Trinity students win European Universities Debate Championships
Posted on: 21 August 2024
The victory marks the second time in three years that a Trinity team has won, and the first time that an Irish woman has won the Championships.
Martha McKinney-Perry and Andy Cullinan, both members of Trinity’s Hist debating society, have won the 2024 European Universities Debating Championships. Their victory marks the second time in three years that a Trinity College Dublin team has won, and the first time ever that an Irish woman has won the Championships.
Martha and Andy (pictured celebrating below) emerged the winners in a competition with 185 teams in attendance. In the final, they faced teams from the University of Oxford, the University of Manchester, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In individual speaker rankings, Martha came second and Andy was ninth.
In 2022, a team from Trinity’s Phil (Jack Palmer and Dylan McCarthy) won the competition.
The Grand Final motion was “This House Opposes the recent rise in distrust of state institutions”. Others included “This House Prefers Hayekian economic policies to Keynesian economic policies”, “This House Believes That devolution has strengthened the Scottish independence movement”, “This House Believes That left wing criticism of liberal NGOs for failing to be intersectional brings more harm than good”, and “This House Believes That Donald Trump winning the 2024 US Presidential Election is in the interest of the Chinese Communist Party”.
The Hist has come close in the past, with teams making the Grand Final in 2021 (Caoimhin Hamill and Jack Synnott) and 2023 (Daniela Williams and Naomi Panovka) respectively, and another reach the Semifinal in 2022 (Martha and her then-teammate Jack Williams).
The Hist holds the record for most team points earned at an edition of the Championships, set by Caoimhin Hamill and Jack Synnott in 2021.
The previous holders of the record were also a Hist team, made up of Sally Rooney and Michael Barton, who earned 25/27 team points at the 2013 Championships.
As this year’s European Champions, Andy and Martha have automatically qualified for the HWS Round Robin.
This is an invitational competition held annually where sixteen of the best teams in the world debate against one another across five rounds, and the best four of those teams progress to the Grand Final.
ENDS
Media Contact:
Catherine O’Mahony | Media Relations | catherine.omahony@tcd.ie