Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) registered 481 students to vote on Wednesday in their first voter registration drive of the year.
The voter registration drive was held as part of TCDSU Empowerment Week, which has hosted a range of events promoting citizenship and activism. The union had a stand in the Arts Block for the day with volunteers helping students fill in the paperwork to register to vote.
Speaking to The University Times, TCDSU Citizenship Officer Stephen Sheil, who ran the registration drive, said that it was “good timing” considering Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s announcement of the referendum earlier this week. The union invited Irish snapchat sensation James Kavanagh to gain traction for the drive on social media, which Sheill said brought in many students to register.
This year, the focus is on registering first-year students because since the drive to register voters in the year leading up to the marriage equality referendum, where they “found that a lot of students hadn’t been registered to vote at all even in older years”, most students in older years have already registered, according to Sheil.
The next voter registration drives will take place in Halls and will be held over the next couple of weeks. Following this, there will be three similar one-day events, including one taking place in off-campus locations before a national voter registration day on November 8th.
Sheil is “delighted” with how their registration drive went, commenting that it was “already more than NUIG [Students’ Union] registered in a whole week of registering”.
Sheil commended the volunteers that have been involved: “They’re really motivated people and it’s really great to see.”
He encouraged those who hadn’t yet registered to register to vote. “There’s no such thing as ‘one vote doesn’t matter’”. He went on: “Yesterday was a hard day obviously but it was really rewarding… I love seeing people registered to vote and caring about things whether that be about referendums.”
Speaking to The University Times, TCDSU President Kevin Keane said that while in any year “it’s really important that we register our students to vote”, this year it is “pivotal that we do a good job”.
Correction: 14.42, September 29th, 2017
An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled the second name of TCDSU Citizenship Officer Stephen Sheil.
