CONNECTIONSUCD

THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE FOR UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN ALUMNI

ISSUE 11, 2006

DRAMATIC LICENCEConor McPherson on Broadway

SPORTSFILEBrian Dooher on Raising Sam

A VIEW FROM EUROPECatherine Day on EU Enlargement

PLUS: CAMPUS DEVELOPMENT * FOURTH-LEVEL STRATEGY * CLASS NOTES

PAGE THREEUCD CONNECTIONS

FUTURE VISION 04Interview with President Hugh Brady by Conall Ó Móráin

FOURTH LEVEL 06Professor Michael P. Ryan on the new focus on fourth level

COVER STORY 08Belinda McKeon speaks to Tony-nominatedplaywright Conor McPherson in New York

YEAR IN REVIEW 11A round-up of the highlights of the year at UCD

DEVELOPMENT 18Newman celebrates 100th fellowship and Ad Astra scholarships launched

CAMPUS VISION 20Ambitious plans for next-generation Belfield campus unveiled

VIEW FROM BRUSSELS 24Jane Suiter talks to Secretary-General of the European Commission, Catherine Day

VIEW FROM HOME 26Grainne Rothery looks back at the impressivecareer of Don Godson

VIEW FROM WITHIN 28Claire O’Connell looks at Ciaran Regan’sachievements in neuroscience

POLITICS 30Noam Chomsky visits UCD. Deaglán deBréadún recalls chairing one of the lectures

PERSPECTIVES 32Danielle Barron asks UCD experts if avian flu is really a clear and present danger

SOCIETY 34Louise Holden examines the dangers ofchildhood obesity in Ireland

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS 36We look at the opportunities presented by a strengthening Chinese market

BUSINESS 38Jane Suiter looks at the newentrepreneurs emerging from NovaUCD

DEVELOPING WORLD 41Eoghan Rice examines the work of UCDVolunteers Overseas

THEATRE 42Declan Kiberd on theatre and the meeting of business and art

UCD WRITERS 44In memory of John McGahern, we reproduce Joe O’Connor’s essay on the late novelist

ONLINE COMMUNITY 47Announcing the new UCD Alumni Online Community

ÓN GCARTLANN 48I gCartlann Choláiste Ollscoile Bhaile Átha Cliath, tá 170 éigin bosca ina bhfuil páipéir phríobháideacha de chuid de Valera

FROM THE ARCHIVE 50In the UCD Archives sit some 170 boxes of de Valera’s private papers. Michael Kennedy reports

HISTORY 52On the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, Michael Laffan profiles Thomas MacDonagh

ENVIRONMENT 54Eoghan Rice reports on the recentdocumentation of the archaeological dig at Tara Hill some 50 years ago

SPORTSFILE 56Gavin Cummiskey speaks to some of this year’s recipients of sports scholarships Eugene McGee interviews Tyrone football captain Brian Dooher 58

UCD ALUMNI 60Chapter News page 60Graduate Associations page 61Reunions page 66Class Notes page 68

C O N T E N T S

In the compilation of this publication, everycare is taken to ensure accuracy. Any errors oromissions should be brought to the attentionof the UCD Alumni Development Office.However, UCD does not accept any liability toany person for loss or damage arising fromanything contained in this publication or forany error or omission in it, even if such loss anddamage is caused by the negligence of UCD orits servants and agents.

Editorial Board: Dr Pádraic Conway, Gerry Looby, Eilis O’Brien, Sorcha Duggan,Sinead Dolan, Dominic MartellaThanks to: JP Donnelly, Catherine Godson,Maurice Manning, Cliona de BhaldraitheMarsh, Damien McLoughlin, Patrick WallEditors: Ann O’Dea (BA ’90, MA ’92), Linda Gillett (BA ’94)Publishers: Whitespace Publishing for UCD

All feedback or enquiries welcome to:Alumni Development OfficeUCD, Belfield, Dublin 4Tel: 353 1 7161447Email: alumni@ucd.ie

WELCOME TO UCDCONNECTIONS

Welcome to our new-look magazine which

we hope reflects the dynamism of both the

university and its wide network of alumni.

Its primary purpose is to tell you, our

alumni, about what your fellow alumni are

up to and to inform you of developments

taking place at UCD.

While UCD Connections is an important

channel of communications for our alumni,

in this issue we also announce a new

channel of communication, the UCD

Alumni Online Community (page 47), which

takes our communications into the internet

age with a website that will allow alumni

to locate, update and communicate with

former classmates and friends from college.

I hope that you enjoy UCD Connections

and that you will let us know what you

think so that we can continue to improve

your magazine and have it reflect the type

of articles you would like to see covered.

Gerry LoobyDirector of Development

24 18 32

DR HUGH Brady surprised many in medical circleswhen he took on the challenge of running thecountry’s largest educational establishment, but it’sa role that he clearly relishes. Until his appointment,this quiet-spoken, precise man had spent over 20years in medicine, along the way becoming a world-

recognised expert on nephrology. He was a leading figure inbiomedical research into diabetes and kidney disease and was one ofthree colleagues who pioneered the setting up of the ConwayInstitute at UCD, where work is done to understand and create newmolecules in an effort to develop new and refined drugs that willdeal more effectively with disease.

Brady was also involved in the setting up of the Dublin Molecular

Medicine Centre, a highly focused research partnership in the lifesciences between UCD, TCD and, more recently, the Royal College ofSurgeons. But, after two decades of medicine, he says he was “readyfor new challenges” and opted to head up UCD for a one-off termthat ends in 2013.

As a student Brady loved the whole university experience. As wellas studying he played good rugby and enjoyed societies such as theL&H. When he speaks about his plans for UCD he does so with an airof calm certainty while exuding great fondness for the university. Hisvision for the future is very clear. UCD will become “research led”because he wants it to be “the country’s premier fourth-levelinstitute” — he has already introduced a new emphasis onpostgraduate learning.

F U T U R E V I S I O N

PAGE FOUR UCD CONNECTIONS

When Conall Ó Móráin met

with UCDPresident, Dr

Hugh Brady, hewas struck by hisclear ambition to

make UCD oneof the world’s

leading learninginstitutions

NEW HORIZONS

F U T U R E V I S I O N

PAGE FIVEUCD CONNECTIONS

Numbers at the university have dramatically increased since 25 yearsago, when there would have been some 10,000 students and staff oncampus. Today, that figure stands at close to 25,000, including part-timestudents and staff, giving UCD a population greater than the town ofSligo. In the future, says Brady, a quarter of those UCD students will bepostgraduate, research-driven students. He wants to change the feel ofthe campus — to make it a centre of learning and living. With 3,000students living on campus now, Brady’s aim is to double that numberover the next five years. He wants UCD to be a place where you feel asense of scholarliness just by walking through it.

And he wants the general public to be part of that community aswell. That’s why he had the hedges cut. It was a simple but effectivestatement of “Let the public see their college”. Now, when you drivealong the Stillorgan Road you can view many of the buildings andfacilities, whereas previously the campus was distant, shrouded inmystery, a ‘no-go area’ to outsiders.

It is a theme that is reflected in the latest building plans, alreadywell in train. They will see an iconic Gateway Complex being built tothe front of the campus, from the main entrance on the N11, right upto the Tierney (Administration) building, which will house a range offacilities from cafes and retail spaces to an art-house cinema. Beforethe year is out, there are plans to announce a major architecturalcompetition for this complex, which should go a long way to definingthe whole new feel of the campus.

Independent of this, the students have recently voted to increasethe levy charged on themselves to pay for a swimming pool, a newgym and a student centre with a space for the performing arts.

Development on this scale requires significant external investment.

Significant funding for some of the more recent new buildingdevelopments on campus was donated by Irish-Americanphilanthropist, Chuck Feeney, and by some of our best-knownbusiness figures, Tony O’Reilly, Michael Smurfit and Lochlann Quinn.While we have not reached the heights of US academia where thistype of giving is commonplace, we are, it seems, well ahead of Britishuniversities in terms of donations. But more will be needed, whichmakes positive re-engagement with graduates all the moreimportant, says Brady.

During his time as a professor at Harvard, he saw the Americanmodel at work where a student is “engaged” with the seat oflearning from the day he or she enters the university. Of course,business gets something back on its investment as well. Today, for

example, UCD hosts a new Centre for Chinese Studies and some150 students put down the new Business and Chinese degree astheir first preference this year — clearly some clever students withan eye to the future.

Brady has also been busy streamlining the number of Faculties.He has integrated them into five Colleges. This change causedsome heated debate within the college but Brady’s idea is to takethe various departments and get them working together, creatingan opportunity to “spark off each other” and generate newclusters where diverse disciplines would create new lines of ideasand research. The second reason for restructuring stems from aneducational imperative. The overall pool of potential students inthe country is getting smaller and the choice of educationalestablishment available to those undergraduates is getting wider.Competition to attract students is hotting up but the introductionof the new UCD Horizons programme, along with a high-profileadvertising campaign, has meant that this year UCD had thelargest increase in first preference CAO choices — by 10%.

The UCD Horizons programme is quite radical for Ireland.According to its own literature, “it has taken the bold step to revisethe entire undergraduate curriculum and redesigned all degreeprogrammes into a fully modular, semesterised system…now eachfull-time degree programme comprises 12 modules each year, 10 tobe taken from the student’s subject area and two free electives thatcan be chosen from throughout the university.” The upshot is that,under the UCD Horizons programme, for example, Sociologystudents can take modules in Law, Medical students can study aPhilosophy module, or Science students can take a Business module.It’s also easier for students to switch to and from other programmesin Ireland, Europe and beyond.

Interestingly, from a business perspective, Brady says that “themoney follows the students”, so an element of internal competitionarises to make these optional courses attract a greater number ofstudents. This is likely to drift on to the web as well, as yet another ofBrady’s plans is to offer its most internationally sought-after courses,such as Irish Studies, to students around the globe, via the web,possibly within two years. Already, UCD is a member of Universitas 21,the network for international higher education which facilitatescollaboration and co-operation between leading universities.

UCD and the third- and fourth-level universe in which it operatesare changing at warp speed. Under leaders like Brady standardsare being driven higher. The changes that have already beenintroduced at UCD, and those that are proposed, seem positive.You could argue that the debate that has arisen from such changeis a good thing, as it shows that people care enough to have, andto express, a view. The future looks bright for UCD under itsvisionary president. Time, and future graduates, alone will tell.

Conall Ó Móráin (BA ’79) is a professional broadcaster who nowruns communications company, the Media Group. He becameRTÉ’s first Business Correspondent and subsequently practised asa stockbroker for eight years. He presents the Sunday BusinessShow on TodayFM and while at UCD he edited the studentpublication Gobshout.

‘This year UCD had thelargest increase in firstpreference CAO choices’

F O U R T H L E V E L

PAGE SIX UCD CONNECTIONS

The aim of UCD’sfourth-level strategyis to establish theuniversity as aninternational leader in graduateeducation andpostdoctoraltraining, saysProfessor MichaelP. Ryan

THE GOVERNMENT’S recentcommitment to providesignificant investment for theestablishment of Fourth-Level Ireland is a clearacknowledgement of the vital

role of higher education in the futureeconomic development of this country.Through the Strategic Initiative Fund, some€300 million will be provided to help Irishthird-level institutions to gear up for fourthlevel. Further investment of up to €2 billionmay be provided from 2006 to 2010 to thehigher education sector through theNational Research Plan — part of the nextNational Development Plan. At UCD, ourchallenge is to establish the highest qualitypostgraduate degrees in order to bothattract the best talent to the university andproduce the most highly qualifiedindividuals to help bring Ireland towards a

knowledge-based economy. UCD has already undergone a major

restructuring programme, merging 11Faculties into five new Colleges, and 95Departments into 35 Schools. In keepingwith this new structure, we have nowestablished Graduate Schools for each of thefive Colleges. Within each of these GraduateSchools, we have appointed a Director andan Administrator, as well as PostgraduateCo-ordinators for the constituent Schools.The Schools will be taking in their firstgraduates, including doctoral students,under the new Graduate Schoolorganisation this September.

Through these Graduate Schools, weintend to establish the UCD ResearchMaster’s and PhD as premier researchtraining programmes. Our vision is to makeUCD the ‘University of Choice’ for graduateresearch and education, both on the

national and international stages. To achievethis vision, we are introducing a range ofinnovative initiatives based on the bestpractice guidelines of the Bologna principles,which were developed by the EuropeanUniversities Association and cover thestructure and organisation, financing ofdoctoral programmes, supervision andquality assurance measures, innovativepractices and joint doctoral programmes.Our current focus is to enhance our researchprogrammes, but shortly we also will beintroducing a range of new developments inthe taught programmes.

In line with our objective of making UCD aleading research-intensive university, weintend to become a much moreinternational university, starting atundergraduate level.

A feature of the Graduate Schools is the modularisation of postgraduate

FUELLINGTHE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY

F O U R T H L E V E L

programmes. Traditionally, there has beena perception that the PhD was akin totraining for the academic world. In fact,nearly eight out of 10 PhDs end upworking outside of academia. Because ofthis, we want to provide doctoral studentswith the opportunity to broaden theirexisting skill sets. We are thereforeintroducing a menu of transferable andgeneric skills modules that will be offeredin addition to the PhD students’ coreresearch. As regards the generic skills, wewill be developing high-level coursesaround specific research areas to enablepostgraduate students to cross disciplines.Transferable skills, meanwhile, will includesubjects like research methodology, projectmanagement, communications andentrepreneurship.

Another new feature is the introductionof a research and personal developmentplan for all research graduate students. Atthe beginning of their postgraduateprogramme, each student will undergo askills analysis which will allow them toassess their existing skills and identify theareas they may need to brush up on inorder to achieve their long-term objectives.This will enable each student to make moreinformed module choices as well as make iteasier for each student to gain a morecomplete set of skills.

There will also be a major change to theway in which research students aresupervised. While most PhD studentscurrently work with a lone supervisor, they

will now have additional access to asupervisory committee, including a mentor.We believe that working with a committeeon a range of areas, including the personaldevelopment plan, will be beneficial tostudents. Students will also be able to enterinto thematic PhD programmes in selectedareas of research.

The duration of doctoral programmes willin future be limited to four years, except inspecial circumstances. An assessment will becarried out at the end of the first 12-18months of the PhD programme and, if itbecomes apparent that the student is notsuitable for the PhD, there will be an exitstrategy with a master’s degree at that stage.

In addition, we want to introduce greaterflexibility as regards how research ispresented at the end of a doctoralprogramme. The traditional thesis willcontinue to be an acceptable format. Thesecond option will be a compendium ofpublished papers with a discussion linkingthem together. The third will be a book orbooks outlining a piece of research. Thefourth option could be creative material,such as a piece of music, artwork or acomputer program, which would be linkedwith a thesis putting it in an academicframework.

Other areas we will be focusing on willinclude more connections outside UCD and agreater emphasis on providing graduatestudents with lifelong learning and careerdevelopment pathways. In particular, we willbe looking at postdoctoral training schemes

and career path support over the next year. We also want to internationalise the

programme, primarily to give our studentsthe opportunity to work abroad for a periodof time. But it will be a two-way process andwe would intend to recruit some of the bestinternational students. In the coming year,we will establish 10 scholarships for Chineseresearch graduates. Links will also be forgedthrough UCD’s membership of Universitas21, a worldwide organisation of leadingresearch-intensive universities.

To mark the start of the new GraduateSchools, we have launched the UCD AdAstra Research Scholarships (see page 18),and we aim to offer over 100 scholarshipsin the coming academic year. This willcertainly help to drive implementation ofthe new PhD programme as we will have acore of 100 of the best and brightestpeople who will be funded for four years.We are also working with theDevelopment Office to attract fundingfrom donors and philanthropy for thesescholarships into the future.

Through our current and planneddevelopments, we believe that fourth-levelresearch students will get a high-qualityexperience at UCD and, ultimately, that theywill be in an excellent position to go out andcontribute to the knowledge economy andthe knowledge society.

Professor Michael P. Ryan is Dean ofDoctoral Studies and Postdoctoral Trainingat UCD and Project Director for theimplementation of the Graduate Schools.

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SHININGLIGHT

C O V E R S T O R Y C O V E R S T O R Y

IT’S A sunny Saturday morning in Manhattan and ConorMcPherson (BA ‘91) walks down West 47th Street with thestep of a man who feels right at home. In a couple of days,his play Shining City will open on Broadway to rave reviewsfrom The New York Times, among others, and McPhersonwill be the toast of a glittering after-party.

Of course, McPherson doesn’t know this yet. Today is just anotherday of waiting, hoping that the New York production of the play hedirected himself last year in Dublin and London will work onstage,that the mix of Irish and American actors will be a successful one,that the accents will be convincing and the performances strong andtrue. His apprehension is unnecessary, as his new work has alreadyearned two Tony Awards nominations for Best Play and BestPerformance by a Leading Actor in a Play (Oliver Platt).

Some playwrights would be all apprehension in his situation,some all arrogance and bluster, but as he settles into a booth in anIrish bar near his hotel, McPherson seems unstressed, even content,a ripple of self-deprecating humour beneath every word.

Then again, the New York theatre scene is hardly unfamiliarterrain to the 34-year-old; Shining City marks his sixth play here inthe last eight years. This Lime Tree Bower, The Good Thief, DublinCarol and St Nicholas have all had off-Broadway runs, while in

PAGE NINEUCD CONNECTIONS PAGE EIGHT UCD CONNECTIONS

Conor McPhersonhas come a long

way from his daysin Dramsoc.

Belinda McKeonmet the playwrightin New York as he

prepared for theopening of his

play, Shining City,on Broadway

1999, his best-known play The Weir took him to the glittering stripitself for the first time.

It’s not with nostalgia that McPherson looks back on theexcitement of those earliest years in his career, though, but with asort of disbelief. Part of him still can’t be sure how it happened. “Itwas weird,” he says, half-smiling, half-wincing, “because it shouldhave been impossible to do something like that. But suddenly you’vegot a review in The New York Times and I was only 25 or whatever.And I found that my own opinion of my work was not as high aswhat others were saying about it.”

What they were saying, and what they’re still saying, is thatMcPherson is one of the most original and important playwrights ofhis generation; that he has made the monologue form superbly hisown; that his writing exhibits an almost unnerving intuition for therhythms and the power of language in the vernacular, and kicks newlife into the tradition of story-telling.

“I thought that it shouldn’t be so easy,” he remembers, “to be hereand be doing this and for it to be working.” Wondering where thecatch was, maybe? “Or just worrying that the standard was very low.Seriously, I thought it was mad that I was getting away with it. I wasbeing told that I had ‘arrived’, you know? And I felt like I wanted togo a little bit farther before I ‘arrived’.”

Whether he liked it or not, however, McPherson had verydefinitely ‘arrived’; after all, he had been just two years out ofuniversity when his play This Lime Tree Bower caused a serious stir atthe Dublin Fringe Festival and nabbed for its writer the eagerattention of two major London theatres, the Bush and the RoyalCourt. Both theatres gave him the time (not to mention the money)to work on a number of new plays, and one of those — The Weir,commissioned by the Royal Court and premiered in London in 1997— became one of the most talked-about plays of the decade.

At this stage, McPherson had also written the script to his firstfeature film, I Went Down, which also appeared in 1997 to positivereviews. Between Dublin, London and New York, McPherson was P

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C O V E R S T O R Y

PAGE TEN UCD CONNECTIONS

kept busy. But then, business is something he’d got used to yearspreviously, during his time as an undergraduate at UCD.

“I didn’t want to go to college at all,” he shrugs now, rememberinghow reluctant he was, at the age of 17, to choose studies in English,Philosophy and Psychology over time spent working on TeenageFanclub-inspired songs with his band. What were they called?“Squidinky,” he laughs, shaking his head. “We sort of saw ourselvesas knowing what good songwriting was.”

Yet Belfield proved the stronger pull — though a gentle push fromhis parents was definitely a factor in getting him into the NewmanArts building — and by his second year there, not only had his subjectsbegun to make a lot more sense, even to be exciting, but he had alsodeveloped an interest in a new kind of writing. Theatre had alreadybegun to weave its spell. And it’s no surprise to learn that the playthat caught the eye of the young McPherson was one which positivelypulsated with the visceral power of speaking, with the forcefulness oflanguage itself.

“I read Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet and when I saw theswearing…,” he exhales deeply, as though struck anew by the brutalimpact of Mamet’s words in his masterpiece from 1984, “I justthought that was the energy and power of the unconscious animal,trying to articulately say something. I just thought that the dialoguewas so much more…” — he searches for the right word —“expressive. Stupid thing to say, but it was so much more interestingthan rational, considered language; it just seemed like music,somehow. That fascinated me and I decided I wanted to try to do that.So I wrote a little one-act play, which was very much trying to imitatethat in Dublin, really. And then I brought it down to Dramsoc.” Andthen? And then, it seems, the work was only just beginning.McPherson was about to discover that there’s more to making a playthan putting pen to paper.

“I thought I would just come back in a few weeks to watch it, butthey were like…well, who’s going to direct it? And I was like, well, Idon’t have a clue and then I realised I’d have to put it on and I’d haveto cast it.” Another laugh. “So I just had to get on with it.”

That was the first play, and in a Dramsoc buzzing with eager andinnovative young theatre-makers — several of his colleagues wouldalso go on to become players in the Dublin theatre scene, with one ofthem, Jason Byrne, currently directing a Brian Friel play on the Abbeystage — plenty more hard graft was to follow. After that first play,Taking Stock was produced, McPherson wrote two others — theenigmatically-named Michelle Pfeiffer and Federal Scenes. Theworkload was intensive. Yet somehow, neither English nor Philosophygot left behind. As well as being caught up in the whirl of acting anddirecting as well as writing, McPherson was a serious student whereboth his subjects were concerned. In fact, it sounds like he might havebeen the most serious student in the whole of the Newman Artsbuilding; he did something, on a regular basis, that most students canonly manage when faced with the panic of final exams.

“I used to get up at seven in the morning and do two hours of studyso that I’d be ready to work at Dramsoc for the whole evening,” he

says almost bashfully. “Yeah, it was mad, but it was great fun. I reallyhad a great time.” So much did he enjoy college, in fact, that hestayed on to do a two-year master’s in Philosophy, writing a thesis onethics, with Sr Joan Newman as his supervisor. Philosophy attractedhim “because of how it seemed achievable in some way, logical. Therewas a neatness to it, which was kind of against my nature. I don’tknow, maybe I was looking for a way of working through.”

With some of his colleagues from Dramsoc, McPherson went on toform a theatre company, Fly By Night, after graduation and itproduced a number of short plays in small, unfussy venues like theInternational Bar and the Crypt. “You look back and realise that thatwas probably the best time of your life really,” he says. “Because itwas so unconscious, so enjoyable.”

Very soon afterwards, however, came huge success for McPherson.And with it, as by now widely known, came a serious alcohol problemthat came close to costing him his life in 2001. It was a tough battle —but, as McPherson himself says, he came out the winner. “I’m freenow. I’m totally free.” As a writer, he means, as well as a person. “Nowthat I don’t drink, and haven’t for five years, my writing has morepoints of view than it used to. It used to be quite monolithic…thishuge weight of one thing. I don’t know what that one thing was, butthere was this one thing there, always, always, always. But now mywriting has more avenues. It’s freer. So that’s where I am now.”

As McPherson shines on Broadway, as audiences get to their feet toapplaud Shining City at the Biltmore Theatre, his years at UCD and inDramsoc are, somehow, always in the back of his mind. “It was a hugeexperience for me and it stood me in great stead,” he says.“Everything I know, I learned there, really. I don’t know much,” helaughs, “but I learned it there.”

Belinda McKeon graduated from UCD with an MLitt (‘05). Based inNew York, today she works as a freelance journalist and contributesregularly to the Irish Times.

‘I used to get up atseven in the morningand do two hours ofstudy so that I’d be ready to work atDramsoc for the whole evening’

Y E A R I N R E V I E W

PAGE ELEVENUCD CONNECTIONS

HIGHLIGHTS OF

ANOTHER YEAR

May 2006

Visit by AustralianPrime Minister,John HowardAustralian PrimeMinister, JohnHoward, took in atrip to UCD on hisfirst official visit toIreland last month.

He spoke on international affairs and tookquestions from UCD postgraduate studentsin history, politics and Australian studies.UCD has taught Australian history since 1971and has one of the longest-runningprogrammes of Australian studies in theworld. During his visit, Prime MinisterHoward announced that the Australiangovernment would provide funding ofAUS$1.5 million to support the continuationof the Keith Cameron Chair of AustralianHistory at UCD.

UCD Ulysses Medal awarded toglobal philanthropistOn May 13, Professor Klaus Schwab,founder and executive chairman of theWorld Economic Forum, was awarded theUCD Ulysses Medal in recognition of hiswork for entrepreneurship in the globalpublic interest over the past 35 years. Theceremony took place in the UCD SmurfitSchool of Business and was followed by anaddress by Professor Schwab entitled TheGlobal Economy 2006: Implications forIreland.

International Conference on Pervasive ComputingPervasive, widely recognised as one of the

premier conferences in pervasive computing,held its Fourth International Conference inDublin 7-10 May and UCD was the host.Professor Paddy Nixon, Head of the newlyformed Systems Research Group (SRG) in theUCD School of Computer Science andInformatics, was General Chair of theconference; while the Conference Chair wasDr Aaron Quigley, also of SRG.

April 2006

The Ultimate College BallOn 21 April, UCD held its first ever college-wide ball on the campus at Belfield. Some3,000 students and alumni enjoyed over 15

acts on four stages, with high-profileheadline acts including Bell X1, DamienDempsey and Republic of Loose. A black-tieevent, the ball was a huge success and looksset to become a permanent fixture on theUCD calendar.

Business alumni go back to the futureOver 100 graduates returned to the UCDQuinn School of Business on 6 April. As partof this year’s CommDay activities, the class of2006 invited alumni to come and see forthemselves just how much businesseducation had changed at the university. Theevent, which was sponsored byPricewaterhouseCoopers, set out tohighlight how technology has impacted onand enhanced the learning environment ofstudents. Pictured below at the Back to theFuture evening (from left) were: FeargalO’Rourke, PricewaterhouseCoopers;Michelle Kurtz (BComm); Senator FeargalQuinn (BComm ‘59); Rebecca McCready(BComm); Paul Haran, Principal, UCD College

of Business &Law; Mark Byrne(BComm).

Dramsoc topsStudent DramaAwards againApril saw UCDDramsoc win thetwo top accoladesin the IrishStudent DramaAwards (ISDA)2006 in Cork.Harold Pinter’sThe Home-coming, one ofUCD’s two sub-

missions to the festival, took Best OverallProduction and Best Director for SimonAshe-Browne and Steven Jones. It was thesecond year running the society has scoopedthe top awards. In 2005 Dramsoc was namedNational Society of the Year after hosting

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PAGE TWELVE UCD CONNECTIONS

and winning the most prestigious award atthe ISDA, Ireland’s largest amateur theatrefestival. This year the society gained a totalof 12 nominations and won three furtherawards.

UCD-Mater GRU opensOn 3 April, An Tánaiste and Minister forHealth and Children, Mary Harney TD,(pictured above) officially opened the UCD-Mater Genome Resource Unit (GRU) and metwith volunteer patients who play their partin the international human genome project.The ultimate goal is to use this informationto develop new ways to treat, cure or evenprevent the diseases that afflict millions ofpeople. Here in Dublin, scientists and doctorswork in tandem, using the genome projectto help real patients with real diseases. Atthe UCD-Mater GRU, the goal is‘translational research’, an approach thatseeks to substantially reduce the time fromdisease discovery to appropriate treatmentby harnessing the power of genomesequence and new technologies.

Conference marks 40th anniversary ofFlann O’Brien’s deathIn April an academic conference was held tomark the 40th anniversary of the death ofFlann O’Brien, one of our illustrious literaryalumni. O’Brien first began writing while hewas a student at UCD, with his early writingspublished in a student magazine calledComhthrom Féinne under the pseudonymBrother Barnabas. Speakers at theconference included Declan Kiberd of theUCD School of English and Drama and KeithHopper of the University of Oxford.

Choral Scholars Spring ConcertThe UCD Choral Scholars, under the directionof Desmond Early, performed Mozart’sCoronation Mass and Fauré’s Requiem in StAnn’s Church on Dawson Street.

March 2006

UCD wins O2 Ability AwardUCD has received an O2 Ability Award for itsleadership position on disability. TheCertificate in Citizenship and Advocacy forStudents with Intellectual Disabilities waslaunched in 2004 and was the first of its kindin Europe. It allows students with anintellectual or other disability to participatein university life by enrolling in UCD andattending classes part-time for one year. TheO2 Ability Awards, now in its second year,rewards organisations who recognise thecontribution that people with disabilitiesmake to business. Pictured top left at the

awards were (from left): Caroline Casey (BA’92, DBS ’96, MBS ’97), founding CEO of theAisling Foundation and the O2 AbilityAwards; Dr Pádraic Conway, UCD Vice-President for University Relations; FrankFahey TD, Minister of State at theDepartment of Justice; and Danuta Gray,CEO, O2 Ireland.

UCD Ladies Hockey win Leinster CupUCD displayed its sporting prowess in Marchwhen the ladies hockey team won theLeinster Cup Final. UCD Ladies Hockey FirstXI claimed victory over Railway Union in anexciting match on St Patrick’s Day. The wincame after Roisin Flinn (pictured above, inUCD’s blue and white) scored twice for UCDin the second half of the game. It was thefirst time since 1951 that the UCD Ladies FirstXI won the Leinster Cup Final. The winningteam was captained by Jane Bourke,coached by Tom O’Donoghue and managedby Pete Johnston.

