MISC. VOL 131, ISSUE 4

Vol. CXXXI, Issue IV

Monday, April 7th, 2025

CONTRIBUTORS Anna Crean is the Treasurer of Environmental Society. She was previously the Co-Art Director for Stance.

Emily Formstone is Misc.’s Science Editor. She has also written for The New Statesman and Times Literary Supplement.

Emma Furlong is a third year Geography and Geoscience student.

Freja Goldman is a second year English student and Climate Crisis Editor at The University Times.

Helena Thiel is a second year History student from Sweden. She is Deputy Film Editor for The University Times and Co-Editor of TN2’s Literature section.

Hosanna Boulter is Misc’s Co-Deputy Editor and the Ireland and Northern Ireland Regional Officer for the Student Publication Association.

Lucia Orsi is Misc.’s Community Editor. She has also contributed to TN2 and The University Times.

Margot Guilhot Desoldato is Misc.’s Culture Editor. She has also contributed to TN2, Trinity Film Review and Trinity News.

Nicolle Riley is a first year Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology student. She has previously contributed to Trinity News and The University Times.

Noah McNamara is a first-time

Photographer Models

ILLUSTRATIONS Jessica Sharkey

Pages 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 16, 23, 24, 28

Honor Lynch

Page 10

Mathilda Gross

Pages 30 and 31

COVER

contributor to Misc. He has also written for Mendax Magazine and The Weir.

Phoebe Pascoe is Misc’s Editor-in-Chief. She was previously the Assistant Editor of Misc. and of The University Times. She has written for Trinity News, TN2, Oxygen.ie and Mission Magazine.

Shea Delaney is a Joint Honours Classical Civilisations and Irish student.

Stephen Conneely is Misc.’s Political Editor, after having spent last year as the magazine’s Erasmus Co-Editor. He is also the Deputy Editor of Trinity News and has reported for TheJournal.ie.

Isabella Reyes Laragh Scharf Tommy McHale

PHOTOGRAPHY Anna Crean

Pages 12, 13, 14

Kate Lawlor

Pages 17 and 18

Noah McNamara

Pages 26 and 27

Editor Phoebe Pascoe | Deputy Editors Conor Healy, Hosanna Boulter | Assistant Editors Eliora Abramson, Rose Slocock | Political Editor Stephen Conneely | Community Editor Lucia Orsi | Culture Editor Margot Guilhot Desoldato | Science Editor Emily Formstone | History Editor Brian Lennon | International Editor Amelia Rosevear | Erasmus Editors Brenna Byrne, Emma Rouine | Critics at Large Song Kinsman, Sarah Rooney Fitzpatrick

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CONTENTS Phoebe Pascoe

Margot Guilhot Desoldato

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Editor's Letter

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The Misc Matrix

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And I’m Not Gonna Change Your Name!

Is this play about us?

Emma Furlong 8

Rigging the Narrative Learning a new story of climate change on Erasmus in Norway

Stephen Conneely 10

Punching Below the Belt Conor McGregor’s visit to the White House

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Meath Street and Memory Lane Two photo-diaries of the Liberties, fifteen years apart

Emily Formstone 15

The Birth of a New Philosophy?

How do we solve the question of consent when giving birth?

Anna Crean

Freja Goldman 17

A Night at Hibernia Indie bands and an isolated warehouse

Hosanna Boulter 19

Long Covid Reflecting on Trinity in the time of Corona

Helena Thiel 21

Punk on Parliament Square When the Clash came to campus

Nicolle Riley

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Getting Lucky in the Lecky The emotional turmoil of a library crush

Noah McNamara 25

(Not) Born in the USA Why does everyone think I’m American?

Shea Delaney

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Last Friday Night A pint-sized history of the Pav

Lucia Orsi

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Trespassing at T Ball: an Interview “All Trinity students should sneak into T Ball. I think it’s a right of passage” 3

EDITOR'S LETTER

S

omewhere between being kidnapped, dealing drugs, meeting the Mansons, writing an advice column and acting in John Waters’ films, Cookie Mueller wrote: “there’s a gap between the art you love and the art you make, and you have to learn to live with that.”

Misc. is by no means “art” (though we are lucky to feature some of the greatest artists and illustrators on campus). But, each time I have sat down on the day before we go to print to write an Editor’s Letter, this quote has come to mind – and not only because I prop my laptop up on Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. As students, many of us inhabit a gap: between childhood and ‘real’ adulthood, certainty and uncertainty, lessons learned and knowledge yet to be acquired. Sometimes, this gap is freeing. Sometimes it feels like falling.

For students who write – students of writing, I guess – there can also be a latent frustration to knowing exactly what you want to write (knowing the writing you love), but not having the skills, or experience, to quite achieve it. But, at Misc., we quite like sitting in this gap. It’s where all the interesting stuff happens.

I don’t think that acknowledging this gap that Mueller writes of, “between the art you love and the art you make”, is self-deprecating. Instead, inhabiting this space allows us to try out new ways of writing, about new things, in new voices, without the pressure of getting it right all the time. Realising that what you write will never be the writing you love enables you to stop trying to replicate it, and try to make something new.

So, reading this issue will take you down some new routes, as well as encourage viewing well-trodden paths from a different vantage point.

In a very spec i a l series of photos, Anna Crean documents the shopfronts of Meath Street (and their owners), fifteen years after her uncle did the same 4

thing. It’s a love letter to the Liberties, and a beautiful snapshot of a community. Looking back even further, Helena Thiel chronicles when the Clash played Trinity’s own Exam Hall in 1977, and brought punk to Ireland. Plus, reflecting on more recent history, Hosanna Boulter reminds readers that the graduating class of 2025 are the last cohort to have felt the full brunt of COVID-19 on campus. Finally, as it will be T-Ball week when you read this, we end this issue with a scintillating interview from one student who managed to sneak in two years ago. If you’re considering trying your luck on Friday, it’s worth the read.

Then, looking forward: Freja Goldman spends a night with House of Hibernia to see what nightlife might hold beyond Drury St, and Emily Formstone contemplates whether we need new guidelines around consent for those giving birth. In a consideration of more terrifying news, Stephen Conneely analyses Conor McGregor’s recent meeting with President Trump, and what it implies about personality in politics.

Last week, I had a cup of tea in the Buttery with Eamon Mag Uidhir, who edited Misc. during the 1970s. He took me through the issues that he put together, pointing out various pseudonyms, controversial cartoons and the articles that got him hauled in front of the Provost, or issued death threats. Not only did I feel lucky not to have received a single death threat in my stint as Editor (maybe that means I’m doing in wrong?), but it also reminded me how grateful I am to have worked alongside the team at Misc. this year, and in the long shadow of those who have made this magazine together in years prior.

While putting together this issue, I was sad to hear from Eamon about the passing of previous Misc.

Editor Ken Bruen, whose novels (some of which later became films starring actors such as Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley) entertained and riveted so many readers. He serves as a reminder that people in the pages of Misc. in decades gone by have crossed the gap Cookie Mueller talks of: the art they make has become the art that we love. Within the scope of this issue, though, I hope you are willing to sit in the gap with us for a little while longer. I feel very lucky to have found a little home in it this year, and for those who have sat in it alongside me.

- Phoebe

THE MISC. MATRIX

Want to contribute to Misc?

We are always on the lookout for new writers and artists.

To get involved, email us directly at editor@miscmagazine.ie ; join our writers' group chats through Instagram, @tcdmiscmagazine, or head to miscmagazine.ie and fill out our 'contact' form.

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AND I’M NOT GONNA CHANGE YOUR NAME! Margot Guilhot Desoldato considers the ethics of writing about people you know – is the label of fiction enough to exempt writers from liability?

“

Write what you know” — advice often levelled at aspiring writers. I’m pretty sure it was Mark Twain who said it first, or most notoriously; the point being we’ve all heard it. It is inarguably sound advice. Writing characters who have had similar experiences, share anxieties and neuroses with us, or ones we’ve had the chance to observe from up close — in friends, enemies, family members — will inevitably make it easier to step into their shoes, to create literary counterparts who feel nuanced and alive. Concise, decisive but vague as Twain’s advice is, like many of the most popular maxims of our time, it is easy to take out of context, or far too literally.

“The expectation that fiction is autobiographical is understandable for the simple reason that so much of it is”, wrote Jessica Winter in a 2021 New York Times piece about the recent popularity of work that confronts the nature of truth and the ever-obscure boundary between fact and fiction. In the piece, Winter explains our tendency to assume that most of the contemporary fiction we read is autobiographical. She mentions instances in which authors were interpellated, especially when their work was widely read and discussed, and confirmation of their authority to explore certain subjects in fiction sought in equivalent personal experiences. If we consume fiction with the goal of gaining an insight into an author’s life and emotional world, on the basis of the belief that what we are reading represents an accurate retelling of events, this has severe implications for the writer. Not only does this lead to a series of assumptions being made about authors’ lives, but also about those who have innocently, perhaps even unknowingly, provided inspiration for 6

their novels. People who may very well exist, may be living and breathing, walking around, and who wouldn’t necessarily want to be written about.

