Students at TCD are to break with tradition by holding a rag week next month. Up until now, the closest thing the city-centre college has had to rag week is Trinity Week, which takes place every year just a fortnight before undergraduates' exams.

However, the entertainments office in the students' union has decided it's time Trinity fell into line with the rest of the country and held a rag week at a time when students can really enjoy it. "Lots of student events during Trinity Week haven't attracted the attention that they might because they're held at the end of term," says the union's entertainments officer, Declan Forde. "People are running around in the horrors over the exams, and then they're expected to take part in an iron-stomach competition."

Forde predicts Trinity's rag week will feature "the same sort of drunken misbehaviour that goes on in other colleges" and will be clearly different from the more "Oxbridge" character of Trinity Week. "This is going to be something that any student could take part in - there are very few students left who want to maintain the exclusivity that's associated with other social events in Trinity.

"We're going to run it in the first week of March - it's early enough to avoid the exam build-up and late enough in the year to hope we might get reasonable weather. It's also the week of the students' union sabbatical elections, when a couple of hundred people are running around campus looking for attention anyway.

"We're not being too ambitious with it this year. The aim is just to get the thing off the ground. The whole idea would be dead and buried if we were too ambitious with it and it failed this year.

"We're offering a £500 prize to the best society in Rag Week to try to get them racking their brains. The societies are vital to the success of Freshers' Week and we're hoping this will give them an incentive to do the same for Rag Week." There will be a charity element to the week: Forde hopes fund-raising events will be sponsored by companies and student volunteers will collect on campus.

The students now await the decision of the college board, which meets tomorrow, on whether they will be permitted to apply for a licence extension for Trinity's student bar, the Buttery. Forde hopes to hold a late-night event in the Buttery on the last night of Rag Week, but the college has refused permission for a bar extension in the past - on the grounds that residents of college rooms would be disturbed.

If the Rag Week bar extension were a success, students would hope to be allowed to run a late-night event once a month.