 miners, so we're really excited to have Lin the Archdei to talk about, and whatever she wants to talk about. We're just going to, I think we'll just probably have her ready to be short and opening her marks, and then we're going to open her up to the floor, and hopefully we can have a great discussion and see how it goes. But I'll have it over to you now to just kind of say some opening remarks. Thank you, Cain. And thanks for the invite. I suppose when I was thinking about what I would talk about today, because I do talk at a lot of events and the thing is I get extremely sick of hearing the young kind of fights. So I try and find different avenues and different ways that I can explore the things that I'm passionate about, one of those being inequality in the education system, poverty, stuff around gender and class. And I've tried to explore them through a number of different avenues. So sometimes when I talk into groups, I'm literally exploring, I'm doing my thinking as I'm having the conversations, you know, so, you know, I'm not some sort of fully formed, you know, politician with all these ideas, and that's what I think, you know, I kind of, you know, I'm on a steep learning curve. Politics wasn't something that I aimed to get into. But when I sat down to write out a bit of a kind of a description for you today about what I'd write about, I decided to, I decided, first of all, I talked back because you were talking about, like, entering, you know, my journey, I suppose, into politics, I think was something that was meant to me. And I was like, well, how did that actually happen? So I sat down to try and think about that and actually what actually won the election for me, I think was my story and own in your own narrative and using your own experience in a positive way, even though that can be really, really scary, you can be attacked for it. So you're basically an attack for who you are when you tell your own story, so that's always quite hard. But it was a guy called, we had just started my campaign in Trinity and so basically what I'm going to talk to you about is where I've used my story throughout, and I think how I've got other young activists to work in my office for me to also use their own experiences to drive the policies that I work on. But in my early days in Trinity, when Donald MacLeon-Born, who was the president at the time, started kind of planting the seed in my head that I should run for the presidency, and it's not something that I would have thought about or wanted to do, I cared about activism, I cared about campaigns, I worked in the addiction sector for 18 years previous to that, in the homing sector, I've been developing addiction programmes since I'm very young, since I'm 17, because I left school at 15, when I had my daughter who's now 18. And then just after becoming a Trinity student, and I kind of was self-taught and then I didn't know what different certificates and stuff, and so I had all this history of working in the area of social justice, so I had a lot of passion and heart, but I didn't really see that in politics, I've seen it more in advocacy on the ground with people in a one-to-one way. But Donald kept planting that seed in my head that I could bring something different to the students' union, I could bring all that lived experience and that lived reality and try and raise awareness about the things that I care about through a different avenue. And I kind of took on the challenge, but it was actually a guy called Jack Cantillam who contacted me one day at the very beginning of the campaign just before, and he was a Trinity student just a year or two before my time, and he contacted me and he said, Use your story, Liam, tell your story, you need to get it out there, and it wasn't part of my campaign at the beginning, it was just to talk about access and inclusion, but not necessarily to kind of put me at the centre of that. And he said, you need to tell your story, and I was like, you know, I kind of thought maybe he's right, but that's quite scary. And the first day I stood up on Trinity to speak, I had no public speaking background, I spoke twice at two drug conferences, but that was very much on an area that I was really confident in and I felt okay in. So then I was in this new space that all these young, intelligent people, you know, much more experienced than speaking out loud than me, you know, to do debate in school. We never got to experience any of that, and I kind of thought, I can't kind of rise up to this standard here, I want to just fall flat on my face. And it was only when Jack Cantillam said to me, don't try and be the other presidents, don't try and be the other candidates. You need to just go up and tell your story, why you're so passionate, where you think that can change, and what can you do, and what can you bring to the policy of Trinity? How can you create a space for people from diverse backgrounds? And as soon as I did that, as soon as I allowed that to be what was the campaign, I relaxed, the nervousness went on, I began to speak. You know, you can't go far wrong when you're speaking about yourself or your own story because you're not trying to remember facts and figures and policies, and I'll do this and I'll do that. You're literally just talking about what you care about and what you love and how you think that those things can benefit others within the college population. So I thought that's what kind of catapulted me then into becoming Trinity students union president and I suppose it was really reaffirming to me that Trinity wanted to see that change. Trinity students were like, okay, I