Minutes of the 4^th Meeting of the 161^st Session

18^th October 2007 ~ The Arts Faculty Debate

AND so it was that the fourth meeting of the year took place here in the Kirwan with Paddy Cluskey chairing. The minutes of the previous meeting were passed with no objections, although I wasn’t actually here so I’m not too sure about that. Main business for the night was the Arts Faculty debate, chaired by Vice President and Registrar of the University, Professor Jim Browne. But before that, Private Members’ Time got underway with Dan Colley proposing the motion ‘That This House Supports SIN in it’s editorial trajectory’. Dan said how our campus newspaper had changed for the better in the face of growing apathy among students, and that as long as the paper’s independent policy and integrity remain, Sin will continue to perform a valuable service to students.
Tony McDonnell (HLM) opposed the motion, saying how Sin is failing in it’s duty to act as the voice of the students and report on the issues effecting them.
Dave Finn said how Sin’s problems are not really their fault as the paper suffers from a lack of resources and contributors simply don’t want to report news.
Muireann O’Dwyer (3^rd Arts) told us how Sin gets lots of support from the Students’ Union and that it must get it’s act together. She said it is the editor’s job to find the stories of interest and the students willing to report on them, and that Sin in its current form is an embarrassment to the University.
Sin’s editor, Kevin O’Connor, defended his position, saying how it’s a tough situation trying to get people to report on the important issues when they aren’t interested.
Ronan Harrington said how students need to get more involved in the newspaper and He also commended the paper for educating otherwise uninterested students of important issues such as the situation in Darfur and which cheap beers are the best.
Damien Foley, Sin’s News Editor, said how he could not independently decide news content in his role and that articles appeared in editions without his knowledge or consent. He added that Sin had come on in leaps and bounds in the past few years but recently had started going to shit.
Steve Lydon (4^th Engineering) asks why it so hard to produce quality editions with the amount of articles and reports emailed to Sin’s office every week.
The motion was then put to the House, and carried.
With that, Private Members’ Time was concluded and main business began with Professor Jim Browne taking over as chair, letting Paddy sit at the side of the stage to stare into space dreaming of his shiny new Auditor’s chain.

Fr. Diarmuid Hogan, the college chaplain, was the first to take the stage to tell us exactly why an Arts degree is useless. He started off by telling us how he is like Eamon de Valera, in that he needs just to look inside his own hear to know what we, the students, think. Fr. Hogan said how he has more pride in his Certificate in Abrasive Wheel Maintenance than in his Bachelor of Arts degree, for which he studied Sociology, Philosophy, and Something Else. He told us how a B.A. opens no doors for you and only lets you end up like Dave Finn, or as it will in a few years time, end up like Sean Butler. Finally, he concluded by telling us when faced with the choice between a B.A. and a tattoo, to pick the tattoo.

First to speak in defence of the Arts degree was Professor Kevin Barry, former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University College Galway, and now the Dean of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies, Karl Marx Studies, Jam-Making, and Whatever-You’re-Having-Yourself at the National University of Ireland comma-space Galway. Professor Barry told us how it was the student levy, largely paid for by Arts students, that paid for his meal earlier that evening in McSwiggan’s. He also said how even our Dear Leader, Bertie Ahern, wants more B.A. students so we will have more intellectuals filling up space in the Irish Times letters page.

Sean Butler, Science Graduate, Current Arts student, and my flatmate, was next to speak against the Arts degree. But before I tell you what he said, I must wholeheartedly commend Sean for turning on the dishwasher and emptying the bins back at our flat. Sean showed all of us his courage and determination in facing overwhelming odds, and single-handedly took on those household errands with dignity and purpose. In the words of the late Robert Kennedy; ‘Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world that yields most painfully to change’. And now his speech. Sean told us how he was once a proper student studying quantum physics and stuff like that, and that now all he knows is that I think, therefore I am. Now all he does is learn about emos like Nietzsche and read Karl Marx’s theories in every subject. He said how the Arts faculty produces nothing but more Arts lecturers and fire hazards, and that your degrees won’t help you when the environment collapses and we are all living on the moon.

Dr. Aidan Kane, of the Department of Economics, was next to speak. He firstly addressed Sean’s seemingly vast array of personality disorders, and then made a very rational, logical, sensible, and ultimately a non minutes-worthy speech explaining how and Arts degree is just as useful as any other degree.

Martin Newell then spoke in proposition, and gave us a very interesting speech on what the Latin on an Arts degree translates into English as; namely ‘this is a piece of litter, smoked in artichokes’. Martin told us how the imitation velum and recycled toilet paper that makes up the Arts degree itself is worth exactly seven and a half cents.

James Hope, our illustrious Students’ Union President, said how Arts allows us more time to live like students and get involved in college sports and societies. James told us how a subject like Engineering makes you spend forty hours a week in class only for you to land straight into a job and die, whereas an Arts degree gives you lots of time to hang about Smokies, go drinking, go travelling, and eventually get a job and die. Most importantly, he added, at least the Arts faculty has the decency not to grade students out of 100 percent.

So with that, the speeches were finished, and the motion was opened to the floor. No less than eleven speakers took the opportunity to say either woo-hoo or boo-hoo to the Arts degree, and seeing as we all want to start talking about weed tonight, I’ll cover their speeches with my one-size-fits-all sentence. Students then spoke in proposition and opposition of the motion. They had names.

So as time was rapidly closing in on us, the motion was put to the House for a vote, and was heavily defeated.

These are the Minutes as Recorded