While there have been rare occasions on which an orphanage fire would have generated more laughs, the Irish Times Debate has traditionally provided some of the best free entertainment seen outside of a tribunal of inquiry.
A determined, impassioned but undeniably well-fed Derek Davis took to the stage in 1969 for a debate on Third World hunger and posed the question "What is the ugly alternative to salvation?" to a well-lubricated audience. In 1971, a competitor challenged the decision to award the prize to Marian Finucane, the first time a woman had been awarded the title, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that, well, she was a woman and therefore couldn't possibly have won.
A certain amount of gamesmanship has also been a feature of the debate. It was traditional for the Dublin colleges to attempt to put off their provincial counterparts by adopting the worst excesses of south Dublin behaviour, including lurid university scarves and accents that would have shamed the most vowel-mangling AA Roadwatch announcers.
Jarlath Ryan, one-time debating partner of this year's convenor, Ronan MacSweeney, liked to season his points of information with the phrase "sui generis" in the certain knowledge that the unfortunate speaker wouldn't have a clue what it meant. "I don't think we really knew what it meant, and most of the adjudicators didn't know what it meant either," admits MacSweeney. "But by saying it with authority you could use it to put off the speaker."
Humour, intentional rather than circumstantial, has been a particular strength of this year's competition, though among previous winners, only Gerard Stembridge (formerly of Scrap Saturday) and Dara O Briain (a stand-up comic and host of RTE's It's a Family Affair) can be said to have taken the comedic baton and run with it as a career.
O Briain, a big man apparently cursed for eternity to wear a smaller man's suit, is also notable for attempting, on the night of his victory, to use the Demosthenes trophy as a chat-up tool, despite the fact that the Demosthenes trophy is a sculpture of a small, sexless individual in a dress.
Since 1980, the debate winners of the have enjoyed an all-expenses paid debating tour of the United States as part of their prize. Occasionally reports have filtered back that some of them may have enjoyed it a little too much: listeners to a Denver radio stations were once treated to an extended treatise on the merits of Shotgun Willie's, one of the city's leading strip clubs, until the students were unceremoniously yanked from the air. (Although even this was eclipsed by the debater who enlivened a Denver TV show with his own personal guide to a sexual practice banned in a number of southern US states).
On other occasions, the trips have taken an odd turn. One group of bemused students was obliged to sing Happy Birthday to a state senator during a tour of Colorado's legislature. Another trio managed to spend $875 of their $900 personal allowance in eight days, but defended their expenditure by arguing that 15 per cent of it had gone on tips. They proceeded to fund themselves by selling guides to ancient Celtic art after debates, despite the fact that the guides were meant to be goodwill gifts to American debaters.
Finally, three Irish debaters were once instructed to liaise with a gentleman called Binky the Clown in the course of the St Patrick's Day parade in Denver, only to find, upon arrival at the starting point, a total of 400 clowns preparing for their role in the parade.
What is perhaps most surprising is that the Americans keep inviting the Irish back to debate, despite the fact that each trio has returned triumphant from the US, dragging the heads of their defeated rivals behind them. As Seamus Doran, a 1997 winner, undiplomatically puts it: "It's amazing how people will hero-worship you when you kick their ass . . ."