One – egregious – example of real-life people’s anonymity being compromised to a morally dubious extent is the viral short story ‘Cat Person’ by Kristen Roupenian, published in 2017 by The New Yorker and later adapted into a film starring Nicholas Braun. The story follows 20 year-old college student Margot as she meets, goes on a date with, and eventually sleeps with 34 year-old Robert. After a brief first encounter, most of their flirtation occurs via text, allowing Margot’s perception of him to remain somewhat malleable and subject to change. Online, he comes off as harmless and charming, but whenever they meet there is an undertow of fear in Margot’s consciousness.

What follows is a drawn-out, disturbing sex scene, in which she realises she might not want to sleep with Robert after all, but feels as though the tact and gentleness required to extricate herself from the situation are simply too much for her to summon. As she goes through the motions and waits for it to be over, she pictures herself from birds-eye, feeling her revulsion turn “to self-disgust and a humiliation that was a kind of perverse cousin to arousal”. After the encounter, she attempts to ghost Robert. Weeks later, she runs into him at a bar, and has her fr iends

sneak her out as she gets hit with a wave of guilt and fear. Robert notices her and the story ends with a series of his texts: first anxious and apologetic, then bitter, and eventually violent, as the chain culminates with him calling her a ‘whore’.

The most sinister element of the story is the sense of familiarity it instilled in so many young women: it was The New Yorker’s most downloaded piece of fiction that year, as its fraught depiction of gender and power relations seemed to epitomise some unspoken truth about the experience of modern dating, sparking an animated debate online. Four years later, a woman called Alexis Nowicki published an essay in Slate magazine. In it, she recounts the experience of leaving a movie theatre to be met with a flurry of notifications from friends and old colleagues all sharing the same link: “Is this about you? Did you write this under a pen name?”.

Nowicki describes having to sit down on the subway as she read ‘Cat Person’, overwhelmed as she was by the eerie sensation of finding uncanny similarities between her and a fictional character in the short story that was breaking the internet. She, too, had dated an older man when she was in college. Her ex-boyfriend Charles (a pseudonym), like Robert, wore a rabbit fur hat and had a tattoo on his shoulder. His house had fairy lights on the porch, posters and board games inside like in the story. Roupenian seemed to know everything: her hometown, her college dorm, the art house cinema where she worked.

She knew where their first date had been, and about his two cats.

Unlike the brief, uncomfortable encounter in the story, however, Nowicki retains a positive memory of her relationship with Charles, who was a gentle, loving partner to her, and who, she reveals in her essay, has since passed away. After asking some of Charles’ friends and, eventually, Roupenian herself, Nowicki found out that Roupenian had met Charles, heard about his relationship with her, and taken information from her social media accounts as a “jumping off point” for the story.

Even with her first-hand knowledge of who Charles was as a person and of their relationship dynamic, Nowicki found herself susceptible to the power of narrative: “Sometimes, to my own disappointment, I find myself inclined to trust Roupenian over myself.

Had Charles actually been pathetic and exploitative, and I simply hadn’t understood it because I, like Margot, was young and naïve? (...) The story is so confident and sure, helping the reader to see things Margot herself does not.”

The identification of real-life elements in ‘Cat Person’ extended beyond Nowicki’s essay. Many, especially men,

dismissed it as a whiny diary entry, reading it as a personal essay rather than a serious piece of fiction, in spite of Roupenian’s many attempts to remind audiences that the story was, in fact, a work of the imagination. On the one hand, Roupenian submitting her short story to The New Yorker was a long shot. At this point in her writing career, she had published a single story in a print magazine. How could she have known ‘Cat Person’ would be accepted, let alone get millions of hits? “In retrospect, I was wrong not to go back and remove those biographical details (...). Not doing so was careless”, she apologised to Nowicki. Nowicki still felt slighted: “I was angry, still—that someone who knows so intensely about what it’s like to watch your readers misconstrue fiction as autobiography would have dragged others, without their knowledge, into that discomfort.”

In a college with such a rich literary heritage, that boasts a number of beloved alumni authors in its ranks – many of whom have transfigured their experience at Trinity in their novels – this is not an unthinkable series of events. How many of us have, through the veil of fiction, dragged an ex through the dirt or aired our family’s dirty laundry in a creative writing workshop? What if one of those stories made it out of the class? What if, despite the typos you missed and the fact that you drunkenly submitted it minutes before the midnight deadline, it got into Icarus? What if it got into The New Yorker?

Of course, fiction is always going to be personal in some way – how can we not draw from real life?

I have a Notes app folder of funny things people have said to me with the very intention of slipping them into a story. My first piece of fiction to be published in a literary magazine independent of college began with a conversation I had at a house party with someone in my course.

As Zadie Smith put it in her defense of fiction for The New York Review of Books, “Our social and personal lives are a process of continual fictionalization, as we internalize the other-we-are-not, dramatize them, imagine them, speak for them and through them. The accuracy of this fictionalization is never guaranteed, but without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking, we could have no social lives at all.”

I do think it’s okay to write stories about the people we know. I also think that, in doing so, we have an unequivocal responsibility to do right by them, to change things, leave out details that make them recognisable. If they’re someone you love, maybe even give them a heads up about a character that may or may not remind them of someone. If they were truly evil to you, though, why not keep the same initial.

How many of us have, through the veil of fiction, dragged an ex through the dirt, or aired our family’s dirty laundry?

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RIGGING THE NARRATIVE I

Emma Furlong discovers the myths of climate education in Norway

t is common knowledge, I think, that one will experience culture shocks when studying in a different country, some more expected than others. I had the opportunity to study in Tromsø, Norway last semester, and was shocked plenty - bus drivers went unthanked, cuisine was more dried fish-heavy than I care for, and my Finnish roommate of 6 months left with no goodbye (and all of our shared toilet paper). But, perhaps most shocking of all to me, was the way in which Norwegians taught and talked about their famed petroleum industry and particularly its relationship to climate change.

It is no great kept secret that the burning of petroleum contributes massively to global warming, not to mention the catastrophic impacts offshore harvesting can have on local wildlife. Indeed, the burning of fossil fuels (including coal and natural gas) is responsible for nearly 90% of global carbon dioxide emissions, in turn leading to the continued overall heating of our planet, resulting in massive knock-on effects across the globe, seen currently in the forest fires ravishing Los Angeles.

The understanding at the very least that we-should-limit-our-petroleum-use-because-it-isbad-for-the-environment is one that has been spread amongst our generation in every facet of our lives. This is largely because of concerted efforts made by our governments to preach this idea as much as possible through initiatives such as Green Week. The Global Citizenship Education Initiative aims to spread climate literacy in Irish common education, and in Trinity, a mandatory sustainability module is being created, following in the footsteps of

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Stanford, Berkeley and Columbia in the United States.

In Geoscience specifically, every module I have taken across my two years at Trinity has touched on climate change in some sense, to the point where to explain climate change in such an article feels as pointless as explaining that the Earth is round. It is a truth as unavoidable as birth, death and taxes.

Because of this, I found myself baffled by my experience of Norway’s relationship with petroleum.

Tromsø is a small island city, located in the far north of Norway within the Arctic Circle, and is close to many significant oil and gas fields. Presumably because of this, and Norway’s extensive history in the petroleum industry, most of the classes offered to me at the Arctic University of Tromsø (UiT) were related to petrology to some extent or other, with ‘Petroleum Geology’, ‘Management of Petroleum Resources’, and ‘Petroleum Processing’ all mandatory subjects for Geoscience students at UiT. Trinity’s Geoscience options by comparison tend to be more focused on the volcanic side of Geology, in line with the mineral makeup of our land, but also include mandatory modules such as ‘Earth’s Climate - Past, Present and Future’, which focuses on our changing environment, a topic which was noticeable by its absence from my experience studying in UiT. You see, Norwegian citizens have a vested interest in the continued harvesting of petroleum. Since 1990, the people of Norway have benefited from the Government Pension Fund, or the ‘Oljefondet‘, which makes it so that surplus wealth generated from government-owned oil companies, such as Equinor is deposited into a fund for future generations, to maintain Norway’s wealth after their offshore oil deposits are exhausted in an estimated 50 years. Furthermore, graduates in geoscience are ranked among the most employable in the country. This meant that most students and professors I interacted with in my time studying in Norway stood to benefit in the continued success of Norway’s offshore drilling. I found all of my Geoscience modules to be lacking in any sort of awareness of the social or climatic impact of offshore oil drilling.

