Students – when you stick together, your power is huge – and often underestimated.

Almost exactly ten years ago, the student leaders of Queen’s University Students’ Union sat in a meeting room, worried. As one of the Vice Presidents of the Union at the time, I was among them. The newly-elected Conservative-Lib Dem coalition was announcing plans to treble university tuition fees from £3,000 a year to £9,000 a year.

We were worrying because we needed to take action on behalf of our student members, but didn’t know if they would be with us. We had come of age at a time of widespread student apathy. We called a Union General Meeting – a meeting open to all the Union’s members – for late October 2010.

What happened next was astonishing. We expected a handful of students to turn up. Instead we ended up with over a thousand students crammed into the Union’s Mandela Hall.

It was the biggest Union General Meeting since the dark days of 1988, when the Gibraltar killings had opened dark divisions on campus. But this Union General Meeting was an energetic cross-community affair. Students were united against the idea of the Northern Ireland Executive following Westminster in hiking up university fees. We had ignited something that hadn’t happened at Queen’s for a generation – a mass student campaign.

After that, things happened quickly. Huge protests were organised at Stormont and on campus. We forged new links with lecturer’s unions. We even had the youth wings of the various political parties lobbying their politicians directly. Smaller student groups staged bold occupations. We used the upcoming Assembly election in May 2011 to get parents involved too, placing electoral pressure on every political party.

It was an incredible campaign – yet almost completely forgotten now. For about a year afterwards, you couldn’t walk anywhere around Belfast’s student areas without seeing the pink-and-yellow ‘Stop Education Cuts’ protest signs adorning student house windows. Every party was on the fence at first, but one-by-one, students knocked them off it. All parties were forced by student pressure to rule out an increase in tuition fees. Since then, fees in Northern Ireland have increased only with inflation – though I hope they are someday abolished entirely, and free education restored. Tuition fees for English students were trebled to £9,000 and may go higher.

My research, published today in the Belfast Telegraph, uses Department for the Economy data to show that since 2012, the freezing of tuition fees in Northern Ireland has saved NI students at least £1.05 billion in tuition fees, compared to English students. This is huge, and the product of the collective will of thousands of students who acted to stop higher fees being imposed on those who would come after them.

Wherever those thousands of students are in the world now, they should be proud of what they achieved.

Our current politicians should be aware of the sleeping giant they could awake if they attempt to raise fees again – as the First Minister suggested earlier this year.

In these times of COVID-19 hardships at university, with students struggling even more than they were ten years ago, remembering these victories is important. People power can move mountains.

Students – when you stick together, your power is huge – and often underestimated.

Adam McGibbon is a writer and campaigner from Belfast, also published in The Guardian, The Independent, The New Statesman and elsewhere. He was the Vice President of Queen’s University Belfast Students’ Union 2010-12. www.twitter.com/adammcgibbon

“Queen’s University of Belfast” by Iker Merodio | Photography is licensed under CC BY-ND