February 2006

Taoiseach opens UCD Centre forSynthesis and Chemical BiologyUCD played its part in the creation of afourth-level Ireland earlier this year with theopening of the new UCD Centre for

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Synthesis and Chemical Biology (CSCB). TheCSCB, a UCD-led collaboration with TrinityCollege Dublin and the Royal College ofSurgeons, was funded under a €26 milliongrant from the Higher Education Authoritythrough the Programme for Research inThird-Level Institutions. The 2,300sqmbuilding comprises six state-of-the-artlaboratories, for synthetic chemistry, massspectrometric and nuclear magneticresonance spectroscopic facilities. Picturedabove is An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, TD, withDr Paul Murphy, CSCB Principal Investigator(back row, second from right) and hisresearch group.

UCD celebratesMozart’s 250thbirthdayA number ofcelebrations tookplace in UCD tocelebrate the250th birthday ofmusical genius,

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The UCD Schoolof Music began the celebrations in Februarywith an international conference inNewman House. Some of the world’s leadingMozart experts attended, with Cliff Eisen ofKing’s College London (pictured above)presenting the keynote address entitledMozart and the Tyranny of Biography. DVDscreenings of five of Mozart’s Master Operasalso took place, as did DVD screenings of themovie Amadeus. A series of lectures onMozart was held in April and RTÉ’sUniversities’ Concert took place in March.The College Choir also put on a concert in

April, while Britishpianist Tim Hortongave a recital.

UCD Symphoniaannual NCHperformanceThe UCD Sinfoniapresented aneclectic programmewhich includedCopland’s Rodeoand Rodrigo’s

Concierto de Aranjuez. The soloist wasguitarist, Redmond O’Toole.

Training bugs to eat plasticScientist Kevin O’Connor and his researchteam at UCD are set to play a significant rolein the reduction of polystyrene waste eachyear. The team, along with Professor WalterKaminsky of the University of Hamburg, hasproduced a new technology that shows howa combination of chemistry andmicrobiology canhelp transformpolystyrene into au s e f u lb iodegradab leplastic. If it gainsw i d e s p r e a drecognition and isput into practice, itcould go a longway in saving thee n v i r o n m e n t .P r o f e s s o rKaminsky uses atechnique calledpyrolysis, whichuses heat in a vacuum to break down theplastic into a crude pyrolysis oil. The oil isthen fed to tiny bugs that transform it into abiodegradable heat-resistant plastic.

January 2006

Chomsky comes to UCDNoam Chomsky, world-renowned linguistand public intellectual, paid a return visit toUCD to deliver a series of lectures in January.

See page 30 for Deaglan de Bréadún’s reporton the visit.

ITENIBA Conference at Geary InstituteA politically important and intellectuallyexciting conference took place at UCD inJanuary, when the ITENIBA(Intergenerational Transmission and Ethno-national Identity in the Border Area)conference was held in the Geary Institute.The event provided a comparativeperspective on a question currently beingresearched at the Geary Institute — theintergenerational transmission of ethno-national identity in the Irish border area.Some of the best contemporaryinternational scholars attended, giving theireducated views and analyses of globalpolitical economy. The conference focusedon the constitution of ethno-nationalidentity and identity shifts in the context ofmacro-level political change. ITENIBA issupported by a EU programme for peaceand reconciliation.

December 2005

Intellectuals and the Nation-StateConference

On 30 November and 1 December, aconference was held at the ClintonInstitute for American Studies whichexamined the role and effect intellectualshave in the making and contesting ofnational identities and state policies.Speakers included Terry Eagleton of the

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PAGE FOURTEEN UCD CONNECTIONS

University of Manchester, Eric Lott ofUniversity of Virginia, Slavoj Zizek of theInstitute for Sociology, Ljubljana/BirkbeckCollege, University of London, and UCD’sDeclan Kiberd.

UCD Conway makes it to Scrip Award shortlistThe work of the Applied NeurotherapeuticsResearch Group (ANRG) at UCD ConwayInstitute was recognised in December whenit was nominated and shortlisted for a ScripAward. The group was shortlisted for theBest Partnership Alliance award with WyethResearch. Hundreds of industry leadersgathered at the ceremony, which was held inLondon, and were given the opportunity torecognise the work taking place throughoutthe pharmaceutical and biotech industriesglobally. Fully operational since January2004, the ANRG has its main centre in theUCD Conway Institute. Other members arebased at Trinity College Dublin and at WyethNeuroscience Research in the US. Pictured onprevious page (from left): Prof Frank Walsh,Senior Executive Vice-President, WyethResearch; Prof Ciaran Regan, Co-ordinator,ANRG; and host John Sergeant (journalistand broadcaster).

UCD Horizons Open DayOver the course of two days, Friday 9 andSaturday 10 December, over 4,000 leavingcertificate and mature students descendedon the UCD campus to visit Open Days todiscover more about the university and itsnew modular curriculum, UCD Horizons.Having already heard about the newmodular curriculum at UCD, studentswanted to get answers to their questionsstraight from the horse’s mouth. More than50 information stands with displays anddemonstrations were constructed in UCD’sO’Reilly Hall to accommodate the fiveColleges, 35 Schools, services and otherfacilities that now make up the university.Pictured top left are students exploring theUCD campus.

November 2005

UCD Under-21s retain Dr TonyO’Neill trophyIn November, the UCD Under-21s beatShelbourne 2-1 at Tolka Park to retain theEircom Under-21 League. First half strikesfrom Conan Byrne and Ronan Finn wereenough to secure the victory for the

experienced students despite a latefightback from Shelbourne. The home sidedid get on the score sheet with 16 minutesremaining when Daniel Ennis powerfullyheaded home a Brian King corner butdespite some late scares, UCD clung onand nearly grabbed a third goal in injurytime when Seamus Long struck thecrossbar from close range.

Photographic exhibition reflects UCD’s pastA photographic exhibition, Images of UCD,which reflected life in UCD through thedecades, took place in November. Theexhibition was the culmination of theefforts of the UCD Women Graduates’Association, which two years ago asked itsmembers to gather their UCD photographsfor a photographic archive they werecreating of life at UCD. Stretching backover 100 years, the UCD WomenGraduates’ Association continues to thriveand members are keenly involved in manyaspects of life at UCD. The photographsare currently lodged in the UCD Archives.Pictured above is the 1958/59 First YearBotany class on a field trip to the BotanicalGardens, Glasnevin, led by Pat Boyle.

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Former President awardedFoundation Day MedalDr Paddy Hillery, the man who, long beforehe was made President of Ireland,established comprehensive schools ensuringboth academic and applied subjects weremade available to all pupils within a 10-mileradius of their homes, was honoured by UCDand awarded the UCD Foundation DayMedal last November. Paddy Hillery, BSc ‘44,MB BCh BAO ‘47, DPH ‘52, LLD ‘62, waspresented with the UCD Foundation DayMedal by the President of the university, DrHugh Brady, in recognition of hisoutstanding contribution to the formationof modern Ireland and for his constructivesupport to his alma mater. Pictured (above)at the UCD Foundation Day dinner (fromleft) were: Dr Paddy Hillery and his wifeMaeve; Dr Hugh Brady and Dr MichaelSmurfit.

October 2005

Launch of Irish UniversitiesAssociationThe representative body of the seven Irishuniversities changed its name from theConference of Heads of Irish Universities(CHIU) to the Irish Universities Association(IUA) as it believed the new name better

represents the objectives of theorganisation and its work. The IUA providesa forum for the presidents and seniorofficers of the universities to identify thestrategic challenges facing the universitysystem and to agree on the policies andplans for tackling them and developing thesector. It also unveiled its new websitewww.iua.ie.

PSNI footballers welcomed to BelfieldIn a historic first the Garniville Gaels (thePSNI training college Gaelic football team)played UCD on a rainy October day atBelfield to mark the Northern Irish team’sinclusion in the Sigerson Cup — the Gaelicfootball competition for third-level colleges.“The game was much more than just aboutthe result,” said Brian Mullins, UCD’s Directorof Sport. “Sport is a great leveller. It breachespolitical and other barriers and shows thenext generation what can be achieved. Weare delighted that UCD hosted the firstgame of Garniville Gaels in the colleges’competition.” PSNI’s Paddy Linnig isphotographed below testing the UCDdefence.

September 2005

UCD researchers win President of Ireland AwardsTwo UCD researchers were among fiverecipients to receive over €4 million fromScience Foundation Ireland under itsPresident of Ireland Young ResearcherAward (PIYRA) scheme over a five-year

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period. Dr Jarlath Nally and Dr ScottRickard are UCD’s recipients of the PIYRAawards. A graduate of UCD, Dr Nally iscurrently a postdoctoral fellow in UCLAand will be based in the UCD School ofAgriculture, Food Science and VeterinaryMedicine, in the College of Life Sciences.Scott Rickard, a graduate of MIT andPrinceton University, is a lecturer in theUCD School of Electrical, Electronic andMechanical Engineering.

UCD’s class of 1955 returns to collegeSeptember saw a get-together of morethan 150 veteran UCD alumni from theclass of 1955 who gathered at a specialceremonial event in the O’Reilly Hall tomark the golden jubilee year of theirgraduation. Following an ecumenicalservice, the alumni were each presentedwith a commemorative scroll by UCDPresident, Dr Hugh Brady. Among theveteran alumni at the event was ProfessorCathal O’Neill who had become a worldauthority on architecture sincegraduating from UCD. He told of how hehad studied in a totally differentenvironment at Earlsfort Terrace, at atime when the student number totalledaround 2,000.

Government announces €72 millionresearch investmentThe government has approved a proposalfrom IDA Ireland to fund theestablishment of the National Institute forBioprocessing, Research and Training(NIBRT) which is to be established by UCD,Trinity College Dublin, Dublin CityUniversity and Sligo Institute ofTechnology and will be based at the UCDIndustry Park. It will receive in excess of€72 million over the next seven years instate support to establish the Institute, itsworld-class research and trainingprogrammes and a 9,000sqm facility with asubstantial scale-up capacity. The NIBRTwill be a centre of excellence inbioprocessing and biomanufacturingtechnology training and research tosupport the rapidly growingbiopharmaceutical industry in Ireland.

August 2005

UCD launches new crestAs part of the strategic planning processand as an expression of the university’sobjective to become one of Europe’s topuniversities, UCD launched its new crest,designed to reinforce its strengths in termsof academic excellence and nationalsignificance. The university undertookmarket research among students, staff,graduates and the outside community ontheir perceptions of the university and itsidentity. The revised crest focuses on thestrong and powerful images that match theperceptions of the university. The redrawncrest reflects a forward-looking confidencewhile including iconic images representingthe university’s heritage and influence.Those who like the more traditional styleneed not worry as the university re-established the 1911 crest for formal itemssuch as graduation parchments.

IUATM symposium on impactbiomechanics Many scientific nuisances in the area ofimpact biomechanics were addressed at amajor four-day conference hosted by UCDon 10 August. Topics explored included howthe various limbs, organs and tissues of thehuman body would react to moderate orsevere impact forces or blast loads and howappropriately designed injury protectionsystems can reduce injury severity and thenumber of fatalities. The conference, whichwas attended by 100 delegates and speakersfrom 19 countries, helped to define futureresearch challenges. Papers presented at theevent were published followinginternational peer review. Prof MichaelGilchrist of UCD’s School of Engineeringorganised and chaired the conference.

ChangingWorlds opens new R&Dcentre at NovaUCDA new research and development (R&D)centre was opened by UCD spin-out andtechnology provider ChangingWorlds atNovaUCD on 2 August. The team of softwareengineers employed at the centrecollaborate with researchers at UCD’s Smart

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Media Institute to build a pipeline ofadvanced personalisation technologies forthe mobile telecommunications industry.ChangingWorlds was co-founded in 1999 byProfessor Barry Smyth and Paul Cotter tocommercialise their research at the SmartMedia Institute. The company is now aleader in the provision of personalisationand mobile portal solutions. Its software hasbeen deployed by more than 20 mobilenetwork operators worldwide, includingVodafone and O2. Pictured opposite page(from left): Vincent Ryan, Vice-PresidentSales & Marketing, ChangingWorlds; Dr PatFrain, Director, NovaUCD; and Luke Conroy,CEO, ChangingWorlds.

July 2005

UCD International Summer SchoolThe UCD International Summer School randuring July and explored Irish history andpolitics, culture and identity, through acombination of lectures, interactiveworkshops and fieldtrips over a two-and-a-half week period. The programme featuredlectures on topics across many fields,

including art, archaeology, folklore,theatre, music, history and politics.

June 2005

Honorary doctorates awardedAs the UCD 150 celebrations drew to aclose, four honorary doctorates wereawarded to recipients who had made animpact on the world through their artistic,scientific and academic work. The recipientswere Bob Geldof, Neil Jordan, Robert Galloand Carole Pateman. Dr Hugh Brady saidthey each reflected the guiding principlesof the university and would be “aninspiration to current and futuregenerations of students”.

Women’s Rowing win at HenlyRegattaThe UCD Senior Eight crew recorded anhistoric victory at the Women’s Henlyregatta, beating a very stronginternational field from the US and theUK. The same crew also won the SeniorEight event at the National RowingChampionship in July.

UCD 150 alumni garden partyFriday 24 June saw the culmination of theUCD 150 anniversary celebrations at agarden party for graduates in the surroundsof O’Reilly Hall in Belfield (pictured above).All alumni had been invited and they cameout in force with more than 600 alumnispending a nostalgic evening with formerclassmates and friends. The event was agreat success and rounded off the UCD 150celebrations in style.

The UCD Aesthetic book launchedBloomsday (16 June) saw the launch of TheUCD Aesthetic: Celebrating 150 Years of UCDWriters. Compiled by our own Dr AnthonyRoche, the book demonstrates theremarkable crop of talented writers that theuniversity has produced since its inception.The 28 authors celebrated include JohnHenry Newman himself, James Joyce, FlannO’Brien, Frank McGuinness and JohnMcGahern, while many of the contributorsare acclaimed writers themselves, such asColm Toibin, Declan Kiberd, ConorMcPherson and Joseph O’Connor. JosephO’Connor’s essay on John McGahern isreproduced on page 44 of this magazine.

PAGE SEVENTEENUCD CONNECTIONS

THE PRESTIGIOUS NewmanFellowship programmereached a milestone this yearwith the funding of the 100thNewman Fellow in Archae-ology by the National Roads

Authority. Such external funding is essentialto support the research agenda at UCD andto attract only the most talented studentsand researchers. To date, some 70 Irish andinternational companies, semi-state bodies,voluntary organisations and individuals havedonated over €8.6 million to fund theNewman Fellowship Programme.

“The Newman Fellowships have been verysuccessful in attracting an extremely high

calibre of candidate,” says Gerry Looby,Director of Development at UCD. “Many ofour Newman Fellows have gone on to highlysuccessful careers in both academic andother sectors of society.”

He points to prominent Newman fellowslike Kevin Whelan, one of Ireland’s best-known and widely published historians andhistorical adviser to the Irish government onthe Famine and the 1798 Rebellion. Whelanis also Smurfit Director of the Keough NotreDame Centre in Dublin, the internationalcentre of excellence in Irish Studies.

Other fellows have gone on to prominentpositions within the university itself likeBrigid Laffan, Principal of UCD College of

Human Sciences. Laffan was the foundingDirector of the Dublin European Institute,UCD, in 1999 and in 2004 she was elected asa member of the Royal Irish Academy. She isan adviser on EU enlargement to theOireachtas Foreign Affairs Committee and amember of the Irish Government’s HighLevel Asia Strategy Group.

External funding is key to expanding andenhancing the research opportunitiesoffered, says Looby, who adds that fundingfrom external donors for Newman Fellowshas been extremely generous since theirinception back in 1989. “The NewmanFellowships are very prestigious and sosuccessful that we have been delighted to

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PAGE EIGHTEEN UCD CONNECTIONS

STARSReaching for the

As the 100thNewman

Fellowship islaunched, the

universityhopes to

match thescheme’s

success withan exciting

range ofpostgraduatescholarships

under the AdAstra banner.

Ann O’Deareports

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PAGE NINETEENUCD CONNECTIONS

Access all areasAlumni support is also contributing toexpanding access at undergraduate levelthrough initiatives such as the New ERAAccess programme and the UCD SportsDevelopment Fund

At undergraduate level, UCD alumni have

supported the provision of scholarships to

the New ERA Access programme and the

Sports Development Fund. Simply through

using the UCD AIB affinity credit card, alumni

have contributed over €600,000 toward the

two initiatives in the last six years.

The aim of the UCD New ERA Access

programme is to increase access and

participation in higher education among

those who for a variety of socio-economic

reasons have traditionally been under-

represented at third level. Launched in

1997, the New ERA initiative has seen some

350 students enrolled in courses across all

faculties who traditionally might not have

opted for third-level study. Some 111

students entered UCD via the UCD New

ERA Access programme during 2005 alone.

Donations from the affinity cards go

towards financial scholarships that help

New ERA students with rent, living

expenses, travel and book costs. Since the

programme’s inception in 1997, there have

been a total of 132 graduates, with 75% of

these achieving first or second class

honours degrees.

A sporting chanceFunds from the affinity cards also go

toward the UCD Sports Development Fund,

which provides financial support for several

sports activities at UCD, such as the all-

important Sports Scholarship Programme

which has proven to be an integral part of

UCD remaining at the forefront of national

and international sport. In the 2005/06

academic year, 105 UCD students were

awarded sports scholarships in 15 different

disciplines, including soccer, GAA, rugby

and basketball. See profiles of some of our

leading sports scholars on page 56.

find many donors renewing their fundingfor fellowships.”

Each Newman Fellow is endowed for atwo-year period and undertakes a majorresearch project that generates numerouspublications. UCD provides facilities for thesescholars and supports them academicallyduring their tenure.

As part of its bid to enhance and expandpostgraduate research opportunities, UCDlaunched its new Ad Astra ResearchScholarships in April, the name derived fromthe UCD motto. These new scholarships areopen to all students undertaking researchdegrees, especially PhD, in any subject withinthe university.

At a time when the world’s leadingresearch universities are competing fiercelyfor the most talented postgraduatestudents, UCD needs to not only retain itsbest candidates but also to attract the bestand brightest postgraduates from other

countries and universities. By offering a veryattractive package of supports for master’sand doctoral research students, the Ad Astrascholarships should help UCD do just that.

This year, UCD will offer over 100 Ad AstraResearch Scholarships across the university,representing €8.5 million in funding, someof which will come from the university, butmuch of which will be through thegenerosity of external donors. Already fiveAd Astra scholarships have been sponsoredby the Bray Lions Club, Denis Kelliher andthe 3Ts (Turning the Tide of Suicide), thelatter sponsoring three scholarships inSuicide Studies.

The first Ad Astra scholarship in SuicideStudies has already been awarded to textileartist Seamus McGuinness, who will take uphis post at the School of Medicine andMedical Science in September, in a movewhich sees an intriguing marriage of Scienceand the Arts. Originally from Donegal and alecturer in textile design at the Galway MayoInstitute of Technology, McGuinness hasbeen working in the area of suicide forseveral years. He will work under thedirection of UCD professor of psychiatryProfessor Kevin Malone and their intentionis to move from awareness to the acquisitionof new knowledge around suicide.

“I’m very excited about the newscholarship, which will allow me toconcentrate my time 100% in the subjectmatter,” says McGuinness. “By looking atthe area of suicide from two very differentangles of science and art, we’re hoping toacquire new knowledge in the area ofsuicide in modern Ireland and place it in alanguage that people will understand.”

Looby says UCD is also looking to itsalumni to assist in the funding of theseimportant scholarships and will launch amajor fundraising programme with alumnilater this year.

Pictured are artist Seamus McGuinness(left), UCD’s first Ad Astra scholar, withProfessor Kevin Malone standing withinMcGuinness’s 21 Grams installation. Hesays the shirts depict the lives lost andthe empty shell of early manhood leftbehind with the destruction in the wakeof suicide.

‘The NewmanFellowships are veryprestigious andso successfulthat we havebeen delightedto find manydonorsrenewing theirfunding forfellowships’

THE UCD Belfield campus hasundergone several faceliftssince its inception in 1964 toreflect and accommodate thedynamic nature of itsinhabitants and

surroundings. The original 1964 campusplan, drawn up by Andrej Werjchert forPresident Michael Tierney, set out tocreate an infrastructure to meet theprimary teaching and research objectivesof the university through an expansiveenvironment where students andacademics could engage and work. Thisprinciple was maintained when thecampus underwent the subsequent designrevisions in 1973, 1986, 1998 and 2002that were necessitated by social andphysical changes.

As much as each of these periods ofchange was greeted with welcomedexcitement, nobody could haveanticipated the explosion of developmentthat occurred over the last five years whenmore than 75,000m2 of new buildings wasconstructed.

A new vision of the campus was once

again deemed necessary in 2005 andfollowing a tendered competition, thetask of drawing up the blueprints wasawarded to architect firm MurrayO’Laoire.

The Belfield campus currently consists of48% green space, amenity anddevelopment land, 29% sports facilities,10% roads and car parking, 9% buildingand 4% managed woodland – a wonderfulcampus that compares favourably with anyinternational university. With an estimateddaytime population of 20,000 it is a hive ofactivity during term time. The combinationof on-campus amenities and facilities –academic, sporting, residential andrecreational – make it the best universitycampus in Ireland.

The campus is regarded as Arcadian,with its leafy surroundings and vast openspaces giving students and staff a sense ofopenness and self-containment.Conversely, the nature of university lifeleaves the campus empty and quiet in theevenings and out of term. The universitynow wishes to rotate its inward focus andengage with the wider community. This

objective requires the development of asustainable and living campus, theprovision of facilities – be theycommercial, educational or cultural – inlocations that invite in the outsidecommunity of Dublin city and visitors.

The Gateway Project, which promotesthe idea of year-round use of facilities bystudents, staff and outside communities, iscentral to this plan’s success. Thedevelopment of economically viablefacilities will ultimately benefit thestudent body and the academiccommunity and in so doing, the seed ofincreased public engagement is sown.

From Arcadia to UtopiaThe first step in any campus developmentplan is to address the existing woes. AtBelfield they include: the volume of cars;lack of parking spaces; creaking transportinfrastructure; dead space in the evenings,at the weekends and out of term; lack ofurban heart that encourages people tostay on campus; reduced local privaterental accommodation; inadequatefacilities to display our historical and

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PAGE TWENTY UCD CONNECTIONS

A recently publishedfootprint of the next

generation of theBelfield campus contains

ambitious plans for itsbuildings and amenitiesover the coming decade

GRANDDESIGNS

Proposed land use zones to encourage 24-7 campus life

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PAGE TWENTY ONEUCD CONNECTIONS

cultural treasures; wasted opportunities topromote the university to the thousandsof visitors and conference delegates whospend time here; and of course theinevitable lack of working space for staffand communal spaces for students.

The plan proposed by Murray O’Laoiretackles these and other infrastructuralissues. It divides the campus into fivedistinct land uses: ● the academic core, centred on the lake

with a main pedestrian avenuerunning from UCD Quinn School ofBusiness to the Sports Centre

● the Gateway area, which runs from themain entrance to the core andincorporates new cultural, amenity,

academic, alumni, retail andcommercial facilities

● the residential areas that intensify on-campus residences, create a morevibrant living campus and reducecommuting

● consolidated Sports on the west side ofthe campus, building on the currentfacilities to international standards

● the innovation park on the easternend of the campus with the addition ofNIBRT to the NovaUCD complex atMerville House.

Core to good planning are embeddedprinciples covering transport, green spaceand amenity, land use density and utilityservices.

Despite the fact that the largest busterminus in Dublin is located on campus,the significant increase in private carusage by students and staff has threatenedBelfield’s Arcadian setting. Sincetemporary surface car parks are neitherdesirable nor sustainable, the plan sets outlocations for a number of multi-storey andsemi-basement car parks outside anextended pedestrian rim.

Good architectural design favouringhigher-density development indesignated areas rather than smallbuilding extensions or stand-alonepavilions is the key tenet to theprotection and conservation of its openspaces. The plan also proposes anevaluation audit of some of the existingbuildings with a view to long-termplanning for replacement or increasedheight extension. The plan alsorecognises the value in retaining theoriginal demesne houses of RoebuckCastle, Merville House, Belfield House,Ardmore House, Woodview and Richview.

The landscaping strategy aims toenhance the biodiversity of the campusthrough tree planting, amenity walks andthe extension of the surface water featurefrom the lake through the Gateway area.The enhancement of UCD’s parkland,much of which was planted during thedevelopment of the original estates in the18th and 19th centuries, will include a 6kmperimeter route designed for jogging,walking and cycling.

The UCD campus has, since its inception,played a key role in the local area, as amajor employer and a valuable recreationaland sporting amenity for the localcommunity. The new vision for the campushopes to extend that relevancy to an evenwider community, whether they beDubliners, or the growing number ofoverseas visitors attending majorconferences here. It’s an ambitious plan, butit’s a vision which is ultimately attainable.

UCD will be hosting public open days oncampus, when full details of the CampusDevelopment Plan will be available toview. Keep an eye on www.ucd.ie wherewe will be posting details of times andvenues.

Pedestrianisation of campus core provides more comfortable environment

‘The university wishes to rotateits inward focus and engagewith the wider community’

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PAGE TWENTY TWO UCD CONNECTIONS

Plans for the move from Earlsfort Terrace to Belfield will include the provision of a new home for the Kevin Barry window.The window is truly one of UCD’s treasures and will be given pride of place on the Belfied campus.

C A M P U S V I S I O N

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END OF AN ERA

Today only Medicine and Civil Engineering remain at EarlsfortTerrace, but the imposing building was designed as the headquartersof UCD back in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

Designed by Rudolph Maxmilian Butler, Earlsfort Terrace was builtto house the entire university. Maxmilian Butler was a leading churcharchitect at the time, editor of the prestigious Irish Builder and headof architecture in UCD from 1924 to 1943.

The old campus was always wrapped up with the earlydevelopment of the Irish State, with many of the staff and studentsparticipating in the Easter Rising in 1916 and the subsequent War ofIndependence. One of Earlsfort’s best-loved features is themarvellous Kevin Barry window (pictured left) in the eponymousseminar room on the concourse. It commemorates the young UCDmedical student who was hanged for his part in an ambush on

British soldiers during the War of Independence.As the university outgrew Earlsfort Terrace in the 1960s, various

parcels of land were purchased at Belfield and the campus facultieswere gradually moved there, under the auspices of UCD president DrMichael Tierney who had a clear vision for a unique suburbancampus. The final move from Earlsfort marks the realisation ofTierney’s dream, but it will be with some nostalgia that students andalumni alike say farewell to the old campus.

The 2007 issue of UCD Connections will include a majorretrospective of the Earlsfort Terrace campus. If you’re an EarlsfortTerrace alumnus, we’d be delighted to hear of any memories,anecdotes or photos of your time there. Please send all materials to:Alumni Development Office, UCD, Belfield, Dublin 4 or email:alumni@ucd.ie.

The imminent move from Earlsfort Terrace finally sees the realisation ofMichael Tierney’s dream of 40 years to bring all disciplines on to one campus.But it is not without sadness that we’ll bid farewell to the old city campus

V I E W F R O M B R U S S E L S V I E W F R O M B R U S S E L S

PAGE TWENTY FIVE UCD CONNECTIONS PAGE TWENTY FOUR UCD CONNECTIONS

recalls. “Ireland joined the EEC in 1973 andwe were all excited and looking to thefuture. It was the topic of all our debates.”

Day’s first job was with the InvestmentBank of Ireland before moving to theConfederation of Irish Industry, IBEC’sforerunner, as EC information officer. By1979, however, she had joined theCommission and by 1982, when RichardBurke became Commissioner for the secondtime, he appointed her to his cabinet.

“Up to that point I had been involved withtechnical work. This was a totally differentside to the Commission and overtly politicalas opposed to technical.” Day excelled and itwas the start of a 14-year unbroken run infour cabinets. At the same time, she alsomanaged to help set up a UCD alumnichapter in Brussels that still meetsintermittently. “It has between 150 and 200members and it is usually a great socialevening.”

Quickly spotted for her extraordinarycapacity for hard work, within two years Daywas working for Peter Sutherland and wassuddenly responsible for state aid policy,where vested interests were tackled. Daysays these were the times when thefoundations were laid for the opening up ofthe airlines and telecommunications sectorsto competition.

Unusually, when Sir Leon Brittan took overthe post in 1989 he made sure to retain Day.Now, on top of her responsibility for stateaid policy, she was given the job of lookingafter relations with central and easternEurope, namely the new accession states andthe Russian Federation.

By 1996 she was Deputy Chef de Cabinetto Brittan and had responsibility fordeveloping a new transatlantic agenda, aswell as looking after the Balkans, Cyprus andMalta. “Working in the cabinet wasfascinating, as you see the problems througha political spectrum,” she notes. “Given thatI was involved with competition policy andwe were putting the internal market in

place, it was also very substantive work. I wasalso lucky enough to work with very reform-minded commissioners.”

Her progress continued to be meteoric.Courteous and good humoured, but with awill of steel, she surmounted every challengeEurope threw at her. Before enlargementshe was promoted to deputy director in ChrisPatten’s external relations DirectorateGeneral (DG). “My job was to help thecountries understand and prepare forenlargement,” she explains. “In one way wewere actually working on both sides of thefence. We had to help them get there, butwe also had to decide if they had come farenough. It was enormously stimulating and Iwould say in many ways it was the mostexciting and rewarding part of my career.”

It was also a great preparation for hercurrent role, a large part of which is taken upwith dealing with ambassadors from thevarious member states and offering theoverall Commission view to the EuropeanParliament. In fact, she says her entire careerpath turned out to be a preparation for thetop job. “I have experience of the politicaland can grasp the technical. I have goodexperience of a range of DGs and of dealingwith the outside. It was all to ultimatelyprove to be the best training ground.”