Take, for instance, one of the modules I stud-

ied in Norway: ‘Integrated Subsurface Geological Analysis’, a module which ‘gives an evaluation of conditions and processes involved in the generation and transformation of organic material in source rocks and the migration of these hydrocarbons to reservoir rocks.’ Included in this module was a trip in an Equinor office in Trondheim, a Norwegian city further south. Here, a baffling presentation was given to us students in which the speaker cited the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period of prehistoric time in which average global temperatures rose rapidly by more than 5 degrees across a very short period of geological time, and the Little Ice Age, a regional cool period in Europe across the Middle Ages, as examples of how our climate has always been changing.

However, both of these examples were characterised by huge tectonic events causing volcanic activity and changes in the atmosphere’s chemistry through natural causes. By contrast, the increased acidification of our atmosphere as it fills with greenhouse gases is a result of human activity rather than any sort of organic phenomenon, and has no end in sight without societal change.

The speaker carried on, stating that much of the climate disasters being seen today, such as burst river banks and flooding are the result of poor city planning, and not working alongside the environment, through redirecting rivers and building dams. While true in some cases, the unprecedented hot, cold, rainy or dry spells being recorded across the globe cannot be put down to poor foresight. The point of this speech was to open discussions about the fear mongering surrounding climate change, to conclude that it is unrealistic to expect to cut petroleum use completely tomorrow without causing societal collapse. He was right: too much of our green energy sources such

as solar panels and wind turbines still require petroleum-based plastic components to function. The narrative he spun bordering on climate change denial, however, I struggle to resonate with. Even more shocking to me was the near dead-silence on the topic from my peers. The task of arguing against this notion fell to myself and two German boys, the only other international students in the class. It became clear to me then that the way I have been taught about climate change my entire life is not a belief as universally held as I had previously believed.

My final assignment for the subject was to write an essay primarily focussed on discussing the UN’s

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), several of which are directly related to tackling climate change and providing access to greener energy sources. Some of the recommended readings for this essay included ‘The Oil Book’, by Øystein Sjølie, who writes in defence of the ‘hated Norwegian oil industry,’ and instead counters that ‘Norwegian oil and gas make the world a better place.’ Being that I do not speak Norwegian, I cannot share what Sjølie’s reasoning for this stance is, but according to other lectures from this same class, Norwegian oil is more environmentally friendly than other sources because of its lighter,

sweeter quality, akin to some sort of Oil Lord Sommelier making it more buoyant and thus easier to harvest from the depths of our Earth, as well as cleaner-burning.

The final part of this essay was to discuss where and how petroleum fits into the future of energy perspectives. To my mind, and also some of the greatest minds of today working in the UN, if we wish to even make a dent in the UN’s SDGs, we should be working towards a petroleum free future.

Certainly Norway is aware of the finite nature of its financial success, as is evident from their Oljefondet savings account. So why then does their university education in geoscience seem to skirt the topic of negative impacts of petroleum, like a borehole in their continental shelf ? Why bother bringing up Sustainable Development and the goals of the UN if the recommended readings for the essay in question are inherently biased and angled to defend Norwegian oil from the get go? Other recommended readings for the essay included Equinor’s own energy perspective publication.

I do not wish to suggest that Norway is part of some cult of petroleum romantics, nor to suggest that the Norwegian government is operating a propaganda scheme of manipulation against their own people. Simply put, the echo-chambered ideal I have held and been taught all my life, of pushing towards a greener way of living, and banishing petroleum to the Earth’s core forevermore was shattered rather brutally during my time in Norway.

I am not naive, I don’t believe that the use of petroleum can be stopped at the toss of a soup can. It is clear that our whole society since the industrial revolution has been built around this fluid finance. But I do not think it naive either to suggest that romanticising the sweet, light oil of Norway’s continental shelf in an academic setting is anything but bad for our global future prospects.

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PUNCHING BELOW THE BELT Stephen Conneely on Conor McGregor’s visit to the White House

W

e are the company we keep, so it’s no surprise that US President Donald Trump warmly welcomed Conor McGregor to the White House on Saint Patrick’s Day this year. Both men have many things in common: questionable charisma and popularity aplenty, yes — but most notably their convictions of serious sexual assaults in a civil court.

McGregor took the invitation to the US’ most esteemed address as an opportunity to misrepresent the Irish people’s opinions on issues such as immigration and the economy, as well as to springboard his apparent bid for the Irish p r e s i d e n c y.

It remains to be seen, however, if he can waltz into Áras an Uachtarán as easily as he did its American counterpart.

On the other hand, Tr u m p used this political playdate 10

to subtly hint to leaders across the world that he favours personality over policies. While this is no departure from what we already knew to be true, it proves to be a particularly callous example of his departure from the norms of diplomacy.

With McGregor running wild around the

W h i t e House on Saint Patrick’s Day, Ta o i s e a c h Micheál Martin was slotted in on the Tuesday before; bumped off centre stage on his country’s national day.

Tr u m p’s

Bizarrepolitik — a misconstrued attempt to replicate the 19th century proto-German political philosophy Realpolitik, which advocates for actually attainable results from government instead of broader, less tangible ideals proposed to the electorate — manifests itself mainly in his parading of world leaders in front of his ( i n c re a s i n g l y hand-picked) White House press pool.

Trump may think that he’s playing chess as Europe plays checkers, but in reality he’s been dealt a hand of jokers in a game of go-fish. His techniques to wrestle control of world affairs to his Republican Party simply won’t work, as the Irish example proves.

In his recent meetings with world leaders, he has repeatedly attempted to gain the upper hand by embarrassing or blitzing his contemporaries in front of the world’s media. His reasons for this methodology are plenty: to begin trade negotiations with force, to (sub) consciously urge the other party to align themselves with his policies, or to simply show brute strength.

While this makes for riveting social media clips, this approach has in fact rarely worked out in Trump’s favour. World leaders now travel to Washington more well versed on his psychological warfare tactics than his actual foreign policy specifics, and act accordingly. Starmer revealed an envelope from King

Charles and presented it to Trump without warning, leaving him stunned, and perhaps even touched.

Macron flexed the breadth of flirting French-style, lulling Trump into a false sense of security regarding their future collective reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was only Zelenskyy who truly faltered in this environment, greatly outnumbered with the US Vice-President and Secretary of State also present in the Oval Office.

This set up proves to be a complete inversion of his proposed Realpolitik of putting “America First”. Here, effecting tangible change to improve the lives of his citizens — say, for example, strengthening ties with allies or productively advocating for trade balancing — plays second fiddle to a stroking of his ego or a bollocking of his opponent.

Trump’s Bizarrepolitik subsequently causes us to totally rethink US-Ireland relations more broadly. For better or for worse, the Irish conduct politics from a uniquely depersonalised approach — while the well-known quip that older people vote for a politician purely “because he fixed the local road” remains largely valid, this stems from a deeply communal perspective.

It must be acknowledged that politicians in Ireland are generally void of personality. Micheál Martin has no compelling narrative, Simon Harris lacks a charismatic voice, and Mary Lou McDonald struggles to centre her party on a singular voice. This is not meant to ridicule our political leaders, but instead to demonstrate the stark differences in politics on either side of the Atlantic.

This divide is clearly demonstrated in Trump’s invitation to McGregor on Saint Patrick’s day, in which Martin’s dismissal mirrors the replacement of any true Realpolitik

in Trump’s presidency.

To not only platform, but further propagate, the deliberately misleading views of a man recently found liable of battering and raping a woman, Nikita Hand, flies in the face of the values widely held by the people of Ireland — Tánaiste Simon Harris said in New York that McGregor is “the very worst of masculinity” and “represents the polar opposite” of Irish values.

It also goes without saying that McGregor is unrepresentative of the Irish people by nature of his never running for public office, low level of personal popularity across the country, and the comparatively short amount of time he spends in the country each year.

Since he descended a golden escalator in Manhattan’s Trump Tower, Trump’s presidency has long blurred the line between actual governance and eye-catching entertainment — but in politics, performance can only go so far until people say the show’s over.

The runtime of Trump’s productivity with international leaders is proving shorter than expected, as he has already had to use an overzealous understudy to provide unnecessary substance on our nation’s closeup.

It goes without saying that McGregor is unrepresentative of the Irish people

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MEATH STREET AND MEMORY LANE Anna Crean documents the mainstays of the Liberties... 15 years after her uncle did the same thing

A

nyone who has walked down Meath Street can feel the shift into an older Dublin culture rarely felt anywhere else in the city today: the smell of hops from the Guinness Storehouse, the freshly baked bread and the sounds of market saleswomen echoing down the street.

The Liberties as a whole is an incredibly special neighbourhood in my life. Not only have I been a resident of Dublin 8, but my greatest friends, favourite pubs and local butcher all lie within a few meters of one another. While much of the Liberties today is shadowed by student accommodation and luxury apartments, it maintains a thriving culture, sustained through generations. Just ask anyone drunk enough at the Liberty Belle and they’ll share the infamous stories of Bang Bang or Johnny Forty Coats; just some of the local legends that colour the fabric of this small Dublin community.

