Society Highlight: FLAC

By Nadine Fitzpatrick and Chloe Dalton Trinity FLAC is the Trinity College Dublin branch of the national Free Legal Advice Centre. FLAC is a voluntary human rights organisation which exists to promote equal access to justice for all. During term time, we run a weekly free legal clinic with a qualified solicitor. This year, our service changed to a phone clinic due to Covid-19. We were delighted to be in a position to continue offering the service over the phone and are delighted that so many members of the college community have availed of it.

On 10th March of this year, we were busy fundraising for our Period Poverty Event in the Arts building and the Hamilton when we received the news that Trinity would be closing. We had our Period Poverty Speaker Event planned for that evening, which unfortunately we were forced to postpone. It was such a disappointment, but our First Year Rep (now Fundraising Officer) Georgia is planning to hold the event in Hillary term next year.

Each year we recruit student volunteers to take part in pro bono legal research projects to send to NGOs with the aim of furthering social justice. During Summer 2020, with more time on our hands than ever, we ran a summer legal research project on Technology and Access to Justice. The Covid-19 crisis really pushed to the fore an issue that the Irish legal system needed to address. The legal system in Ireland and abroad has been slow to adopt the advancements of 21st century technology, however the pandemic has made virtual remote courts a practical reality. A team of 67 legal researchers prepared a report on the potential impact of IT on access to justice and will hopefully be of benefit to the Independent Law Centres Network.

In solidarity with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, our Michaelmas term research project is on Racism and Hate Crime in Ireland and is currently being edited by our Legal Research Officer Síofra. A key issue we seek to examine is the urgent need for updated racism and hate crime legislation in Ireland.

Sadly, we were unable to host our annual Sleepout in association with TCDSU in aid of the Peter McVerry Trust this October. This event is always a huge amount of fun for us committee members and also for our volunteers. Instead, Trinity FLAC took part in Movember along with Lawsoc, TCLR and a guest appearance by Professor Neville Cox! We were delighted to raise over €500 for a fantastic cause.

Although we were not able to run our well-established panel discussion events in person this semester, the pandemic has brought some silver linings for us at Trinity FLAC. Thanks to our online approach we were able to upload extra events and hear from speakers that may not have been able to talk to us in our traditional format. Additionally, we were delighted to establish our YouTube channel which allows us to upload the events, enabling our members to watch these informative discussions in their own time. If you want to do a bit of productive procrastination, watching a social justice panel discussion is definitely the way to go!

To conclude our Michaelmas Term events, Trinity FLAC decided to run a mini-series of speaker events for the first time. The series – Referenda in Review – spanned three weeks with four distinct panel discussions which focused on a range of referendum-related social justice and political issues. The idea behind the series stemmed from a meeting where we discussed that although the run up to a referendum usually generates significant public interest and debate, after Ireland goes to the polls and the result is announced, the subject matter tends to be put to the back of our national consciousness. The purpose of the mini-series was to examine whether referenda we have had over the last number of years have led to tangible change in Irish society and whether these constitu-