Nominations deadline for the AGM closing midnight Sunday 19th March

[cap n chris]

Any news?

I mean the lack of either the secretary or chair of the organisation offering even a simple explanation onto this thread/the website/anything anywhere is shameful. They should cop to the shoddy job they're doing but because it involves being held to account they pretend that talking to the membership is beneath them.

I'm surprised they haven't faced a vote of no confidence

We are in agreement. It doesn't look good.

 

[moletta]

1. what are you satisfied about? I know a lot of very indifferent members who think it may as well not exist.

2. If the Irish students go caving without authorisation from the university, the university will shut the club down and repossess all equipment bought with university funds. The club would also then have no ability to access funds from either the university or other bodies (in this case Sports Ireland). The same thing effectively happened to SUSS about 20 years ago, they were effective in combating this by ensuring the university was not able to access the equipment, by ensuring other funding was available, by having a strong relationship with other cavers for support in going caving (along with good alumni support) and by telling the university they would keep using the university name in the club name so the university would still be associated with the club by name (not what the uni wants, they want to control what happens in their clubs which they would not have been able to do in this case). Unfortunately the Irish student clubs are not in a position to do this.

Your student days were some decades ago - since that time, universities have changed massively, and are now businesses rather than places to learn in most cases. This is even more the case in Ireland than in the UK, and Ireland has quite a different, more Americanised, approach to liability than the UK does as well.

3. I mean the Republic and Northern Ireland. Administratively in this case student caving clubs from NI and ROI are basically treated the same and the universities from both places are acting together.

Just a question. Is this university management led or the students unions not wanting to engage with caving?

 

[ChrisB]

I don't have any direct knowledge, but I have heard that the trigger for Irish Universities' concern about leader qualifications may have been a fatal incident on a university kayaking trip. The report of the investigation identified a lack of accredited instructors as a contributing factor.

 

[Ian Ball]

I see the AGM is June 11th,

I was surprised the nomination deadline was 2 months ahead so I had a look for details of positions up for grabs and I found this volunteer details page under the BCA Council section, it's a little out of date but is there a list anywhere of the positions BCA are looking for?

Volunteer

The BCA elects most of its council members at the AGM. If you'd like to stand for a BCA Council position that is up for re-election at the next AGM (and we really encourage you to!

british-caving.org.uk

 

[andrewmcleod]

I don't have any direct knowledge, but I have heard that the trigger for Irish Universities' concern about leader qualifications may have been a fatal incident on a university kayaking trip. The report of the investigation identified a lack of accredited instructors as a contributing factor.

In comparison to any student caving trip, that kayaking trip was packed with kayakers with instructor qualifications (including two who had worked professionally as sea kayaking guides/instructors) and other qualifications, albeit only for instructing on grade 1 water which is presumably a world away from a grade 3/4 river...