Some things have been lost to the past, however. Older members of the Liberties have remarked on the smell that used to waft out of O’Keeffe’s Knacker’s Yard on Mill Street throughout the early- and mid-20th century, and residents still wince when thinking about the smell that covered the streets in the summertime - a

Foley’s Pharmacy 12

legacy left by my great uncle! It was a proud family business that processed animal carcasses, the descendants of which include none other than my wonderful self.

Since I moved to Dublin four years ago, my family have continued to share stories of their connections to the area with me. The most recent was a photo series my uncle completed when he was in photography school about fifteen years ago. The moment he sent them, I recognised my local butcher outside of an identical shopfront I had walked into just a week prior. As I scrolled through the photos, I began to realise that nearly every shop was the same – the pharmacy, the pub, the hairdresser, the bakery – nothing had changed.

I always knew that the Liberties had an “Old-Dublin” charm, but I couldn’t fathom just how much of a time capsule Meath Street truly is. I decided it was only right to go to these local shops and show each owner these photographs from over a decade ago.

If they were willing (and they were), I’d take an updated photograph to encapsulate the essence that is “Old Dublin”. Same shops, same faces – just the distance of fifteen years.

Stephen’s Pork Butchers

Molly Malone Market

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C&N Meats Ltd

Angel Hair and Beauty

14

THE BIRTH OF A NEW PHILOSOPHY? “

Emily Formstone questions the lines between incapacitation and consent during labour

Is birth philosophical?” I asked my mum, who has two philosophy degrees and, thanks to me and my brother, two qualifications in giving birth, so to speak. Her answer was detailed, ending with the ever-so-philosophical idea that, “maybe at the edges, philosophy and birth collide. There are the ethical questions of competing rights, choices, and controls. There are the glimpses of beauty, truth, the divine.”

But my mum is a rare case study when it comes to being clued in on the philosophy of birth. Currently, if you type the phrase into a search engine, you’re more likely to come across books and articles on the birth of philosophy. So how can we pivot the conversation from the Enlightenment to something more enlightening? And what benefits would this actually yield, if any?

I started thinking about this collision a year or so ago after attending a talk about the “battle to make our birthing experience communicable.” At least, this is how the speaker, Stella Villarmea, a coordinator of the Philosophy of Birth Network, framed her subject.

Villarmea sparked my interest because her belief in the philosophical significance of birth-givers lies specifically in their physicality. Though we might typically think of philosophy as a mental process and birth as a physical one, Villarmea pointed out that we give birth “with our capacity, our reasoning skills, our cultural past, our thoughts and intentions, our desires, our fears. We birth with everything that matters to us.

In short, with our values.”

This pivot astonished me. I think if you asked most people who haven’t had a direct experience in a birthing room to picture a person giving birth, they’d describe a discombobulated, screaming woman on a hospital bed. A woman who has lost control of mind and body.

This is a far cry from the way Villarmea understands the experience; she very literally takes the screams of a birthing person as rational and premeditated actions.

The comparison Villarmea made was to that of a battle cry — we don’t usually think of soldiers as behaving irrationally, so why think of people crying out during labour in this way?

Yes, the cries can be an expression of fear and pain, but it turns out the act of engaging the throat muscles can also help to open the birth canal. This is the first I had heard of such a phenomenon. As it happens, it’s apparently relatively common knowledge that female opera singers similarly use their pelvic floor muscles to help their singing.

This tension between maintaining full control over the body and surrendering to the body — with both states indicating a unity between body and mind — has various philosophical implications. To Villarmea, the key question is whether we should take the birthing person to be in a special, altered state of mind-body, or whether we should take them to be in full capacity to make sound medical decisions?

This dilemma is important because it informs a wider understanding of consent in the birthing room.

Most societal contracts are based on the signing individual having full mental capacity and rationality. In Ireland, to grant consent in a medical setting requires the consenting individual to have “the mental capacity to make the particular decision”.

But are we simply running around in semantic circles here, chasing our academic tails? To help ground my thoughts, I spoke to some current medical students about the possible practical applications of these questions.

Brian Counihan, a fourth year medical student at Trinity, had his first birthing ward experience during a night shift at the Coombe Hospital. “The ward is possibly the most energetic place you could find in Dublin in the early hours of a Monday morning”, he said, reminiscing on how helpless he felt, offering “words of encouragement to the mum, and the usual sports chat

Some situations just occur that no one could have predicted

Clearly, there is a very grey area here

15

with the dad, who was almost as useless as I was, the poor fella”.

I also spoke to Alex Rowlands, 24, who completed her medical degree last month. She summarised her experiences in the birthing ward to date as “honestly a battlefield”.

Both conversations pivoted to rights in the birthing room. Rowlands told me how, despite the questions at hand, hospital policy maintains that “being in labour alone may not qualify someone as lacking capacity”. Counihan confirmed his belief that “most people during childbirth absolutely retain their cognition.”

“Of course there are cases where a mother is assessed as lacking capacity and therefore is not considered capable of making the right decision for herself ”, he explained. Under Irish law, doctors may only make decisions without the patient’s consent “in exceptional circumstances”. Such circumstances could include becoming unconscious, or having an infection that affects cognition. Decisions could be as various as moving the mother’s body into a different position to carrying out a C-section.

Typically, I was told, birth plans and worst case scenarios are run through before the big day in order to ascertain what the birth-giver is comfortable with.

“We’ll discuss where they want to give birth, who will be there, whether they would like an epidural, their attitudes towards medical intervention if it is required and how they feel about a C-section”, Rowlands explained.

But it is these worst case scenarios where our questions of capacity and consent crash into one another. What if someone changes their mind? Rowlands, who studied in England, said she was once with a woman who decided mid-labour that she wanted an epidural, de-

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spite having previously expressed a desire to go without medication.

“I think this broaches an interesting question regarding consent”, she said. “In some ways, this was not informed consent — there was no clear two-way discussion of the risks of having an epidural. Maybe this is a good example to argue against the idea that there is an altered state of mind which precludes a patient from giving their consent: if that were the case, then the birth plan would have to be followed without any deviation possible.”

Clearly, there is a very grey area here. “I just don’t know how else you do it”, said Counihan, at a slight loss.

“These situations are far more complex than the legislation provides for. No matter how many hundreds of pages are written on the legislation, some situations just occur that no one could ever have predicted.”

When asked if either of them had encountered ideas about the philosophy of birth, both Rowlands and Counihan explained they’d had medical ethics lessons, but nothing that touched on the detailed ideas developed by Villarmea. To Counihan, Trinity’s yearly medical ethics modules “often feel as if they’ve just been thrown in somewhere as a ‘tick the box’ module”.

His opinion of the modules was honest and enlightening: “I think medical students struggle to engage with medical ethics — I think we all tend to think in more binary, right or wrong, true or false, very precise ways. [Yet] the nature of medical ethics is that it can be somewhat obscure or vague, and while there are things that are black and white, so often real life medicine is not so clear. I think us medical students struggle with that way of thinking even if we would be too proud to admit it.”

Admitting the grey area, in my opinion, is the first step towards embracing V i l l a r m e a’s dilemma. I began with my mum and I’ll end with an idea that she drilled into me as a child: science and medicine answer questions, but philosophy asks them.

S o m e times, we must remind ourselves that there’s no specific answer.

A NIGHT AT HIBERNIA

Freja Goldman heads to an abandoned warehouse with anonymous figures for a night of music and self-discovery gan’s - full. Dicey’s? No - cesspit, a place where dreams go to die. Sisyphus, boulder: every night out is the same.

Surely, as the “cream of Ireland”, Trinity students can find somewhere better, chicer, to go?

May I suggest an alternative: an abandoned warehouse in the back arse of nowhere.

That was where I found myself on a freezing cold night in January, definitely not wearing enough layers, despite having anticipated the inevitable frostbite. Going against every parent’s warnings, and my own better reason, I had decided this was an event to attend on my lonesome. Shock and horror ensued when I stepped off the Luas (after successfully avoiding social interaction with anyone who seemed to be going to the same place) and found myself surrounded by eerily twinkling street lamps, unsettling stretches of grass and a darkness so overpowering it seemed as though I had entered another dimension.

In an attempt to “branch out” and “make 2025 my bitch” (jury is still out on how that’s going), I’d set my heart on going to an event hosted by House of Hibernia.

I’d stumbled across their Instagram account and been following them for about a year, but had never got myself to buy a ticket – mostly because I’ve been let down by ticketed events (cough, cough, Trinity) one time too many. But, somehow the manic energy of being home magine this: for Christmas and studying for Schols pushed me to acIt’s a Saturday night and you’re getting hype tually do something about my suppressed desire to go. for the night to come: bumping Glorilla, drink in hand, An empowering moment, that was. Press donate. Fill in cigarettes and ID (because even though you’re well into your credit card info. Stop for a moment to think whethyour twenties, the cashier at Lidl still thinks you’re un- er you’re getting scammed. Finish, press buy. Email ticks derage) locked and ready to go. It’s a beautiful night and in: “Heyho, thanks a mill for your contribution” you desperately need a break from gossipping outside So that was how I found myself staggering the Arts Block and evoking Nietzsche for the seventh self-consciously toward a desolate metal and concrete time in a tutorial (despite not having read any Nietzsche structure somewhere near the end of the Green Line or, in fact, the texts you were actually supposed to). We Luas. all get it, uni is hard. Luckily, drinking isn’t.

