UCD Students’ Union works to represent every one of the 30,000+ students attending UCD. We offer help, advice and an advocacy service for students. We also run cheap student shops, affordable entertainment & campaigns promoting the best interests of our members.

Your elected President & Sabbatical Officer team take care of the organisation of the Students’ Union and they depend on 8 elected College Officers & 200 Class Reps for feedback, communication & co-ordinating SU events & campaigns. The priority of everyone in your Union is to ensure you have the best possible experience of college life at UCD.

Every spring, we hold elections to decide who will represent UCD students for the following academic year. In March 2014, Marriage Equality was one of the most important issues for Students' Union election candidates. Feargal Hynes, Presidential candidate, promised to stand up for the rights of fellow students & orchestrate the largest ever voter registration drive ahead of the referendum.

Excerpt from Feargal's election Manifesto.

Following election, we led a 2014 voter registration drive in conjunction with UCD LGBTQ+ society. 4,500 students were registered as new voters in the space of two weeks from November 10th-26th. This was the highest number of students registered by any individual students’ union in the country.

We continued to register 1000s of UCD students as voters all the way up to Tuesday 5th May, the closing date for entry to the Supplement to the Register of Electors 2015 – 2016.

“4,500 students were registered as new voters”

UCDSU Facebook status update later November 2014.

Over 300 of you attended the launch of the Students’ Union #VoteforME campaign along with head of Amnesty Ireland, Colm O’Gorman. Support following the launch was mobilised via social media & word of mouth. Our campaign was about personal stories– your stories, your faces and your reasons to vote for marriage equality. Together we put up hundreds of posters, we ran TV screen adverts and we even put it on the SU shops checkout screens.

Hundreds of UCD students & staff lent their faces and messages to the campaign.

Upwards of 35,000 students throughout Ireland were registered as new voters ahead of the marriage equality referendum—we personally accounted for over 20% of that total registration.

As the referendum approached, we focused on getting out the largest possible number of student voters for the day. A video driving home the importance of 18-35 year olds to the overall success of Yes Equality was produced by Students’ Union staff and was widely shared by other universities & members of the Yes campaign.

We left the office late on May 22^nd after a day spent on electronic devices texting, messaging & emailing everyone we knew to see if they voted and checking Twitter for turnout updates.

May 23^rd was a great day to be part of a students’ union & part of the student vote. Reports from all over Ireland suggested record youth turnout and the referendum result confirmed it.

We worked for our community and to represent your desire for a better place for that community in Irish law— we worked to fulfil commitments in our ethos & election manifestos to you.

“Reports suggested record youth turnout and the referendum result confirmed it.”