Day was subsequently to become deputydirector general for relations with thewestern Balkans and the Mediterraneanbefore becoming Director General for theenvironment. This was a real break from herbackground in trade.

Summit of successFinally she became Secretary-General, thetop job in the EU, succeeding another Irishcolleague David O’Sullivan. She says theirshared nationality is coincidental but that it isalso a testament to how well thought of theIrish are in EC circles. “In many ways it wouldbe difficult to have two people followingeach other from some of the bigger countriessuch as France, Germany or the UK.”

The challenge now she says is toconsolidate all the different departmentsacross the EU and ensure that they worktogether. But her capacity for hard work willcertainly be called upon. The EU, she admits,has received a “few knocks” and the ‘Nos’from the French and the Dutch referendumsprovided a salutary reminder that the publicneeds to be brought along.

“I am eternally optimistic, however, and Ireally believe we are coming out of thatcrunch period. After all, the prime ministerswere able to reach agreement on thebudget in December which many haddoubted beforehand.”

But she stresses the real task ahead is topersuade the people of Europe thatglobalisation is an opportunity and not athreat. “We can only deal with it by workingtogether. People are worried about theirpensions, healthcare, climate change andthat we will be overwhelmed by the rise ofChina, India and Brazil. But together we canensure that Europe has an important role toplay and has values that others respect.Other countries such as China and Russiawant Europe to be a key world player. Ourmultinational, negotiated approach basedon rules is really the only fair way,” shepoints out.

She is also optimistic about futureenlargement, with Romania joining theranks in the next year or so, to be followedby Croatia and Turkey and finally the rest ofthe Balkans. “We have to acknowledge theconcerns of our citizens but the last wavewas very successful, even if a lot to digest allat once. I am confident we can enlargefurther and increase the prosperity andfuture well-being of all our people.”

With Day at the helm, this enormous tasksomehow seems all the more achievable.

Jane Suiter is a financial and economicsjournalist and for many years wrote for TheIrish Times. She graduated with a BA inEconomics and Politics (‘89) and is todaypursuing a PhD in Political Science.

As Secretary Generalof the EuropeanCommission,Catherine Day (BA‘74, MA ‘75) is thefirst woman to takeon the role of the EU’smost senior official.Jane Suiter spoke to her on Europe,enlargement andglobalisation

DAY IN THE

LIFE

‘I am confident we can enlarge further and increase the prosperity and future well-being of all our people’

CATHERINE DAY, Secretary-General of the EuropeanCommission, the most senior EU official and one-time architect of enlargement, is a distinguishedgraduate of the old Group IX degree of the UCDArts Faculty of Economics and Politics. At the timeGroup IX was taught by some of the university’s

most illustrious economists — Paddy Lynch, James Meenan, JohnO’Donovan and Garret FitzGerald — many have gone on todistinguished careers in the public and private sector.

Yet Day was in the front rank of such graduates, with first honoursin both her BA and MA in International Trade and EconomicIntegration. She was conferred with an honorary Doctorate of Lawstwo years ago.

She was very much a local at UCD. Brought up in Mount Merrion,she attended Mount Anville before going on to study at Belfield. “Itwas a really stimulating and enjoyable time to be at UCD,” she

CONSTRUCTION SIGHT

V I E W F R O M H O M E V I E W F R O M H O M E

Don Godson’s management styleand business foresight formed thecornerstone of CRH’s phenomenal

success worldwide. Grainne Rotheryspoke to him about his long and

illustrious engineering career sincegraduating from UCD in 1961

DON GODSON (BE ‘61) sometimes wonders how hislife might have panned out if he’d left Ireland in1961 to take up a scholarship on offer from theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Othersmay well wonder how CRH would have developedwithout his involvement, initially as development

director, then as head of US operations during a pioneering period ofacquisitions in the US, and later as group chief executive from 1994to 2000 when profits grew from €150 million to nearly €600 million.

As it was, after graduating from UCD with a degree in MechanicalEngineering in 1961, the former Synge Street student decided to startwork straight away instead of accepting the scholarship. His first jobwas with DuPont in Derry, where the company was building a majorchemical plant. Godson says DuPont was an exciting and innovativecompany, a leader in critical path scheduling, project managementand site safety. His early exposure to US management wouldinfluence his own management style later.

When the project was nearing completion, he applied for a US visaand, while waiting for it, took a job in the Irish Sugar/Erin Foodsresearch centre in Carlow. In 1964, he set off on the first of many tripsto the US, travelling to San Francisco with Dr Tadhg Twomey, directorof research at Irish Sugar, to look at new developments in food

processing. On his return, Godson helped to re-design an innovativefreeze-drying plant in Mallow.

He subsequently joined Cadbury and was involved in a majorexpansion of its Coolock plant, which applied new chemicalengineering techniques to chocolate manufacturing. Around thattime, he started a Master of Industrial Engineering degreeprogramme at UCD, which updated his primary engineering skills,provided new insights into operations research and design ofproduction systems, and also included accounting, marketing and HRprogrammes from the Business School.

Cementing relationsAt the beginning of 1968, he was on the move again, this time toRoadstone, which was the leading Irish company in aggregates,asphalt and concrete, with annual sales of around €12 million. He wastaken on as development manager under Dr Bill Murray. On hearingthat Godson had previously been involved in several major projects,Tom Roche, Roadstone’s visionary and entrepreneurial founder, puthim in charge of building a giant quarry at Belgard Castle inClondalkin. He looked to the US for inspiration and, together withtwo senior designers, embarked on a tour of leading US quarries,developing the main design concepts for the project on the road.

PAGE TWENTY SEVENUCD CONNECTIONS PAGE TWENTY SIX UCD CONNECTIONS

Towards the end of that project, he was involved in evaluating acement plant at the same location. At that time, Irish Cement had amonopoly in the Irish market and Roadstone was its major customer.

Godson was friendly with a number of people in Irish Cement’ssenior team, including Brian Kearney and Jim Walsh, who were alsoUCD engineering graduates. Indeed, he and his family were onholiday in west Cork with Kearney and Walsh and their families whenthe news came through that Roadstone had made a hostile bid forIrish Cement. In the midst of all that, Readymix UK made a hostile bidfor Roadstone.

Input from the common shareholder, Irish Life, resulted inRoadstone and Irish Cement merging to become Cement RoadstoneHoldings (CRH) in 1970. Godson says it took a while for the twodifferent cultures to gel. “Roadstone was Tom Roche-style, low keyand entrepreneurial, whereas Irish Cement had an establishmentview of things,” he explains. Having won a Fulbright Scholarship toattend the UC Berkeley Business School, Godson was glad to take abrief break from it all.

When he returned to Ireland, Jim Culliton was appointed CEO andhe himself became CRH development director. At the time, thecompany was almost completely dependent on the Irish market. Withlimited scope for domestic growth and indications that things weregoing to get tougher in the Irish construction industry, Culliton setgoals for CRH to grow internationally while continuing to upgradethe core business in Ireland.

In the early 1970s, CRH expanded in the UK and the Netherlands,and managed projects in Iran, Kuwait and Nigeria during the first OilCrisis. But, with its US$400 billion construction market, Godson sawthe US as a land of opportunity for CRH. From 1977, he commuted toNew York for a year before moving over full-time. He acquired CRH’sfirst US company in 1978. CRH is now the largest constructionmaterials company in the US. “We had a very good growth model,”

he says. “We bought family-owned businesses. Owners feltcomfortable with CRH’s management style and stayed on to growtheir businesses.”

Before leaving Ireland, Godson had been advised by a topmanagement consultant that CRH had no transferable skills to bringto the US. “I realised later that the transferable skill was the ability towork with entrepreneurs,” he says. “I met a lot of Tom Roche-styleowners over there. They continued to lead their companies. Valuewas created by building a learning organisation that captured bestpractice from every company rather than handing down corporateedicts on tablets of stone.”

Man of stoneGodson returned to Ireland in 1994 as group CEO. During his time atthe helm he reorganised to facilitate the development of thecompany in Poland, Ukraine, Finland, the Baltic States and SouthAmerica. He remained on the board until 2004 and still stays close toformer colleagues with whom he shared a 36-year adventure. CRHcontinues its strong growth under CEO Liam O’Mahony. Last year,pre-tax profits reached €1.28 billion. The group now employs 66,500people at 2,600 locations in 25 countries and has delivered compoundannual growth in total shareholder returns of 19.5% per annum overthe past 35 years.

Today Godson is on the board of the UCD Graduate School ofBusiness and is a director of AIB. He’s also chairman of Ireland’sleading engineering firm, Project Management (PM), founded by hisex-UCD and CRH friends, Jim Walsh and Brian Kearney, and now ledby another UCD and CRH graduate, Pat McGrath. “My contributionhas been to try to encourage PM to do a bit of the CRH thing andgrow overseas,” he says. “PM has developed in the UK and Polandand is looking further afield to Asia and the US.”

Although he has always had an interest in the arts, Godson believesthat his engineering training stood him in good stead throughout hiscareer. “It provided a good basic skill set for structuring and solvingproblems, be they in engineering or in business,” he points out. Andhe has no regrets about passing up the opportunity to go to MIT in1961. “I’ve had a lot of fun and friendships and frequent flyer milesand I never went to work without looking forward to it,” he says.

Grainne Rothery graduated with a BA in History of Art and

German (‘86) and now works as a freelance journalist and writer.

‘I never went to workwithout lookingforward to it’

V I E W F R O M W I T H I N V I E W F R O M W I T H I N

AS YOU read this magazine, something amazing isstarting to connect deep in your brain. Signals areracing along circuits of interlinked brain cells,circuits that can rewire like a network exchange tocreate new routes for information. This fizzingmaelstrom of connections is the basis of how we

process new experiences, how we learn and remember. And ifthose connections go awry, disease can result.

UCD neuroscientist Professor Ciaran Regan has spent more than25 years looking at what makes brain cells ‘plastic’, or able toforge these new links. And whether he is figuring out the basicsof how the brain wires itself, or collaborating with industry tolook at brain disease, he has built a sterling scientific career onmaking the right connections.

He currently directs the Applied Neurotherapeutics ResearchGroup (ANRG) based at the UCD Conway Institute, which hasteamed up with Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to look at the molecularevents involved in brain connections during memory formationand in diseases such as schizophrenia and depression. They aim todevelop new approaches to detecting and treating theseconditions.

It all started when he graduated from UCD with a zoologydegree, going on to pursue a PhD in the proteins that helpmediate vision in fish species. He moved to the University ofNijmegen in the late 1970s and while there he met a mentorcalled John Marshall who was interested in how the brain regainsspeech function after damage. Their evening discussions overBordeaux wine — Marshall’s other interest — fuelled the youngresearcher’s intrigue about the notion of nerve connectionschanging in the brain.

“I had become absolutely captivated by this whole idea,” recallsRegan. “In those days this was really quite novel, outrageousthinking and we were talking about neuroplasticity before theterm had even been invented.”

Regan developed this interest in brain cell connectivity with theMedical Research Council in London, where he looked at proteinson the surface of nerves and helped identify a ‘sticky’ proteincalled N-CAM that seemed to play a pivotal role in linkingconnecting nerve cells.

He moved back to UCD, this time to the pharmacologydepartment, to set up his own research group and in the early1990s they made a groundbreaking discovery that set a newparadigm in the field of memory research. “It took me ages to tryto figure out what was going on and it suddenly struck,” saysRegan of the breakthrough, which showed how and when N-CAMis involved in processing memory in rats. They found the animalsfirst overproduced sticky connections between nerve cells in thehours after learning a new task and then slowly weeded out thenon-essential ones over two days.

Regan is particularly fond of the three papers his grouppublished in 1992 to describe the seminal results. “To this day theyare cited in any paper on this subject, so that for me is just great,14 years and still rolling,” he adds.

Pharma fieldMore recently, his research focus has shifted towards drugdevelopment and he is no stranger to collaborating with industry.While such associations are commonplace today, back in the 1980sand 1990s the research climate in Ireland wasn’t as supportive ofties with big business. But this didn’t deter Regan, whoestablished a series of fruitful associations with biotechnology andpharmaceutical companies.

And again, connections came into play. All Regan’scollaborations with industry have arisen through personalcontacts and trust. “Because when you think about it, the pharmaindustry is taking very substantial career risks — if it goes wrong,it is in very serious trouble,” he points out.

As his interest in the drug-related aspect grew in the late 1990s,

PAGE TWENTY NINEUCD CONNECTIONS PAGE TWENTY EIGHT UCD CONNECTIONS

Regan took a sabbatical and went to GlaxoSmithKline in the UK to getan inside view of drug development. “I thought UCD was quiteinsightful in allowing me to fly the coop for a year to spend mysabbatical in the pharma industry, because the tut-tutting from theacademic community was loud — it was thought that I had taken theking’s shilling and just gone to industry,” he recalls.

But it was all part of a larger plan. Regan came back to UCD and in2003 got support from Science Foundation Ireland and WyethPharmaceuticals to set up an interdisciplinary research cluster, theANRG, to look at brain disease. With funding of €10 million, it was thelargest collaboration between basic research and the pharmaceuticalindustry that Ireland had ever seen.

The ANRG hopes to improve on our current anti-depressant and anti-psychotic drug therapies, which were discovered by serendipity in the1950s and have advanced little since, explains Regan. By going back tothe drawing board, the researchers use animal models of memory anddisease to look for molecular events involved in plasticity changes inthe brain. Ultimately, they want to find the molecules that differbetween healthy and diseased states, most substantially inschizophrenia, but they are also working on depression andAlzheimer’s disease.

This molecular approach can identify ‘biomarkers’ that indicate theearly stages of a brain condition, allowing for early treatment. And itcan find new targets for developing drugs to treat that disease. ButRegan points out that the work is pre-clinical and that any humantherapies arising from this research will take around 10 years todevelop.

And while the plasticity research forges ahead, Regan also takes timeto reflect on the wider connections between drug use and culture,which was the subject of his popular science book, Intoxicating Minds.“It has resulted in many invitations to speak at interesting forums,which has been a lot of fun,” he concludes. It’s all about connections.

Claire O’Connell graduated from UCD with a BSc in Botany (‘92) anda PhD in Pharmacology (‘98). She works as a freelance science journalistand is a frequent contributor to The Irish Times.

Professor Ciaran Regan has beenresearching the highly complex area of

nerve connections in the brain for over ageneration. He talks to Claire O’Connellabout his achievements in neuroscience

Mind’sEYE

THE AGE OF DISSIDENCE

P O L I T I C S P O L I T I C S

ONE OF the best titles for a magazine article I haveever seen was UCD As I Forget It, a beautifullywritten piece by novelist Kate O’Brien that waspublished in University Review, reminiscing abouther student days when the college was located inEarlsfort Terrace.

Drowned in the well of forgetfulness, some of my own oldmemories came back to life as I sat in O’Reilly Hall on 17 Januarywaiting for Noam Chomsky to give a lecture. As we waited, a seriesof black and white photographs from the university’s past flashedbefore us from a screen at the back of the stage.

Among them was a picture of the late John Feeney addressing amass meeting in the Great Hall at Earlsfort Terrace during the GentleRevolution, the dramatic student upheaval of 1969. It’s a marvellousphotograph, which captures Feeney’s conviction and certainty, hisshock of hair thrown back in a gesture of rebellious insouciance.

PAGE THIRTY ONEUCD CONNECTIONS PAGE THIRTY UCD CONNECTIONS

In the background the faces of the crowd are tiny specks. I knowI’m there somewhere because I was in the audience for that speechand every other oration that was given in those heady days.Tragically, Feeney himself — who went on to become a journalist —died in a plane crash in 1984.

Dissent is never safe but in those days it was decidedly dangerous.Feeney and others came close to expulsion from the college for theiractivities. The powers-that-be did not welcome disagreement andchallenges to their authority.

Given that background, it was decidedly refreshing to see ProfessorChomsky, the dissident’s dissident, getting so warm a welcome fromsuch enormous crowds during his Irish visit. Most of his talks andlectures — covering such topics as the role of intellectuals, the threatof nuclear warfare and different aspects of US foreign policy — weregiven in Belfield and it was heartening to see the College Presidenthimself, Dr Hugh Brady, making a short speech of introduction for thedistinguished visitor. UCD and Ireland have grown up and matured.

It fell to myself to chair one of the Chomsky lectures, held underthe auspices of the Literary and Historical Society and the PhilosophySociety. The massive audience of perhaps 1,300 people was very wellbehaved, but chairing Chomsky is still not an easy task. He is not aman for sound-bites and I suspect most of the people who queued upto ask questions at the end failed to get a hearing.

Filling the O’Reilly Hall on three separate nights and crowding theRDS for an Amnesty lecture as well, Chomsky was the hottest ticketin town. How to explain this phenomenon? Obviously the man’sintellectual achievements must be part of the reason, although wehave had other fine minds visiting our capital city who did not attractthe same level of interest: a recent example was the Polish intellectualand founder-member of Solidarity, Bronislaw Geremek.

It wasn’t just Chomsky’s eminence and distinction but the fact that,like John Feeney and his co-thinkers all those years ago, he was the

right person in the right place at the right time. With the Bushadministration at war in Iraq and rattling sabres over Iran and otherplaces, people are concerned about world peace. As an articulate andiconoclastic dissenter from within Fortress America, Chomsky wasbound to get a good hearing.

Thirst for truthIreland is finding its feet intellectually and every other way at thepresent time. Successive scandals combined with the rise ofmaterialism have seriously undermined the position of the CatholicChurch. Indeed the crowds that came for Chomsky reminded me ofthose that flocked to hear famous Catholic preachers in the past:humankind clearly craves certainty. A video webcast of the mainChomsky lectures at UCD is available on the internet atwww.ucd.ie/news/jan06/011306_chomsky.htm and readers mayjudge the events for themselves.

Chomsky is a trenchant critic of the modern mass media and theadvance coverage given to his visit seemed to confirm his strictures.He was reported as having called the Taoiseach a “shoeshine boy” forGeorge W. Bush. Following up these reports, I made contact withProfessor Chomsky, who denied ever having made such a remark. Itturned out he had given a telephone interview to an Irish journalistthe previous May where he made a disparaging comment aboutcertain European leaders who were prepared to “shine the shoes” ofthe Bush administration by supporting the Iraq War, but thecomment was directed at governments in what Donald Rumsfeld calls“New Europe” and not at Bertie Ahern at all.

Happily, this more accurate version of Chomsky’s views waspublished in The Irish Times. I know my article was read in theDepartment of Foreign Affairs under Minister Dermot Ahern TD andthat it influenced its thinking when a major dilemma arose in relationto the Chomsky visit. Immediately prior to his planned departurefrom Boston for Dublin, he discovered that his passport was out ofdate (no jokes about absent-minded professors please!). The ministerwaived the usual entry requirements and the visit went ahead.

Although he expressed gratitude for the gesture, Chomsky did nothold back in his views on the alleged use of Shannon Airport as astopover for the “extraordinary rendition” of CIA prisoners on theirway to Guantanamo Bay or some other, more obscure place ofdetention. The US Embassy has denied that any prisoners are beingtransported through Ireland but, at the time of writing, thecontroversy still rages.

Some enterprising MA student at UCD should write a thesis aboutthe Chomsky visit as an instance of how one man, an intellectual ofuncompromising seriousness, could so readily be adopted as afigurehead by so many Irish people. It could tell us a lot aboutChomsky, but it might tell us even more about ourselves.

Deaglán de Bréadún is the Foreign Affairs Correspondent of TheIrish Times. A UCD graduate in English literature, he is author of TheFar Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland (Collins Press,2001) and Scealloga, a collection of short stories in Irish (ComharTeoranta, 1991).

‘The crowds that camefor Chomsky remindedme of those thatflocked to hear famousCatholic preachers inthe past: humankindclearly craves certainty’

For three nights in January,the world-renowned linguistand political dissident Noam

Chomsky held a packedO’Reilly Hall to rapt

attention. Irish Timesjournalist and UCD graduate

Deaglán de Bréadún recallschairing one of the lectures

FOWL?FRIEND OR

P E R S P E C T I V E S P E R S P E C T I V E S

As the threat of avian flu continues todominate headlines, Danielle Barronasks the experts if it is really a clear and present danger

AVIAN INFLUENZA, known colloquially as bird flu, hasdominated news reports in recent months. The H5N1virus first emerged in poultry and wild birds inSouth-East Asia in 1997. Since 2003 there have been196 people infected and over half of these caseswere eventually fatal. But is avian flu really a global

threat, edging its way ever closer to Irish shores? And is Irelandadequately prepared in the event of bird flu becoming a real andpresent danger?

Last February the Minister for Agriculture and Food, MaryCoughlan TD, established an expert group to advise on and reviewcurrent control measures regarding avian influenza. ProfessorMichael Monaghan from the UCD School of Agriculture, Food Scienceand Veterinary Medicine acts as chair of this group, with a pivotal rolealso being played by Professor William Hall, Director of the Centre forResearch in Infectious Diseases. Hall also chairs the InfluenzaPandemic Expert Group, which was set up by the Department ofHealth and Children in 2000.

Monaghan had a similar role during the foot and mouth diseaseoutbreak in 2001. As chair of this group, he says they are concernedwith the impact that a potential outbreak of avian flu could have onIreland’s poultry industry, and the consequent risks to human health.“What we’re interested in doing is trying to reduce the risk of thevirus carrying into the poultry industry. All our efforts are directedtowards protecting both the industry itself and the people whowork in it, since those in the front line are most at risk,” he explains.

Monaghan adds that as the poultry industry is controlled by arelatively small number of people, it is much easier to communicateeffectively within the industry. There is a challenge as regards peoplewith small private poultry holdings, though Department officialsbelieve that the majority of such holdings are now registered.

EU regulations currently dictate that all birds in an affected flockbe slaughtered and restriction zones of three to ten kilometres beplaced around the area. Monaghan sees as encouraging the fact thatduring the recent outbreak in France, avian flu was rapidly identifiedand controlled by the quick implementation of such a protocol.Ireland is apparently similarly prepared. “The Department ofAgriculture has all the measures in place that are required to manageit,” he says.

Remote riskWith bird flu having entered people’s vernacular, it is no wonder thatthere are some popular misconceptions about the nature of itstransmissibility. When news of its presence in Italy broke, poultry salesdropped some 70% in two days.

Monaghan says, however, that once chicken is cooked thoroughly,there is no chance of contracting the disease from it. “The reality isthat chicken needs to be cooked properly for all sorts of otherreasons. But the possibility of the virus being present in the chickenwe buy in the shops is so remote as to be negligible.”

At present, the only means of contracting H5N1 is from closecontact with sick or dead birds. Monaghan explains that this was a

major factor in the case of bird-to-human transmission in East Asiawhere there were many small, privately owned poultry flocks, withthe families concerned in regular intimate contact with infectedbirds. There is no confirmed evidence of human-to-humantransmission with H5N1 as of yet.

Monaghan believes that the recent discovery of the dead swan inScotland that was found to have been infected with H5N1 onlymarginally increased the risk of an outbreak in Ireland. “It meant thatthe disease was geographically closer than it had been up to thatpoint but the risk is only marginally greater…and that risk has alwaysbeen there.”

He goes on to explain that H5N1 has already mutated andcombined with other avian viruses in a process known as re-assortment, so that there are now five distinct forms of H5N1 inexistence. The current concern is that the virus could mix withanother human or animal virus and create a new virus that infectshumans easily.

Hall admits there is a chance of this happening, saying it’s difficultto predict how pathogenic a virus is going to be. “The virus isconstantly changing but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will infecthumans.”

It is, however, something the Department of Health must consider,admits Hall. The Influenza Pandemic Expert Group was first set up in2000 to prepare Ireland’s influenza pandemic preparedness plan,based on World Health Organisation recommendations.

Hall says this is an ongoing dynamic process, with the planconstantly updated during recent outbreaks to incorporate newscientific data and experience obtained. The plan does not justconcern H5N1, but is a contingency plan in the event of any newinfluenza pandemic, something Hall says is a probability.

“No one can say when it will happen, how it will happen, or whatthe virus will be,” says Hall. “But it happened three times in the lastcentury and is probably likely to happen again.”

In a recent study published in The Lancet medical journal, thepandemic flu plans of 25 EU member states were analysed. Irelandwas found to have one of the best overall plans, along with the UK,France, Germany and the Netherlands.

While Hall admits that the recent human fatalities are “alarming”,he says the number is relatively small compared to the millions ofbirds that have been infected and the many thousands of people thatwould have been in close contact with them.

The grim reality is that while it is difficult to catch bird flu, it has ahigh mortality rate, killing over half of those infected. And nobodycan say for certain if the virus will mutate into a form that transmitseasily between humans. Hall says it is something we will have to“watch carefully”, but is insistent there is no need to panic. “Rightnow there is no evidence to suggest that the current H5N1 virus is asignificant human threat.”

Danielle Barron graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Pharmacology (‘05)and is currently pursuing an MSc in Science Communications in DCU.She works as a freelance science writer and has contributed to boththe Irish Examiner and The Irish Times.

PAGE THIRTY THREEUCD CONNECTIONS PAGE THIRTY TWO UCD CONNECTIONS

Bird flu outbreak at Norfolk Road Farm, North Tudenham, Norfolk in April 2006

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CH O C O L AT E - F R O S T E Dcereal for breakfast, Cokeand crisps for lunch, chipsand sausages for dinnerand an endless stream ofsugar, salt, additives,

preservatives, artificial flavourings and fatthroughout the day — this is the diet of agrowing number of Irish children.

‘Childhood obesity in Ireland’ — thephrase has a certain resonance as healthexperts in the country have been pushingthe subject in the national media forseveral years. But the true extent of theproblem is stark and has grim implicationsfor the next generation of Irish adults — apoint to which many of us may havebecome inured.

One in five Irish children aged 5-12 yearsis overweight or obese (Irish UniversitiesNutrition Alliance, 2005; Economic andSocial Research Institute, 2005). That’s300,000 people at increased risk ofdiabetes, heart disease and cancer.According to UCD nutritionist EileenGibney, the problem is growingexponentially. “Already children arepresenting with chronic disorders normallyonly seen in adulthood, such as Type 2Diabetes,” she says. “What will happen tothese children in adulthood? Arthritis?Heart disease? Cancer?”

The important point for families, schoolsand government to take on board is thatmany of the risk factors associated withexcess weight can be reduced or removedby a change in lifestyle, says Gibney. Thatis why it is so important for thegovernment to act now to address theproblem.

This time last year An Taoiseach BertieAhern TD was presented with the Reportof the National Taskforce on Obesity,which included recommendations onremoving vending machines from schoolsand establishing a new trainingprogramme for health professionals, aswell as guidelines for the labelling offoods, a review of fiscal policy andguidelines for the diagnosis and treatmentof overweight and obesity.

Few or none of the recommendationscontained in the report, Obesity — the

S O C I E T Y S O C I E T Y

PAGE THIRTY FIVEUCD CONNECTIONS PAGE THIRTY FOUR UCD CONNECTIONS

Policy Challenges, have beenimplemented, according to Gibney.

“The report highlighted the need for‘joined-up’ policy, cross-collaborationbetween all key stakeholders and realpractical engagement by both the publicand the private sectors. Childhood obesityis a hard nut to crack, however, because somany diverse and complex societal factorsare feeding the problem.”

In a recent presentation to the EuropeanHeart Network, Maureen Mulvihill, HealthPromotion Manager with the Irish HeartFoundation, showed a chilling set ofimages. The traditional food pyramid,almost entirely consisting of complexcarbohydrates, fruit, vegetables and low-fat proteins, with just a tiny fraction setaside for fatty and sugary foods at theapex, was displayed alongside theadvertising food pyramid, a monolith tojunk. Made up almost entirely of sweets,crisps, fizzy drinks and processed foods,only the slimmest stratum was left forhealthy food at the bottom of a pyramidrepresenting food advertised in the media.With the might and wealth of theadvertising industry so firmly on the sideof bad foods, children who watch up to

four hours of television a day are sittingtargets.

Active senseThis brings us to the next part of theproblem — lack of exercise. “Many schoolsoffer no opportunity for physical activityto children because they lack theresources,” says Gibney. “In some casesthey are even not allowed to run in theplayground for insurance reasons. Forreasons of safety many children are drivento school and are not allowed to play onthe street. The opportunities for physicalactivity are narrowing all the time.”

The most immediate problem of all,however, is intake. One fifth of Irishchildren’s energy intake comes fromsweets and processed snacks such aspotato crisps and biscuits. Daily intake ofsoft drinks such as Coke and Spriteaverages about two glasses. Not only arethese foods flooding children’s systemswith dangerous levels of sugar, fat andsalt, they are also replacing the nutritiousfoods that should be providing childrenwith essential vitamins and minerals suchas calcium, iron, vitamins A, C and D,storing up problems for the future.

The risk from this nutritional deficit isjust as serious as the risk from excessweight itself, says Martin Higgins, CEO ofthe Food Safety Promotion Board. “Fortyper cent of children have a daily fat intakethat is above the recommendation.Because they are consuming so much fatand energy from low-nutrient foods theyare losing out on key minerals such ascalcium. Almost a third of girls in Irelandare not getting enough iron and this hasimplications for energy levels andconcentration.”

Higgins says organisations like his ownneed to work harder to explain thefundamentals of a good diet to a publicconfused by technical jargon anddistracted by advertising. “The FoodSafety Promotion Board is working toeducate the public about good eatinghabits and response to the campaign hasbeen positive. So far we have run abillboard campaign and established aninformation website for children, parents

and other stakeholders atwww.safefoodonline.com. The site hashad 22,000 visits in two months,” he says.

Higgins acknowledges the role ofindustry, advertising, government and thehealth sector in addressing the problemsof Ireland’s overweight and obese youth.However, he believes that in order toeffect real change, the public must beempowered with knowledge.