Being a socially awkward twenty-something So you stumble up Drury Street, realising you can have its challenges. But one thing it’s good for is might have overdone the mostly vodka, a splash of mixer that I’m excellent at sussing out which girl to cling onto drinks at pres. Where do you go? Doyle’s, Chaplin’s, Ho- in order to ensure both of us evade the gruesome fate

I

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of a serial killer on the loose. Needless to say, the twinkling lights and oppressive darkness made it seem like the perfect occasion for exactly this move.

I feel like such a man admitting that I can’t recall her name. But I do remember her long, blonde hair, leather jacket and black eyeliner. She’d also come on her own – her friends didn’t get tickets in time – and I think we both sighed with relief when I awkwardly approached her with a morbid joke about being lured into a serial killer’s den. Add that to the list of anecdotes you can’t get from your routine visit to the Pav. It’s funny how quickly you can bond when none of you know what lies ahead of you. It was the first time either of us had attended a gig like this – we noted the piñata hanging from the roof (if you can call it a roof ), and the people driving around in a children’s toy car, swinging canned beer at anyone in their vicinity.

It wasn’t all anarchy - just the right amount. As anyone who makes it to a House of Hibernia event can attest, the nights are meticulously planned – on this occasion, the event wrapped up in time for all of us to get on the Luas home. Nonetheless, abandoned places have always appealed to those in want of adventure. I remember climbing through ruins as a teenager, believing that we were sooo deep for seeing the value and beauty in the deterioration. Really, I think it must have been the German imported vodka and Små Sure (sweet, gross Danish shots) – not the poetic qualities of creepy abandoned farm houses – that made us feel that future nostalgia.

The warehouse where the gig was held had that same air of nostalgia. It felt as though, despite being desolate and, frankly, creepy as shit, the walls (or what was left of them) were made to be reignited by the purple and pink strobe lights. Much of this is owed to the effort of the team behind Hibernia.

Shaymon – the anonymous head of operations – and others had worked tirelessly to make the place presentable. More than this, though, they had managed to create an energy – a vibe, if I may be so bold – out of a metal structure and a few Papier-mâché birthday cakes. Hibernia had their cake and ate it too, literally: someone brought out a real birthday cake toward the end of the night. It was the three year anniversary, after all.

Believe it or not, though, the highlight of the night was neither the cake nor the unabashed annihilation of a poor, sunset-coloured piñata – it was the bands.

Fighting the bitter cold and somewhat questionable stage conditions (it was an abandoned warehouse after all), the bands showed up. Ate up the crumbs of that aforementioned cake, and so on.

Mickey Chaos kicked off the night, playing various smooth indie diddies such as ‘i <3 u Steve Wallis’ – a heartfelt song dedicated to the great Youtube stealth camper, Steve Wallis. Chaos was followed by Robbie

Stickland, who gracefully asserted that it is indeed ‘Cool To Start Smoking In Your 30s’. Projective went on last, sending the wavering souls remaining in the warehouse off into the night with their soulful harmonies.

Hibernia makes it possible to experience art in a way that feels organic and in touch with those who planned, those who played and those who attended. The organisers do a great job of putting humanity back in the modern “cultural event”, which can often only be described as inauthentic and commercialised.

Buying concert tickets nowadays seems like more of a financially upending act than it used to - or ought to - be. While a cold warehouse might not appear to be the most accessible medium through which indie artists can show off their amazing talent, it sure is more genuine than those big arena concerts, where the artists appear ant-sized and you wonder why you had to spend €50-100 to be there. Paying €10 to see, to support, three independent bands is way more purposeful and, like, so much more fun. Plus, you get the added bonus of having a witty and quirky story to regale your friends – or the readership of Misc. – with.

So the next time you find yourself in that eternal repetition of weekends spent in dingy bars, having the same conversation with strangers in the hopes of getting laid, think of all the abandoned forests, warehouses, and underpasses you could be in. Save a few bucks on the 6-8 euro Guinness, split a bottle of the cheapest vodka at Lidl (this is not sponsored), and indulge yourself in a cultural experience beyond the ordinary. Enjoy a night at Hibernia.

It wasn’t all anarchy - just the right amount

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LONG COVID As the last cohort to experience college in the heyday of the pandemic prepares to graduate, Hosanna Boulter reflects on Trinity in the time of Corona.

I

f you look down the next time you are queuing for a coffee at the Perch, you will see faded floor stickers instructing you to stay two metres

away from t h o s e around you.

If you look to the side the next time you wash your hands in a campus bathroom, you will see a laminated sheet of step-by-step instructions on how to wash your hands correctly. If you have a minute to spare, look up and watch any of the television monitors around campus.

Eventually you will come across a yellow infographic that has been a part of the rotation of slides on the televisions around campus for 5 years. The infographic asks: are you well enough to be here today? Then, it lists some classic COVID symptoms – a cough, chest pain, fever,

and shortness of breath – and tells you to go home if you are currently experiencing any of them.

On campus, you are never far from an artefact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year, the last cohort of undergraduate degree students who experienced university with COVID-19 related restrictions will graduate, and I will be one of them. Thinking back to my early days in college, I am struck by how normal it all felt – the masks, the testing, the isolating. I can’t speak for my peers, but when my mum dropped me off at college in September 2021, I thought the way we lived then would last forever.

The pandemic had completely ruptured the trajectory of my life. Overnight, I went from being like any other eighteen-yearold – worried about how I would

perform in my school leaving exams and if I had an invite to so-and-so’s house party on Saturday – to worrying that, if I brought COVID home, it could kill one of my parents. It only happened five years ago, but it seems so old-fashioned, like a story a grandparent would tell about a letter that arrived in the post one morning that changed everything.

That morning, as the first person to go downstairs, I picked up the post from the floor and left it on the ledge in the hall. One envelope caught my eye – it had a big b l u e National Health S er vice logo

i n the top lefthand corner and was addressed to one of my parents.

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COVID test. I then isolated myself in my flat in Halls for three days while waiting for the test result.

In my mind, all of this was normal. This was just how we lived now.

I had a brilliant first semester at college. Yes, the nightclubs were all closed. Yes, many of our lectures were online. Yes, we spent the evenings of our Freshers’ Week in freezing cold pub gardens. Yes, all the society events were held in weird little tarpaulin structures on the green outside the Arts Block and Front Square that gave you no protection from the elements. Yes, we hid in wardrobes and bathrooms so the person hosting the prinks or afters would not get in trouble for having more people over

Perhaps half an hour later, I was in the kitchen and could hear a hushed but frantic conversation taking place in the front room. Curious, I walked over to the door to try and eavesdrop, but it was promptly slammed shut, and the agitated whisperings continued. Later that day, my parents sat my brother and me down and told us that one of them was vulnerable to COVID and that we would have to do something called shielding – it was the start of a long eighteen months.

When it was time for me to leave for college, I uploaded my proof of vaccination for a 45 minute flight (from the UK) that did not require a passport check. Upon arriving at Trinity Halls, I was told that, if I was caught at a gathering of more than six people, I risked a fine or maybe even eviction. Three days before going home for my first Reading Week, I walked half an hour to a testing centre my mum had booked me into to take a PCR 20

than they should. But at the time, it was all part of the fun. We had no idea what we were missing as we had nothing to compare it to.

As a History student, I used to struggle to understand why people who lived through traumatic political and cultural events, like a war, would often go through the rest of their lives without ever speaking about what they had been through. I am not claiming to have lived through a war, or anything close to it, but I think I now understand such people a little bit better. These days, weeks can go by without me thinking of the pandemic and, to be honest, that’s the way I want it to be. I have no interest in reading a book or watching a show set during the pandemic. I was there – I know how miserable it was and how inescapa-

ble it felt; I don’t need someone else to tell me.

It is really strange to exist in a space where rules are shouted out at you that have no bearing on how you live your life.

Occasionally now, I will see one of the COVID-19 artefacts around campus, and it will remind me of something. The week I spent isolated in Halls when my friend group got COVID, having to go to the Arts Block reception to get a mask when I’d forgotten to bring one so I could attend a lecture, or how you had to book a seat in the library if you wanted to study there.

Though it felt normal to me then, I am glad it is not my normal now.

For the past three years, I have watched Freshers nervously frolic around campus and felt both envious of and pleased for them. I had a great first year at college, but I will never know how great it could have been without the pandemic.

