the same attitude to third-level fees in 20 years’ time. It’s paying off for us – if you look at the amount of people we have in the IFSC and the professions, education is paying off for us. It’s just a question of putting the investment in.
For over a decade now, girls have systematically been gaining higher grades than boys in their Leaving Certs. Does this situation need to be redressed?
That depends on whether you see it as a problem. It’s an interesting one, and I’m not sure how the situation came about. From my own experience – obviously, this is anecdotal – girls do tend to work harder. Perhaps they’re more conscious, at an earlier age, of the need to secure their futures. Also, for a lot of guys, there’s this attitude of, "You shouldn’t be trying too hard." There’s a general culture among lads whereby learning is discouraged, you’re considered a nerd if you study for your exams. I’m sure that applied to me – I was probably seen as a nerd, a small kid with big glasses and a bigger mouth. I’ve noticed this among a lot of guys – they just don’t see the need to do as well in the Leaving Cert. Because an awful lot of them want to go into trades. One lad I went to school with – extremely smart fella, never bothered doing a tap in school, got an apprenticeship and is now a foreman, so he’s doing pretty well. And fair whack to him. I’m sure there’s countless similar cases, and maybe it’s just the way of it that more girls want to go to university.
Why is this?
Most of the arty courses are in universities, so they probably attract more girls, whereas most of the Institutes specialise in more practical subjects, as well as having much better student/staff ratios. No one would suggest girls are inherently smarter than boys, but they tend to be more verbal, better at writing things down, and far better at verbal recall, which is what the Leaving Cert is all about, really. Thirty years ago the imbalance was the other way round, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Ideally you’d like to see it more 50/50, as in all other walks of life, but you know, very few girls go into trades, and I think that’s a factor. We’ve no idea how many boys got the points for university, but decided not to go because they didn’t think it would get them anywhere, or they’d already got a job they liked. Something like a third of all CAO offers are refused. So I don’t think this is a crisis: you’re probably never going to have the same number of male nurses as female nurses, or female electricians as male electricians. There’ll always be disparities. The thing is to make sure that no one’s disadvantaged on account of gender – as long as they have an equal opportunity, that’s all you can ask.
You’ve taken issue with the Government over the endless delays in processing grants…
Yeah, the Student Support Bill hasn’t been implemented and there doesn’t seem to be any urgency about doing so. We welcome the increase in the value of the grant, but it won’t do students any good if they don’t receive it when they should. We spent from January till May advising the government that failure to implement the grant would result in the crisis that’s about to affect many students, who will be living in severe hardship for as long as payment of the first grant installment is delayed. We’d like to see a centralised grant system, administered by one department, and all grants paid on time. I don’t understand why they have to be paid through the universities. It probably made sense twenty years ago, but I don’t see why it’s an issue now. Social welfare is now paid directly into people’s bank accounts – why not student grants? It would actually be cheaper to do that.
Do you think the grant itself is adequate?
We’re a student organisation and, as such, we’d obviously argue that the grant isn’t enough, but the biggest problem is that people have to wait till January and February to get it, and most of them are first-years who just can’t afford to wait that long. Because getting it renewed is quite a simple process, so it’s a problem that mainly affects first-years, who end up having to take out loans or overdrafts, or worse still, getting a fucking credit card. They’re then saddled with a load of debt that they have to pay off, so the first grant installment ends up going to pay that off when they finally get it, then they’re poor again, then they borrow again, a vicious circle. And the E850 registration fee – absolutely no-one in first-year gets their grant in time to pay that, so they’re just hit with that automatically, and it causes people a lot of problems. I know all about this from my time as a local student officer, having to write endless letters to Finance Officers saying "look, this guy just doesn’t have the money, can you please give him some time, please register him but don’t take the E850, he will get it." In general, people in colleges are very good about things like that, but the point is that they shouldn’t have to be. The Department of Finance just don’t put the grants in the estimates at all – they don’t exist as far as the Department of Finance is concerned. If they were included in the estimates, then you’d have some idea of how much money you were going to need, and you could get a statement detailing income limits and how much is going to be paid, and all the VEC’s and the councils would have time to go through all of the applications, check them, and have the grants sorted in time for people going to college. It would solve so many problems. It just seems so simple. I can’t understand why it doesn’t happen.
In general, how would you assess the government’s performance on education?
