Isn’t it Ironic?

“It’s like a traffic jam when you’re already late.” Isn’t it ironic? No, it’s certainly not ironic at all, it’s a pain in the arse but it isn’t ironic. Miss Morrissette has got it all wrong. If you were a town planner and you got stuck in a traffic jam when you’re already late, now, that would be ironic.

It’s ten years since I was the Auditor of the Lit & Deb and while quite a lot has happened to me since then I’ve no intention of inflicting any anecdotes of my recent life on you. Instead, I’d like to ramble on in the way you’d expect from a past auditor about how great the society was when I was in college and how wonderful all the people who were involved in it were. Oh what fun we had crowding into the Kirwan to listen to outspoken idiots from the Engineering Faculty easily rise above the wildest expectations of their class-mates by using words of more than one syllable. It’s all coming back to me now (thanks Celine!); the witty Commerce students flooding down from the Library to find out why the rest of UCG didn’t bother going up to the Library in the first place. Who can forget the razor-sharp insights into matters of both domestic and international significance provided by the Medical Faculty speakers who triumphed time and time again in the Interfaculty Debates but were not so successful in their exams or their personal hygiene? Or what about the Law students like myself, we were the Matlocks of our college generation, shouting across the Kirwan Theatre such under-used phrases as “I put it to you” or “with the greatest of respect” or “you gobshite”. We were all great, the whole bloody lot of us. We drank ourselves stupid on the account in the Skeff, hi-jinked our way up and down the country to intervarsity debates where we tried our best to capture the ultimate trophy: a shift east of the Shannon!

“It’s like a no-smoking sign on your cigarette break” Isn’t it ironic? Wrong again, Alanis, you sad, sad person, again there’s nothing remotely ironic about it unless you work in a cigarette factory. Then it’s ironic. During my time in the Lit & Deb, the society produced some excellent speakers, most notably Damian Crawford, Brendan Wilkins and Peter Scannell. My most vivid memories of the society in the 80’s (I was in college for most of the 80’s) are of a group of people who finally believed we could be the best in the country, if not in the world. We were finally able to shake off the myth that UCG debaters got to finals by pure chance and were only there to make up the numbers. During the 80’s, the Lit & Deb won the Irish Times competition 3 times (twice with individuals and once with a team). Our former auditor, Damian Crawford was one half of a team from the King’s Inns which won the World Championships in Montreal and a team from the Lit & Deb were World Championship semi-finalists in 1986. The Lit & Deb was the most receptive forum for debate in the whole country and was the favourite “away” venue for speakers from other colleges.

Another feature of the 80’s Lit & Deb was the creation of two new honorary memberships: the writer Samuel Beckett and the musician Adam Clayton. These honours were accepted most graciously by both parties and indeed an oblique reference to the society in a U2 song some years later gave rise to much misinterpretation by some critics. Then, as now, the Students’ Union was both an object of derision and an outlet for naïve revolutionary idealism, the S.U. of the 1980’s held general meetings in the restaurant and still failed to generate a quorum. In the midst of this mayhem, the Literary and Debating Society shone through like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat, which wasn’t there. “Like rain on your wedding day” (don’t get me started!). If, however, you were a songwriter whose stock in trade was language, words and their meaning and you wrote a song which was supposed to be extremely deep and clever but you managed to utterly misunderstand the meaning of the one word you used as a title: now that would be ironic.

Conor Bowman

Auditor 1986-87