PUNK ON PARLIAMENT SQUARE W

Helena Thiel documents when the Clash came calling at Trinity

hen the Clash walked onstage in Trinity’s grandiose Exam Hall for two explosive gigs in October 1977, it was a clash between a traditional institution and everything anti-institutional that punk embodied. Punk rockers spoke excitedly of the event afterwards and attendees remembered it fondly, but the media struggled to make sense of the scene.

Punk rock music emerged in America in the early and mid-1970s and quickly made its way across the pond to England. Musically, it rejected the existing trajectory of rock and roll that relied heavily on technical ability and sonic experimentation. In contrast to progressive rock, punk rock took a do-it-yourself approach. If you have something to say, play - not the other way around. Lyrically, it reflected the social malaise and restlessness of the ‘70s. It targeted all forms of oppression and authority using highly specific references to people, places, and events. Arising from urban, mostly working-class London youth, bands like the Sex Pistols came to embody the values and rejection of values associated with punk.

The Sex Pistols proved highly influential to other up-andcoming musicians, including the soon-to-be members of the Clash.

The Clash only played their first gig in July 1976 but, from then on, they rapidly made a name for themselves with fast-paced, aggressive playing and lyrics that called out systemic injustice and encouraged direct action. Punk rock concerts were often disorderly, reflecting the brash nature of the music. As a result, many

bands were barred from playing certain venues (only seven out of twenty-one gigs of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy’ tour went ahead as planned).

Having supported the Pistols, the Clash set out on their own tour in 1977, which included a major gig in London’s Rainbow Theatre that erupted into a small riot.

If 1976 was Year Zero, 1977 was Year One. Punk rock, to the dismay of the media, found unprecedented popularity and gained a cult following. The Sex Pistols’ anti-monarchist single ‘God Save the Queen’ was released to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee

context and became a unifying force amidst sectarian division, the ultimate act of defiance. By 1977, armed conflict had already lasted for a decade in Northern Ireland, and it had seeped into the music scene two years earlier when the UVF targeted musicians in the Miami Showband Massacre. Afterwards, few international bands were keen to play in Ireland, making the Clash’s visit all the more important.

The Belfast concert was scheduled for October 20th in Ulster Hall. Newspapers framed it as a test of the movement’s strength.

Tickets did not initially sell out, but anticipation was high – so high that the insurance company decided to pull out just as the crew had begun to set up equipment. While the insurance company cited outstanding fees, the band dismissed this as pure nonsense. More plausibly, they feared the event would erupt into violence.

This it did, as punks staged a riot in the street, landing them on the front page of The Belfast Newsletter the next day. A riot was not unusual for a punk rock concert or in the context of The Troubles, but it was an expression of a particular kind of youth disaffection.

After the disappointment in Belfast, the Clash were happy to play in Dublin the next day. The College authorities, having read about the riot from the day before, did not want a repeat on campus, but the Students’ Union organising the event would not buckle under pressure. For £1.50 (equivalent to £12 today), a thousand students flocked to the Exam Hall to see the Clash play two sets with support from the

Punk was fast and fleeting and had largely passed by Ireland until this point but was subsequently banned by the BBC and RTÉ for its offensive lyrics. At the same time, both the Sex Pistols and the Clash signed major record deals. 1977 was thus a balancing act: the Clash had to ride the wave of momentum but remain authentic to their roots.

In the autumn of 1977, the Clash embarked on the ‘Out of Control’ tour to mark the release of their debut album. Struggling to book venues in England, the band instead turned to Ireland.

Belfast would be the first stop, then Dublin. Punk was fast and fleeting and had largely passed by Ireland until this point; few bands had been able to capitalise on the success of their English counterparts.

Nevertheless, punk rock found a receptive audience in Ireland. It adapted to suit the Irish

21

with no regard to conventional grammar. In their own words, the Clash concert came at a crucial moment in time for Irish punks. Joe Strummer’s rapport with the crowd was a form of acceptance and a confirmation that Ireland was part of the greater punk rock scene.

The gig brought people together, revealing the strength of the movement.

Later, Strummer said of his time in Ireland that “between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to LIVE for one glorious, burning moment”.

As much as they rejected the notion, punk was gradually subsumed into the mainstream, and the conditions of 1977 that prompted the gig were never replicated. TCDSU went on to book both the Stranglers and the Buzzcocks, but it was the Clash who paved the way.

In the following years, the Clash found greater commercial success in America and beyond, and punk Count Bishops. The gig erational clash. Critics with appearance. In try- rock as a whole began to marked the first time an observed from afar and ing to make sense of the incorporate more polished international punk band analysed the whole ordeal movement’s growing pop- elements, transforming played in Ireland. After as a visual spectacle. The ularity, they acknowledged into new genres of muovercoming the first hur- irony of the setting did its revolutionary under- sic that drew heavily on dle of ensuring that they not go unnoticed, and they tones and calls for social both its ethos and sound would be allowed to play, looked on in horror as stu- change but concluded that but did not pack quite the the gig proceeded without dents from the respectable lyrics were only “suppos- same punch. It is difficult major commotion and left Trinity College let loose edly political”. to imagine a band like the a lasting impression on the for an exhilarating few Outside tradition- Clash playing in the Exam Irish punk scene. In the hours. They unanimously al media, punks had begun Hall today. Alternative audience were members agreed that punk rock was to produce their own news music is no longer an alof U2, who would go on a fad that would soon go outlets, DIY-style. Fan- ternative, and with T-Ball to reference the experience out of fashion like previ- zines like the English Snif- tickets selling for nearly in later songs as having ous, tangentially-related fin’ Glue and the Irish Heat €100, the point of concerts profoundly affected them. subcultural movements. Magazine were scrapbooks no longer seems to be to Reading reviews There was no substance to of photographs, cutouts, defy and disrupt. All is enof the gig reveals a gen- it; it had everything to do and hand-written articles tertainment.

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GETTING LUCKY IN THE LECKY The epitome of the college experience isn’t parties or academics, but the profound silence and unspoken chemistry between you and a complete stranger in the library, writes Nicolle Riley

I

t’s a distinct feeling that every college student comes across in their lives when they are sitting with their friends and catch a glimpse of what they believe is the hottest man alive. From your positioning in the library, you don’t have an ideal view, but you can see his hair and barely make out his side profile. You whisper to your friends over the textbooks you’re supposed to be reading: “Don’t look - he’s right behind you guys”. Everyone completes a full-body assessment of the man in question.

This moment feels like nothing and everything at the same time. You hold your breath slightly and attempt to gauge how obvious the persistent glaring and mouthing of words and thumbs up across the table is.

Upon self-reflection, you decide to brush past it and move on; you’re just in your head. But you can’t shake this feeling. The love of your life attempts to act studious while you fangirl. Naturally, your friends feed your delusion like no other, even though they don’t see what you see in them. Inevitably, you have to wonder about this guy. What does he study? What’s his star sign? What year is he?

Why haven’t I seen him a ro u n d ?

Who are his friends?

Trying not to be too conspicuous, you scrutinise what he’s wearing- it’s almost alarming how well dressed he is… but you remind yourself that’s expected on the fourthth floor of the Ussher.

You leave that study session revived. Yet, a part of you was lost in that library, as you sat for two and a half hours not completing a single ounce of work and wondering what your babies would look like. But you have to move on. Seriously. He was 6’6 tall with beautiful locks of hair, but that era has to end.

The next day, you return to the library with a sense of false hope, excited about the slim chance of seeing him again. As you sit in the deafening silence of the Ussher, you hear people taking out their AirPods and the strained breaths of those struggling with their essays. Aimlessly, you gaze out at the field when, to your surprise, you spot him again.

Is this fate? Perhaps. Suddenly, you start to wonder how you look and whether he even notices you, all while trying to play it cool.

The concept of a library crush is quite a thrilling thing. You never know when you will see this highly anticipated man again. It’s like watching a fish in a fish tank. You don’t know anything about their lives as you observe it from the outside. There comes a point in a long library stint where you have grown so bored trying to do the lecture readings that you have to settle for daydreaming about a man in Doc Martins, who likely inhabits the 23

Arts Block as a Film or English major and wants to be a ‘creative’. Your friends and you will text whenever you see him out in the wild. You failed to figure out his name, but for now, you settle without it and just envision what type of name it looks like he has. You will spot this campus celebrity occasionally reading in the library or on the lawn. Is he reading Socrates for fun or for coursework? An ever-present question that will remain an alarming mystery.

But, the most crumbling yet bonding feeling is when you meet someone who knows him or, even better, someone else who also has eyes on him. It’s like someone telling you they know Paul Mescal. What do you mean you know my celebrity crush, aka my Tuesday morning BESS boy library acquaintance? You realise it was too good to be true and you can’t gatekeep him for much longer. You both stand in solidarity, appreciating his beauty and asking each other the same questions as if you already know the answers. At times, it feels almost impossible to act

seriously in such a situation. It’s even more challenging to describe your feelings to someone who doesn’t understand your underlying agony, pain, excitement, and heartbreak. Everything that encapsulates a young, flirty teenage romance seems to rest solely on those three minutes of intense eye contact during exam season, and you wonder if anyone else noticed it.

