The University of Limerick Debating Unionis a society devoted to the British parliamentary style of debating. A debating society has existed in UL in one form or another since the foundation of the National Institute for Higher Education in 1972.
The Debating Union holds in-house debates on issues of public interest and current affairs as well as private members motions on lighter issues. Debates in previous years have focussed on such issues as the American presidential election, the environment and the future of the European Union.
All Irish universities are active in debating and the Debating Union consistently competes in inter-university events both in Ireland and abroad. The Union hosts a competition every year in March, which attracts some of the best debaters in Ireland, Britain and the world. The Union has attended both the European and World debating championships for many years.
In 2009 the Debating Union adopted a new crest to symbolise the changing and evolving identity of the Union. The symbol of the Debating Union is a raven and its motto is “Verbum sat sapienti est” (A word to the wise is sufficient).
Read more about University Of Limerick Debating Union: Predecessors, Competition and Collaboration, Formation of The Debating Union, Structure, Honorary Life Members, Auditors Medal, Notable Alumni
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“The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Galway is a blackguard place,
To Cork I give my curse,
Tralee is bad enough,
But Limerick is worse.
Which is worst I cannot tell,
They’re everyone so filthy,
But of the towns which I have seen
Worst luck to Clonakilty.”
—Anonymous. “Clonakilty,” from Geoffrey Grigson’s Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs, Faber & Faber (1977)
“Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves,—the union between themselves and the State,—and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do not they stand in the same relation to the State that the State does to the Union? And have not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting the Union which have prevented them from resisting the State?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)