Last year, a new Students’ Union constitution was voted in by students, which explicitly outlines the role of each sabbatical officer as well as each college officer. Since then a number of the criteria have not been met. The most obvious breach, regarding updates to the SU website, is the responsibility of both the Campaigns and Communications officer and the Secretary of the Union.
The constitution, which last year reintroduced the position of C&C officer, states that the officer is “responsible for the administration of the Union website.” This includes the publishing of SU council minutes, Executive meeting minutes, lists of class reps and the results of the elections.
At the time of going of print, the minutes from only three executive meetings this year had been published on the website. This is in direct violation of the constitution which says “the Union secretary shall take minutes and publish same… not later than one month after the relevant meeting.” The executive, which consists of all the sabbatical officers, college officers and the Irish language officers, meets a minimum of once every two weeks and is ultimately responsible for the day to day running of the Union. At the time of going to print, the latest minutes of any executive meeting published on the website is dated 24th September 2015.
The SU Council minutes are also behind, missing two sessions from this year. The results of the recent SU elections are not available on the website either, with a search for them leading to a blank page titled “representation,” though these results are available in a post UCDSU’s Facebook page.
C&C officer, Cian Byrne explained that some of the problems with the website come from the lack of experience of those responsible. “The issue with the website, I suppose just to clarify it, we outsource it to England and this was a decision made however many years ago,” he said. “So there’s myself, David [Burns, Communications and Research Assistant] and Ger [Byrne, Creative Designer], who between us had a two hour webonair training session on what to do with [it]. So we put a lot of time, we put a lot of time after work as well to get the stuff up, but it’s just constantly a work in progress.”
Particularly noting the Executive minutes, Byrne explained “that’s just linking in with the secretary to get them up as well… It’s obviously of great importance to get the minutes up so we’re transparent, everyone knows what’s going on.”
Yet he did go on to say that “it’s just one page in a whole heap of other things that we’re working on as well… as one thing goes up, something else is obviously being affected, especially ongoing things.”
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