“It must become a matter of economicnecessity for food producers to offer andmarket healthier food options,” he says.“It’s an ongoing process to educate thepublic about safe eating so that they canpass that demand on to retailers.”

Even as food manufacturers start tomove towards healthy options, however,the consumer must remain vigilant. It’seasy for a product to make glib claims tohealth advantage without actuallyoffering consumers much more than thefull-fat or full-salt alternatives. Evenproducts which now offer to fulfil aportion of the day’s fruit and vegetableintake need to be approached withcaution, says Higgins. “A glass of fruit juiceoffers some of the nutrients of the originalfruit, but not all.” Consumers need toreduce the amount of processed foodsthat they are eating and eat more wholefoods in their original state.

Gibney worries about the ability ofmany parents to produce healthy meals athome when so few people have the timeor the skills to cook fresh food fromscratch. A change in children’s healthmight, for many families, start with a basiccookbook.

Getting children on the right dietarycourse for life will take a whole family,whole school, whole country approach. Inreality, however, parents are the peoplewith the greatest motivation to push forchange, as we face into the dystopianpossibility of an Ireland where mothersand fathers outlive their children.

Louise Holden is studying for a Mastersin Education at the UCD School ofEducation & Lifelong Learning and hasbeen writing on education matters for 10years. She is currently EducationCorrespondent with The Irish Times.

Concern is mounting about the increasing rate ofunhealthy eating and childhood obesity in Ireland.Louise Holden reports on the weighty issue affecting our younger generation

‘A change in children’shealth might,for manyfamilies, startwith a basiccookbook’

OF THE LANDFAT

THE DRAGON EMERGES

I N T E R N A T I O N A L B U S I N E S S

Grainne Rothery looks east to see what trade fortunes Irish businesscan share with the strengthening Chinese market

IT HAS taken a while, but Napoleon Bonaparte’s prediction thatthe world would shake when China wakes is finally coming topass. Since 1978, the Chinese government has introduced andimplemented a series of reforms that have graduallytransformed what was a former USSR-style centrally plannedsystem into a market-driven economy. As a result, China’s GDP

has increased more than tenfold since the late 1970s and the mostpopulous country has now also become the world’s largestdeveloping economy.

China’s economy is now ranked fourth in the world when measuredagainst the official US dollar exchange rate. However, in terms ofpurchasing power parity (PPP), it’s ranked second, with a GDP of morethan US$8 trillion in 2005. According to the World Trade Organisation,growth is continuing at a rapid pace: in 2005, GDP increased by 9.9%.And China’s not about to take its foot off the accelerator: its latestfive-year plan has called for a 45% increase in GDP by 2010.

With the country now ranked third in the world in terms of totaltrade value, its impact on the global economy is obviously enormous.“Most economists believe that China is the engine behind globaleconomic growth because it is such a big potential market for the restof the world,” says Dr Liming Wang, director of UCD’s Centre forChinese Studies. Although China has a population of 1.3 billionpeople, it’s estimated that the actual market for Western goods andservices consists of around 300 million people, most of whom arelocated in the country’s coastal regions, where economicdevelopment has been fastest.

Breaking into ChinaFor Ireland, as with most of the rest of the world, the Chinese marketoffers huge opportunities. Michael Garvey, Director of Asia atEnterprise Ireland, points out that Greater China, which includesHong Kong and Taiwan, is now the second largest market in Asia forIrish companies. When diplomatic relations were established betweenIreland and China in 1979, trade between the two amounted toUS$6.9 million. In 2000, this figure had grown to US$714 million, withChina exporting US$336 million and importing US$377 million worthof goods. In 2005, the total value of trade between the two countrieswas more than US$4.5 billion. While Ireland’s exports to China morethan doubled to US$900 million in those five years, imports increasedtenfold to approximately US$3.6 billion.

As the figures show, much of Ireland’s move into the Chinese

market has occurred in the past decade. When An Taoiseach, BertieAhern TD, led his first trade mission to China in 1998, just five Irishcompanies had offices or bases in the country. Following this visit, astrategy committee was set up to guide development and increasebusiness engagement with Asia. Today, 55 Irish companies, includingGlen Dimplex, Kerry Group, Glanbia, Iona Technology and EPS, haveeither production or sales and marketing operations in China.

“There are more Irish companies in China now than there are inany other Asian country,” says Garvey. Enterprise Ireland’s China-based staff, meanwhile, has increased from three to eight peoplesince 1998.

The agency is working primarily with companies in the ICT sectorand says there are particular opportunities in telecommunications,mobile handset and equipment production and e-commerce andbusiness-to-business portals. Another active area, according toGarvey, is education services. More than 3,000 Chinese students arecurrently studying at Irish third-level institutions, but there is hugescope for growth. “For us, it’s a key economic sector,” explainsGarvey. “Business is all about getting to know people. When thesestudents go back, they’ll know Ireland, will have friends here andhopefully will do business with us in years to come. This is a veryimportant platform for the future of Irish trade with China.”

Another area where Ireland may carve out a niche is in Chinesetourism, which is now the fastest growing market of its kind in theworld. According to the World Tourism Organisation, just over 20million tourists travelled out of China in 2003. Outbound tourism isexpected to increase to 50 million by 2010 and to 100 million by2020. In an attempt to capture a slice of this market, Tourism Irelandset up an office in Shanghai in 2005.

The Irish government continues to forge links with China: it hasbeen involved in a number of high-profile trade missions over thepast few years and also recently established an IDA Ireland officein Shanghai in an effort to encourage inward investment.However, Victor Huang, a council member of the Ireland ChinaAssociation, believes there needs to be a wider effort in terms ofeducating Irish people about China and its potential benefits.“China is now officially the fastest-growing trading partner withIreland,” he says. “People need to be aware of what China canoffer them in terms of economic benefit. Otherwise they will missout on this big wave. And the people who will miss out will be theIrish, not the Chinese.”

PAGE THIRTY SIX UCD CONNECTIONS

I N T E R N A T I O N A L B U S I N E S S

PAGE THIRTY SEVENUCD CONNECTIONS

Centre for ChineseStudies at UCD

The recent establishment of a Centre

for Chinese Studies at UCD is a clear

indicator of the growing importance of

Ireland’s relationship with China. The

new centre’s main objective is to

facilitate economic and cultural ties

between the two countries by offering

teaching programmes to Irish students,

recruiting Chinese students, developing

research programmes and introducing

outreach activities.

There has already been strong

interest in the first study programme

set up in association with the centre, a

new four-year BComm with Chinese

Studies, which will start this September

and will include a year’s study at a

partner university in China. The centre

is currently working with other schools

within the university to develop a

range of joint programmes with a

Chinese element.

Recruitment of Chinese students to

UCD will also be a significant element

of the centre’s function. Other plans

include the establishment of

programmes to improve links with the

community, including the large Chinese

population in Ireland, and the provision

of consultancy services for both the

government and for companies

interested in doing business in China.

UCD has also recently been chosen as

the location for a Confucius Institute:

the Chinese government is currently

setting up 100 such institutes around

the world to promote Chinese culture

and language and to facilitate research

and economic links. With very similar

objectives, the new institute will work

alongside the UCD Centre for Chinese

Studies.

Grainne Rothery graduated with a

BA in History of Art and German (‘86)

and now works as a freelance

journalist and writer.

A NEW BREED OFENTREPRENEURS

B U S I N E S S

A nursery of innovation, NovaUCDis continually producing home-grown companies that provide avaluable contribution to the Irishknowledge economy. Jane Suiterreports on its latest progeny

THE INNOVATIVE knowledgecompanies in NovaUCD, theInnovation and TechnologyTransfer Centre at UCD, are acrucial part of building theIrish economy for the future,

according to leading scientists andresearchers.

The companies, which are at the cuttingedge of new research, specialise incommercialising scientific academic research,from developing new and better drugs toimproving voice testing and building bettermobile communications.

Dr Cormac Kilty, chairman of the IrishBioIndustry Association and NovaUCD boardmember, is fulsome in his praise for the

centre and what it is trying to do. “NovaUCDis crucial to developing indigenousknowledge-intensive firms. The governmentand Enterprise Ireland recognise this andhave provided great support. On top of thatScience Foundation Ireland provides thefunding to attract the best researchers toIreland.

“But the key is that it is so hands-on in thesame way that Yale is in the US. NovaUCDwill assist start-ups and even help pull in seedcapital, will help with patent applicationsand offer introductions to the local venturecapital community.”

Kilty is no stranger to the process ofcommercialising a scientific discovery. Heholds a PhD in Zoology from UCD and is

founder of Biotrin Holdings, a diagnosticscompany with a niche in emerging virusesand pathogens, as well as a newer companyspun out of Trinity College Dublin, OpsonaTherapeutics. He stresses that the mostimportant lesson that NovaUCD teachesacademics is to always reviewcommercialisation possibilities beforepublishing.

“It is vital that academics realise theyshould not disclose information before it iscommercialised and patented,” he warns.“Otherwise they are simply disposing of anasset that could be of great value tothemselves and to the country as a whole. Itis always possible that the idea could be thenext Elan or Microsoft. Technology transfer

PAGE THIRTY EIGHT UCD CONNECTIONS

Prof Barry Smyth, co-founder of ChangingWorlds andnominee for the Ernst & Young 2006 Entrepreneur of theYear Award in the International Services category

B U S I N E S S

PAGE THIRTY NINEUCD CONNECTIONS

is also the key to the nation getting returnon its investment.”

Dr Pat Frain, the director of the centre,echoes these sentiments. But his focus is alsoon attracting more UCD alumni in a varietyof roles. “Whether you are an academic andthinking of returning to Ireland, or someoneexperienced in business or marketing inknowledge-intensive industry we would loveto hear from you,” he says. “Many of thecompanies here are technically driven but we

also need management teams and seedcapital in particular.”

Crucially NovaUCD is already supportedthrough an innovative public-privatepartnership that includes AIB, Arthur Cox,Deloitte, Enterprise Ireland, Ericsson,Goodbody Stockbrokers and Xilinx. Theseprivate sector companies take a maximum of6% share in all firms locating there.

The results speak for themselves. Thecompanies at NovaUCD represent some ofthe best young, knowledge-intensive start-ups in Ireland. Dr Ray Bulger, who moved hiscompany Duolog Technologies fromSandyford back to NovaUCD, is typical and iseffusive in his praise. “NovaUCD’s supportmeans we can concentrate on what we are

good at, which is research and design. Whenwe were a stand-alone operation inSandyford we had to look after everythingincluding the lighting and the rates. NowNovaUCD looks after it all. There is alsoalways expert advice on hand includingfinancial and legal, while the networkingopportunities are enormous. It means we canfocus on the business.”

Keen to stress that at heart NovaUCD is acommunity of entrepreneurs, Frain points

out that companies get two years and ninemonths to stay before they have to stand ontheir own feet, while life sciences get a littlelonger. “NovaUCD is not simply good valuerental space,” he adds. “The first companieswill be moving out soon and newcomers willtake their place.”

Professor Barry Smyth of ChangingWorlds,another of the 23 companies based atNovaUCD, has also moved its advancedresearch unit and 17 software engineersback into the UCD campus. In recognition ofhis efforts, he has been shortlisted for theErnst & Young 2006 Entrepreneur of theYear, in the International Services category.Perhaps one of the best-known spinoutsfrom UCD’s School of Computer Science and

Informatics, ChangingWorlds is a market-leading provider of intelligentpersonalisation technology to the mobiletelecommunications industry.

The company has now rolled out itsflagship ClixSmartTM Intelligent Mobile Portalplatform to over 30 mobile networkoperators worldwide, including Vodafone,O2, TeliaSonera, Mobilkom and WataniyaTelecom groups. More than just a NovaUCDcompany, it already employs over 870people and has opened offices in SanFrancisco and Kuala Lumpur to support itsbusiness development activities in NorthAmerica and Asia.

Also focusing on the mobile telecomssector and other wireless communications isthe aforementioned Duolog Technologies,founded by Dr Ray Bulger and MarkO’Donovan. The company’s designs areincluded in high-volume products such asmobile phones, internet devices,home/industrial gateways and set-top boxes.Duolog has now expanded its operations toGalway, Bangalore and Budapest to takeadvantage of the lower cost base. Thechallenge, according to Bulger, is to ensurethat wireless connectivity becomes seamless.Its client list reads like a who’s who of blue-chip firms from Texas Instruments to IBM, SkyTV, the European Space Agency and Intel.

Other companies include BiancaMed, aspin-off from UCD’s School of Electrical,Electronic and Mechanical Engineering,which specialises in products to diagnosesleep apnoea. Its first product, LifeScreenApneaTM, allows a standard outpatientelectrocardiogram (ECG) to be used toidentify people with sleep apnoea and hasalready won FDA clearance. Otherinnovations at various stages ofdevelopment are its combined ECG andoximeter, which will provide a more refinedassessment of sleep apnoea and its impact onthe heart, and a home-based sleep-qualitymonitor to aid insomniacs.

Another hugely successful NovaUCDspinout is Celtic Catalysts, founded by DrBrian Kelly and Dr Declan Gilheany. Thecompany specialises in the niche area ofchiral catalysts, a technology that has been

Prof Paul Engel, head of Enzolve Technologies

B U S I N E S S

PAGE FORTY UCD CONNECTIONS

in development at the university over thepast 10 years. Kelly explains that the word‘chiral’ comes from the Greek word ‘kheir’meaning ‘hand’. Some 75% of all drugs inpharmaceutical pipelines are known as‘handed’ or chiral compounds. This meansthat on a molecular level the drugs exist inmirror-image forms — just as one’s left handis a mirror image of the right hand. Theproblem is that while one image may beactive, the other causes unwanted side

effects, the most quoted example beingthalidomide. The desired aim is to produce adrug that only exists in the one wantedform, thereby increasing effectiveness,reducing costs, lowering the necessarydosage and crucially helping eliminateunwanted side effects.

The company has recently added twoexperienced industry players to its board:Brian Elliott, formerly of the IDA and ofJensen Pharmaceuticals and a UN negotiator

charged with getting AIDS drugs into thedeveloping world, has been appointed chiefexecutive, while Nobel Prize winner BarrySharpless is chairman of the scientificadvisory board.

Chiral compounds are also the scope ofEnzolve Technologies, headed up byProfessor Paul Engel. This biotechnologycompany focuses on the commercialisationof novel enzyme products arising from UCDresearch, particularly in the area of proteinengineering. The first campus company tolocate in the bio-incubator at NovaUCD,Enzolve provides novel enzyme-basedsolutions, for example in the areas ofdiagnostics such as PKU testing for infants,synthesis and food. Put simply, the companymodifies nature’s enzymes and broadensthem to enable them to take up new traits.

Berand is another name in the NovaUCDbiotechnology field, which providesspecialist consultancy services to thepharmaceutical and biotechnologyindustries. The company is run by Dr AndrewFoley, who has developed novelneurotherapeutics for the treatment ofneurological and psychiatric disease.

One of the newcomers is Vocal HealthScreen, founded by PhD student RosalynMoran (BE ‘04) who was the overall winnerof the 10th NovaUCD Campus CompanyDevelopment Programme. She is currentlydeveloping a remote screening tool for voicediseases for use in ear, nose and throat clinicsworldwide. It is designed to replacescreening and follow up endoscopyexaminations and has the potential togenerate significant savings for both patientsand specialists. Detection is carried out usinga two-second voice sample from a telephonecall with results computed automatically andsent to a password-protected webpage.

These sorts of commercial applications areall key if Ireland is to continue to build itsreputation as a knowledge economy, saysKilty. “NovaUCD is where the entrepreneursof the future can get vital support to get offthe ground.”

Jane Suiter graduated with a BA inEconomics and Politics (‘89) and is todaypursuing a PhD in Political Science.

Dr Pat Frain, director of NovaUCD

Cormac Kilty, founder of Biotrin Holdings and chairman of the Irish BioIndustryAssociation

D E V E L O P I N G W O R L D

PAGE FORTY ONEUCD CONNECTIONS

BUILDING BRIDGES IN

HAITIThe demand for places on UCD

Volunteers Overseas trips certainlydebunks the cliché of the self-serving

student. Eoghan Rice reports

WHILE TODAY’S students are often portrayed asself-serving and little concerned with globalissues, one organisation in UCD is proving thatquite the opposite is true. Since itsestablishment in 2004, UCD VolunteersOverseas (UCDVO) has sent almost 200 students

abroad in a bid to improve housing and tackle environmental issuesin some of the world’s poorest areas. UCD students have alreadyparticipated in projects in India, Haiti and Niger, while next summerwill see the scheme further expand into South America.

“Demand amongst students to do volunteer work overseas ishuge, but there had been no on-campus group co-ordinating theseefforts,” explains UCD Chaplain Fr Tony Coote, one of the foundersof UCDVO. “We have grown phenomenally since we first set up andwe are looking at expanding our projects again next summer.”

One student to take part in voluntary work is Sean McKeon (BSc‘05), pictured above, who is currently researching a PhD in chemistry

in UCD. He was one of 36 students to travel to Haiti last July, wherethey took part in several crucial projects. It was an experience, hesays, they will never forget.

“It was certainly a bit of a culture shock when we first arrived,” herecalls. “There were no roads in the area we were in and all youcould see were tin sheds. The locals were great though and were veryfriendly towards us.”

While in Haiti, UCDVO renovated a home for the elderly,constructing a patio at the rear of the building for the residents to sitout. The students also worked in a sports camp, teaching games andsports to local children. The third project involved digging trenchesalong the hillside to counter the effects of the monsoon season.

“Although you wouldn’t think it, Haiti is actually a very greencountry, but there is a big problem with deforestation,” saysMcKeon. “In the monsoon season, they suffer from mudslides, whichdestroy crops and houses. So we constructed trenches along thehillsides to try to slow down the slides.”

The organisation is primarily aimed at students, although threemembers of staff travel with them each year. According to Coote, theuniversity has been very supportive of their efforts and universitypresident Hugh Brady has given “great backing”.

This summer, nine UCD computer science students will travel toEthiopia as part of an innovative aid programme that aims to bringIT skills to the developing world. The trip has been organised incollaboration with Camara, a charity that sends refurbished PCs toAfrica. The students will instruct local teachers in basic IT skills.

Fundraising is of crucial importance to the organisation. Whilestudents pay for their own flights and accommodation, theorganisation must raise money to fund the projects themselves.

This year, for the first time, UCDVO has received a governmentgrant for its plans to construct a bridge in Delhi later this summer. Tosupplement the grant, students organised various events on campusand held collections outside church throughout the year. While thegrant will not cover the full cost of the project, Coote says it is animportant step towards securing further funding in the future.

While UCD students are the driving force behind the organisation,Coote is eager to point out that local communities are heavilyinvolved in all stages of the planning and construction of projects.UCDVO is linked with local non-government organisations, whichhelp with the choosing of projects to undertake.

Aside from the obvious benefits to local communities, UCDVO alsooffers important skills to the students themselves, adds Coote.

“All the students who have gone on trips have said it has been alife-changing experience for them,” he says. “Seeing the poverty thatexists in some countries gives students great perspective at a youngage. Students are also given important leadership andcommunication skills.”

Membership of UCDVO is open to all UCD staff and students andapplication forms are available at www.ucdvo.org.

Eoghan Rice is a Sunday Tribune journalist. He holds a BA in Politicsand Economics (‘03) and was former Editor of the College Tribune.

T H E A T R E T H E A T R E

UCD’S PROLIFIC professor ofEnglish and Drama, DeclanKiberd, puts his voraciousappetite for plumbing thedepths of Irish identitydown, lightheartedly, to

“wannabe Irishness”. Nothing if not anoriginal thinker, his great-grandfatherKiberd arrived to these shores from Germanyvia Liverpool in black ’47 — “the least likelyyear in human history for anyone to come toIreland”, the year of the Great Famine.

So, has he simply been overcompensatingfor this by producing tome upon tome ofcritical writing? Yes, he proffers, ponderinghis 30 years assiduously publishing weightybooks on Irish literature, “in a futile attemptto make myself at one with a culture thatwill always be foreign to me!” Or, it occurs tohim, a split-second later, that he mightactually be an Irish counterpart to TS Eliot,who “spent his life trying to define thenature of English culture as a club that hecould then enter”.

Kiberd’s immediate ancestors were well-to-do merchants in the rag trade, with anumbrella and hat shop on Parnell Street.They became involved in supporting Parnelland the constitutional nationalistmovement. “But one of the first effects ofindependence was to slap surcharges onimported textiles, which actually destroyed

their business,” he recounts. “They werekind of ruined by the success of their ownpolitics.”

Add into the mix a mother who hailedfrom a Gaelic League family and attendedLouise Gavan Duffy’s all-Irish Scoil Bride, andyou have got a recipe for some prettyinteresting perspectives on Irish literatureand the universe.

As a nine-year-old city boy, Declanexperienced a wake in the ConnemaraGaeltacht involving a dead man laid out onthe kitchen table and drunken tricks beingplayed on the poor corpse throughout thenight. This all somehow led him to write hisground-breaking PhD thesis in Oxford onSynge and the Irish language.

But that was then. Kiberd always seemsone step ahead, embracing the future withrelish. Excited by the new multiculturalIreland, he takes Jewish Irishman LeopoldBloom as an example of how “a lot of thetexts of Anglo-Irish literature could be seento be rehearsing for multiculturalism”.

Mixing business and pleasureNew Ireland, new money and new businessare the latest phenomena to be woven intoKiberd’s critical canvas: “Generations of Irishkids were brought up to believe that therewas something reprehensible about money.The radicalism of the 1960s created an

allergy to business, confusing it with themore Jane Austen-type contempt for peoplein trade,” he says. Kiberd, however, isproposing the unorthodox theory (in thiscountry anyway) that business people andartists actually have a lot in common. “Bothare brokers in risk. If you have a businessidea, it’s a hunch that may take years ofhard slog to put to the test. And it may notwork. But that’s what Joyce had with Ulysses— a hunch. It’s no accident Joyce himselfwas a businessman — he set up the firstcommercial cinema in Dublin.

“The climax in Ulysses is unique inmodernism in that it is a meeting between asmall businessman, Bloom, the ad canvasser,and a fellow called Stephen Dedalus,”Kiberd continues. “It’s the only highmodernist text where the businessman andthe bohemian sit down and make sweetmusic.” To Kiberd, who is re-reading Ulyssesagain for, he estimates, the 36th time, it isultimately about “abolishing the distinctionbetween bohemian and bourgeois”.

“The main thing that was lacking in thepast in this country was money,” he states.Kiberd, who never suffered from ivorytower syndrome, bought his own house inthe 1980s when mortgage interest rateswere 21% and Bob Geldof was refused aloan because of his scruffy appearance.“Now you can get your hands on money ifyou are young, which is a great thing. It hascreated a different mindset. People arewilling not just to imagine things, but to dothem and to believe in their ability to dothem.”

As opposed to the staple fare of dottygrannies, tortured priests and put-uponsons, he feels “it’s time the artist engaged

PAGE FORTY THREEUCD CONNECTIONS PAGE FORTY TWO UCD CONNECTIONS

with business people and put them on stageor in novels. It’s a pity business people heredon’t write autobiographies the way theydo in America. Those books — alwayshomespun philosophy and aesthetics — arequite useful and interesting.”

Just as Alain de Botton wrote How ProustCan Change Your Life, Kiberd is currentlytwo-thirds of his way through producing aself-help Ulysses, “which would fit theinterface between business and the arts.Especially seeing as Joyce was a frustratedbusinessman himself”. The synopsis?

“Young UCD graduate, overburdened withhis philosophical learning, doesn’t knowhow to process it. Wanting to learn certainthings, he meets a man who is perhapssimpler, but wiser, because he is older.”Kiberd sees it being about this search for anauthentic guru.

The example of key businessmanDermot Desmond being interested in anew building for the Abbey Theatre andengaging in a newspaper debate withBruce Arnold last summer is exactly thetype of thing that delights Kiberd.

Newly appointed to the Abbey board,Kiberd believes the whole idea of a nationaltheatre in the 21st century is to bequestioned and debated. “It’s importantbecause you need something to counter thehuge pressure of global culture. It’s part ofthe duty of a national theatre to resistcommodification.”

Though by virtue of being the nationaltheatre “anyone feels they can criticise it,because their taxes are going towards it,which induces caution or defensiveness”.Kiberd defends the Abbey’s right to failbecause it has the subvention. “It also hasthe right to try things that don’t alwayswork. Then you can get work beingaudacious. The audience should be surprisedby newness.”

Kiberd considers the Abbey’s main remit isto allow the community to talk to itself. Forexample, he notices “a huge contradiction inthe economy, which is basically Americannaked market force on the one hand, and onthe other we have a set of laws that are stillsomewhat social democratic in theirunderstanding. There is a total cultural clashbetween this type of market capitalism andthe more old-style socialist notion that thestate should protect — the French idea. Thatclash is inherently dramatic”.

Considering Ireland a laboratory for theworld, Kiberd advocates that the newgeneration of playwrights should harnessthat energy, in the belief that “theseclashes will result in new literature”. Thisphenomenon will also apply to theexperience of the immigrant community,says Kiberd.

“The only question is, will the firstPolish-Irish playwright write in Polish or inEnglish? And will it be on in Warsaw or inthe Abbey? I hope it’s the Abbey.”

Deirdre Mulrooney, BA (‘90), MA (‘91)and PhD (‘98), is a lecturer in drama anda freelance journalist who hascontributed to Rattlebag, Artszone andThe Irish Times. Her new book, IrishMoves – An Illustrated History of Danceand Physical Theatre in Ireland, ispublished by Liffey Press.

Following his recent appointment to the board of the Abbey Theatre, Declan Kiberd shares histhoughts with Deirdre Mulrooney on theatre,literature and the meeting of business and art

BUSINESS ATCENTRE STAGE

Photograph: P

atrick Bolger

READING JOHNMCGAHERN

U C D W R I T E R S

In memory of the recentlydeceased John McGahern, wereproduce this essay from TheUCD Aesthetic: Celebrating150 Years of UCD Writers(New Island Books, Dublin),edited by Anthony Roche

THE FIRST short story I wrote was a work of genius. It wasaustere and lovely, full of elegant sentences and sharpinsights. Any reviewer would have called it a tour deforce. Because the first short story I wrote was by JohnMcGahern.

It’s called Sierra Leone and it appears in the 1979 collection GettingThrough, a copy of which had been purchased by my father and waslying around the house. In the story, a couple meets in a Dublin barto analyse their complicated affair. I was 16 that year. Complicatedaffairs interested me. My English teacher, John Burns, a wonderfulman, said writing could be a beneficial hobby for teenagers. It wasthe one thing he ever told us that was completely wrong.

Writing was like attempting to juggle with mud. I would sit in mybedroom, gawping at a blank jotter, wishing I had the foggiestinkling as to what might be written. McGahern often wrote aboutrural Leitrim, but we had no hedgerows or loys in the 1970s Dublinestate I called home. We had no thwarted farmers, no maiden auntson bicycles, no small-town solicitors, no cattle-dealing IRA veterans.Simply put, there was nothing in Glenageary to write about. Youcould call it the original failure of the creative imagination withoutwhich no writer ever got going.

Whenever I tried to write, there was only frustration. I felt as pent-up as McGahern’s lovers. That’s how I recollect these youthful effortsat fiction: a haze of self-conscious fumblings and awkward gropings,

PAGE FORTY FOUR UCD CONNECTIONS

BY JOSEPH O’CONNOR (BA ‘84, MA ‘86)

Imag

e co

urte

sy o

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second-hand sentences, sentenced to fail. One evening, in dismalhopelessness, I found myself copying out Sierra Leone word for word.I ached to write a story. So I wrote one of his.

I must have felt that the act of writing would make the wordssomehow mine. But, if so, it was an act of literary adultery. Ismouldered to know what that feeling was like: to write out abeautiful text from start to finish. I suppose this was comparable towannabe pop-stars throwing shapes and pulling pouts in thebathroom mirror. But something richer and more interesting wasgoing on, too. McGahern was teaching me to read, not to write: tosee the presences hidden in the crannies of a text, the realities thewords are gesturing towards. Perhaps this is what pulses at the coreof the desire to read: the yearning for intense relationship with wordswe love. Not just with what they are saying, but with the wordsthemselves. Perhaps every reader is rewriting the story.

The next evening, I transcribed the McGahern piece again. Thistime I dared to alter a couple of names. The male lead became Sean(my father’s name). I christened his girlfriend Deborah (after the punksinger Debbie Harry). Our next-door neighbour, Jack Mulcahy, had hisname nicked for the barman. This felt taboo. It was like editing theBible. I was raised in a home where books were revered. My parentsconsidered it disreputable even to dog-ear a volume’s pages. Tointerfere with a story would have been regarded as a form ofsacrilege. Under the spell of McGahern, I became a teenageblasphemer.

Every few nights I’d guiltily rewrite the latest adaptation, changingthe grammar here, a phrasing there. I’d move around events, breakup the paragraphs, or tell the same story but from a different pointof view. I must have written a hundred versions. The heroine’sbeautiful hair became auburn or black, and finally — exultantly! —strawberry blonde. I learned the importance of punctuation in astory. A question mark could change things. A well-placed full stophad the force of a slap. Before long, I was murdering McGahern’scharacters, replacing them with my own pitifully scanty puppets. Thepub became a discothèque, the couple acquired flares; I engagedthem, married them, bought them a house in the suburbs, then acollection of Planxty records and a second-hand lawnmower. Thelovers in the story were starting to seem familiar. They would nothave appeared out of place in Arnold Grove, Glenageary.

I rechristened them Adam and Eve, after a church on the Dublinquays. I altered their appearances, their way of speaking. I was afraidto admit it, but I knew who they were becoming. They roamed thisfictive otherworld, this Eden designed in Leitrim, talking to eachother about all sorts of things: how much they loved novels, howbooks shouldn’t be dog-eared. I could almost feel the firelight of thatpub on my face as I watched my parents materialize through theprose.

