With colleges facing increased competition for students, freshers' week is gaining new importance in the battle to win hearts and minds - and bums on seats in lecture halls, writes Áine Kerr.

Students court entertainment and rascality, and the much-anticipated freshers' week has traditionally offered the appropriate platform to mingle, bond, play act and revel in new found independence, much to the bemusement of college authorities.

Now, however, college heads are abandoning their indifferent attitude toward freshers' week and the clubs and societies stalls that align their colleges' corridors every year on a protracted stakeout for new members.

The marketing potential of freshers' week has finally been realised. Colleges are now actively promoting their freshers' week activities and the achievements of their varying clubs and societies during the months of frantic competition for CAO applicants. With fewer students to go around these days, this is crucial.

While political parties, GAA clubs and philosophical societies have already cemented their authority and popularity in colleges countrywide, one society hoping to garner much student interest is Macra na Feirme. With the World Ploughing Championships due to take place this weekand thousands of students moving from the country to the city landscapes for the first time, Macra na Feirme is appealing again to students, according to Edel Cocomam of the UCD branch.

In the battle to enrol freshers, Macra na Feirme is offering a trip to the ploughing championships and a "culchies versus the townies" debate, widely known to excite, enrage and enliven students, before the Minister for Agriculture and members of the Irish Farmers' Association.

The word "controversy" personifies much of the freshers' week concept. Where freshers have gone, chaos, hysterics and beer guzzling antics have usually followed and a review of Ireland's freshers' week history relays a catalogue of important changes and activities.

When the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) distributed a sexual health awareness pack including a condom in 2001, the Catholic Bishops' Conference declined to comment on the campaign, but reiterated its teaching on contraception.

September 2003 proved to be a particularly turbulent year for freshers following the re-emergence of UCD's 23-year-old campaign to install 22 condom vending machines in men and women's toilets. The dispute, which commenced in 1979 following the removal of a condom vending machine on the grounds that it was illegal, led to three subsequent missions to install the machines. Each attempt was, however, thwarted by the college authorities. In October 2003, the National College of Art and Design outmanoeuvred their Belfield counterparts and the relevancy of their campaign by installing 12 condom vending machines.

A key component of any successful freshers' week is a mass fallout or dispute, which if it escalates, should catch the imagination of the public and media alike.

The year 2004 offered the Trinity Women's Issues Group's boycotting of meetings of the Philosophical Society in protest at its choice of a porn star and a page-three model as speakers.

Last year, the Young Progressive Democrats in UCD superseded all other clubs and societies in the battle for public and media attention when they produced a poster depicting PD ministers as characters from Star Wars. However, when someone or some individuals stole into the PD stand during the night to offer their succinct analysis of "PD Scum" in large black marker, media attention was swiftly diverted.

But aside from the side antics that freshers' week can offer, the battleground where clubs and societies compete for student membership and college funding is one which is gaining the increased attention of college authorities.

USI president Colm Hamrogue believes that as the points have dropped and more courses have come on stream, students can now be more selective about the college they choose to attend. "A lot of colleges and institutes now offer similar courses, so students can really afford to sit back and choose a college on the basis of the extra-curricular activities, the clubs and societies on offer and the social life attached to the college."