I am writing this as I sit in the Boland Library. Every 20 minutes I contemplate if I should leave. Ultimately, that decision is in the hands of whoever walks into this library and will motivate me to pretend to work for another 15 minutes in an attempt to look engrossed in my studies. The played-out library crush is something every college student undergoes secretly indulging, despite their qualms. Amid exam stresses and homework boredom, one’s mind can easily be distracted by someone who sits diagonally from you on the third floor of the Ussher. That one late Thursday evening, while your friends are out, your vision is blurred and suddenly you forget what your ‘type’ actually is. At that moment, anyone’s back profile seems somewhat suitable and can become your newest crush. Like any bored college student, this person will always sit in the back of your mind. This whimsical fixation of yours has nudged you to adjust your hair and apply a hint of lipgloss, thinking maybe your future husband will stroll in at any moment, swipe their student ID, take a long look at the open seats, and change everything for you.

The weirdest feeling of all is witnessing this mysterious side character in your life in the flesh, outside the domain of the library.

You’re partly shocked, yet also relieved (I mean thank God they have a life outside chaining themselves to the Hamilton five days a week). But still, you’re starstruck to find them at Pav Friday with their friends.

This crush is everything a girl could want – all the excitement and adrenaline of a ‘talking stage’ minus any real conversation.

This one-sided relationship relies solely on spontaneous campus encounters as you both trudge up the staircase and decide to ‘randomly’ sit at opposite desks. But it’s right when you think everything is perfect that this love affair crashes and burns. Like all of your past situations, you are too emotionally attached, too close, too dependent, too needy, and likely have got the ick. You are obligated to forget them and move on. For now, they will remain a distant memory.

This one-sided relationship relies solely on spontaneous campus encounters

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(NOT) BORN IN THE USA W

Noah McNamara on navigating identity based on where you are and aren’t - from

hen meeting people for the first time, especially when away from home, I get the same question again and again: “Where are you from?” It’s a standard question, I know. But, no matter how I answer, the reaction always falls somewhere between surprise, dismay, or even distrust. “You sound like you are from America, you know that?” “There’s no way you are from here – you must be joking”... And on and on it goes.

I used to meet these reactions with humour and understanding as, to be fair, it is reasonable.

I’d explain to the questioner that I lived in the US for a couple of years when I was in my preteens (formative years and such). Or, that maybe it’s the fault of too much American television, or too many American friends. I won’t put into writing a final verdict, but there is certainly a popular opinion that my accent has some extra ‘Freedom’ in there. Either way, the conversation typically moves onto a path less travelled, and I can relax a little more.

However, recently I’ve been getting a tad exasperated. I feel a sort of hollow twang inside as the aforementioned script is handed back and forth. When the first words of every new person entering my life are ones questioning my place, my past and who I am, it is unsurprising that those questions begin to stick around a little inside. And, while

the specifics of my little problem are rather niche, it’s these questions that I’ve held onto for a time that begin to grow in significance.

My parents both grew up a town apart in southern Down.

They met as teenagers and, long story short, I ended up being born in Dublin. From there we moved around a lot until I was in secondary school, when we finally settled in a place that truly felt like home – back in south Down, the Mourne Mountains. The Mournes are beautiful, cast high above the sea and fettered with purple and red heather. They enshroud the land where I have spent the most time growing.

But where are we from?

What are we a part of ? Due to politics outside of my control, I didn’t grow up with a deep and alive Irish culture readily at hand.

I can’t speak Irish and, apparently, I don’t sound very Irish, either. But I do look pretty Irish – ginger and decently freckled – and I love the trees and hills and rain and wind.

Clearly, you can look at this from a micro to macro level. We all come from and are part of smallyet-elastic communities of family and friends and the immediate environment we live and grow in together. If someone understood the context of this community they would likely get a good answer to where I am from. But I’d wager that if I answered “Where are you from?”

by listing all the people who are important in my life, describing their personalities, detailing the places I’ve lived and the blend of cultures I’ve absorbed, I would cause more confusion than simply saying, “I’m from Ireland.” So is that too micro?

If I say I’m from Earth, that I’m a human, I may get a pity laugh. Now we’ve gone too macro, although this shared trait is often assigned surprisingly little value. So if I say I’m Irish, what understanding do they gain? If I said I’m American instead, what would change? They would probably assume I was born there or at the very least spent a lot of my life there. Is there anything else they’d assume? Surely a fisherman in Alaska and a billionaire in Florida can’t have some inherent Americanism within them that ties them together.

Of course, there is a central and shared culture, history and heritage in anyone’s homeland that is very important. Ash pebbledashed cottages and the bite of an attempted sea swim regardless of the season can be enjoyed all over this island.

So too can the immense breadth of music and art - that seems to confound all expectations of a place with such a small population - be enjoyed all over this island. Music contains our stories and is a means to pass them on, fighting against a continued effort to eradicate them. Shared suffering is another key piece to a country and its heritage. Suffering is 25

central to how we connect with others. If you can find mutual ground in suffering, then maybe you can better pass through it together. This is what communities are for and it can be a major pulse within a nation. We can be proud to have made the best with our circumstances and hardships, and that our parents and their parents have also done so. These are the pieces that represent us, not just a flag held far above our heads. These are the positives of what unites a nation and are what I hope would be appreciated when I call on Ireland as my place of root.

While this seems to have resolved the issue of how to identify 26

one’s place, the real problem for me is how the immediate community and culture that I am from is now attached to the modern nation state.

I’ve thought before that it may be harder for those actually from the US to feel love for their nation. To me, it is a terrifying nation for plenty of reasons, though beatniks and cowboys are obviously still pretty cool. But I also can’t always say that I’m Irish and proud. In terms of the politics and functions of the state, I don’t feel proud of Ireland.

It’s no individual’s fault. It’s when, typically out of fear, and in hopes of a solution, we apply our ideas and issues from within our immediate

community to the nation state that things get very muddled. Your community’s cries will move the smallest cog in the machine and hundreds of miles away someone else’s will move it back. The grand mean of what needs to be done will then suit almost no one and fear still grows. It’s not uncommon for an American to pronounce they are one of the ‘good ones.’ Unfortunately that means very little when they all seem to revel in exclaiming this fact. A nation should represent the collective people but ours have never done so, they are built in such a way that will never actually support our varied communities. Instead, we will always be

graced with solutions riddled with compromise, solutions that are addled and ineffective. This slow burn of lazy evil continues until enough people are tired of it, until someone steps up and offers an even more reactionary, ignorant and evil solution, and suddenly everyone’s shocked that fascism is back on the table.

The solutions then become blatantly brutal and our varied and invaluable communities are forever poisoned with hatred, and then eradicated.

We can’t be ignorant, we can’t just sit back and accept business as usual and let these archaic, stagnant structures fold in on themselves and destroy us. The modern era of polarised, partisan identities blocks out any and all useful constructive conversation. These days it seems some people believe one’s moral superiority grants one the right to do nothing, which only allows the very forces you claim to oppose to thrive, as inaction disguised as righteousness makes the problem worse and we become even more di-

vided.

Modern discourse fails to grasp the full spectrum of identity I speak of. As hyper-nationalism is on the rise again, so is a migrant crisis that will put pressure on most borders and any rigid concept of every country having their own separate little place in the world. I don’t have an easy solution, but pessimism is an indulgent privilege for those who can afford the time to wallow in despair.

If we want a future beyond fear and division, we must find new ways to define ourselves. Perhaps there are alternative narratives of identity that produce kindness and understanding, which might be more valuable. I can now at least begin with a deeper understanding that there is importance in my immediate community, my Irishness and in my humanness. But what we must do is cast a critical eye on how we weigh these elements of identity. It’s possible our future will see increasing failures from the powers that be to support them all. Prior-

itising, sacrificing and adapting aspects of these things, our identity, may be necessary, but I want to believe we will sacrifice our humanity last of all. Examining our own identity and how it may reflect the status quo may seem simplistic, but it’s a crucial first step, one that leads to a deeper understanding of what truly benefits us, a stronger camaraderie with all people, and the possibility of enacting actual creative change.

Recently, I found myself dancing my heart out to two of my close friends, an American and an Irishman, rocking out their adaptation of Cooley’s reel on stage together. Regardless of really knowing how to define an answer to the question of where I am from yet, I feel place and belonging with them and other faces in the room. I can still feel hope. This, I know, is the core of my place (‘nation’): with the children of many who fare from this windy isle and farther afield. With those that share in my head, heart and humanity – regardless of accent.

