Sentiments from a Past Auditor
I was elected Auditor of the Lit ’n’ Deb the year the Society set the world record for the longest debate ever. For twenty-eight days at the bottom of Smokies (roughly the whole month of February), the Lit ’n’ Deb dominated the College. Because the Society had such an inordinately high profile that year the elections for the Auditorship could now, twenty months later, be classified as “robust.” With great [mock] ceremony and an oration in pidgin Latin courtesy of Mr Ronan MacSweeney, the one hundred and forty-ninth session was inaugurated.
A planned feature of our year was what we called “set piece” debates, where the best speakers in the College would be asked to speak every Thursday night from the podium. The committee would decide a motion, invent a trophy, often inventing alumni to name the trophy after as well. Thus we had the Sir John Cauldfield-Herron memorial debate, the Dimbleby-Bodkin debate, and the Lord MacDonald Debate. All former Auditors you understand, their young lives coming to violent yet heroic ends, the exact details were unrecorded of course, lost to history, but the Society decided to commemorate their inspired and brave deeds etc., etc.
These debates were a great success and nurtured in our speakers a confidence in ‘formal’ debating which would pay off later in the season. A Galway Advertiser reporter visited the Lit ’n’ Deb during one of these debates. I think the poor unfortunate we were ‘commemorating’ that night came to a sticky end in the 1870’s in the British Army in India. We said his name was Campbell. When the news got back to Galway that he had taken the King’s shilling, apparently he became known as a disgrace. Thereafter when anyone disgraced themselves speaking, the hecklers shouted them down by yelling “you’re Campbelling sir! You’re Campbelling!” The Advertiser’s reporter was suitably impressed by this authentic piece of Lit ‘n’ Deb tradition.
The emphasis on formal debating paid off in that the Society won the Observer Mace National Final. We had more speakers than any other society in the final of the Irish Times, five of the twelve were Galway speakers. A Galway team came runner-up. The first piece of Waterford Glass that had been brought home since the late eighties.
One of the major debates of the year was what we termed our ‘Divorce Forum.’ The country was tearing itself apart at the time, and we decided to exploit it. We let Michael D. Higgins and assorted others tear into Nora Bennis for a night of classic mauling. A massive crowd and both a Swiss and German television station showed up.
We carried the crowds right the way through. The standard was exceptional. One chap who had an extraordinary collection of bullets in his foot stood up and complained about a woman rubbing off a speaker in the College Bar for sexual gratification. The retort from the back benches went: “surely Sir, you were not the speaker in question.” One of the grand old men of the Society was accused of living in the trees, he replied that if the speaker was an example of what was on the forest floor, “then raise me up to the highest branches.”
I have read some of the articles submitted by the other former Auditors and a recurrent theme seems to be drink, dependency on which did not decrease during the one hundred and forty ninth session. In a recent interview with a large firm of solicitors in Dublin, the interviewer seized on the fact that I was an Auditor of the Lit ‘n’ Deb and then asked me about the Skeff, apparently she was familiar with Galway. As my employment prospects with the firm started to fade, I told her how often I fell out of the Skeff, how convenient it was to live on Merchant’s Road because you didn’t have far to walk home, and how a convenor of the Irish Times Debates came back to my birthday party with ten bottles of dodgy wine from ‘Shamas.’ In hindsight, perhaps I shouldn’t have concentrated on the main business of the Lit ‘n’ Deb and should have told them more about debating. Who ever had the idea that debating enhances your career prospects? Oh well, I suppose I never wanted to be a solicitor anyway.
Jarlath Ryan (3rd LLB)
Auditor 1995-96