think we think this is good and we think this is good. I might not have been represented above them all. They all might not have wanted, you know, needed the particular things that I was bringing to Trinity, but they wanted them things brought to Trinity, which is really powerful, you know, and the same when I was elected to the Shannard again. It was the alumni gone, okay, this diversity is good and bringing this aspect in is good and I think it's a real testament, I suppose, to Trinity students and Trinity alumni. I've had people that would be so different in politics to me that would come up and say to them like, you know, I voted for you and I think you're doing great work. We won't ever agree on X, Y and Z, but you know, and that's really quite powerful that people will appreciate diversity and put you in a position and give you that platform even if they don't necessarily completely support every single thing that you do. But they support some aspects of what you do and realise the importance of it there, of course. And when I moved then into politics the past two years have been, me I suppose, taken my lived experiences and what I care about. One of them being addiction, dual diagnosis, and one of them being drug decriminalisation, which is mainly decriminalisation of possession more so than because the drugs would still be illegal, so sometimes I can be confused. I was on obviously the committee for the Eighth Amendment, I'm on the education committee, I'm the co-founder of the civil engagement group. So myself and Senator Higgins should have naturally been with the other university senators when we went in, because that's what would have happened previously. And we decided that they were political elites in the sense that they've been there a long time, they knew what they were doing, they were really, really good. There was Michael McDill, such an amazing legal mind, there was other people that just had that they knew politics inside out and myself and Senator Higgins felt that maybe we could create something slightly different to that and that we wouldn't be having to compete with these kind of geniuses of politics, that we could find a caravaspace for ourselves. So we looked at the other candidates coming in and we looked at their stories and we looked at their backgrounds, what they worked in, and they all had different aspects of social justice. So it was one work for the National Women's Council, the CEO of Alzheimer's Island, the CEO of a disability federation, Francis Black who developed the rise foundation for families of people in addiction. One that worked for Simon and the Cope community, all kind of similar backgrounds and not backgrounds in terms of where we grew up or how we grew up, but the work that we did. And we came together to kind of create something new and we were all force time senators and we weren't kind of career senators, so we didn't kind of really set out to become politicians in the same sense, we all had different kind of jobs before that we were doing. And our whole past two years has been, I suppose, quite powerful. I've used my story a lot. People can't, you know, when you're talking about poverty or disadvantage or deprivation or undereducation. Why I think it's powerful for you to use your own experience, whatever your experiences are in life, you know, they're not going to be, they're not all going to have the same experiences. But when you talk about them, you kind of talk with authority, especially when you're in politics, a lot of the time people can talk in abstract terms about social issues or statistics. And, you know, these just abstract stuff. So when I come in, I try and bring on the stuff that I know about the people back into that space and bringing the reality back into that space and dragging it down out. The abstract a little bit. I'm just bringing it back down to the ground and reminding them whose lives that policy affects. But doing it in a positive way, like I wouldn't be very confrontational or anything in the shannot. I've got a lot done, mainly probably because we are quite good at working cross-party and we've gained the respect of all the parties within the shannot as a group. We have, as a group and individually, I think we've probably won well over 100 amendments to legislation, which is quite unusual for independence to do. I've amended the domestic violence legislation. I've amended the mediation bill. I have amended the adoption bill. And that, apparently before airtime, didn't really happen very much. You wouldn't really get any amendments in. So that's quite powerful in itself, and maybe that's just because of the numbers. Who knows that might change next time around and be like, God, that's not working anymore. We weren't really that amazing, were we? But it has been good. The make-up has been positive. So I've worked obviously on a lot of different things, but I also use my platform to kind of bring people along on that journey of not only my story, but my community story because it's kind of a collective story. And I've used it in a way that I hope is not beating people over the head with it. It's just going, listen, this is what's happening. Not blaming, because if you just keep blaming one particular political party when it's a historical, systematic thing, you kind of have to break it up away from just looking at it in political terms and looking at it through philosophical, sociological, all those different aspects and looking at how you can address in that way. Instead of just playing politics with an issue all the time, whether that be poverty or education inequality, because