With just three days to go to the Cork South Central by-election, thousands of students are due to march on the streets of Cork today to protest overcrowding in colleges and "the pathetic student maintenance grant".
Buses from Carlow, Tralee, Limerick and Waterford will bring students to Cork for the protest. Activists from USI have been in the city since Friday, distributing some 20,000 flyers calling for substantial increases in the student maintenance grant and reform in the way eligibility for the grant is assessed.
USI says it is determined to "embarrass" the Minister for Education on what they describe as his "broken election promises". Minister Micheal Martin is the campaign manager for the Fianna Fail candidate in the election, Sinead Behan.
The union wrote to all the candidates in the by-election last month and promised to "heavily endorse" any candidate who backed their demands. However, according to campaigns officer, Ronan Emmet, they hadn't received a single reply from any of the candidates at the end of last week. Meanwhile, the students' union at University College Cork says Martin should "quit the small talk and repetitive promises" and "bite the bullet" on the issue of overcrowding. The union says UCC was expected to accommodate 1,000 extra students this year, without been given the resources to cope with the increased numbers. So severe is the overcrowding situation that some lectures have been held in Cork's Kino Cinema because of the lack of suitable classroom space.
USI is expecting support at today's protest from the Teachers Union of Ireland and the National Parents Council. They say they will keep up the pressure on the Minister with a National Day of Action in Dublin on November 11th.
The leaflet distributed to voters in Cork describes education as "the only issue in this election" and says the Celtic Tiger economy will not last without substantial investment in education and a boost to the financial assistance available to students - to allow students from poorer backgrounds to go to college. Students in Cork are left with £5 a week of their grant after they pay their rent, say USI. They describe the 77p increase in the maintenance grant for students living away from home this year as "pathetic", the equivalent of "a can of Coke and a pack of Taytos".
In the unlikely event that the Minister does decide to brave the protest in his backyard, he will also face placards from the Waterford IT students' union, which is angry at reports that the institute will not be given degree-awarding powers in the near future.
Waterford IT was the first regional technical college to be to be upgraded to IT status in January 1997. However, its advantage over the rest of the State's RTCs didn't last long, with the former Minister for Education, Niamh Bhreathnach, announcing five months later that all the RTCs were to be upgraded. The WIT students' union is unhappy with the idea of their institute being on a level with other institutes of technology. "We were supposedly being taken out of a system which didn't meet the needs of the college or the needs of the south-east of Ireland," says union President Mark Kelly. "Being upgraded wasn't just a step in the evolution of the college, it was a step in the evolution of the whole region."
Since the Department of Education extended IT status to all the former RTCs, the focus in Waterford has been on attaining independent degree-awarding powers for the institute. The union argues such powers are necessary if the relatively low degree-programme participation of young people in the south-east region is to be addressed.
"We should be getting every encouragement to grow rather than being put back into our box because it suits somebody else. We've proved ourselves worthy of degree awarding powers.
"We'll be lobbying the Minister to recognise the uniqueness of WIT and lobbying against us becoming just another part of the Irish National Institute of Technology structure, which would involve going back into a system which doesn't serve our needs," Kelly says. "We won't accept any sell out."