I’d look at Sierra Leone. It became a kind of friend to me. I wantedto know it better, to learn how it ticked. At one point in those years,I feel almost certain, I could have made a fair stab at reciting theentire text by heart. It was breathtakingly simple, as though it hadtaken no effort to compose. In that, and in other ways, it was like an

old Connemara ballad, of the kind I had often heard with my fatheron our holidays in Galway: so direct, so alluring, so subtly economical.It reminded me of The Rocks of Bawn: you wanted to know how itwould turn out. It read, in fact, as though nobody had written it —as if it had somehow grown on the page. I recall one of the sentences:‘Her hair shone dark blue in the light.’ That strange ache in the heartcaused by precise words.

Each man kills the thing he loves. And so the vandalism continued,night after night, with me editing and rewriting this once perfectstory, until gradually, over the span of my teenage years, every traceof McGahern was squeezed out of the text. Sierra Leone had becomeGlenageary. The story had been desecrated, but at least the resultingruin was mine.

Perhaps all writers have the story they will tell forever, the ideathey will go on exploring, consciously or not, until they run out ofmasks or find their own way of seeing the world. McGahern’s SierraLeone helped me find mine. Every fiction I’ve begun, every story I’vestruggled and failed with, has been an attempted reaching-back tothat heart-stopping moment of first encountering the power of hisart. It’s a desire as doomed as any in the history of love stories. Butyou could spend your time chasing worse.

The Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, a city about whichMcGahern has written with great grace, is somewhat unfashionablyarranged by chronology. You start with the child-artist’s naïve littledoodles: his cartoon faces and multicoloured animals. Then you walkthrough the rooms organised year by year, through a life of struggleto say anything worth saying. You think of Patrick Kavanagh as youmove through the still rooms: a man who dabbled in verse, only tohave it become a life. Here are the pictures from the young Miró’sfigurative phase, the bowls of fat oranges, the wine bottles onwindowsills. Then the warped guitars, the twisted limbs and mouths.You see him wrestle with the central question of Kavanagh’s career:how to balance the satirical impulse with fidelity to the sacred.

And then the stuff gets stranger, wilder, more revolutionary. Thefaces are leering, the bodies apparently yearning to flee their frames;the world turns upside down before your eyes. And now paint itselfbegins to be abandoned: there are crazy collages, sculptures,ceramics, electric with the colours of the Catalonia Miró loved. It is astunning experience to enter the last room and see the three vastcanvases that dominate its walls. They hit you the way the openingnotes of Beethoven’s Fifth do, or those last short plays of SamuelBeckett, in a way you know you will never quite forget. Each paintingis an unadorned field of vivid blue, with a yellow snaking linebisecting the plane. The simplicity moves you with incredible force,the idea that at the end of such a long search there is only the verysimple, the plain line across colour, the desire to leave a stain on thesilence. To stand before these images always brings McGahern to mymind: the man who knew, again like Kavanagh, that in art there willalways be two kinds of simplicity. The simplicity of going away andthe simplicity of coming back.

Much more could be said about McGahern and Kavanagh, tworural-born Irish writers who chronicled versions of Dublin more

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memorably than did many a native. Again and again, the city appearsin McGahern’s work, sometimes at a distance but often centrally. Theexquisite short stories are peopled by migrant characters who see themetropolis as a labyrinth of possibilities. Here is a Dublin of tattydancehalls and uneasy courtships, of kisses in damp doorways andunfulfilled hungerings. His citizens are stalwarts of the city’s rural-born workforce, who take the first available bus home to thecountryside on a Friday evening and the last one back to bedsit-landon a Sunday night. They are, in short, like most Dubliners were at thetime, and as many are now, despite the new prosperity. Their flingsand farewells make for writing of extraordinary beauty, with the cityas a forlorn backdrop to the search for love. Anyone who has everlived away from home will find bittersweet beauty in these pages.

McGahern’s work acknowledges that Dublin (like capitalseverywhere) is largely a community of migrants with conflictedloyalties. And I think of his explorations as opening a way for anumber of subsequent writers. In that context it is striking that muchof the most compelling fiction about the city has been produced byauthors who grew up somewhere else. Ulsterman Patrick McCabe’sThe Dead School and London-born Philip Casey’s The Fabulists offerpowerful reflections on a place that changed radically in the 1970s, aspolitical failure and corruption began to wreak havoc. In The Book ofEvidence, Wexford-born John Banville produced a gripping novel setin the Dublin of that furtive era, a night-town of whispered secretsand compromised positions. I find it hard to imagine how thesenovels could have been written without the presence of McGahernon the Irish scene. For me, he looms behind everyone: an Easter Islandfigure. Every subsequent Irish novelist owes him a debt.

At UCD in the 1980s, encouraged by Declan Kiberd and the lateGus Martin, I read The Barracks, The Dark and more of the stories. Ifound them strange and haunting; always enthralling. At the time,the vogue among my friends was for Latin American Magic Realism.In those years it often seemed that no novel was worthy of the nameunless it contained a talking leopard or a 15-page sentence. Againstthis blizzard of vowelly pyrotechnics McGahern’s work stood solid,starkly implacable, like a dry-stone wall in the sweep of a windstorm.I loved its quiet faith, its insistence on its own terms. And then camehis masterpiece Amongst Women, the most important Irish novel ofthe late-20th century.

So much has been written and said about this sparely magnificentbook. It does what was done by Joyce, George Eliot and Miró, byMuddy Waters and Bessie Smith, the Sex Pistols and Miles Davis: itconjures a world that is absolutely specific to itself, down to the mostminuscule, seemingly inconsequential detail, but in so doingmanages the alchemy of saying something about every life. Not fornothing did this novel become a bestseller in Ireland, as well as beinggarlanded with literary awards. The family it depicts is somehowevery Irish family of a certain era, held together by its secrets, boundby its evasions, by a nexus of loyalties only one of which is love.Indeed, it is difficult not to read the Morans as embodying theprofoundly uneasy nation in which they exist.

The book draws so subtly from that bottomless well of Irish familial

images and returns them to us re-imagined, made wholly new.Moran, the disillusioned republican, burnished hard by pain, walksthrough the book like a living ghost, through drifts of memories ofnights on the run, promises broken, responsibilities ducked. Thewomen in the book, especially the elderly women, are so utterly real,so achingly recognisable that you forget they are products ofsomeone’s imagination. They talk about the rain, about children andfood, and you know something else is being discussed all the time.And the episode near the end, at Moran’s funeral, is the mostpowerful fictional scene I have read since my adolescence, when itsauthor helped me first know what it is to read. We see the local hacksof the two conservative parties snickering together in the ruralcemetery, as the embittered old revolutionary is buried. Sometimesgreat writers know things they don’t know. This tableau wascomposed a decade before the Tiger padded into Ireland, but it is themost forceful comment imaginable on that ambiguous, sharp-toothed beast.

His most recent novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, took 11years to make and surprised many of its creator’s admirers byaddressing that rarest of Irish literary subjeveryday syncopations —yet, as ever, McGahern unearths resonant beauty. Gossip is a currency,as always in Ireland, and his dialogue, so subtle and carefully poised,abounds with the juiciness of popular speech. It is his mostaudaciously structured book, almost completely devoid of plot,suggesting reams about its characters while rarely telling youanything about them. Reading it is like reading everything he haswritten: like moving to a place you’ve never lived in before, whereyou don’t know the neighbours or how things work. But thanks toMcGahern, you want to know them, because somehow coming toknow them, even though they might be nothing like you, is to cometo know yourself and those you love, and to understand that there isstill a kind of hope. The everyday miracle of fiction, perhaps; one ofthe reasons why we want to read at all, wherever that grace isrevealed to be available, in suburban bedrooms, or in bedsits, alone.

Joseph O’Connor’s novel Star of the Sea is published byVintage/Random House.

The new Alumni Online Community will provide youwith a range of services that allow you to communicatewith your former classmates and friends over the web.You can update and share your contact details onlinewhile retaining the ability to reveal as much or as littleinformation as you choose.

We all know that we should make more of an effortto stay in touch with our college mates but, given thehectic pace of life, this doesn’t always happen. Wellnow you can let them know what is happening in yourlife by submitting class notes online and for those whomay be creatively challenged the system will evenautomatically generate your notes for you.

Take the hassle out of having to distribute your newemail address to friends and family when you changejobs or email provider by signing up for a permanentemail forwarding address from the Alumni OnlineCommunity. So no matter where you go in the emailworld you will always be contactable at youralumni.ucd.ie email address.

The main services offered by the UCD AlumniOnline Community include: ■ A password-protected online directory where you

can update your details and search for yourclassmates and friends

■ A class notes section where you can post updatesand photos of your family, career and interests

■ A permanent email forwarding address that willautomatically forward email messages to anexisting email account, so that you can avoidhaving to let everybody know your new emailaddress each time you move job or email provider

■ Access to all the latest updates on overseaschapters, clubs and graduate associations

■ An events and reunions calendar listing alumniand university events, updated weekly by theAlumni Office. It will also allow you to book andpay for events online

■ Online newsletters that will update you regularlyon details of alumni events and developmentstaking place within UCD.

Announcing the new UCD Alumni Online Community Sign up, log on, communicate

■ Go to www.ucd.ie/alumni

■ Select ‘Online Community’

■ Select the ‘Register Now’ link

■ Follow the simple four-step instructions:

■ Find your record on the database

Enter your name and year of graduation

■ Select your record from the list displayed

■ Verify your record

Check the details displayed

Enter your date of birth

■ Create your user ID and password.

Registering is quick & easy

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le déanamh aige ná ón tuirse.”Tá grianghraf iomráiteach ann ina bhfuil de Valera ag máirseáil ar

dheis Hitzen, agus é ag treorú a chuid fear feadh BhótharNorthumberland chun go ndéanfadh na Sasanaigh príosúnaighdíobh. Tá an bheirt fhear gar dá chéile sa phictiúr, d’fhéadfadh fiú gobhfuil siad ag comhrá.

Nuair a thug de Valera Fianna Fáil chun cumhachta i 1932, leanMason an scéal “agus suim mhór agam in obair agus i saothair deValera i réimse na heacnamaíochta”. Lean sé babhtaí aighnis deValera le “J.H. Thomas righin” Rúnaí Stáit na Breataine um Ghnóthaína dTiarnas, ina iarrachtaí cúrsaí idir Éire agus an Bhreatain afheabhsú.

Dúirt Mason le de Valera conas mar a bhí “meas agam ar dobhuachaillí”, i rith an Aiséirithe. Anois, sa bhliain 1936 “ós rud é gurbhuaileamar le chéile an uair úd, níl aon ní is mó a chránn mé ná docheannaithe a fheiceáil léirithe i nuachtáin shuaracha na tíre seoamhail is dá mba duine diabhlaí mallaithe thú”. Dá mbeadh pictiúrina sheilbh aige den Uachtarán “a leithéid de phléisiúr a thabharfadhsé dom a bheith in ann Ecce Homo a rá!”

Choimeád de Valera an litir ó Mason. Tá sí anois i measc a pháipéirphríobháideacha, agus ó 2003 i leith is féidir iad sin a scrúdú aon uairi gCartlann Choláiste Ollscoile Bhaile Átha Cliath (CCOBC). Tá 150bosca cáipéisí, 20 bosca grianghraf maille le roinnt taifead gutha agusscannán, sa chnuasach.

Ar bhás de Valera sa bhliain 1975, fágadh na páipéir ag na BráithreProinsiasacha, agus aistríodh iad go COBC in Iúil na bliana 1997 faoithéarmaí páirtíochta idir na Proinsiasaigh agus CCOBC. Is iad naBráithre úinéirí an bhailiúcháin, ach is iad CCOBC na coimeádaithe.Páirtíocht COBC-OFM a thugtar ar an socrú sin agus níl a leithéid dechonradh déanta ag aon ord rialta eile, is é sin, cáipéisí ina seilbh aaistriú go cartlann ollscoile chun iad a choimeád agus a chaomhnú.

Do CCOBC, atá ina cuid de Scoil na Staire agus na gCartlann i COBCó Mheán Fómhair 2005, baineann páipéir de Valera le bunsraith debhailiúcháin atá aici, ag baint le Fianna Fáil. San áireamh ansin tácartlann pháirtí Fhianna Fáil agus páipéir phríobháideacha thriúr dedhlúthchomhghleacaithe de Valera sa chaibinéad, Proinsias Aiken,Séamus Ó Riain agus Seán Mac an tSaoi.

Tá páipéir phríobháideacha mórán daoine tábhachtacha igCumann na nGaedheal agus i bhFine Gael ag CCOBC, mar shamplaEarnán de Blaghd, Pádraig Mac Giollagáin, Deasún Mac Gearailt agusSeán A. Ó Coistealbha.

Is acmhainn a bhfuil tábhacht idirnáisiúnta léi don ollscoil, páipéirphríobháideacha mórán de phríomhphearsana polaitiúla na 20úhaoise in Éirinn a bheith ar coimeád aici i gCartlann i leataobh faoifhoirgneamh na Leabharlainne i mBelfield.

Tugann na bailiúcháin scoláirí ó gach áit ar fud na cruinne chuntaighde a dhéanamh in COBC, agus is leis na bailiúcháin chéanna istúisce a chuireann staraithe óga COBC faobhar ar a scileanna taighde.Tá saothar na gcartlannaithe in COBC ag dul ar aghaidh i gcónaí.Leanfaidh siad orthu ag fáil páipéir ó gach aird.

In Aibreán 1938, scríobh Mason arís go de Valera. Luaigh sé chomh“sásta is a bhíos lenar bhainis amach le déanaí”, an conradh cosanta,

geilleagair agus airgeadais leis an mBreatain ar ar tugadh AnConradh Trípháirteach Angla-Éireannach 1938. Bhain Mason sásamhgo háirithe as gur thug Príomh-Aire na Breataine, Chamberlain,déshúiligh (binoculars) ar ais do de Valera (an Taoiseach an tráth sin)a bhí tugtha ar láimh aige don Chaptaen Hitzen. D’fhreagair deValera ag gabháil buíochais as an “litir chaoin a fuaireas le déanaíagus as an litir a scríobhais chugam nuair a fuair mo mhac bás”.Luaigh sé mar a mheas sé a thiocfadh feabhas ar an gcaidreamh idirÉire agus an Bhreatain: “Lenár linn féin chífimid bunaithe idir an dámhuintir, an caidreamh ba cheart a bheith idir dhá chomharsachairdiúla, agus na seanchaidrimh thruamhéalacha á gcur i leataoibhmar rud atá thart.”

Scríobh an Captaen Hitzen go de Valera chomh maith i 1938 agtréaslú an chonartha leis an mBreatain leis: “Ba thragóid a bhí ann anuair dheireanach a bhuaileamar le chéile. Tá súil agam gobhféadfaimid lámh a chroitheadh le chéile nuair a bhuailfimid lechéile arís.”

Ocht mbliana is fiche ina dhiaidh sin, scríobh Hitzen, agus é 80bliain d’aois, go de Valera, in Aibreán 1966, cothrom 50 bliain anAiséirithe. Ní fhéadfadh sé “ligint don Cháisc áirithe seo dul thart gantréaslú ó chroí leat as 40 bliain den ‘idéal’, ar labhrais liom faoi arthuras cinniúnach áirithe, a bheith curtha i gcrích”. B’fhéidir gurrugadh ar an mbeirt fhear ag comhrá ar an ngrianghraf gráinniúil údtar éis an tsaoil.

Dhein Hitzen turas dá chuid féin i 1966. Bhuail sé le de Valera agMuilte Uí Bheoláin le linn na gcuimhneachán. Bhí pictiúr den bheirtle chéile ar Scéala Éireann (Irish Press).

Cuirtear de Valera i láthair go minic mar dhuine fuaránta, dúranta,gléasta in éide dhubh, samhail ar mhórán mícheart le hÉirinn inanallód. I ndornán litreacha ón gcartlann idir triúr fear a raibh sé denasc eatarthu gur throid siad i mBaile Átha Cliath le linn Aiséirí naCásca 90 bliain ó shin i mbliana, tagaimid ar phictiúr níos leithne dede Valera: réabhlóidí idéalach 1916, an t-athair ag éagaoin, státairena 1930idí ag iarraidh an caidreamh Angla-Éireannach a fheabhsúsula dtiocfadh anord an chogaidh sa mhullach ar an Eoraip.

Chímid tarraingt phearsanta as an ngnáth de Valera agus mar asháraigh sé imeacht aimsire, náisiúntacht agus easaontas cogaidh.

Tá an ceathrú duine sa scéal seo. Chuaigh iníon Hitzen, Vivien,isteach i Roinn Gnóthaí Eachtracha na Breataine. I 1967, ar fhilleadhón Nigéir di, ceapadh í i bpost in Ambasáid na Breataine i mBaileÁtha Cliath. Níor chaill de Valera riamh a dhraíocht. Thug sé cuireadhdi bualadh leis in Áras an Uachtaráin. Ba “phléisiúr agus pribhléidiontach é” a scríobh sí ina litir buíochais. Bhí sí ag tnúth lena cuairt aphlé lena hathair a raibh “barr measa aige ar an Uachtarán, mar atáagainn go léir, go deimhin”.

Tá íomhánna eile ó Pháipéir de Valera agus eolas faoi bhailiúcháineile i gCartlann Choláiste Ollscoile Bhaile Átha Cliath ar fáil agwww.ucd.ie/archives.

Tá Michael Kennedy (BA, 1990; PhD, 1993) ina EagarthóirFeidhmiúcháin ar Cháipéisí Acadaimh Ríoga na hÉireann ar ShraithPholasaí Eachtrach na hÉireann.

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PORTRÁID DEN PHOLAITEOIR AGUS É INA FHEAR ÓG

BHÍ SÉ dian ar an Maorsháirsint Complachta, i 5úReisimint Lincolnshire (Sír Lincoln), James Mason,na litreacha a scríobh. Ghabh sé leithscéal i gcuidacu faoina chuid “iairiglifí”, á mhíniú gur toradhiad ar chréachta a bhain dó i 1917 agPasschendale.

Is amhlaidh i 1936, gur mhúscail bás fir óig cuimhní ann, ó 20bliain roimhe sin. Chuir Mason peann le pár óna thigh cónaithe igCleethorpes, i Sír Lincoln Shasana. Scríobh sé mar a dhéanfadh“seansaighdiúir amháin go seansaighdiúir eile” go hUachtaránChomhairle Feidhmeannaí Shaorstát Éireann, Éamon de Valera, agdéanamh comhbhróin leis i mbás a mhic, Briain, in aois a 21, a d’éagi dtimpiste marcaíochta.

Thuig Mason go bhfaigheadh de Valera a lán litreachacomhbhróin. Ní raibh aon choinne aige go mbeadh cuimhne ag anUachtarán air, cé gur bhuail sé féin agus Mason le chéile 20 bliain níostúisce i mBaile Átha Cliath agus Aiséirí 1916 ag teacht chun deiridh.

I bpeannaireacht chreathach thug Mason de Valera siar godáta a mbeadh cuimhne mhaith ag an Uachtarán air: anDomhnach, 30 Aibreán, 1916. Ar 2 i.n. an lá sin ghéill anCeannfort de Valera, agus é ag feidhmiú ar orduithe ó PhádraigMac Piarais, agus thug sé suas garastún Mhuilte Uí Bheoláin, 117fear an Tríú Cathláin Bhriogáid Bhaile Átha Cliath de na hÓglaigh,d’Oifigeach Ceannais Mhason, an Captaen Edward J. Hitzen. Bhían tAiséirí thart ó 4 i.n. an lá roimhe sin, i ngan fhios do de Valera.Bhí Mason i láthair ag faire. Cé go raibh de Valera cloíte ag an

troid “mhúscail a iompar mo chomhbhá agus mo mheas”.Ba chuimhin leis an gCaptaen Hitzen níos déanaí gur “labhair de

Valera go mall, mar a bheadh sé spíonta: ‘Bhuel, tá sé go léir thart. Táordaithe dom géilleadh.’ Príomhoifigeach a bhí sa bhfear ard,tuirseach seo, a raibh cuma ghioblach air agus ar baineadh siar gohiomlán as ag an ordú géilleadh. D’fhéach sé níos trí chéile ag a raibh

Tá líon mór bailiúchán tábhachtach igCartlann Choláiste Ollscoile BhaileÁtha Cliath agus ina measc tá 170éigin bosca ina bhfuil páipéirphríobháideacha de chuid de Valera.Le cabhair cuid den chomhfhreagras,d’éirigh le Michael Kennedy léargasníos leithne a fháil ar an bhfear — anréabhlóidí idéalach, an t-athair agéagaoin, an státaire.

De Valera as a young man / De Valera agus é ina fhear ógAbove/os cionn: Prisoner in Richmond Barracks, 1916 /Príosúnach i mBeairic Richmond, 1916

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wearily: ‘Well, it is all over. I have orders to surrender.’ This tall, wearyman of unkempt appearance was a senior officer and one who wasdumbstruck by the orders to surrender. He seemed more dazed bywhat he had to do than from fatigue.”

A well-known photograph shows de Valera, on Hitzen’s right-hand side, marching his men along Northumberland Road intoBritish custody. The two men are close in the picture; they couldeven be talking.

When de Valera brought Fianna Fáil to power in 1932 Masonfollowed de Valera’s “work and labours in the field of economicswith great interest”. He followed de Valera’s rounds with “theegregious J.H. Thomas”, the British Secretary of State forDominion Affairs, in his quest to improve relations betweenBritain and Ireland.

Mason told de Valera how during the Rising he had “admiredyour lads”, now in 1936 “having so closely met you, nothing soaggravates me as to see in the yellow press of this country yourfeatures portrayed which are made to view as malevolent anddiabolical”. Had he a picture of the President in his possession“what a pleasure it would give me to be able to say Ecce Homo!”

De Valera kept the letter from Mason. It is now amongst hisprivate papers, since 2003 open for inspection at the UniversityCollege Dublin Archives (UCDA). The collection runs to 150 boxesof documents and 20 boxes of photographs as well as a numberof voice and film recordings.

Left to the Franciscan Friars on de Valera’s death in 1975, thepapers were transferred to UCD in July 1997 under the terms of apartnership between the Franciscans and UCDA. The friars retainownership of the collection, but the curatorship of the collectionis with UCDA. Known as the UCD-OFM Partnership, this is aunique arrangement, no other religious order has undertakensuch an agreement to transfer papers in its possession touniversity archives for safeguarding and conservation.

For UCDA, part of the UCD School of History and Archives sinceSeptember 2005, the de Valera papers belong to a matrix ofcollections in its care relating to Fianna Fáil. This includes thearchives of the Fianna Fáil party and the private papers of threeof de Valera’s longest serving cabinet colleagues, Frank Aiken,James Ryan and Seán MacEntee.

UCDA also holds the private papers of many important figuresin Cumann na nGaedheal and Fine Gael, such as Ernest Blythe,Patrick McGilligan, Desmond FitzGerald and John A. Costello.

Holding the personal papers of many of the key political figuresfrom 20th-century Ireland makes the UCD Archives, housed in apurpose-built repository in the James Joyce Library, a resource ofinternational importance for the university.

The collections bring scholars from across the globe to researchat UCD and they are also where many young UCD historians firsthone their research skills. The work of the archivists at UCD is anopen-ended process. They will continue to acquire papers from allbackgrounds.

In April 1938, Mason wrote again to de Valera. He expressed his

“delight at your recent achievement”, the defence, economic andfinancial agreement with Britain known as the 1938 TripartiteAnglo-Irish Agreement. Mason was particularly pleased thatBritish Prime Minister Chamberlain had returned to the Taoiseacha set of binoculars that de Valera had handed over to CaptainHitzen. De Valera replied thanking Mason for the “kind letterrecently received and also for the letter you wrote to me on theoccasion of the death of my son”. He predicted how British-Irishrelations would develop: “We shall in our time see establishedbetween our two people the relations that should normally existbetween friendly neighbours, leaving the old tragic relationsbehind as a thing of the past.”

Captain Hitzen also wrote to de Valera in 1938 congratulatinghim on the agreement with Britain: “Our previous meeting was atragedy and I hope at the next we may shake hands.”

Twenty-eight years later, Hitzen, now 80, wrote to de Valera inApril 1966, the 50th anniversary of the Rising. He could not “letthis particular Easter pass without sending you my heartfulcongratulations on your survival to enjoy the accomplishment of40 years of the ‘Ideal’ of which you spoke to me on a certainfateful journey”. Perhaps the two men had been caught talkingin that grainy photograph after all.

Hitzen made a journey of his own in 1966. He met de Valera atBoland’s Mills during the anniversary celebrations. The two menwere pictured together on the front page of the Irish Press.

De Valera is often portrayed as a distant, dour and black-cladfigure representing much that is wrong with Ireland’s past. In ahandful of letters from the archives between three men whoshared the common bond of having fought in Dublin during theEaster Rising 90 years ago this year, we encounter a broaderpicture of de Valera: the idealistic revolutionary of 1916, thefather in mourning, the statesman of the 1930s seeking toimprove Anglo-Irish relations before the chaos of war descendedon Europe.

We see de Valera’s extraordinary personal appeal and themanner in which it transcended time, nationality and the divisionsof war.

There is a fourth person in this story: Hitzen’s daughter Vivien,who joined the British Foreign Office. In 1967, on finishing aposting to Nigeria, she was posted to the British Embassy inDublin. De Valera never lost his ability to charm. He invited her tomeet him in Áras an Uachtaráin. It was, as she wrote in her letterof thanks, “a tremendous pleasure and privilege”. She lookedforward to discussing the visit with her father who “holds thePresident in the very highest esteem, as indeed we all do”.

Other images from the de Valera Papers and information aboutother collections in UCD Archives is available atwww.ucd.ie/archives.

Michael Kennedy (BA, 1990; PhD, 1993) is Executive Editor ofthe Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign PolicySeries.

F R O M T H E A R C H I V E

PAGE FIFTY UCD CONNECTIONS

PORTRAIT OF THE POLITICIAN AS A YOUNG MAN

Among the many major collectionsin the UCD Archives sit some 170boxes of de Valera’s private papers.Through some of thecorrespondence, Michael Kennedyencounters a broader picture of theman — the idealistic revolutionary,the father in mourning, thestatesman

COMPANY SERGEANT Major James Mason of the 5thLincolnshire Regiment found it difficult to write. Heapologised in letters for his ‘hieroglyphics’,explaining that they resulted from wounds hereceived in 1917 while engaged in battle atPasschendale.

Now, in 1936 the death of a young man had stirred memories from20 years before. Mason put pen to paper from his home inCleethorpes, Lincolnshire. He wrote “from one old soldier toanother” to the President of the Executive Council of the Irish FreeState, Eamon de Valera, to offer his condolences on the death of deValera’s 21-year-old son Brian in a riding accident.

Mason knew that de Valera would receive many letters ofsympathy. He never expected the President to remember him,though he and Mason had met 20 years earlier in Dublin during thefinal hours of the 1916 Rising.

In shaky handwriting Mason brought de Valera back to a date thePresident would remember well: Sunday, 30 April 1916. At 2pm thatday Commandant de Valera, acting on orders received from PadraicPearse, surrendered the Boland’s Mills garrison, 117 men of the ThirdBattalion of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, to Mason’sCommanding Officer, Captain Edward J. Hitzen. The Rising had beenover since 4pm the previous day, unknown to de Valera. Masonlooked on. Though worn out from fighting, de Valera’s “demeanourevoked my sympathy and admiration”.

Captain Hitzen later recalled that de Valera “spoke slowly, almost

Eamon and Sinéad de Valera ontheir wedding day, 8 January 1910

De Valera beingescorted toBallsbridgeBarracks aftersurrender toCaptain E.J.Hitzen

AN UNLIKELYCONSPIRATOR

H I S T O R Y H I S T O R Y

As we celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, MichaelLaffan looks back at the role of one of its seven leaders and formerUCD Lecturer in English, Thomas MacDonagh

IN THE UCD Staff Common Room two busts face each other, afew metres apart. They represent the two members of theuniversity’s academic staff who were most directly associatedwith the Easter Rising — Eoin MacNeill and ThomasMacDonagh.

The two men were friends as well as colleagues, although theirroles in Easter Week could not have been more different. MacNeillwas convinced that an insurrection would not be morally justifiedand he did all he could (short of informing the British) to prevent itfrom taking place, while MacDonagh was one of the signatories ofthe proclamation, one of the last commandants to surrender and oneof the first rebel leaders to be shot. MacNeill’s actions have been thesubject of much research and debate, but MacDonagh has remaineda relatively neglected figure.

Forty years ago F. X. Martin edited a book entitled 1916 andUniversity College Dublin, in which Michael Hayes wrote aboutMacDonagh with insight and affection. He reminisced about UCDshortly before the outbreak of the First World War, contrasting it withthe changes that would soon come, before moving on to describeone particular member of the academic community:

“at the Cumann Gaelach in the year 1912, you could see Eoin

MacNeill presiding, hear Pearse making a speech, meet Piaras

Beaslaí and others like him on the platform, or in the hall,

without suspecting that in a year’s time MacNeill would be

presiding at another, an enormous meeting, in Dublin to found

the Irish Volunteers, or that in four years’ time Pearse would be

reading the proclamation of the Irish Republic in O’Connell

Street. The men in the hall at that time who were to follow

Pearse little knew what was in store for them. In seven years’

time MacNeill would be a member of Dáil Éireann and of an

Irish republican government. The youngest and most junior

member of the academic staff in January 1912 — myself — was

little more than 10 years later to be presiding over an Irish

parliamentary assembly ...

MacDonagh was a small man with a very pleasant, attractive

face, crisp, curly hair, full of talk, eager for argument, but not

intolerant. No man ever seemed to have more zest for life, more

interest in everything about him. He was easily angered, just as

easily soothed and he had the great gift of enjoying a joke

against himself. He did not look a bit like a conspirator ...”

