Cork WUDC 1996

Cork 1996 Final

Macquarie (Fenja Berglund and Ben Way) won the competition with Adam Spencer (Sydney) as best speaker. The final was held in Cork City Hall and highlights were televised by the Irish National broadcaster RTÉ.

The winners

There were a number of problems at this championships which combined to give a bad perception of the organizing committee and the championships as a whole. The tab system was missing several results or had results entered incorrectly, resulting in a Princeton team losing out on a break position. Official results were never released, although a team tab was found and circulated in the US and, in the absence of any other, is now taken as the Cork tab. The tab also could not guarantee a 3,2,2,2 for positions with all teams. Council requested that position allocation be made crucial in future championships. This caused serious problems with future tab systems, generating large brackets of 3 or 4 points in rounds 4 and 8 combined with a popular move back to pure power-pairing, instead of brackets to protect the top teams, for future championships.

The championships were also note worthy for two decisions by Worlds Council. Firstly the creation of the Deputy Chief Adjudicator positions to make sure that the interests of debaters outside the host nation were represented on the organizing committee. Secondly this council voted on the Australian motion from the previous year to standardize to the British Parliamentary style rather than allow the host to decide the style. As in Princeton, this was an extremely contentious decision and at one stage featured a walk out by delegates who were either opposed to standardization or favoured another style. The motion was passed and for better or worse, and this paved the way to the creation of Worlds rules as they are today.