In an internal email circulated to students this Friday evening and seen by the Irish Farmers Journal, UCD deputy president and registrar, Professor Mark Rogers, said the university had immediately instigated an investigation after UCD's student paper, the College Tribune, reported suspected inapproriate online activity by students last week.

"Following the investigation, the specific allegations made in the article were not upheld," Prof Rogers wrote.

The College Tribune had reported that “a private Facebook groupchat with as many as 200 members is active among male students in UCD, in which members share and rate stories and pictures of girls they have slept with". The paper added that members of the group were "predominantly Agricultural Science students”. The paper's source was an unnamed student who said she had seen the existence of the group discussed on another social media platform, Yik Yak.

Prof Rogers said that the investigation started with confidential requests for information from students by the dean of agriculture, followed by 28 interviews with individuals and calls for information through social media from the university's 27,000 students. The investigation "found no evidence of the existence of such a group where UCD students were posting nude photographs of female students and then rating them".

Although students did report hearing about the alleged group through Yik Yak late last year, "I have been unable to find any student or other individual who had any first-hand sightings of these specific postings," Prof Rogers wrote.

The claims in the article have been fully investigated and have been found to be unsubstantiated.

The Facebook group of the Agriculture Science 2018 Class was found to have hosted a picture of a model in a bikini taken from a UK website and student's comments, which Rogers described as "irrelevant and inappropriate traffic on their site".

However, abusive posting of the nature and scale alleged by the College Tribune article "have been fully investigated and have been found to be unsubstantiated," UCD's deputy president wrote.

The university has decided not to make a referral to An Garda Siochána.