Uneven. Very mixed. I like the lack of tuition fees, I like the focus on access programmes – that’s changed our colleges for the better. My major problem with them is, they seem to be introducing a funding model that was basically robbed wholesale from the UK, which is advantaging postgraduates hugely over undergraduates, so there’s a problem with undergraduate funding.
And – though this doesn’t directly relate to third-level – the court case relating to ABA (the Applied Behavioural Analysis therapy for autistic children) really disgusted me. I suppose you’ve a responsibility as a government minister to try and be prudent with your finances, but surely in a case as serious as this, you can’t make penny-pinching the priority. ABA does seem to work; that’s no longer in any real doubt. I’ve seen so many kids who are visibly better off than they were without it. And even leaving out the human dimension, from a utilitarian point of view, it costs less money long-term – if you give autistic children a chance to become productive members of society, and hold down jobs, that costs a whole lot less than having them in institutions which will cost E50,000 a year, minimum. If they’re working and paying tax instead, it’s clearly of net benefit to the State and society. It seems an area so obviously deserving of investment, I couldn’t believe the court case, I was shocked.
Politically, how would you describe your outlook?
In a private capacity, I would be fairly left-wing, but obviously I’m bound by USI policy. I’m happy to give you my opinions on anything, but it doesn’t mean my views represent the official USI position. I’m strongly libertarian, I would be very wary of any encroachment on civil liberties. I’m a liberal – I believe the State has a role in many areas, and the private sector has its role too. But I think politics in general is far too close to business interests, and I think the two should be strictly separated, or it obviously conflicts with the public good. You want business to provide services that the State can’t do properly, and you want the State to provide services that business can’t do properly, and regulate the rest of the businesses to provide a level playing field. Also, I’ve a strong environmental conscience: we’ve only one planet and we’re at least halfway to wasting it. We seem to be headed towards the extinction of the human species, and I don’t think that’s a great idea, I think on balance it would be a bad call. I quite like the human species, and I think it’s very much in our interests to preserve it in some form or other.
What did you think of Enda Kenny’s proposal to introduce mandatory drug testing in schools and colleges?
Completely wrong. An invasion of privacy. That’s my opinion; USI don’t have a policy on that. I’m firmly against anything that invades privacy. It’s discriminatory as well; why not apply it to doctors? Lawyers? Pensioners? Politicians? And what does it matter what people do to themselves, once it has no impact on anybody else? It’s their business, and no one else’s. To me, it just smelled of playing to the crowd, looking for a ‘TOUGH ON DRUGS’ headline. I don’t think for a minute that he would have genuinely gone through with it, had he got into power – there’s an awful lot of very clever people working in the Attorney General’s office, who would have been able to point out a million flaws in the idea. It was rhetoric, designed to pander to a certain segment of the electorate. That’s fair enough; politicians do that all the time. But it was an extremely silly idea, and probably unconstitutional. It surely would have been tested in the Supreme Court, because we’ve a constitutional right to privacy, and I’d imagine the Supreme Court would have seen it the same way I do.
Is there cause for wider concern about Irish alcohol and drug consumption, or is too much being made of it?
Irish people do have something of a close relationship with alcohol, no doubt. There’s a history there. You wander around the city centre on any Saturday night, and the amount of people you see staggering, falling around, unable to move, getting into fights and stuff – that’s not something you see in most other countries, you’d have to wonder why it’s so acceptable in Ireland. It might have something to do with places to go – there aren’t a whole lot of options if you want to go out at night. You can go to the cinema, and there are a few coffee shops open relatively late, if you want to be totally ripped off. But in general, your options are pretty limited. Historically, it might have made sense for Irish people to meet in the pub, because that was where communities met. But it’s nothing like that now – people go out on ridiculous rampages, get into buying rounds and feel like they have to keep pace with one another. It’s healthy to socialise, but it can’t be healthy to do that to yourself on a regular basis.
Do you like a pint or two yourself?
Ah, yeah, I would. But I try not to get hammered, because I hate having hangovers. I try to be sensible, and don’t always succeed.
Many of your predecessors as USI President have gone on to play very active roles in Irish public life. Do you have political aspirations?
It depends what day of the week you ask me. Sometimes, yeah. I do like being a representative. I don’t know if I have the stomach for politics. I don’t like in-fighting and back-biting. Compromise I can handle, because this job is largely all about it – you can’t always get what you want, as the song goes. So, I don’t know yet. Maybe. I’ll need a few months off after I finish this, and then I’ll think about what I’ll do next. I won’t say yes, but I won’t say no.