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LAST FRIDAY NIGHT: A HISTORY OF THE PAV Shea Delaney discovers the Pav’s past

T

he belfry of the Trinity Campanile serves as the allegorical central meeting point for many on campus. The statues representing divinity, science, medicine and law stand proud, with Homer, Socrates, Plato and Demosthenes – pioneers of the study of humanities – overseeing this guild of students. At the other end of campus looms another meeting point, overseen not by 28

titans of ancient knowledge but by the names of former sports captains: the Pav. When current Trinity students hear any utterance of the Pav – the Pavillion Bar –, it likely conjures an image of the campus bar overflowing with students, or the infamous Pav marquee outside. Pav Fridays rage on as the bar staff dole out pints of the Pav’s own new-

ly released signature lager. However, older alumni might have other associations; the building opened its doors in 1885 and has gone through 140 years of evolution to reach its seminal point today.

In the years leading up to 1885, Thomas Drew, an architect from Belfast, befittingly provided the design for the Pav before going on to design another beloved centre of on campus discourse – and lighter drinking – the Graduate Memorial Building (GMB). At the time of opening, the Pav was officially the Cricket Pavilion. A smaller building built on the college property for the purpose of housing changing rooms and bathrooms as well as a reception room capable of hosting meetings and providing post-game refreshments for those coming from College Park.

It served the dual practical purposes of providing a centre for hygiene and a meeting place for sportsmanship.

Over the next seven and a half decades, players interested in celebrating a win or commemorating a loss over a fresh pint from the keg had to venture from the Cricket Pavilion to the Buttery. The Buttery was the centre for drinking, indoor smoking and student events on campus throughout this time. The Cricket Pavilion became a bar in 1960 following the Dublin University Athletics Club, the body responsible for Trinity sports clubs, successfully acquired a liquor licence for the property. College implemented its own restrictions on hours that alcohol was permitted to be served: 3:30pm to 6:45pm during term time, with final call drawn back to 6:15pm outside of term time. The hours would change over time, with the bar now open from 12pm to 11pm year round. This marked the Cricket Pavilion expanding its purpose to a centre for socialisation outside of sports.

The Buttery and the Pav both served alcohol from 1960 through to

2006. In a University Times article, Trinity Professor Neville Cox, the Registrar and then Dean of Undergraduate Studies, outlined a distinction between Arts students socialising in the Buttery and sportspersons socialising in the Pav. When the Buttery stopped serving alcohol in 2006, the Pav became the on campus haunt for all students, in turn creating the meeting place of humanities and sports.

Throughout this time and persisting to the present day, the premises has been formally recognised as the Cricket Pavilion. ‘Pavilion’ and, later, ‘Pav’ were abridged versions of the name coined for convenience, however this name also became more apt as the Pavilion

nered with college societies. Students from multiple Dublin based universities have been known to attend the renowned event in order to see what the furor is about (so blame UCD students for the never-ending queue). The spirit of Pav Friday enabling all students to take part in any social outlet from conversation to dancing is what captures the soul of the Pav as it exists today.

The one thing that Pav Fridays prove, irrespective of anything else, is that the story of the Pav’s evolution is yet to finish. When the 2025 ‘re-freshers week’ Pav Friday was cancelled on account of Storm Éowyn, it made headlines on both Trinity News and The University Times. An unprecedented re-refreshers week was introduced to host the planned Pav Friday a week later. This introduced a widespread discourse around the tradition, as Pav Friday regulars debate whether the Pav FriBar now provided to a larger clien- day entertainment should introduce tele beyond sportspersons. This was bands or stay true to DJs and the especially aided by the Pavilion not controlled rave ambience. requiring a student identification for The bar will stand strong so admittance, which the Buttery Bar long as this discourse continues to necessitated. manifest as patronage to the PavilWith only one bar on cam- ion. The bar provides a lot for curpus, the later noughties saw the rent students, from jobs behind the popularisation of buying cans and bar to revenue which supports sports other portable (and cheaper) drink clubs. The beloved staple also prooptions from the Pav. Popular phras- vides to its newer patrons in the hues that can be attributed to the ar- manities – during essay season, after chetypical ‘Trinner’ evolve from this a long night in Kinsella Hall, there is trend: “to have a Bav in the Pav, 24 hour access to locker rooms and Gav”, references purchasing cans of showers beneath the Pavilion bar for Bavaria Premium Beer. Many stu- students carrying a T-card. dents opted to drink this while sitThrough its students, Trinity ting around the College Park cricket promises to gift the world a historfield. Throughout Hilary Term exam ical tradition, a social community, periods, Students’ Union class rep- a legacy in sports and an outlet for resentatives began to encourage the education and discourse. This can practice astutely called, “Exam to all be found in the confined space Pav”. of the Pav. I think everyone would Recent history of the Pav is benefit from a picture at the Pav on encapsulated by the emergence of their graduation day. It may be just Pav Fridays. As the name suggests, as, if not more, significant than the the event is a night out in the Pav one you will inevitably take in front on a Friday hosted by the Students of the campanile.

Union Ents committee, often part-

I think everyone would benefit from a picture at the Pav on their graduation day

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HOW TO SNEAK INTO TRINITY BALL Crashing Trinity’s event of the year isn’t easy, but it can be done. Lucia Orsi hears from a previous (successful) intruder

Set the scene for us. Why did you decide to sneak into Trinity Ball?

It was T-Ball in my second year, so 2023. The ticket day rolled around, I didn’t get a ticket, so after embarrassing myself on Instagram and debasing myself with the Pav Ticket Competitions, I was left with no other option than to sneak in. My hand was forced, basically.

What was the schedule on the day? How did you feel?

Well, there were still nay-sayers around me who didn’t believe that I was able to pull it off. Some friends were still trying to find me a ticket, which didn’t happen (pro-tip, those people in the Instagram comment sections selling tickets are all scammers).

Day of, I arrived at campus around 3pm and preparations for the ball were already u n d e r w a y.

I had a tote bag with my tux, and I had gone to Centra to 30

get supplies. I had my hiding place ready - the basement of the film building, below the arts workshop. I knew the code for the building but when I pressed in the code, it didn’t work. I started panicking, it was already a tense situation, and then a security guard started walking up to me and I thought, “This is over. Mission has failed.”

He asked me, “Can I help you?” I said I’d forgotten my code for the building, and then immediately he was like “Oh let me help you” and just let me into the building.

So the lesson from that is: confidence is key.

If you act like nothing’s wrong, then nothing is wrong.

Having gained access to the building, what was next?

For those who haven’t been in the film building, it’s labyrinthine, asylum-esque. To get to the workshop, you have to go through these corridors like a rat in a tunnel.

Anyway, I got down into the basement and by this stage, it was 4pm. So my waiting game

began.

Well, the basement is a place you’re not supposed to spend a lot of time in. It’s just storage space. It’s dusty, cobwebs but, conveniently, there was some red-bull I could use as a mixer. It toed the line between asylum and resort because it did really have bits and pieces for me.

I was doing yoga because they have yoga mats. There’s amenities.

The alcohol was a question mark, to be honest.

While I was in this basement going mildly crazy and getting stressed thinking I was gonna get caught, my friends were drinking at pres and having fun. There were multiple points where I heard the security searching the building.

I was uncertain of how the plan was actually going to work once I left, because the film building is just separate from where the arena of T-Ball is. By the time I was leaving, I’d had a bit of alcohol so I was feeling more confident. Plus, the workshop has full-length mirrors, so I’d been getting ready and psyching myself up for the exit.

thing I remember most is everyone else’s reaction to me having snuck in.

I guess in some ways it was q u i t e unceremonious. It just consisted of me being in a basement and then emerging, at which point everyone else is buzzed up and screaming for me. Which was nice, obviously, but I realised that I just been in a basement while everyone had been partying. It wasn’t a great T-Ball.

What time did you make your escape?

Really? Why not?

At 9:30 I left, so I’d been in there a really long time.

T-Ball is in need of serious reform. It’s definitely not worth paying for but, honestly, is it even worth sneaking in for? I wish I could say yes, emphatically. But I just don’t think T-Ball is that great. Is it worth going at all?

That being said, I am on the list of 6000 suckers who are paying one hundred euros to go to T-Ball this year. Should I be sneaking in again? Absolutely. Will I sell my ticket at the last minute? Maybe.

What was it like waiting for the ball to start?

Was that wait worth it?

It felt like a psychological experiment, so I guess that’s the one hundred euros you’re forgoing. It wasn’t my favourite (laughs). It would have been nicer to hide out somewhere else.

What happened once you left the building?

It was nighttime by the time I left, and I was suddenly in the thick of it. It was a 100 metre walk to the ball so I just strolled in.

And that was it.

What did it feel like?

It was a massive relief. The

Would you recommend sneaking in?

Absolutely. No questions. All Trinity students should sneak into T-Ball. I think it’s a right of passage. I think everyone should do it once. It felt legendary in its own way, but the actual experience was less exciting.

What are your top tips for those attempting to sneak in this year?

Find a spot that makes for a good story. Or else just embellish your experience. Finding a good hiding spot is essential and if you can get the tunnels involved, do.

Don’t get caught.

Also you need some sort of supplies.

Would you do it again?

I don’t know. I might think about it. Definitely not ruling it out.

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