Union fail to send award winners to BICS

NUI Maynooth came close to being unrepresented at the biggest national society event this year, it was revealed to the Advocate. The BICS (Board of Irish College Societies) awards are held at the end of every academic year. This year they were hosted by NUI Galway. Every college in Ireland is given the chance to send their best in each category to the awards to compete on a national level. The members this year included Trinity College Dublin; Dublin City University; National University of Ireland Galway; Universtiy College Cork; Queens University Belfast; National College Ireland; Dublin Institute of Technology; Cork IT; IT Tralee; Dundalk IT; IT Tallaght; Mary Immaculate College Limerick; University College Limerick and National University of Ireland Maynooth. The awards, according to this years Chairperson of BICS Ríona Hughes (NUIG), are about “bringing colleges together to celebrate the contribution that societies make to their institutions”. The catagories are the same as here in Maynooth: Best Poster; Best Website; Best Fresher; Best New Society; Best Individual; Most Improved Society; Best Event and Best Society, each category divided between Large and Small colleges. In previous years, the winner of each category here in Maynooth went on to represent the college in these awards and had gained a great reputation for their extra-curriclur activities. This reputation had been mentioned throughout many of the speeches given at the NUIM Clubs and Socs awards, and was linked to being the cause of the huge rise in CAO applications by Student Activities Officer, Ian Russell among others.

This year the Student’s Union of Maynooth did not intend to send any representatives from NUI Maynooth to these prestigious awards. The President of the Best Society 2007, Leona Nally, was taken aside after recieving the award and told very discretely that the application had not been sent by the Union and so they were not able to go on to the National Awards. This applied for all the societies here in Maynooth and so there would be no representatives for the college at the awards. A committee member of the DramaSoc who is highly involved in intervarsity events through ISDA contacted the societies officer at NUI Galway at midnight on Tuesday to get him to “pull some strings”. No other winner of an award was able to make this call and so three members of the Drama Society were the only representatives for Maynooth this year, compared to the large crowds who showed up to support the likes of DCU and DIT etc.

The three Maynooth Students received a very warm welcome at BICS. They spent two hours of the bus journey to Galway on the phone to the webmaster Paul Killoran, who assisted them in filling out the application form. ‘Their story’ was told to the room by the Chief Adjuicator Brian Gormley after the dinner and the entire room gave a cheer of support. One of the representatives remarked “It’s just such a shame we couldn’t get this level of support from our own Union”. Another disgruntled union member told the Advocate that they felt “the amount of hard work and dedication that many members of the student body put into their societies has been belittled by the bad organisation of the Union resulting in them not being able to compete on a national level.”

“Maynooth has a great name nationwide for its extra-curricular activities. Having three Maynooth Students at the BICS awards this year was a shock to many of the other colleges as they are used to seeing a much higher level of representation of our college.” For such a small college, the size of our clubs and societies goes to show that the majority of students do get involved on some level, and many who do take their involvement very seriously. For these people, to have their opportunity to represent their college taken away is very disheartening and would certainly not encourage such dedication and enthusiasm in the future.

A complaint was brought up at Clubs and Socs council last week and Ian Russell explained to the room that the venue was booked for the Maynooth Clubs and Socs Awards before they were told of the date for BICS, and it was not possible to change the date. He apologised to the winners for this major mistake, which he accepted as being most definitely not the first this year. He claimed that the best he could do, was to promise there would be better systems in place to prevent such a disaster in the future.