Anya Wilson and Athena Wu of Trinity College Dublin’s Historical Society (Hist) have been crowned team winners of the 66th Irish Times Debate final, Ireland’s longest-running third-level debating competition.
The individual speaker’s award went to Cian Carew of the Solicitor’s Apprentices Debating Society (SADSI).
The runner-up team was UCC Law Society’s Tara Kennedy and Joyce O’Sullivan and the runner-up individual was Christina Mohan of King’s Inns.
The motion for this year’s final was “This house believes the United Nations has had its day”.
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Speakers were competing for the Demosthenes Trophy for best team, and the Christina Murphy Memorial Trophy for best individual, as well as places on an all-expenses-paid tour of the United States for the three winning speakers.
A dozen speakers took part in the final at Dublin City University on Friday evening, the culmination of a competition that began last autumn. Some 140 teams of 280 third-level contestants took part.
Human rights barrister Caoilfhionn Gallagher, who won the team award representing UCD in 1999, was the debate chairperson.
She praised the standard of the debate and pointed out that the Irish have more special rapporteurs working for the United Nations – not just per head of population, but overall.
Among those present in the audience was the barrister and historian Charles Lysaght, who won the first competition in 1960. He described it as the “highlight of my life”.
Announcing the result, Irish Times editor Ruadhán Mac Cormaic said we are living in an age in which “we fret constantly about an incipient crisis of literacy. There’s a kind of moral panic about young people’s attention spans or the dumbing-down of the culture”.
However, he said the quality of debate in the final was “as high if not higher than it has ever been in the competition’s long history”.
“Nobody could leave this hall tonight with anything other than a sense of hope and optimism about the generation of students you represent.”
