It seems likely that when USI's annual congress convenes in March, it will look back over 12 months that will not be remembered as the national union's finest. The vote in favour of disaffiliation by UCD and a threatened disaffiliation referendum in NUI Galway have contributed to the impression of USI as an organisation which urgently needs to reinvent itself. Other controversies involving its president, Colman Byrne, have raised questions about the financial structures operating within USI and have led the union's trustees to seek detailed explanations of its financial affairs. (The role of USI's own finance committee in investigating the union's financial structures has been called into question by some observers, since Byrne himself sits on the committee, having only recently stepped down from its chair.)
On a broader issue, the HEA working group on the £250 student charge - a group formed after intensive lobbying by the previous USI leadership and on which the current leadership was represented - failed to secure funding guarantees for students' unions, a failure which could yet have serious consequences for individual unions and USI itself.
Meanwhile, the students' unions in the non-affiliated universities are making cautious progress on their own moves towards a co-operative structure. Students from the five universities involved - UL, UCC, TCD, NUI Maynooth and new arrival UCD - have met on two occasions to discuss the issue, once in Cork and once in TCD. A third meeting is scheduled for early this month.
Ultimately, their aim is to achieve recognition for the nonaffiliated unions in any discussions with the Department of Education.
Representatives of individual universities differ on what they want USI to do. For example, at last Saturday's USI national council, UG students' union president Darren McCallig detailed some of the areas on which he believes USI needs to concentrate, including regionalisation - the very policy which UCD students' union believes should be "clawed back".
Yet within USI there are indications that, for the first time, there exists a recognition of the need for real change. In recent years, it had appeared that there were few individuals in USI's higher echelons capable of the leap of imagination required to take USI successfully into the next millennium. A slow-building momentum in favour of change, including tentative steps towards internal reorganisation through USI's strategic review process, now appears to hold out some hope of a more progressive national union.
"My own philosophy is that it's better to be inside an organisation and to change it than to try to change it from outside," says USI education officer Malcolm Byrne, who has consistently argued for a more progressive and far-sighted outlook from the national union. He admits that USI has sometimes lacked a long-term vision "but equally that also applies to unions outside membership".
Byrne believes that the affiliated and non-affiliated unions need to come together and formulate a combined vision of the future of the student movement in Ireland. "There is a need for a blank sheet of paper and for people to sit down and say that these are our common aims and this is what we must do to achieve them. USI, internally, is trying to do that at the moment."
Dermot Quain, USI's union development officer and another potential presidential candidate, also believes that a round-table discussion with the non-affiliates would be a progressive move. "It reduces our voice to a lesser extent if we don't have the backing of other colleges," Quain says. "We have to go back to the drawing board and look at where we are going wrong and what the nonaffiliates say we are doing wrong. I'm quite open to that."
Malcolm Byrne also says USI needs to professionalise a lot more, that it needs to invest heavily in research and lobbying, that it needs to prioritise key issues of student welfare and education and that its executive needs to be composed of more local SU officers.
"USI needs to set out its longterm vision of where it sees Irish education in five, 10, 15 years from now," he says. "The basic principles of the organisation are an inclusive education system, one that is accessible, particularly regardless of financial background, and that students are seen as real partners in the education process. "The other issue for students' unions in general, which USI and non-affiliated colleges need to take on board, is that there has to be respect for a diversity of opinion. It shouldn't matter what sector students come from, whether they are nationalist or unionist, pro-life or pro-choice. "We have to seek to be inclusive and respect that diversity and the problem with student unionism is that it hasn't always done that in the past."
Byrne defends USI's actions as part of the HEA working group on the £250 student charge, arguing that there is now a code of good practice in place through which colleges must be accountable for the manner in which the £250 is going to be spent. Despite the absence of concrete funding guarantees for unions and student activities, Byrne says the Minister for Education and Science will expect the code of practice to be followed and that it is up to individual unions and USI to ensure that this happens.
A new presidency - whoever the ultimate president may be - may provide USI with the opportunity it needs to reinvent itself.
For, in the end, USI needs to radically reorganise if it is to safeguard its position as an authoritative voice in educational affairs and ensure that inclusiveness, not fragmentation and exclusion, is the hallmark of student representation.