It is true that in most respects MacDonagh was an unlikelyconspirator. He was a literary critic, a poet, a schoolteacher and aninspirational lecturer. Hayes wrote of him that “at no moment wasthere evidence of any kind of gloomy forebodings about his own fate.He had made conscious, and very arduous, preparations to fit himselffor a university post ... He had made every preparation for a successfulacademic career ... His line of research, had he lived, would have ledhim far. He had a broad view of life and a clear understanding of thevarious strains which go to make up Irish nationalism”.

But when the Ulster Volunteers challenged the UK government andparliament and when they formed a paramilitary force that couldresist Home Rule, MacDonagh was caught up in the excitement thattheir defiance provoked among many Irish nationalists. He becameactive in the Irish Volunteers and he played an important role in theHowth gun-running.

After the First World War broke out and John Redmond had urgedthe Volunteers to enlist in the British army, the movement split in two.MacDonagh soon became an influential figure in the smaller, radicalfaction that was led by MacNeill and was influenced by the IrishRepublican Brotherhood. He was appointed Director of Training andcommander of the Second Battalion. He became ever more distractedfrom his teaching and his research, with the result that his bookLiterature in Ireland appeared only a month after his death.

Perhaps partly as a result of his close friendship with P. H. Pearseand Joseph Plunkett he drifted towards the radical faction withinthe Volunteers that planned an insurrection against the British.But he was co-opted to the IRB military council only weeks beforethe Rising, and the rebels may have been wise or fortunate in

PAGE FIFTY THREEUCD CONNECTIONS PAGE FIFTY TWO UCD CONNECTIONS

drawing him into their plans at such a late stage. On Wednesday,four days before the rebellion was due to begin, he remarkedincautiously, “We are not going out on Friday. But we are goingout on Sunday.” This was reported to Dublin Castle by a policespy, but it was one of many warnings of trouble ahead that wentunheeded by the British authorities.

As a friend of MacNeill, MacDonagh was involved in the rebels’attempts to prevent him from disrupting their plans. They failedand the Rising took place a day late because of hiscountermanding order. MacDonagh commanded one of the rebelbattalions, but his role in Easter Week was not particularlysignificant. Contrary to the original plans his garrison ended up inJacob’s Biscuit Factory and it was virtually ignored by the Britishforces who concentrated on other, more central targets. CharlesTownshend, whose recent Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion hasbecome the standard work on the Rising, is critical of the SecondBattalion’s actions and inaction and he describes how most of thegarrison “stayed in the biscuit-filled mausoleum for the rest of theweek waiting for an attack that never came”. The atmosphere in

the factory appears to have been relaxed and easygoing.When MacDonagh received Pearse’s order to surrender he was

astonished and dismayed; he had led members of his garrison toshare his belief or fantasy that the rebellion would last for months.Eventually after long discussions with the British commander GeneralLowe he was convinced that further resistance was futile, so hesurrendered and led his men into captivity.

Together with Pearse and Tom Clarke, MacDonagh was one of thefirst of the rebels to be tried and sentenced to death. His recentlyreleased court-martial record reveals that he said virtually nothing athis trial — which, like the others, would seem to have been brief andperfunctory. William Wylie, who was one of the prosecuting counsels,later expressed particular regret that MacDonagh had been shot. Butsince he was a signatory of the proclamation, a battalion commanderand one of the earliest to be tried (before the Irish public began toreact against the executions), it is hard to imagine how he could haveavoided a death sentence.

We know much more now about the Easter Rising than an earliergeneration did 40 years ago, when Michael Hayes wrote hisappreciation of MacDonagh. We have a vastly more detailed andnuanced appreciation of the Rising’s background, course andconsequences. But in some respects traditional impressions andjudgements have been endorsed. Shortly after the executions hadcome to an end James Stephens, who knew many of the rebels andwho had kept a diary of moods and events during Easter Week,wrote that “No person living is the worse off for having knownThomas MacDonagh, and I, at least, have never heard MacDonaghspeak unkindly or even harshly of anything that lived.”

Thomas MacDonagh was not a great military commander, but fewpeople are, and his background and training would have made thisan unlikely role. In some respects he seems to have been out of hisdepth as a rebel leader during Easter Week. But for almost a centuryhis image has survived as that of a much-loved man who was brave,scholarly, imaginative and idealistic.

Dr Michael Laffan is Head of the UCD School of History andArchives. His published works include The Partition of Ireland, 1911-1925 (Dublin, 1983) and The Resurrection of Ireland: the Sinn FéinParty, 1916-1923 (Cambridge, 1999).

Image courtesy of the National Photographic Archive

‘No man ever seemedto have more zest forlife, more interest ineverything about him’

RETURN TO TARA

E N V I R O N M E N T E N V I R O N M E N T

IT WAS a daunting task to undertake. Stored away inside UCD’sSchool of Archaeology were hundreds of boxes of bones,maps, drawings, artefacts waiting to be examined, sorted andcatalogued. The boxes had been moved to the university inthe 1950s following an ambitious, but ultimately aborted,attempt to research one of Ireland’s best-known treasures, the

Hill of Tara. And there they remained, collecting dust. It is almost 20 years since Dr Muiris O’Sullivan decided to take up

that challenge to document the findings of the 1950s excavations.Last month, those findings were finally published, followingpainstaking work by O’Sullivan to chronicle the items retrieved fromthe great dig.

For O’Sullivan, it has been a long journey from that day in 1987when he opened up the first box of items. “It’s almost a bitembarrassing to say that it has taken this long, although I have beenworking on a lot of other projects in between,” he jokes.

The product of that work, Duma na nGiall, published by Wordwell,offers a fascinating insight into the complexity of the monuments atTara and more specifically the Mound of the Hostages, the burial

tomb on which the 1950s excavations were focused. The book bringsto life the site, revealing the people and items that were buried thereaway from the world’s view for over 5,000 years.

“The book is the equivalent of an excavation report, only it is 50years after the excavation,” explains O’Sullivan. “Everything that theyfound during their digs is recorded, together with a lot of documents,field notes, drawings and photographs.”

If a 50-year gap between the excavation and the publication of thefindings seems a bit long, it is put into perspective by the time frameof the Mound of the Hostages itself. Over 300 people are believed tohave been buried or cremated at the site, with some human remainsdating as far back as 3500 BC. Indeed, the site was used for burialpurposes for 2,000 years, which also gives an indication of howexclusive a burial site it was — with a rate of one burial every six orseven years, it is clear that not just anybody was allowed into theMound of the Hostages.

Burials continued at the site right up until 1700 BC, well before it isthought burials were carried out at the Hill of Tara itself. This wouldseem to suggest that the Mound of the Hostages predates the Hill ofTara and was originally considered a more important site.

For four years during the 1950s, researchers from UCD carried outthe most extensive excavations ever conducted at Tara. Work firstbegan in the summer of 1955, when Sean O’Riordain, Professor ofCeltic Archaeology at the university, led a team of researchers to thesite in a bid to uncover its secrets. Strangely, given the massiveimportance of the Hill of Tara in Irish history, this was the first majorexamination of the area.

O’Riordain and his team carried out work throughout the summersof 1955 and 1956. However, their work was dramatically halted in1956 when O’Riordain died suddenly.

For a period it seemed as though the plans to excavate the Mound

PAGE FIFTY FIVEUCD CONNECTIONS PAGE FIFTY FOUR UCD CONNECTIONS

of the Hostages would die with O’Riordain. That was, however, untilhis successor as Professor of Celtic Archaeology, Ruaidhri de Valera,decided to take up where O’Riordain had left off, bringing a team ofresearchers back to the site.

De Valera, son of former President Eamon, continued the researchthroughout the summer of 1959. It was during this dig that the trueimportance of the Mound of the Hostages was revealed.

Guarding the central tomb, the researchers discovered three cistscontaining the remains of 55 adults, three children and four infants— more than most megalithic tombs have produced in total. Asstartling a discovery as it was, it paled in comparison to what laywaiting inside the tomb itself. Inside the tomb, the remains of anastonishing 250 bodies were uncovered, making it arguably the mostvaluable burial tomb in Europe.

“What makes the site so interesting is that, although it is farsmaller than sites such as Newgrange, the Mound of the Hostagescontains far more than any other site,” explains O’Sullivan. “No othersite in Europe has such a collection of material as the Mound of theHostages.”

Despite the startling discovery, work on the site halted in thesummer of 1959 and the recovered items were brought back to UCD,where they have remained ever since. Only now, due to the tirelesswork of O’Sullivan, have those discoveries finally been documented.

However, the work does not end here. As with all archaeologicalresearch, the findings of the 1950s excavations have thrown upalmost as many questions as they have answered.

By teaming up with the UCD Conway Institute, O’Sullivan is hopingthat further analysis of the human remains may uncover one of thegreatest secrets of sites such as the Mound of the Hostages — whowas buried there?

It is hoped that further research may provide crucial clues towardssolving this mystery. For example, were the people buried in thesemounds members of powerful local families? Or could they have beenbrought from far away, possibly even abroad, in order to be buried atTara? The second possibility would further prove the massiveimportance of Tara to the ancient world, both in Ireland and Europe.

“There is still a lot to learn about the remains themselves,” saysO’Sullivan. “For example, we do not know whether there is a geneticlink between the people buried in the site. Most of the remains werecremated, but some were not burnt and that will enable us to carryout further tests.”

Could it be that the research of 50 years ago will finally help tounlock the secrets of this ancient and fascinating landscape?

Eoghan Rice is a Sunday Tribune journalist. He holds a BA in Politicsand Economics (‘03) and was former Editor of the UCD CollegeTribune.

For decades the fruits of the mostproductive archaeological dig at TaraHill were left undocumented. EoghanRice reports on the eventual unveilingof the secrets that lay undiscovered for thousands of years

Left: The excavationteam led by Ruaidhride Valera in the 1950s

Above: Excavations atthe Mound of Hostagesin the 1950s

ON YOURMARKS

S P O R T S F I L E

Gavin Cummiskey speaks to some ofthis year’s recipients of sportsscholarships on the challenges ofcombining training with their studies

PAGE FIFTY SEVENUCD CONNECTIONS PAGE FIFTY SIX UCD CONNECTIONS

S P O R T S F I L E

REMEMBER STUDENT life? Late to bed, late to rise. Idlingaway the time between social ventures. Always stony broke.Occasional visits to the library.

Well, there is another species that walks among the Belfieldpopulace. These people are different; they are leaner, busierand can usually be identified by some form of representativetracksuit. They are the sports scholarship students.

Many of Irish sports’ present-day superstars passed throughUCD, namely Brian O’Driscoll, Denis Hickie and a host of currentGAA players, including former UCD striker Jason Sherlock. Themost recent graduate to burst on to the global stage is hurdlerDerval O’Rourke (see panel).

But what about those who are currently on campus? I spoketo five current scholarship students — Emer Fallon, Tom Brady,Brendan Walton, Conan Byrne and Catriona Buckley — to seehow they balance a professional attitude with their studies.

Two UCD rugby players — Conor McInerney and KevinSheahan — were understandably unavailable having justreturned from the under-19s World Cup in Dubai where Irelandfinished a respectable fifth. Their attentions turned immediatelyto the Business and Legal first-year exams.

For a scholarship student, attaining a degree or diploma isbackup in case a sporting career fails to materialise. The trick isto maintain equilibrium. Sport is the priority but exams must bepassed, and some downtime is also essential.

The budding playersTake emerging handballer Emer Fallon, who is in the first yearof a BSc in Physiotherapy and Performance Science. She hopedto add a senior world title to her under-17 success in 2003 butnow finds she has to give physics another shot in the summer.“Having to repeat physics means I can’t go to the WorldChampionships in Canada this summer,” she reveals. “It was myfirst time doing physics and it was totally over my head. But Iintend to get my head around it. I have to!”

Fallon’s day will come. Already this yearshe gave World No. 1 Fiona Shannon a scarein the semi-finals of the Irish Open. She alsomade an impressive first dip into the US. “InArizona I won the US Junior Nationals insingles and doubles. In my first Collegiatecompetition in Texas I beat Maria Daly [mainrival] for the first time. I was seeded thirdand I got to the final, but was beaten, so Iwas happy with that for my first season.”

Cork football and camogie player RenaBuckley has already entered the historybooks with the unique achievement of Corkcapturing both All-Ireland titles in 2005.

If it is not Cork, then it is UCD or the homeclub that seeks her presence. And yet,Buckley refuses to complain about thesacrifice she makes on a daily basis. “Lifewould be much more difficult if I wasn’tplaying sport. It is a fantastic opportunity.”

Tom Brady is a hurler, footballer andengineering student on UCD scholarship, allat the age of 18. When not playing for theDublin senior hurlers, there are clubcommitments with Na Fianna in football andhurling. Then there is the Dublin under-21s,in both codes of course. And this is notforgetting his UCD obligations.

This year he didn’t have the time to play inthe Fitzgibbon or the Sigerson Cups, but hedid squeeze in a championship run with theFreshers. “We had a very good team,” herecounts. “Waterford IT beat us in the All-

Ireland semi-final. I love playing in UCD.”Brady could train every night of the weekand then play up to four games on theweekend, but people like Dave Billings inUCD ensure he is cut the necessary slack.Studying is also included in this multitaskinglifestyle. “I tend to do a lot of work at theweekends and in college,” Brady adds. “Iwould have a lecture at 9am and thenanother at 2pm so I would get a lot of studydone between them.”

Brendan Walton is a nephew of PhilipWalton — most famous for sinking thewinning putt at the 1995 Ryder Cup. He iscurrently on the Sports Managementdiploma, which allows him plenty of time tofine-tune his game on the Island golf coursein Donabate. “It’s been quite a goodexperience and pretty easy actually,” headmits. “I prefer it to school as I have moretime on my hands to practise. I’m doing thediploma so it is a one-day-a-week course butbecause I’m on scholarship I also go to thegym three times a week.”

UCD soccer player Conan Byrne is probablythe best person to give an insight into thecomparisons between student life and beingan actual professional. Byrne was on thebooks of Millwall before choosing theLeaving Certificate over the make or breaklife of English football.

“At Millwall you were on your own twofeet without a doubt. I was 15 when I first

went over. The longest I stayed was threeweeks in a row and I wanted to go homeafter one. I loved the football side of things.You were down at the training ground at9am and finished by 2pm. But after trainingyou are in somebody else’s house. You had toask could you watch TV or anything else.”

Being a professional footballer is the stuffof dreams but he could do without thesolitude. In two years’ time Doyle will still beplaying football but he will have options.

That’s the bottom line for sportingscholars: options.Gavin Cummiskey graduated with a BA in

History and Politics (‘01). He attained a MA

in Journalism from Dublin City University in

2003. He is currently a sports reporter for

The Irish Times.

Gold for O’Rourke

Congratulations to Derval O’Rourke.

On 11 March 2006, she won the 60

metre hurdles at the World Indoor

Championships in Moscow.

Two hours before the final

O’Rourke won her semi-final in 7.87

seconds — an Irish record. The UCD

graduate would need to run faster to

beat the world-class field. She ran

the final in 7.84 seconds. This was a

remarkable achievement, considering

she only broke eight seconds the

previous month.

Tom Brady (left), in action with Dublin, and Conan Byrne

Brendan Walton

Rena Buckley

A COUNTY PRACTICES P O R T S F I L E

WHEN BRIAN Dooher (MVB ‘98), as captain of theTyrone Gaelic football team, was presented withthe Sam Maguire Cup last September in CrokePark, it was the sixth occasion on which agraduate of UCD had achieved this honour. Theprevious All-Ireland-winning captains from UCD

were Sean Flanagan (Mayo, 1950 & 1951), Donie O’Sullivan (Kerry,1970), Mickey O’Sullivan (Kerry, 1975) — who was unable to receivethe cup after being injured in the game and it was instead presentedto Pat Spillane — and Denis ‘Ogie’ Moran (Kerry, 1978).

Dooher graduated from UCD with a degree in Veterinary Medicinein 1996, having helped the college to a Sigerson Cup final victory thatsame year. He admits it was something of a culture shock when hefirst went to UCD in 1993. He had been born and reared on a farm atAughabrack, Co. Tyrone, right on the Tyrone-Derry border and about10 miles from Strabane. His secondary education was at St Columb’sCollege, Derry, about 15 miles from his home, so when he arrived inDublin 4 it was a significant change of scene.

“I adapted quickly enough and, as I was keen to be a vet, it was aquestion of getting into UCD or having to travel to a university in theUK,” says Dooher. “Thankfully I got the three As in my A-level exams,which at that time was sufficient for entry to UCD.”

He had indicated early proficiency at Gaelic football, playing for theTyrone Under-18 minor team that won the 1993 Ulster championship,later losing the All-Ireland semi-final to Meath. Dooher, however, didnot immediately get involved in sport at UCD.

“I was going up and down to my home most weekends for clubfootball and it was a quite a journey so that, along with my studies, itoccupied most of my time,” recalls Dooher. “But later I did join thecollege senior panel and I really enjoyed my three years in the UCDcolours. I was fortunate that we had a team good enough to win thecoveted Sigerson Cup in 1996 — for the first time since 1985.

“By UCD standards, that team was unusual in that we had very few

well-known county players but instead we had a very dedicatedbunch of men from all over Ireland. Possibly the best-known player onthe team was Trevor Giles, who went on to win two All-Ireland medalswith his county.”

Upon graduation, Dooher returned to his native county to join afour-person large-animal practice in Claudy, Derry and remainedthere for seven years.

As the Tyrone football team moved closer to the top of the nationalGaelic football scene, winning their first All-Ireland in 2003, however,Dooher found that the ever-increasing demands of training made itimpractical to continue in general veterinary work.

“The demands of training with Tyrone were such that I alwaysfound myself swapping around with other vets in the practice andinconveniencing them. In reality I was burning the candle at bothends and something had to give.”

In May 2005, Dooher decided to quit the practice and took aveterinary job with the Department of Agriculture in Omagh, offeringa more regular nine-to-five day. It was perhaps no coincidence thatthis move was closely followed with Dooher’s appointment as captainof the Tyrone team in March 2005.

The appointment came about following the tragic circumstance ofthe sudden death of then captain Cormac McAnallan, who died of aviral heart infection. McAnallan had also played for UCD whilestudying for his Higher Diploma and he too had won a Dublin seniorchampionship with the university. The event sent shockwavesthroughout Irish sport but particularly in his native Tyrone.

“I had grown to know Cormac since he had joined the Tyrone panelback in 2000,” says Dooher. “He was clearly an exceptional person,not just for his brilliant prowess as a footballer but also for hisqualities of courage and leadership that set him apart.

“When Cormac died so tragically, the rest of the Tyrone playerswere determined that his wish to win a second All-Ireland would befulfilled,” says Dooher. “The memory of Cormac sustained us througha record 10 hard championship games until we triumphed over Kerryin the final. Little wonder that many tears were shed by players andsupporters that day and it was a great privilege for me to be the oneto receive the Sam Maguire Cup on behalf of Cormac and Tyrone.”

Dooher married May from Clonbridge last December and thecouple intends to build a new home in his native parish. He says hewas very honoured to receive a UCD Foundation Award last autumn.

Eugene McGee is a BA and HDip graduate of UCD. He coached UCDto six Sigerson Cup wins as well as two Dublin championships andtwo All-Ireland club titles in 1974/75. He later managed Offaly to All-Ireland success in 1982. McGee recently retired from the positionof Managing Editor of The Longford Leader and writes a weeklycolumn for the Irish Independent.

PAGE FIFTY EIGHT UCD CONNECTIONS

Brian Dooher followed in thefootsteps of four previous UCDalumni when he raised the Sam

Maguire Cup last September. Eugene McGee talks to the Tyrone

captain about balancing life as apractising vet and a Gaelic footballer

S P O R T S F I L E

PAGE FIFTY NINEUCD CONNECTIONS

‘It was agreatprivilegefor me tobe the oneto receivethe SamMaguireCup onbehalf ofCormacand Tyrone’

WASHINGTON DC

Isobel Murray is the ChapterPresident for Washington DCand can be contacted atisobelm@comcast.net.

Ambassador Noel Fahey (DPA‘67, BA ‘71) was presentedwith the Centenary History

of the Literary & Historical Society by Isobel Murray (BCL ‘85),former auditor of the L&H and President of the Washington DCChapter at an alumni event hosted by Ambassador and Mrs Faheyat their residence in April 2005

NEW CHAPTER/OVERSEASCONTACTS 2005/06

JAPANAmbassador Brendan Scannell (BA ‘73)(www.ucd-alumni-japan.com)

MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICAAhmed Elwakil (PhD ‘00) elwakil@sharjah.ac.ae

C H A P T E R S

UCD chapters are created when graduates living overseas come together in specific regions to network and socialise.There are currently more than 50 UCD chapters and overseas contacts, the details of which can be found atwww.ucd.ie/alumni. If you are a UCD graduate living abroad and there is no active chapter in your region pleasecontact UCD Alumni & Development on tel +353 1 7161447 or email alumni@ucd.ie for information on how to set upa UCD chapter.

PAGE SIXTY ONEUCD CONNECTIONS PAGE SIXTY UCD CONNECTIONS

BRUSSELS

Adeline Farrelly (BA ‘84) (a.farrelly@europabio.org) and BrendanCardiff (BA ‘66, MA ‘67) are the co-chairs of the UCD BelgianChapter and would be delighted to hear from graduates living inand visiting Belgium. A graduate dinner will be held on 26 June2006 in Brussels with guest speaker, UCD graduate, Catherine Day,Secretary General of the European Commission. For an update onthe dinner log onto www.ucd.ie/alumni.

FRANCE

Gerry Collins (BE ‘91) is the Chapter President for France and canbe contacted at gerry_collins@hotmail.com.

The UCD Chapter in France is active and had a great night outfor their Christmas dinner. They have regular pub nights and arecurrently planning a summer outing. They are a relatively smallband and Gerry would welcome contact from new membersliving in France.

GERMANY

Nina McGuinness (BA ‘00) and Cáit Kinsella (BA ‘00) are thecontacts for the UCD Chapter in Germany and can be contacted atinfo@ucd-alumni.de. They held an event in September and wouldbe delighted to welcome new members to the chapter. Log ontowww.ucd-alumni.de and check out their website.

JAPAN

The Japan Chapter got off to agood start this year with a numberof events including a ChapterDinner, participation in various StPatrick’s Day parades, a joint eventwith alumni from EM Lyon andNUIG, as well as an informal dinnerwith visiting UCD representatives.

The Chapter President andfounder John Bourke (MBA ‘93) of

Nichiai handed over the reins to Brendan Scannell (BA ‘73),Ambassador of Ireland to Japan.

Log onto www.ucd-alumni-japan.com to check out the events.

UK

The UK Chapter meet on the third Thursday of every month. Tofind out the location of the next meeting, contact Myles Farrell(BComm ‘98, MBS ‘99) at ucduk@hotmail.com. Their recent eventsincluded a dinner in October 2005, a table quiz in February 2006and they also participated in the London New Year's Party forIrish universities. A summer boat cruise on the Thames is beingorganised for Thursday 6 July 2006. Further details are availableon www.ucd.ie/alumni.

Rachel Crotty (BA ‘85) at StPatrick’s Day Parade, Tokyo

UCD CHAPTERS

G R A D U A T E A S S O C I A T I O N S

MEDICAL GRADUATES’ASSOCIATION GALA DINNERThe School of Medicine & Medical Science, formerly the Faculty ofMedical & Health Sciences, celebrated the graduation of the finalmedical year class of 2005 on 11 June 2005 in O’Reilly Hall, UCD,Belfield. The evening was a fantastic success and was attended inrecord numbers by the graduates, their families and friends and bythe staff who were involved in teaching in UCD.

Dato Dr Leslie Lam (MB BCh BAO ‘67, BSc ‘69, DipCH ‘75) wasawarded with an Honorary Fellowship Award of the Faculty ofMedicine & Health Sciences, UCD. Dr Lam is a distinguishedcardiologist and runs The Cardiac Centre based in Mount ElizabethMedical Centre, Singapore. Dr Lam attended the evening togetherwith his wife Dr Ivy Yap (MB BCh BAO ‘69, DipCH ‘77), who is also aUCD graduate, and a delegation from Singapore.

The MGA Student of the Year award — nominated by the final-year class and sponsored by the Medical Graduates Association andPfizer Healthcare — went to Dr Aileen McCabe. In true altruistic styleDr McCabe could not be there on the evening as she wasvolunteering with Sunshine House, a project that provides services tochildren from disadvantaged areas of Greater Dublin.

Teaching Awards were presented to the top 10 teachers, asnominated by the final medical year class of 2005. The winners wereDr John Seery, Dr Eric Heffernan (MB BCh BAO ‘98), Professor WilliamPowderly (MB BCh BAO ‘79, MD ‘88), Dr Jurgen Mulsow (MB BChBAO ‘00), Mr Arnold Hill (MB BCh BAO ‘88, MMedSc ‘90), Dr KoonMeng Chan, Dr Donal O’Shea (MB BCh BAO ‘89, MD ‘97), ProfessorColm O’Herlihy (MB BCh BAO ‘73, DipCH ‘74), Dr Brian Barry andProfessor Oscar Traynor (MB BCh BAO ‘74, PhD ‘84). The Departmentsof Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Surgery and Paediatrics were eachpresented ex aequo with Department of the Year awards.Congratulations to all!

Pictured above: Drs Manley, Bacon and Donnelly at the gala dinner

FORTHCOMING EVENTS

The AGM, Annual Scientific Meeting and Distinguished GraduateAward will take place on 29/30 September 2006. For moreinformation contact Martin O’Donohoe (MB BCh BAO ‘83, BSc ‘85,MCh ‘92) on +353 (0)1 860 0190 or mkodonohoe@eircom.net.

PAST EVENTSThe School of Medicine and Medical Science Gala Dinner took placeon Friday 9 June 2006. Check www.ucd.ie/alumni for an update.

CAREERS GUIDANCE SEMINARThe Annual Career Guidance Seminar was held on Wednesday 22March 2006. It was organised by the MGA and the UCD MedicalSociety. This year, programme directors in Medicine, Surgery,Anaesthetics, Pathology, Paediatrics, Obstetrics & Gynaecology,Psychiatry and General Practice gave a short overview of entry intobasic training in their individual specialities. This was followed by theusual one-to-one advice given by professors, lecturers and specialistregistrars. Generous sponsorship was obtained by the MedicalSociety and the event was a great success thanks to Karen O’Connell,Ronan Sugrue and the other organisers.

ANNUAL SCIENTIFIC MEETINGThe Annual Scientific Meeting coupled with the AGM and thepresentation of the Annual Distinguished Graduate Award washeld at the Catherine McAuley Centre at the Mater Hospitalfollowed by dinner at the Medical Board Building, 59 Eccles Street.The scientific session comprised short talks from UCD graduatesrecently awarded Newman Professorships. Professors John Crowe(MB BCh BAO ‘70), Aidan McCormack (MB BCh BAO ‘79) andStephen Eustace (MB BCh BAO ‘86, MSc ‘93) provided interestinginsights into the cutting edge of their own disciplines. The meetingconcluded with the AGM of the MGA.

The Distinguished Graduate Award was presented to UCDPresident, Dr Hugh Brady (MB BCh, BAO ‘82, BSc ‘84, PhD ‘93, MD ‘94)at the dinner that followed in the Medical Board Building. All at themeeting were particularly impressed with the facilities which DrBrady had developed at the Catherine McAuley Education Centre atthe Mater.

Pictured above: Award Winners

GRADUATE ASSOCIATIONS: MEDICAL

G R A D U A T E A S S O C I A T I O N S

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EVENTS HELD IN 2005

In June 2005, the Annual Conference of the University Women ofEurope was held in Cork. It was preceded by a friendship visit toBelfast and then Dublin. These events attracted a large numberof overseas members.

The WGA heat of the Irish Federation’s (IrFUW) PublicSpeaking Competition for Girls Under Fifteen was held inFebruary 2006. The team award went to Loreto College, StStephen’s Green, Dublin and the Individual Best Speaker wasMelanie Schlaschl from St Killian’s German School, Clonskeagh.These four speakers represented the WGA in the national final ofthe competition, which took place in Belfield on Saturday, 4March 2006.

Some other activities during the year included an outing to theCollins Barracks Museum to see the exhibition The Endurance:Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition, and two talks, oneon Studying Burmese Manuscripts by Sinead Ward and thesecond on Trafficking in Persons: The Facts, Roots & Branches byDr Maura O’Donohoe, MMM. We also had a visit to the Office ofthe EU on Molesworth Street, which included an informationsession and lunch.

Our fundraising activity this year was in the form of a bridgeevening, held in April with the proceeds going to UCD ChoralScholars.

Pictured above: UCD WGA President Annette Durkan with thewinning team from the UCD heat of the Public SpeakingCompetition — Estelle Purcell, Rosalind O’Sullivan and HannahLucey of Loreto Secondary School, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin

The UCD Women Graduates’ Association (WGA) is affiliated to theIrish Federation of University Women (IrFUW), University Women ofEurope (UWE) and the International Federation of University Women(IFUW), which has consultative status within the UN. Membershipforms can be by writing to the Honorary Secretary, UCD-WGA, UCD,Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2 or email women.graduates@ucd.ie.Annette Durkan (BA ‘63, HDipEd ‘64, EDipEdAdm ‘92) is the currentUCD WGA President.

IMAGES OF UCDThe WGA’s mainproject in 2005 wasthe UCD Photo-Call,which aimed tocollect photographsfor the universityarchives. Thisculminated in themounting of anexhibition of the

photographs submitted — Images of UCD — which was held inNovember 2005 in the Quinn School. The response to the exhibitionwas very encouraging and requests have been received forpermission to use some of the photos.