it's just more deep rooted and they span over history. So it's how do you unravel that and unpack that. And that's what I suppose I've been trying to do with my story. And I also, outside of politics, I've used my platform to address other areas. So, for instance, I'm just about to launch three and three maths grindskills in the North, the Northside's outside on the inner sea. And we've been working on that for months. And we've built a big database of maths volunteers that have studied maths in college and, you know, with different criteria for them to me. And it's for kids that can't afford grinds. And it won't be enough to bring them up to a level playing field. But it will be enough for the kids that are engaged, but they're just missing out because they just don't have that extra support. They'll be mostly from kids, from desk girls, like from community similar to mine. I just wouldn't have access to that. So that's one of the areas, you know, that I'm working on. I've also began to build a database on mentorships. The Tommy Turning Show actually kicked off something really powerful. By just telling my story, I suppose, by sharing my experience and my story, people are genuinely good. People are good people and they want to help. And I've been inundated constantly with emails from people that have seen the show saying, what can I do? I had a big question because I had to see a lot of things I don't know. You know, some say you have to stop sharing the narrative and go, yeah, but actually these are the tangible things that we can do. So it's about trying to match them up, you know. So I built a database of everyone that contacted me, and I began to introduce them to individual schools. We started in Dublin, but we're trying to do the other big cities as well. It's just obviously easier for me to do it in Dublin because it's so accessible, but it's nationwide. You know, I need to be able to spread the same format into other communities. So now, like I say, last year, the Department of Foreign Affairs, which is my favourite department, they really are so inclusive and they have me constantly to talk about class to all their ambassadors. They're really active, they're really kind of forward-thinking. So they're bringing kids in now from desk skills onto their programmes, which there's usually a competition for. But unfortunately, some skills will never be able to compete with some of the private skills and the resources and the language that they'll use on an application compared to so the Department of Foreign Affairs has carved out spaces where they just go on. And then people get to work together from all different sectors of society then and get to know each other and kind of help heal some of the us and them kind of stuff because they're working together. So we're trying to build that out for that. We have different law companies, TV production, human rights laws. We've laws of different sectors now that have given me their information. And now we just match them up with skills. We had one young lad do his placement last year. He would love to be a photographer. I think he was from Finglas. So he went into, I don't know, a kite entertainment who does like Google Box and Ireland's Got Talent and all those things. And these kids would just never have the connections. They don't have the social and cultural capital to ever be able to access that type of work experience. Cos most people think it's all financial, but it's not sometimes. It's just like just known somebody to ask, you know, can my child is doing work experience this year? Like grown up. Like if I ask my mashy manufacturer across the road making term stats, the whole fucking school work there. We had a whole community learning how to make term stats. Sorry, it was like last week. I don't think we need all this territory. So it's kind of like spreading that out a little bit and being able to access, order, order experiences and broaden horizons and, you know, that kind of thing. And then I take a lot of kids in as well. I had a bill recently to lower the vote age to 16 and local and European elections. And myself and Fintan Warfield. And what happened with that was I had a young lad. He was only 16 working for me. And he'd done the hot from Finglas from a desk girl. Does have an interest in politics contacted me himself. And I took him on for a year, one day a week for a year. And he used his own experience then to do a research project with 40 other desk girls. And we invite all the desk girls into Lensterhouse trying them up how to carry out the research. Owned on up the questionnaire. The 16 year old. And we were trying to show proof how a 16 year old can like create all this. But yeah, you're not going to let them vote, you know. And he's actually done all my research work, my speech and everything for the actual day. And he carried out that whole research project and done the analysis then when it came back. Now obviously I mentored him a bit. But it was fairly much led by him. So I do a lot of that as well. So sometimes the legesis of peace is just one piece of the work. I suppose that I do. And I try and focus on lots of different other projects as they come up. Lots of talking because people ask questions. Be back. I think that deserves a round of applause. I guess in terms of owning your story, I think I was around Trinity around the time just before you as well. I was actually friends with Jack Antelon. His story is much nicer story. I guess when you were running for the SU and in your work now, your story is very... It does stand out in a way. And it's something that really captures a lot