The ongoing civil war in student politics means Minister for Education Micheal Martin will face double the number of protests at the start of this term.
When the Dail resumes tomorrow, TDs will be met by a USI protest. The Minister for Education is to be presented with an enlarged version of a Leaving Certificate report card, in which he will graded on his election promises and fail the exam.
Some 20,000 postcards to TDs, signed by students in USI's western area demanding that the capitation fee be frozen at £260, will be presented to Dail deputies as they return to work. USI is angry that the capitation fee was increased by four per cent (£10) last year "without any consultation with students".
The union will also mount a campaign for the Cork South Central by-election. USI expects the writ to be moved on the by-election tomorrow and the election to be held in the last week of October or the first week of November. They are asking for polling to be held on a Friday, and opening hours to extend from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.
USI deputy president and campaigns officer, Ronan Emmett, says union activists will be in Cork "in force" in the run-up to the by-election. He expects Micheal Martin to be named Fianna Fail's by-election campaign manager.
"We're going down there with the specific aim of holding the Minister accountable for his promises," Emmett says. "We will also present all the candidates with our policies on student grants, the capitation fee and the accommodation crisis and ask them to publicly respond to our demands."
USI will publish each candidate's response and "heavily endorse" candidates who give satisfactory answers. The union will also run a voter registration campaign prior to the by-election and will attempt to heighten students' awareness of their ability to use the postal vote.
Emmett say the union is heartened by the fact that two of the likely runners in the election - Fianna Fail's Sinead Behan and Simon Coveney for Fine Gael - are both exceptionally young.
Meanwhile, the Federation of University Students' Unions (FUSU) - whose meetings are attended by SU officers from UCD, DCU, TCD, UL, UCC and NUI Maynooth - is likely to stage a demonstration outside the Department of Education in the first term of the college year.
The President of Maynooth students' union, Maurice Garde, says he and his TCD counterpart were so exasperated by the Minister for Education's refusal to meet them or to acknowledge their letters that they sat in the Department of Education one day in July and refused to leave until they saw the Minister. They were met by a "senior official" who "promised the world", but have yet to receive a reply to any of their correspondence
According to Garde, the next step in the campaign will be to bring "busloads of students to protest outside the Department of Education".
The federation, which meets once a month under the auspices of a rotating chairperson, argues it is more entitled to a seat on the Higher Education Authority than USI because it represents three times as many university students' unions.