The WGA is still appealing to all UCD graduates to send inphotographs from their time in UCD. Photos should be accompaniedby a Photo-Call form that can be found online atwww.ucd.ie/alumni/wga or can be requested by writing to UCDPhoto-Call, Room 10, Arts Annexe, Woodview, UCD, Belfield, Dublin4. Soft copies of photos should be emailed towomen.graduates@ucd.ie.

Pictured above: Some members of UCD WGA and guests enjoyingthe PhotoCall Exhibition

EGA GOLD MEDAL AWARDSThe 2005 EGA Gold Medal Awards were presented to the beststudents in each of the six graduating engineering classes. Theunusual event of a tie in Electronic Engineering meant that sevenmedals were presented. Recipients were:GEA Tuchenhagen Gold Medal (Biosystems Engineering): Roger McDermott

ESSO Gold Medal (Chemical Engineering): Gráinne McDonagh

RPS-MCOS Gold Medal (Civil Engineering): Páraic Quirke

Electricity Supply Board Gold Medal (Electrical Engineering): Ronan

Thomas FitzMaurice

Ericsson Gold Medal (Electronic Engineering): David Looney and Aishwarya Moni

CRH Gold Medal (Mechanical Engineering): Barry Hogan

G R A D U A T E A S S O C I A T I O N S

GRADUATE ASSOCIATIONS: UCD WOMEN

ENGINEERING GRADUATES’ASSOCIATIONThe Engineering Graduates’ Association (EGA) is open to allgraduates of engineering in UCD.

The 2006 Annual Luncheon will take place in O’Reilly Hall inBelfield on Friday, 30 June. All graduates are welcome and mayinvite colleagues or take a table. For more information or to makea booking please contact Caitriona Boushel (BE ‘03) atcaitriona.boushel@ee.ucd.ie or tel +353 1 7161853.

ANNUAL LUNCHEON AND DISTINGUISHED GRADUATE AWARDThe Annual Luncheon of the EGA was held in O’Reilly Hall, Belfieldon 8 April 2005. At the event, on behalf of the Association, thePresident of the EGA, Simon Kelly, awarded the 2005 DistinguishedGraduate Award to Professor Jim Dooge (BE ‘42, BSc ‘42, ME ‘52).Professor Dooge entertained the guests with his stories ofengineering in UCD over the years and of his career. Previousrecipients of the award were PJ Rudden (RPS-MCOS, 2002), JoeO’Donovan (Roughan & O’Donovan Consulting Engineers, 2003),Vincent O’Doherty (Superquinn, 2004).

Professor Dooge began his career in 1942 with the Office of PublicWorks. In 1946 he joined the ESB. Between 1954 and 1956 he wasresearch associate at the Department of Civil Engineering atUniversity of Iowa. In 1958 he became Professor of Civil Engineeringat University College Cork and then a Professor at UCD in 1970.Between 1984 and 1987 he worked at the Department ofEngineering Hydrology at University College Galway. In 1988 hereturned to UCD to the Centre for Water Resources Research.

As well as having a distinguished career as an academic, ProfessorDooge has led a very active political life. From 1961 to 1977 he wasa Senator in Seanad Éireann, having been nominated by theInstitute of Engineers of Ireland. He served as Cathaoirleach from1973 to 1977. In 1981 he was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs.In 1981 he returned to Seanad Éireann and served until 1987.

He was Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee of theWorld Climate Impact Studies Programme (1980-1990), President ofthe International Commission on Water Resources (1971-1975),President of the International Association for Hydrological Sciences(1975-1979) and President of the Royal Irish Academy (1987-1990).Elected as a foreign member of the Royal Academy of Engineeringin 2000, he is the recipient of the 2005 Prince Philip Medal of theRoyal Academy of Engineering.

Nominations for future awards are invited from members andshould be sent to Caitriona Boushel, contact details above.

Pictured above: Prof James Dooge addressing the Annual Luncheon

ANNUAL GOLF OUTING

The Annual Golf Outing of the Association was held in Elm Park GolfClub on 30 September 2005. A great day was had by all and all theprizes went to just one team! Nearest The Pin was Martin Hussey (BE‘88); Longest Drive went to Liam Carroll (BE ‘72) and, complete withtheir captain Michael Gilchrist, UCD Team 3 was awarded the 2005Vincent Dodd Perpetual Trophy by the President of the EGA, SimonKelly (BE ‘75). Congratulations to all! Details of the 2006 outing willbe available at a later stage on www.ucd.ie/enggrad.

Pictured above from left: Martin Hussey; President of the EGA,Simon Kelly; Liam Carroll; and Prof Michael Gilchrist

ANNUAL LECTUREThe Annual Lecture was delivered on 4 April 2006 in lecture theatre326 of the Engineering Building, UCD. Entitled Future Trends inEngineering Education, the lecture was delivered by ProfessorGerald Byrne, Dean of Engineering, UCD. Professor Byrneaddressed the needs of future engineering education in thecontext of the recent changes to the structures in UCD. The talk wasfollowed by a panel discussion and question and answer session. Avote of thanks was delivered by Tony O’Brien (BE ‘74, MBA ‘83),Treasurer of EGA.

GRADUATE ASSOCIATIONS: ENGINEERING

G R A D U A T E A S S O C I A T I O N S

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PAGE SIXTY FOUR UCD CONNECTIONS

INSTITUTE OF CRIMINOLOGYDr Ian O’Donnell was appointed Director of theUCD School of Law’s Institute of Criminology.The institute completed a number of majorresearch projects, including the Study of ChildPornography and the International Self-Reported Delinquency Survey. Among theacademic studies published was Crime andPunishment in Ireland 1922-2003: A Statistical

Sourcebook. In its Distinguished Visiting Lecture series lectures weregiven by Professor Eric Dunning, Dr Harry Kennedy, Professor JosephKennedy, Professor Phil Scranton and Dr Julian Roberts.

Pictured: Dr Ian O’Donnell, Director, UCD Institute of Criminology

ADJUNCTSCHOOL OF LAWAmong those participating inthe UCD School of Law’sAdjunct School of Lawprogramme were Judge John

Cooke (BCL ‘65, LLB ‘66), Court of First Instance of the EuropeanCommunities, and former EU Commissioner, David Byrne.

Pictured (from left): Joanne Blennerhassett, UCD School of Law;

former Commissioner David Byrne; Hugh Mohan, Chairman of

the Bar Council

FORDHAMSUMMER LAWSCHOOLThe fifth annual Fordham Summer

Law School organised in conjunction with the UCD School of Lawand the School of Law at Queen’s University, Belfast took place in July2005. The curriculum comprised the subjects of International andDomestic Dispute Resolution, International Organisations,International Human Rights and Comparative Criminal Justice.

Pictured at a reception in King’s Inns for the participants in the

Summer School are (from left): Prof Joseph Sweeney, Fordham

Law School; Alice Sweeney; Justice Roderick Murphy, Irish High

Court

UCD SCHOOL OF LAW LAUNCHESPROCUREMENT RESEARCH PROJECTThe TenderWise project, led by Dermot Cahill of UCD School of Law,was launched recently in O’Reilly Hall with the holding of aninternational conference addressed by leading experts in the field.Internationally, the modernisation of procurement practices isbecoming a major strategic objective for governments and regionalauthorities charged with spending public monies.

Since 2004, an international research project between the UCDSchool of Law and the Enterprise Unit of Trinity College Carmarthen,Wales, has been investigating procurement issues. Underlying theresearch was the search for the reasons as to why more small andmedium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are not seeking to win governmentbusiness awarded by way of public tender. Also the objective is toeducate the public sector on the problems faced by SME tenderers.

The project’s current research output can be found onwww.tenderwise.com or by contacting Dermot(Dermot.Cahill@ucd.ie) for a free copy of the TenderWise DVD-Rom.The TenderWise Research Team is pictured above.

BROADCASTING,SOCIETY ANDTHE LAWLECTURE SERIES

The 10th lecture in this series,organised jointly by RTÉ and the UCD School of Law, was deliveredbefore an audience of more than 500, by Michael McDowell TD (BA‘72), Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform. The title of theminister’s lecture was Society and Broadcasting: Rethinking Roles.

Pictured: Cathal Goan, Director General, RTÉ and Minister Michael

McDowell TD

JOHN MAURICE KELLY MEMORIAL LECTURE

The 12th John Maurice Kelly MemorialLecture was delivered by thedistinguished Roman and comparativelawyer, Professor Alan Watson, ErnestP. Rogers Professor of Law at theUniversity of Georgia. The title ofProfessor Watson’s lecture was: The

Romans: Not a Legalistic People. The lecture was delivered before adistinguished gathering of legal practitioners and academics in theWilliam Jefferson Clinton Auditorium, Belfield, on 28 April this year.

Pictured (from left): Michael Collins, SC; Delphine Kelly; Prof Alan

Watson; Nils Pettersen-Hagh, Advokat; Patricia Rickard-Clarke,

Law Reform Commission

IRISH EUROPEAN LAW FORUM -NINTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE

ANNUAL STUDENT PRIZEGIVING CEREMONYThe 29th annual Student Prizegiving Ceremony was held in NewmanHouse, St Stephen’s Green, on Thursday, 15 December 2005. Thisceremony, since its inception, has been sponsored by Bank of Ireland.The adjudicator for the essay competition was Justice HughGeoghegan of the Supreme Court (BCL ‘61, LLB ‘63).

Back row (from left): Mr Spooner, on behalf of Joe Spooner, 2 BCL

Silver; Niall McGoldrick, 1 BCL Silver; Margaret Murray, 1 BCL

Gold; Paul Ward, UCD School of Law and event organiser; Grace

O’Connor, 1 BCL Bronze; Noel McGrath, 3 BCL Bronze; Mark

Murphy, 3 BCL Silver. Front row (from left): Des Crowley, CEO

Retail Financial Services BoI; Justice Hugh Geoghegan, Supreme

Court, essay adjudicator; Dr Hugh Brady, President of UCD; Prof

Paul O’Connor, Dean, UCD School of Law

The ninth annual conference of the UCD School of Law’s IrishEuropean Law Forum was held in Newman House on 10 December2005. The title of this year’s conference was Enhancing CorporateGovernance in Europe.

Back row (from left): Dan O’Keefe SC, Chairman, Irish Takeover

Panel; Prof Klaus J. Hopt, Director, Max Planck Institute for

Private Law, Hamburg; Paul Appleby, Director of Corporate

Enforcement; David Devlin, European Corporate Governance

Forum; Prof Gérard Hertig, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

(ETH Zurich); Prof J. A. McCahery, University of Amsterdam; Prof

Jonathan Rickford, British Institute of International and

Comparative Law; Prof Paul Davies, London School of Economics.

Front row (from left): Dr Blanaid Clarke, UCD School of Law; Prof

Janet Dine, Queen Mary University of London; Prof Paul

O’Connor, Dean, UCD School of Law; Prof Eilís Feeran, University

of Cambridge; Prof Irene Lynch-Fannon, University College Cork

Prof Michael Quayle, University of Glamorgan; Dr Barbara Allen,

University of Birmingham; Dermot Cahill, UCD School of Law,

Project Leader; Dr Brian Clarke, Trinity College Carmarthen

GRADUATE NEWS: LAW

ORGANISEA REUNION

R E U N I O N S R E U N I O N S

UCD Alumni & Development offers asupport service and reunion pack forthose wishing to organise a reunion. Wecan also provide you with the contactdetails of your former classmates. Call us on tel +353 1 7161447 or emailalumni@ucd.ie for more information.We’d be delighted to include yourphotos in next year’s magazine

PAGE SIXTY SEVENUCD CONNECTIONS PAGE SIXTY SIX UCD CONNECTIONS

GOLDEN JUBILEE 2005More than 140 UCD alumni from the class of 1955 proudlygathered at a special ceremonial event in O’Reilly Hall to markthe Golden Jubilee of their graduation. They returned to witnessa much-changed university where they met with old friends,some of whom they had not seen for more than 50 years.

Among the alumni at the event was Sister Cora Richardson (70).She completed an Arts degree at UCD before joining the MissionarySisters of the Holy Rosary andleaving Ireland to work in Africa.As a missionary, she is currentlyworking with people sufferingfrom AIDS in South Africa.

Also at the event wasMieczyslaw Swiatkowski (81)who studied dental surgery atUCD after fighting for the FreePolish Forces during World War II.

RUBY AND SILVER JUBILEE 2005Saturday 19 November 2005 sawgraduates from the classes of 1965and 1980 return to UCD for theirRuby and Silver Jubilee.

Ambassador Thelma Doran spoketo graduates of her memories of UCDin the pre-Belfield era. Theambassador graduated with a BA in1965 and followed this with a HDip inEducation in 1966. Representing theclass of 1980 was MEP and BAgrScgraduate, Mairead McGuinness.

Dr Philip Nolan, Registrar of UCD, welcomed more than 200UCD graduates, staff and their guests to a reception inNewman House.

Friday 24 June 2005 saw the culmination of the UCD 150thanniversary celebrations at a garden party for graduates inO’Reilly Hall, Belfield. The garden party was attended by morethan 600 graduates who spent a nostalgic evening sipping wineand reminiscing about the non-academic activities of theirstudent years.

Cora Richardson andMieczyslaw Swiatkowski

BArch Class of 1955 on the day of their graduation

The BArch Classof 1955 as theyare today

Clíona de BhaldraitheMarsh, President HughBrady, Mairead McGuinnessand Thelma Doran

MVB graduates from 1965 with their guests and Professor BoydJones, Dean of Veterinary Medicine. Back row: D.J. O’Driscoll, JohnCassells, Tom Cusack, Tom Dillon, Pat Brophy and Prof Boyd Jones.Front row: Dr Mona McGarry, Nuala Cassells, Enda O’Driscoll,Deirdre Cusack, Kathleen Brophy and Dr Yvonne Groarke

Carole Devlin, Sean Mac An Bhaird, Angela Cooney, Emer Condon

Desmond Ormsby, David Ormsby, Louis Knowles

Terence Doyle,Maura Doyle

Sinead MacBride, JenniferAllen and Catherine McNally

Sheelagh McHugh, PatrickMercer, Renagh Holohanand Helen Keogh

UPCOMINGREUNIONS

MB BCh BAO 1951UCD medical class of 1951 areholding a reunion at GlenloAbbey Hotel in Galway 17-20October 2006. Any 1951 medicalgraduate who has not alreadyreceived notification of thereunion and who is interested inattending please phone Dr EithneConway-McGee at +353 (0)91522015 or mobile +353 (0)868641183. If you know thewhereabouts of Dr Maura Cowley(Mayo), Dr Ivan Crowley, DrPatrick Walsh (Carlow/Germany),Dr Thomas Hunt, Dr JeremiahHealy, Dr Peter Kelly (Kildare), DrPatrick Lavin, or Dr Dermod Ryan(Mayo), please contact Eithne.

GOLDEN JUBILEEThe 2006 Golden Jubilee for theclass of 1956 will take place onFriday 20 October 2006. Pleasecontact alumni@ucd.ie for moreinformation.

BE & MEngSc 1966There will be a reunion on 1September 2006 for the BE &MEngSc class of 1966. The formatwill be a golf outing followed bydinner at the Marriott Druid’sGlen, Newtownmountkennedy.Please contact Courtney Murphyat murphycj@iol.ie.

MB BCh BAO 1966The reunion for the MB BCh BAOclass of 1966 will take place inSeptember 2006 in Killarney. Forfurther details please contact DrJohn Murphy class66@iolfree.ie.

RUBY & SILVER JUBILEEThe 2006 Ruby & Silver Jubileefor the classes of 1966 and 1981will take place on Saturday 4November 2006. Please contactalumni@ucd.ie for moreinformation.

PAST REUNIONS

BAgrSc 1965The BAgrSc class of 1965 held a40th reunion on 22 September2005. Peadar Murphy organisedthe reunion, which was held at theAgricultural Science AssociationNational Conference banquet inthe Mount Wolseley Hilton Resort.

BSc (BIOCHEMISTRY) 1974There were nine graduates inBiochemistry in 1974 and five ofthese met on 10 March 2006 in TheMerrion. Pictured above are DonalDanagher, Claire O’Connor,Marian Devitt, Mary Murphy (nowWallace) and Kieran Geoghegan,who came all the way fromConnecticut.

BCL 1980The BCL class of 1980 held aninformal reunion on Friday 18November 2005 in the TeachersClub, Parnell Square West,Dublin. They had a great turnout(approximately 50) and plan a 30-year reunion in 2010!

BCL 1985Mairead Ruane, Ken Casey andNiall Farrell organised a reunionof the BCL class of 1985. Theevent was held in October inNewman House and was a greatsuccess as people travelled fromas far as the UK to attend.

150 ALUMNI GARDEN PARTY

MB BCh BAO 1986A reunion is being planned forthe medical class of 1986 inMount Juliet Hotel on 3 and 4November 2006. Should youwish to find out more pleasecontact Mary Horgan atmary.horgan2@mailp.hse.ie orcatherineE.cronin@mailp.hse.ie.

BSc (BIOCHEMISTRY –HONS) 1989Dr Eilis Boyle-Walsh isplanning a reunion for the BScHonours Biochemistry class of1989 in August 2006. ContactEilis at yillee1@yahoo.co.uk.

HOMECOMING RECEPTION 2005

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CLASS NOTES

INVITE FOR SUBMISSIONSIf you would like to submit material for inclusion in our next edition ofUCD Connections please contact Sinéad Dolan, UCD Alumni &Development on tel + 353 1 7161698 or email sinead.dolan@ucd.ie.Submissions should be no more than 100 words and photographs arewelcome. We look forward to hearing from you!

If any information is printed incorrectly, please contact UCD Alumni &Development on tel +353 1 7161698 and the error will be corrected inthe next issue.

RICHARDWILSON BSc‘56, PhD ‘59,DSc ‘91

After graduating, Richard took up aposition with the Agricultural Institute, nowTeagasc, and stayed until retirement. Thepost allowed him the flexibility to lecture inchemistry for many years at NUI Maynoothand at UCD on a part-time basis. He servedon both the Council for The Institute ofChemistry of Ireland and as a judge in theYoung Scientist Competition. Currentlyretired, he remains active with voluntarywork and writing about Irish scientists. ForHamilton Year 2005 he wrote a series of 10articles published in Rush Community News.In 1961 he married Penny McGrail (BScHons Biochemistry ‘60); they have sixchildren and 11 grandchildren.

KEN WLASCHIN MA ‘57

Ken graduated in 1956 from DartmouthCollege in the US. He worked onnewspapers in the US (Star-Herald),Rome (Daily American) and in London(Daily Sketch). He was drama serieseditor for London Weekend Television(1968), director of The London FilmFestival (1969-1984), director of TheAmerican Film Institute’s Film Theater inWashington DC and of The Los AngelesFilm Festival (1984-1993), and director ofAFI Film Preservation (1994-2005). Hisbooks include Encyclopedia of Opera onScreen and Encyclopedia of Movie Stars.He lives in Palm Springs, California andon the Isle of Wight. He is married toMaureen Kennedy Martin and has a son,Scott. Ken can be contacted atbeachwoodprs@earthlink.net.

REV. FR BERNARD JOHNRAYMOND BA ‘58

Bennie worked in the Traffic Departmentof Aer Lingus at Dublin Airport. In 1959he went to Nigeria to work as a teacherin a mission college in the diocese ofIbadan. After four years Bennie joinedthe SMA Fathers in Ireland in 1963. Hereturned to Ibadan Diocese in 1968having being ordained in December1967. Bishop Richard Finn SMA askedhim to edit a Catholic weekly paperwhich he had founded in 1960. Aftertwo years, he went back to teaching inFatima College, Ikire, and St Mary’sGrammar School, Iwo. In 1994 Benniecame home to work in the Archives inCork and still works in the PhotographicDepartment. He can be contacted atraymond301131@eircom.net.

PATRICK J QUINN BArch ‘54

Patrick is currently Institute ProfessorEmeritus (formerly Dean) of Architecture atRensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is also adirector (and former president) of theEastern New York chapter of the AmericanInstitute of Architects (AIA). Amongnational and international awards for hisdesign projects he is proudest of an AIANational Honor Award. He received anMArch from University of Pennsylvania. Hewas captain of the UCD Athletic Club andhas competed internationally in Mastersswimming and in amateur golf.

FR JOHN ARCHBOLD BAHons ‘55, HDipEd ‘60

Fr John Archbold OMI spent 25 yearsteaching in Belcamp College, Raheny, thelast eight as headmaster. He spent asabbatical year in South America followedby a year at Boston College. He returnedto Ireland where he spent three years inparish ministry at St Michael’s, Inchicore.He served as Assistant Pastor in theBasilica of St Patrick, Fremantle, Australia,where for four years he also was chaplainto the newly-founded Catholic Universityof Notre Dame, Australia. Fr John ispresently in ministry at Fremantle.

AUSTIN HEALY BA ‘55,HDipEd ‘57

After being ordained in 1962 Austintravelled by boat to Freetown, SierraLeone, Africa. From 1964 to 1968 hetaught French and English in the HolyGhost Secondary School, Segbwena,where he was principal until 1972. Hethen moved to Sewafe Secondary Schooland was principal there until 1982. Austinwent on to become parish priest in 1988in Kailahun and moved to St Martin’sFreetown until 1996. He studied at theInstitute of Philosophy, Ejisu, Ghana from2001 to 2004 and moved to Ireland in2005 where he now resides as curate inKimmage Manor parish.

RITA KIRWAN MB BChBAO ‘41

After graduating from UCD, Ritacompleted her internship at St Vincent’sHospital in St Stephen’s Green,following which she became a GP onDublin’s northside. Rita is a proudmember of the Alumni Association andlikes to keep in touch withdevelopments in medical education atUCD through her grandson Ruaidhrí(see Class Notes 2000s).

DR MAURA P.IMBERT (NÉECOOKE) BScHons ‘53

After graduating,Maura travelled to Trinidad to marryDesmond Imbert (BE ‘53, ME ‘59), nowProfessor Emeritus of Engineering.Highlights of her career include: obtainingan MSc and a PhD from The University ofThe West Indies; founding the Trinidad &Tobago Astronomical Society in 1966;retiring as principal researcher from theCaribbean Industrial Research Institute in1994 where she was head of the Food &Chemistry Division; and obtaining an onlinemaster’s degree in astronomy in 2005 fromJames Cook University, Townsville,Australia.

FERGUS CASS BA ‘67

Fergus retired from Unilever in 2003.During his career he worked infinancial and general management andlived in the UK, Ireland, the US, Kenya,Nigeria, Malawi and Romania. Herecently completed an MA in thepolitical economy of eastern Europe atthe School of Slavonic and EasternEuropean Studies at University CollegeLondon and plans further postgraduatestudy. He undertakes consultingassignments in eastern Europe. Fergusis married and has one daughter. Helives in London and can be contactedat fergus.cass@btinternet.com.

[1960s][1940s] [1950s]

BREANNDAN MOORE MBBCh BAO ‘68, DCH ‘70

Breanndan obtained the FCAP fromThe American Board of Pathology in1976 and the FRCPI from the RoyalCollege of Physicians of Ireland in1989. He is currently a consultantphysician in the Division ofTransfusion Medicine and also directorof the Histocompatibility Laboratoryat the Mayo Clinic, Rochester,Minnesota. He married Mary Teehanin 1969 and has two children, Endaand Anna. Breanndan can becontacted on +1 507 284 8710 or atmoore.breanndan@mayo.edu.

Thank you to all our graduates who sent in material for our Class Notes section. Due to the large number ofsubmissions received, we have edited them considerably. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

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MARTIN SHEEHY MB BCh BAO ‘68

Martin has been the Regional Medical Director forLiberty Mutual Insurance Group for the past eightyears, serving as adviser for its Workers’ Compensationproduct line, west of the Mississippi, US. Prior to thathe served for more than 20 years as a medical directorof various pain centres in New York City and Phoenix,Arizona. Additionally he is involved with the AmericanCollege of Medical Quality and the American College ofPhysician Executives (as he once upon a timesupplemented his MD degree with an MBA) in asometimes vain attempt to bring order out of chaos towhat is loosely described as healthcare in the NewWorld. The photo above taken at Hallowe’en in 2003 ishis photo ‘for all seasons’, being suitable for St Patrick’sDay, July 4th Independence Day, Bastille Day,Hallowe’en and All Saints Day. He is the ‘Lord’ SirRichard Attenborough lookalike to the right on thephoto; the lady on the left represents a very green LadyLiberty, thus its pertinence to his current corporatemilieu.

FR FERGUS MICHAELKELLY BA ‘66

Fr Fergus Kelly CM was a student forthe priesthood in the Vincentian’scommunity when he studied in UCD,and the daily trip by bicycle from StJoseph’s, Blackrock to EarlsfortTerrace had to be done come hell orhigh water. Fergus recalls beingintroduced to the mysteries ofphilosophy by Fr Desmond Connell,the intricacies of Shakespeare’s firstfolio by Professor Jeremiah Hoganand what the medieval men andwomen were up to by F. X. Martin.Since then he has worked with deafpeople, taught in Armagh duringThe Troubles and is presentlyassisting the Daughters of Charity ofSt Vincent de Paul in their work inthe UK.

JOSEPH O’CONNOR BA ‘68

Joe obtained a HDipEd from UCGin 1970 and taught in VocationalSchool Newport, Co Tipperarybetween 1968 and 1969. Hemoved to St Joseph’s SecondarySchool, Spanish Point, Co Clare, in1969 and taught there until 2002.Joe took early retirement fromteaching in June 2002. He receiveda DHP from The Institute ofClinical Hypnotherapy/Psychotherapy in July 2003. Joe ismarried to Veron and they havetwo daughters, Sanchia andUrsula. Joe presents traditionalmusic programmes on Clare FMand Radio Corca Baiscinn and hecan be seen regularly on Doonbeg,Kilrush and Spanish Point golfcourses and at singing sessionsaround the country. He is enjoyingretirement.

SR MARGARET ANNE MEYER MB BCh BAO ‘64

Margaret obtained a DCH from the College ofSurgeons in 1971, a DRCOG from London in 1976and a qualification in Leprosy Studies in Ethiopia in1989. It is now four years since Margaret leftmedical missionary work in Africa. She worked as ageneral practitioner in Uganda and Tanzania for24 years in Medical Missionaries of Mary Hospitals.In 1990, she went to Nigeria to engage in leprosyand TB work where she stayed for 12 years.Leprosy was on the decrease but TB was increasingdue to the rise of HIV/AIDS. Margaret had neverseen AIDS patients in Uganda for the 12 years shehad worked there (1966 to 1978). She wrote apaper which she presented at her 40th MedicalReunion in which she spoke of some of the clinicalsituations she was faced with and how the goodclinical training she received in UCD helped her toface these challenges. Now Margaret is travellingby car throughout the US talking to grade-schooland high-school students about the missions andabout how people can help African childrenthrough prayer and sacrifice. This keeps her closeto the plight of the beautiful African people whosuffer so much from famine, drought, sickness, warand corruption. She passed the ECFMG exam topractise in US in 1964 but her heart was always inAfrica and still is.

ROGER CUMMISKEY BComm ‘65

Roger tried to retire some years ago without success. He is a painter inwatercolours (www.rogercummiskey.com) and lives most of the time insunny southern Spain with his wife.

[1960s]TERENCE M GREEN MAAnglo-Irish Studies ‘72

Terence received a BA (Toronto) in1967 and a BEd (Toronto) in 1973.He taught English in Ontariosecondary schools until retirementin 1999. He is the author of eightbooks (seven novels and acollection of short stories), two ofwhich were finalists for the World

Fantasy Award. Shadow of Ashland (1996) saw more than a quarter of amillion copies printed, was broadcast on CBC radio across Canada andoptioned for feature film six times. Currently, he is a lecturer in creativewriting at the University of Western Ontario. He and his wife and three sonslive in Toronto. You are invited to visit his website at www.tmgreen.com.

[1970s]

FR JOHN FOGARTY BSc Hons ‘76

John obtained an STL from The University of Fribourg, Switzerland andtaught physics (1976-78) at Sunyani Government Secondary School, Ghana,Africa. John was ordained a missionary priest in 1981 after graduate studiesin Switzerland. He returned to Ghana in 1982 and worked initially in parishministry (1982-1986) and subsequently as rector of The Spiritan Institute ofPhilosophy at Ejisu (1990-1994). He has served in various administrativeposts in the Congregation of the Holy Spirit in Ireland (1986-1990; 1994-1998) and most recently as Vice Superior General of the Congregation at itsheadquarters in Rome (1998-2004). John is currently Director of the Centrefor Spiritan Studies at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, US. John can becontacted at fogartyj@duq.edu.

PHILOMENA MURRAY BA Hons ‘78

Philomena’s new book came out late last year. It is called Australia and theEuropean Superpower: Engaging with the European Union and is publishedby Melbourne University Press.

CIARANO’BROLCHAIN BE ‘71

Ciaran is Managing Director ofMinstrel Systems, atelecommunications and

utilities consultancy in Hindhead, Surrey. He spentseveral years in software consultancy with assignmentsat companies such as ICL, BT, British Gas and Nortel. Heis currently president of Grayshott Tennis Club. He canbe contacted at www.minstrelsystems.com or +44(0)1428 608485.

PAULA E LEMASS BA ‘73

Paula has completed a short course in TEFL with the view to teaching inMalta/Gozo. She is considering returning to UCD to do a further degree inteaching English as a foreign language.