of people's hearts, a lot of people's imagination. And I think among the Trinity community it was like wow, this young woman who's gone through the Trinity Access program has a kid which was unusual for a student. So it was clear that you could obviously add something to the Trinity community that most people couldn't. And as you said, you were a different candidate to the others. But there are still a lot of people who are just kind of that regular type of Trinity student or young professional or something with a death circle. And I guess if those people were just thinking about their own stories and minutes that would be problematic because you also have to be thinking about other people. Because those stories are stories of privilege and a story. So what would you say to people who maybe haven't had as much of a struggle or a class struggle or anything but want to be able to be involved in social justice? Because you don't want to be, as you said, if you don't understand it, you can't really be there as much. But if you still care and you want to be involved, how can you kind of square those two problems? Well, I suppose I always look at you. When you look at college students and internships or people offer their resources all the time if they care about some particular social justice end of things. So you would have, say if I run a campaign, a lot of people contact me and saying I'm actually really interested in this. But the thing is I'm not the fourth person to do that. So there's all these amazing campaigns in communities that don't have, they can't carry out a piece of research because first of all they don't have the time because they might be working full-time jobs and this is another piece. Say what happens to me now, what I do in terms when they come to me. And I feel a little bit bad for them, right? Because now they'll come in from Trinity mostly will contact me and they'll have an interest in international relations or politics or whatever it is. Or else I might be studying any of those things and they just would like to be involved. And what I deal with them now is I kind of send them away from them. So they come, they're doing their internship with me, but I then tie them into a community that needs them the most. Or else they'd be left sitting in the office reading Google and show you feel like it's not fair. So the most recent one I had an intern in from Trinity doing his masters on social policy and I had him carry out a piece with safety net. So safety net provides healthcare to people that need it the most but are probably the least likely to receive it. So Syrian refugees are the long-term homeless and the various different aspects of it. But they have a mobile unit that goes and stores like medicals on the Syrian refugees and helps them try and integrate and blah, blah, blah. But it was only one on so much money and that. So I'm like actually I don't really have anything of you to partner with now but you could really actually do, you could be there intern and actually carry out that really important piece of work around migration and intervention with Syrian refugees. I have another talent travellers group that I'm supporting and the next intern that comes in I will, I support them. They do one day a week with me and then they probably do two days a week out with I'm hoping the next one would be the talent travellers group because we've had no kind of analysis of the conditions or the numbers of travel families in Tala for the past 20 years or something. So I think trying to identify sometimes if we have an interest and we care about social justice it's kind of looking a little bit outside of the field a little bit because you'll get so much more from working in the community sector in that way. Like if you have research skills, if you have an economics degree and you would also do some sort of cost-benefit analysis on some particular thing that they're working on that means more to them than anything that you could really do through my office and stuff and you get to get involved on the ground. Like the regeneration of Michael's estate is another great one like they have a housing project there so people all want to look at so homelessness is a big thing that people are passionate about and care about and want to do something about but there's so many layers to that and it's quite complex not complex in the sense that what we need to do but complex in the sense that different groups within the homeless kind of community. So say there's a site that needs to be regenerating on Michael's estate nobody ever thinks, well I can't maybe I'm very aware of people on the streets and I want to do something about that but can I impact that another way with my skillset? So like does a housing group in Michael's estate years in a regeneration work and one of their names is John Bissett and one of their names is Rita Spaffagan they've built this whole cost rental model but I think how Murphy is actually going to take on them and actually do but they were just a local community group that worked there that have been chipping away at this years and years with no resources and no help so like what I'm saying is that if you're interested in a particular area and housing is just one, it's to actually do a bit of research outside of the Simon communities to focus the politics because we have all these big names that we looked at if we want to volunteer when actually just lots of other satellite programmes I don't have the brands I suppose or the air time but you would still be making a massive contribution to the thing that you care about in those projects