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CONOR O’CARROLL BSc ‘76, MSc ‘77, PhD ‘88

As head of the Research Office at theIrish Universities Association, Conor isresponsible for the co-ordination ofresearch policy across all seven Irishuniversities. He is also responsible forthe Marie Curie Programme andNetwork of Mobility Centres inIreland. He is a physicist by trainingand after completing his doctorate inItaly he worked for both industryand academia in Ireland, Scotlandand Germany. He has extensiveexperience of policy formulation,having worked in the EuropeanCommission’s DG Research and withForfás, the Irish science policyadvisory agency. He has also deepexperience of the operations offunding agencies through his timeon the Marie Curie Programme andkey involvement in the establishmentof Ireland’s newest funding agency,Science Foundation Ireland. He ismarried and living in Dublin with adaughter and son.

CLÍODHNA DEMPSEY BA Hons ‘73

Following graduation, Clíodhna spent a year inBrittany working at the Lycée in Guingamp andwas fortunate enough to find a post teaching atan agricultural training college nearby. On herreturn to Ireland in 1977 her most saleablecommodity was her fluent French. Through aseries of fortunate contacts Clíodhna wasoffered a contract at the European Parliament.Since November 1977 she has been living inLuxembourg working in the general secretariatof the European Parliament. She is currentlyHead of Unit for Financial Planning &Management, in the Directorate forInfrastructure & Logistics.

STEPHEN O’BEIRNEBComm ‘77, HDipEd‘78

Stephen has worked in variousfinancial roles in the HealthServices, mainly with the GMS(Payments) Board. He movedto the Health Board in 2002and also recently qualified asan accountant. He is now Area

Accountant for the HSE NA. He is married to Martina and hasthree children, Stephen, David and Patricia. He is very involvedlocally in coaching basketball and soccer with Tolka Rovers. Hecan be contacted at stephenandmartina @eircom.net.

MARY HARTE BA History/Political Science ‘76

After a short spell teaching in Greenhills Comprehensive SchoolMary joined the EC Press Directorate in Brussels, working towardsthe first direct elections to the European Parliament. Shereturned to Ireland in 1979 to work as a freelance journalist withthe Irish Press. She was appointed special adviser to the late JimMitchell, Minister for Justice during the short-lived Fitzgerald-ledcoalition government in 1981. Mary joined BBC Northern Irelandas a broadcast journalist in 1984 reporting on The Troubles. Shehas worked as a producer with the BBC Radio 4 flagship newsprogramme The World At One in London. She spent a year inTokyo contributing to BBC World Service before returning to BBCRadio Foyle in Derry where she continues to work as aproducer/presenter. She graduated with a Diploma inArchaeology in 2003 at St Angela’s Campus in Sligo and lives inher native Donegal with husband Peter Nolan (BL) and twochildren, Daire and Naoise.

FR MICHAEL FRANCIS O’SULLIVAN BSocSc ‘74

Michael has a BPhil (1976) and a BD (1981) from The MilltownInstitute. He also has an MTh (1986) from The University ofToronto, an STL (1986) from Regis College, Toronto and a PhD(2005) from HETAC. Michael is a Jesuit priest and a member ofthe Faculty of Theology at Milltown Institute, Dublin. He was apastor with the economically poor in Chile (1982-1984) and hasalso worked in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Kenya,Tanzania and Ethiopia. He lived and worked with economicallydisadvantaged people in Ballymun and inner-city Dublin formany years and has written over 70 articles concerning therelationship between Christianity and social and gender justice.His PhD thesis was a theological treatment of the relationshipbetween salvation in Jesus Christ and male violence againstwomen.

DERMOT RYAN MB BCh BAO ‘77 DCH ‘79

After completing the Dublin Regional VTS for general practice, Dermot worked in Canada,Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe before settling into practice in Loughborough in the UK. Hehas a particular interest in primary care respiratory medicine and was chairman of theGeneral Practice Airways Group. He has a part-time appointment as clinical research fellowat the University of Aberdeen where his current research interest is the use of mobile phonetechnology in the management of asthma. Dermot has three boys aged 15, 17 and 19, noneof whom will be following in their father’s footsteps.

[1970s]MARY O’GORMAN BSocSc ‘72

Mary has postgraduate qualifications incommunity development from Universityof Swansea, 1977 and in healtheducation from University of Leeds,1984. She is presently living and workingin Zimbabwe in training, research andcapacity-building in the health andcommunity-development sector. Mary isthe founder and main fundraiser forShingirirai Women Zimbabwe, acommunity-based organisationproviding peer education, training andpsychosocial support to orphans andvulnerable children, particularly in thearea of early learning development for3-7 year-olds, and income-generatingprogrammes for vulnerable women andgirls. Mary previously worked in Kenyaand Ethiopia for a variety of UN andNGOs on a consultancy basis inpopulation education, communitydevelopment and health, especiallyHIV/AIDS. She is married to CharlieDavies, ex UNFPA, and they have twochildren, Russell and Ceri, both studyingin University of British Columbia,Vancouver. Mary can be contacted atmelogo@gmail.com.

CHRISTINA HUNT MAHONY MA ‘71, PhD ‘88

Christina is the Director of the Center for Irish Studies at TheCatholic University of America in Washington, DC. She recentlyserved as the Executive Director of the Forum on the Future ofIrish Studies held at the European University Institute in Fiesolein October, 2005. The proposals of the forum will be publishedby the Charles University Press, Prague in August. Christina hasalso edited Out of History: Essays on the Writings of SebastianBarry (Carysfort Press, 2006).

If you would like to submit material for inclusion inour next edition of UCD Connections please contactSinéad Dolan, UCD Alumni & Development on tel + 353 1 7161698 or email sinead.dolan@ucd.ie.Submissions should be no more than 100 wordsand photographs are welcome.

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DR FELIX CLAVERIE-MARTIN PhD ‘84

After completing his PhD thesis, Felix went to the USfor his postdoctoral training at the University ofGeorgia and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hewas a senior research associate at DNAX ResearchInstitute, Palo Alto, California and a medical researchfellow at the Department of Genetics, StanfordUniversity. In 1997, he returned to his home town inTenerife (Canary Islands) to set up a research laboratoryin the Nuestra Señora de Candelaria UniversityHospital. He is currently Director of Research. He ismarried to Noriela and has three daughters, Sara,Andrea and Laura. He enjoys playing basketball. Felixcan be contacted at fclamar@gobiernodecanarias.org.

BARRY ANDREWS BA ‘88, MA ‘90 BL

After graduation, Barry was aschool teacher for seven years inBallyfermot Senior College, SuttonPark School and Bruce College. Hewas called to the Bar in 1997 andpractised as a barrister until 2003.In 1999 he was elected to DúnLaoghaire Rathdown CountyCouncil and in 2002 was elected toDáil Éireann. Barry is married andhas one son.

MIRIAM FOLEY BSocSc ‘84

Miriam has been living on LongIsland, New York for a number ofyears and was looking for a firmwith a real connection to the LongIsland community that wouldprovide a quality and diversity ofwork to enhance her professionalgrowth. She worked as an associateat the Global Corporate Mergersand Acquisitions Group at Milbank,Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. She joinedMeyer, Suozzi, English & Klein, P.C.(www.msek.com) recently andbelieves that MSEK will not onlyallow her to realise her careerobjectives but also that the firm’shistorical connection to nationaland local politics is an added bonusfor a political and policy enthusiastlike Miriam. She is a 1996 graduateof New York University School ofLaw and has also worked as anactress and producer in New Yorkand Ireland.

CONRAD BURKE BSc ‘89, MSc ‘94

Conrad is CEO of InnovaLight.His roots are in sales, marketingand physics and he was a fastriser at AT&T and its Lucentspin-off. In 2000 he joined anoptics firm called OMM Inc. thattanked with the telecoms sectorin 2003. Stints with a venture-capital firm and optical-component maker Bookham Inc.followed. Conrad is picturedstanding above the East Baynear Oakland, California andbelieves his nano-silicon crystalswill light up the future.

BREDA HALLORAN-SINGH BA English &Psychology ‘87

Breda moved to the US in 1989 and married Deepak Singh in1992. They live in Maywood, New Jersey, with their twochildren, Jai and Ian. They own a number of Indian restaurantsin northern NJ and would be more than happy to feed any oldfriends from UCD if they happen to wander in. After movingto NJ, Breda continued her studies in the area of taxaccounting and is currently employed by Atlas Copco NorthAmerica as a tax accounting supervisor in the ASAP Division.

ANNA MARIE DOWLING BSc ‘87, HDipEd‘88, DipPsych ‘95

Anna Marie worked as a teacher of science and mathematicsin The Seychelles between 1988 and 1989. On returning toIreland she worked as a research assistant in ComputerScience in TCD (1990-1993). On graduating with DipPsych in1995 she has been working as a psychologist in the healthservice in the west of Ireland. She is currently living inCastlebar, Co Mayo and employed as a Senior ClinicalPsychologist in Community Care and is also a visiting lecturerto the DPsych Clinical Psychology training course at NUIG.While working she completed an MSc in Applied Psychology(2000) at The University of Ulster, Jordanstown, apostgraduate diploma in Professional Clinical Psychology(2001) from The Psychological Society of Ireland and AnDioplóma sa Ghaeilge (2004) from NUIG.

SHARRON ROANTREEBA English/German‘88

Sharron moved to Philadelphiain 1991 where she is themanager of the CommunicationsCenter for City of Philadelphia/Philadelphia InternationalAirport. The CommunicationsCenter is a 24-hour operation. Inaddition to many duties, theCommunications Center staffhandles all aircraft and medicalemergencies. Sharron is alsoinvolved in various charitableorganisations such as the SPCA.She can be contacted atsharemr@aol.com.

PATRICK SHALLOW BA ‘81, HDipEd ‘82

Patrick taught in Dublin and Donegal before settlingdown in the Royal & Prior School, Raphoe. He lives nearBuncrana, Co Donegal with wife Catherine and threechildren aged 15, 13 and 10. Patrick can be contacted atshallowp@eircom.net.

[1980s]

DOTS SHERWOOD MVB ‘87

The travel bug brought Dots from the UK to Zimbabwe to Peru andback. She finally set down roots in beautiful Homer, Alaska whereshe lives with her husband Gary and their two sons. In early 2006Dots became the owner of Homer Veterinary Clinic and looksforward to the 20-year class reunion in Ireland in 2007. Dots can becontacted at homervet@acsalaska.net.

KAREN FITZSIMON BAgSc LandscapeHorticulture ‘88

Karen works as a chartered landscape architect and since2001 has been the principal of Karen Fitzsimon LandscapeArchitecture based in north London. The practice works inpublic regeneration projects and in the top-end domesticgardens market. Prior to this she worked in west London fora large local authority as Principal Landscape Architect andlatterly as Landscape Manager. She completed apostgraduate diploma in landscape architecture inBirmingham in 1994. Karen is married to a fellow Dublinerand they have two children. She regularly returns to visitfamily and friends in Ireland. She still considers her UCD daysas the best of her life! KFLA@blueyonder.com.

JACQUELINE BROPHY BCL ‘88

Jacqui attended the King’s Inns from 1992-1996 and was called tothe Bar in 1996. She chose not to practise at the Bar and has beenworking in the UK for the past few years in human resources. She iscurrently the Head of HR in an ethical bank based in Bristol. Jacquilives in Cheltenham with her partner, Peter, and they have two boys,William and David. Her work and personal life takes her back toDublin often and Jacqui would love to hear from other members ofthe class of 1988. brophyjacqui@hotmail.com.

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[1980s]

KEVIN O’CONNOR MB BCh BAO ‘80

Having qualified in 1980, Kevin moved to England in 1983and has been a GP in Wolverley, near Kidderminster inWorcestershire since 1988. The practice is semi-rural with alist size of 3,000. Together with a female partner they employ11 part-time staff. From 1984 to 2004 Kevin was the MedicalOfficer for Kidderminster Harriers FC. The highlights werethree visits to Wembley in the FA Trophy and promotion tothe Football League under Jan Molby. Kevin is married toAndrea and they have two children, Liam and Francesca.

MARIE KEEGAN FINN BSc Hons ‘81

Marie has also obtained a HDE (1982) from Maynooth and aDiploma in Applied Finance (1999) from the IMI. She spent 11years in California, where she taught high school chemistryand biology. She returned in 1997 and with her husband setup Hydro International and Hydro Pure, which providetechnology for industrial and domestic water treatment andcleaning. She lives in Navan and has three children. Marie canbe contacted at marie@hydrointl.ie.

MICHAEL F. MCCORMACK MA Anglo-IrishLiterature & Drama ‘81

Mike has been working as a director of contracts in the publishingindustry in New York for the past 20 years. He lives with his wifeJane, daughter Emily and son Connor on Long Island and wants tohear from others who were in the MA programme 1980-1981 —where are you Aidan Hayes, Margie Waters, Kevin Phippard, etc?Mike can be contacted at mccormack1957@hotmail.com.

PATRICIA CULLEN BSc ‘83, PhD ‘86

Upon graduation, Patricia was employed as a chemist by LoctiteResearch & Development Centre. Loctite was acquired by Henkel in1997 and Patricia is currently Director of Product DevelopmentEurope for Henkel Industrial. Post-UCD and during her employment,she completed an MBA and a marketing degree.

MARTIN MCELROYBE Ag & Food ‘85

Martin has an MBA, DIC (‘93)from The Imperial CollegeLondon. He is a seniorconsultant with the Centre forHigh Performance(www.chpd.com) in London.Martin was the coach of theBritish Men’s rowing eight thatwon gold at the SydneyOlympic Games in 2000.Martin’s rowing career startedat UCD. Martin marriedGrainne Brennan (BE Civil ‘85)and they have two daughters.

TONY FARRELL MB BCh BAO ‘86, MSc ‘93

Tony is an interventional radiologist in Chicago. He is a brotherof Richard Farrell (MB BCh BAO ‘90, MD ‘98), James Farrell (MBBCh BAO ‘92) and the late Mary Farrell (MB BCh BAO ‘88) allgraduates of UCD. After completing his radiology training atBeaumont Hospital in 1993, Tony did radiology fellowships atDuke University and Washington University in St Louis. Herecently obtained his MBA from the University of Colorado. Hisinterests include cycling, skiing and opera. Tony can becontacted at tfarrell@enh.org.

NIALL TIERNEY BAPhilosophy & History‘88

Grandson of the late presidentof UCD Dr Michael Tierney, Niallwas called to the Bar in 1993 andqualified as a Registered TradeMark Agent in 1994. Niall thenmoved to London and qualifiedas Solicitor of the Supreme Courtof England and Wales in October2002. Niall currently works as anintellectual property lawyer withClifford Chance LLP, CanaryWharf, London.

TARA COSGROVE(NEÉ MEAGHER)BCL ‘90

Tara qualified as a solicitor in1994 and worked on high-profile multi-party classactions in Ireland, Sydneyand London. She now runsher own property searchbusiness helping peoplelocate property in Dublin forresidential or investmentpurposes. She is married withtwo children and can becontacted at taracosgrove@propertylocators.ie.

LISA MADDENBArch ‘96

After graduation Lisaworked in Dublin for twoyears before moving to NewYork for a change of scene.She is a project manager atGWK Architects, working inthe fields of healthcare andretail, both high-endresidential and commercial.She got married this yearand spends every weekendhiking, running and rock-climbing with her husband.

ALISON ANN MOOREBA ‘96, MLitt ‘99

Since graduating in 1999Alison spent a year travellingaround Australia and NewZealand before returning toDublin. Putting her time asEditor of UCD’s CollegeTribune to good use, she has

been working in medical journalism since 2001. Alison iscurrently assistant editor of two nursing publications. Aschairperson of the Irish Tennis Umpires’ Association sheofficiates at tennis events in Ireland and overseas.

PATRICK (PADDY)CULLINAN BSc HonsCell Biology andMolecular Genetics‘97

The year following hisgraduation from UCD Paddybegan a PhD at theUniversity of Chicago, wherehis research focused on theregulation of T cellactivation. Paddy thenmoved into the corporatebiotechnology world. He is amedical writer for a smallbut promising company insuburban Chicago calledNeoPharm Inc. He is also theregional chairperson ofBioLink Ireland, anetworking organisation forIrish people in the biologicalfields working in the US.Paddy married an Americanwoman who he had met inUCD in his final year andthey have two children,Emmett and Erin.

[1990s]REMIGIO ACHIAMDevtSt ‘99

Remigio obtained a BStatfrom MUK and a MSc fromDCU. He is from Uganda andwas elected as a Member ofParliament for Pian Countyin the recently concludedpresidential andparliamentary elections inUganda. Remigio can becontacted atreach28@yahoo.com.

COLIN O’CARROLLBA Psychology ‘96

Colin completed his MSc andsubsequently PhD inNeuroscience at theUniversity of Edinburgh. Hisresearch interests focus onneuronal plasticity and themechanisms underlyingmemory formation. He spenttwo subsequent years inacademia pursuingpostdoctoral research in Italyand London. He is currentlyworking in California for abiotech company in the BayArea. Colin can be contactedat cmocarroll@yahoo.com.

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DAVID GRIFFITH BA ‘95

David received a NationalDiploma in PersonnelManagement from theNational College of Ireland in1998. He is currently employedin the Public AppointmentsService as a careers advisor. Healso treads the boards playingbass as well as singing withvarious musical societies.

ALAN EDWARD O’CONNOR MB BCh BAO ‘90

Alan is an Emergency Physician, currently Director ofEmergency Medicine at Peel Health Campus, about 80kmsouth of Perth in Western Australia. He is married toAmanda and they have three children, Jack, Daniel and Ella.Since leaving UCD Alan has worked in the UK, Australia andNew Zealand but is now settled in Australia where he hasbeen for the last six years and is loving it. Alan can becontacted at alan.oconnor@peehc.com.au.

MICHELLE MULHERIN BCL ‘92

After graduation, Michelle trained and qualified as a solicitorand works in a private practice at Denis M Molloy Solicitors,Ballina, Co Mayo. Michelle is a Fine Gael elected member ofMayo County Council since 2004 where she serves as Chair ofthe Roads & Transportation Strategic Policy Committee. Sheis also a Councillor on Ballina Town Council since 1999 and iscurrently Deputy Mayor of the town. Michelle is a boardmember of Ireland West Tourism and was recently appointedas member of the EU’s Committee of the Regions. She is alsoa member of Ballina Arts Events.

AMANDA (MANDY) NOLAN BScChemistry ‘95, MSc EngineeringTechnology ‘96

Mandy has worked across a number of industries during hercareer in quality assurance: Industrial Chemistry (Iralco);Chemical Processing (Labscan); Logistics/Supply ChainManagement (Exel) and Service Industry (Mason Technology).She is currently working as a Quality Manager for MasonTechnology, a supplier of equipment and instrumentation tolaboratory, process and production areas. Markets serviced byMason Technology include pharmaceutical and chemical,healthcare, food processing, electronics and engineering.Mandy can be contacted at mnolan@masontec.ie.

JOANNE O’CARROLL-MINERVA MB BAOBCh ‘94

Joanne is a consultant childpsychiatrist in private practicein the suburbs of Philadelphia,Pennsylvania. Her husbandPierre Minerva (RCSI 1994) is arheumatologist also in privatepractice. They have twochildren, Justin and Siobhan.

ALEX VALENTINE PhD ‘97

After graduating, Alex moved to SouthAfrica to join the Department of Botanyat the University of Stellenbosch. Hecompleted an MPhil in Science Journalismat this institution. In 2004 he moved tothe Department of Horticulture at theCape Peninsula University of Technology.

AILBHE ROE BAgSc ‘99

Ailbhe worked with MouchelParkman for four years onvarious infrastructure projectsin Ireland, including the CorribGas Pipeline. She is currentlypart of the National RoadsDesign Office in Westmeathand is involved in theconstruction of the new N6,Kinnegad to Athlone dualcarriageway. She lives inTyrrellspass, Co Westmeath.eroe@wccprojectoffice.ie.

HUGH O’CONNOR BBS, MBS ‘99

Hugh is a Senior Consultant and Directorof the Dublin based strategic researchand consulting company OCS Consulting(www.ocsconsulting.ie). Hugh specialisesin qualitative and business-to-businessresearch and has also lectured in servicesmarketing and marketing managementat the Institute of Technology in Carlow.

COLM FURLONG BA ‘95

Colm moved from Dublin to London in1996 and pursued a career in financialsoftware. Following senior roles atRoyalblue and Man Financial in equitytrading systems, Colm now works inLondon as Product Manager for softwarefirm SunGard. He lives in Brighton withhis partner Genni and daughter Layla.

DONAL FITZGERALD BAgrScAnimal & Crop Science ‘95

Donal has worked full-time in the agri-trading business, starting in July 1995 asa sales rep for Southern Fuel & FarmSupplies in Cork, and moving to GoldcropLtd in 1999. He has progressed withinGoldcrop to become Sales Manager in2003 and was appointed GeneralManager of Agriculture in 2005. Donallives in Shanagarry and is married toHelen. They have one daughter, Keely.

DR AISLING D. O’SULLIVANBSc ‘95, PhD ‘02

Aisling worked in scientific research withCSIRO in Canberra from 1995 to 1996before returning to UCD to pursue a PhDin constructed wetland technology. From2002 to 2003 she worked as aresearch/teaching Post-Doctoral Fellow atthe University of Oklahoma, US beforetaking up a lecturing position at theUniversity of Canterbury, Christchurch,New Zealand (www.nre.canterbury.ac.nz).

NAOMI MASTERSON BComm ‘96, HDMP ‘97, MBS (MIS) ‘98

Naomi worked as an analyst in Merrill Lynch on the EMU transition project. She moved in1999 to Ulster Bank Investment Services which then became Northern Trust InvestmentServices as Analyst/Programmer. She is now a Senior Business Process Analyst responsiblefor the development of the Outsourcing & Trade Services product at Northern Trust.

DR PETER L. DOLAN BSc ‘90

Peter has obtained a DPhil (1997) from Oxford University anda JD (2002) from Temple University. Peter is a US patentattorney and is currently Director of Global Patent Litigationat Sanofi-aventis in Bridgewater, New Jersey. He is marriedand living in Manhattan. Peter can be contacted atpeter.dolan@sanofi-aventis.com.

NIALL BYRNE BA ‘90,HDipEd ‘91

Niall taught in Blackrock Collegefrom 1991 to 1993 before goingto Botswana with APSO andViatores Christi from 1994 to1996. On his return to Ireland, heresumed his teaching position inBlackrock College where he is todate. He ran as a candidate inthe local elections in 2004 and isnow a member of the GreenParty in Wicklow, where he liveswith his wife, Annette Cleary, aprofessional cellist, and their twodaughters, Sarah and Anne. Niallcan be contacted atbyrnecleary@eircom.net.

RAKESH ARORA BE‘92, DipMathSc ‘93

Rakesh recalls UCD as a universitythat facilitated the pursuit ofexcellence in academics as well assports. From 1992 to 1993 heworked as a demonstrator andtutor in the computer sciencedepartment. On the sports fronthe represented UCD inbadminton and trampolining, aclub for which he was also theauditor during the 1994 to 1995academic year. Rakesh was alsothe elected president of theInternational Society during the1995 to 1996 academic year. Fordetails of his career seewww.xentex-consultancy.com.

STEPHEN MULLIGAN BE ‘94

Stephen joined JBA Software in Irelandin September 1994 as a softwareengineer. While there he met anotherelectronic engineer, Gillian, but fromDCU (boo!), who later became his wifein 1998 and is now the mother of theirthree children, Cian, Caoimhe and Áine.After six months in Dublin, Stephenmoved to Rochester, Minnesota to workin the IBM Facility for JBA as a technicaltrainer (Apr-Oct 1995). They both movedto San Francisco, California (April 2006),working for Workgroup ManagementInc., a start-up consultancy firm inOakland. That company was bought outin December 1997 by Documentum. Theyboth worked with Documentum until2000 when they returned to Ireland.Gillian went to Eircom.net and Stephento Accuris. In July 2001 Stephen movedinto Eircom IT and has been there since.

[1990s]

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DANIEL DAJMAN MDevtSt ‘04

Daniel Dajman of Mexico City married Jami Feinberg of Vineland,New Jersey in Mexico City in 2005. Jami completed her BSFS inRegional & Comparative Studies in 2002 and her MSc in LegalAnthropology at the LSE in 2004. She is a Field Administrator forthe Middle East Region with PAE Government Services, Inc. inArlington, Virginia. Daniel completed his BS in InternationalBusiness in 2000 and a Masters in Development Studies at UCD in2004. He is the Business Development Manager for the LatinoEconomic Development Corporation in Washington DC. Thecouple now reside in the Washington DC area.

MICHAEL HO YIPFEI MSc InformationManagement ‘00

Michael is from Hong Kongand is a flight lieutenant inthe Hong Kong Air Corps.Michael feels that the MScprogramme provided himwith cutting-edge knowledgein his career development.

RUAIDHRÍ PATRICK KIRWANMB BCh BAO ‘00, MSc ‘02

Ruaidhrí completed his internship at theMater Hospital in Dublin and the Mid-Western Regional Hospital in Limerick. He isnow a trainee on the Dublin OphthalmicSurgery Training Scheme and a fourth-year

PhD student at the Conway Institute of Biomolecular & BiomedicalResearch, UCD. In 2006, he was awarded an International TravelScholarship from the prestigious Association of Research in Vision &Ophthalmology in the US and was a recipient of one of UCD’s OpenPostgraduate Scholarships from the College of Life Sciences.

SHAHBAZ KHANMSocSc ‘04

Shahbaz obtained an MA inSocial Work from PunjabUniversity, Lahore, Pakistan.He worked as a communityorganiser and social workerfor an NGO, as a CommunityDevelopment Officer in thePublic Health EngineeringDepartment and as MedicalSocial Officer/Social WelfareOfficer in Social Welfare andWomen DevelopmentDepartment in Pakistan. Heis a qualified social workerwith The National SocialWork Qualification BoardIreland and General SocialCare Council UK. His area ofspecialisation is social casework (patients, children andfamilies), gender andcommunity development andanti-oppressive social work.He is a member of the IrishAssociation of Social Workersand Council of SocialSciences, Pakistan.

JONATHAN SHIRLEYBE Civil ‘00, MMangtSc ‘01

Jon travelled for more than ayear after finishing collegeand ended up in Brisbane,Australia where he currentlyresides. He worked for twoyears with a civil engineeringconsulting practice in Brisbane(www.wadeconsult.com).Here he was involved withdesigning structures and FEAsoftware development. Jon’scurrent position is SeniorEngineer for a miningconsulting company thatspecialises in draglineproductivity(www.gbi.net.au).

BERNARD KENNEDY MSc ‘04

Bernard Kennedy is a priest of the Dublin Diocese. He receiveda MSc degree in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from the Schoolof Psychotherapy based in The Department of Adult Psychiatryat St Vincent’s University Hospital. Bernard previously receivedan MA in Psychoanalytic Studies from the Department ofPsychiatry, University of Sheffield in 2002. He is presently adoctoral student at the School of Psychotherapy, researching onthe Unconscious Formation of the Symptom in Freud and Lacan.He was ordained in 1979 and presently is a curate atBeechwood Avenue Parish, Dublin. He has written a number ofpoetry books and articles for psychoanalytical and theologicaljournals.

SEAMUS MACSUIBHNE MB BCh BAO ‘02

Seamus is on a Dublin University Postgraduate Training Scheme inPsychiatry. He has worked in Naas General Hospital, TallaghtHospital and St Patrick’s Hospital. He has contributed book reviewsand articles to the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, TheSpectator and The Scotsman. seamus.sweeney@campus.ie.

KATHRYN G. EDWARDS MB BCh BAO ‘03

Kathryn is finishing her paediatric residency in June 2006 andwill join a private paediatric practice in Suffolk, Virginia, US, inJuly 2006.

[2000s]ORNA RYANBSocSc ‘00, MBSHuman ResourceManagement ‘02

On graduating in 2002 fromthe Graduate School ofBusiness Orna joined TheCentre for DistanceLearning at the UCD Schoolof Business and is theLearning Support Officer forthe Bachelor of BusinessStudies (part-timeprogramme). She hasrecently achieved a HigherDiploma in UniversityTeaching & Learning here atUCD and is now completingher doctorate at Universityof Edinburgh in the field oftertiary educational policyfor mature students.

DR THOM BROOKSMA Philosophy ‘00

Thom obtained a BA inMusic and Politics fromWilliam Paterson Universityin New Jersey, a MA inPolitics from Arizona StateUniversity and a PhD inPhilosophy from Universityof Sheffield. He is a lecturerin Political Thought at theUniversity of Newcastle, UKsince August 2004. He is theauthor of Hegel’s PoliticalPhilosophy (EdinburghUniversity Press, 2007) andeditor of Locke and Law(Ashgate, 2006) andRousseau and Law (Ashgate,2006). Thom was a memberof the Dublin jazz scenewhen a postgraduatestudent, playing both theguitar and electric bass atthe Viper Room. He plans todo the same in Newcastle.

KAYAWE NKUMBWA,HDipDevtSt ‘00, MDevtSt ‘02

Kayawe obtained a BALS from TheUniversity of Zambia and a PGDHousing & Urban DevelopmentStudies from The Institute forHousing & Urban DevelopmentStudies (NL). After graduatingfrom UCD in 2002 Kayawe workedas Regional Co-ordinator for theEC-Microprojects Programme inwestern Zambia. In 2004 he tookup an appointment at theUniversity of Zambia as StrategicPlanning Manager under the Vice-Chancellor’s Office. Kayawe lives inLusaka, the capital of Zambia, withhis wife and daughter.

CECIL DUNNE MDevtSt ‘01

Having finished his Masters in Development Studies Cecil immediately found employment withConcern as a project manager in south Sudan. From there he moved to Afghanistan as aprogramme co-ordinator, then to Liberia as an emergency co-ordinator, and is currently aprogramme advisor with Concern in Sri Lanka.AMY ROE BA ‘02

Amy currently works as anEnglish teacher in asecondary school in Kent. Hersubjects were English andSpanish and she was alsoinvolved in Dramsoc. Amycan be contacted ataroe22@eircom.net.