A good education is life-changing. A great one is world-changing. We’ve been inspiring generations since 1592. With your support, we can continue.
Show your support at tcd.ie/campaign #InspiringGenerations
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WELCOME
EDITORIAL BOARD Kate Bond Tom Molloy Jennifer Taaffe Beibhinn Coman Eileen Punch Róisín Cody THANK YOU Katie Byrne Caoimhe Ní Lochlainn Aoife King Seána Skeffington COVER IMAGE Paul Burke
Provost’s Welcome This edition of Trinity Today celebrates the public launch of Inspiring Generations, the first comprehensive philanthropic campaign in Trinity’s history. It’s an important step for Trinity’s future and I want to thank all those of you who joined us at the Dublin and international launch events and are supporting the Campaign and spreading the word. Philanthropy was part of the Trinity story from its very foundation in 1592: the University was founded on lands granted by Dublin Corporation. All major growth in the intervening centuries has had the support of alumni and friends. Now, with Inspiring Generations, we are rallying support for two ambitious goals: a400m in donations and 150,000 volunteer hours.
Photo: Naoise Culhane
EDITORS Nicole Matthews Rachel Farrell Sarah Ling (Project Manager)
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Philanthropy is more important for Trinity today than ever before. With Inspiring Generations we will leverage additional state funding and loans, and we will venture into new cutting-edge research and innovative ways of working. This is why Trinity has been able to keep pace with change over recent decades, maintaining our position as Ireland’s leading university in a hyper-competitive global environment in education and research. For instance, in May we celebrated the opening of the magnificent new Trinity Business School (TBS), funded by philanthropy and a loan from the European Investment Bank. Just this month, work began on the first capital project of Trinity’s landmark E3 Institute: the E3 Learning Foundry, a state-of-the-art 6,000 m 2
Contact Trinity Development & Alumni East Chapel Trinity College Dublin Dublin 2 Ireland t. +353 (0)1 896 2088 e. alumni@tcd.ie w. tcd.ie/alumni
Publisher Ashville Media Group ashville.com All information contained in this magazine is for informational purposes only and is to the best of our knowledge correct at the time of printing. The opinions expressed in these pages are not necessarily shared by the Trinity Development & Alumni office or Trinity College Dublin.
facility that will transform how we educate students of Engineering, Computer Science and Natural Sciences by bringing them together to work on team projects, motivated by the E3 philosophy: “Balanced Solutions for a Better World”. Both TBS and E3 have been made possible by generous philanthropy and by the dedication of the whole Trinity community that includes volunteers and friends of Trinity. With the help of alumni and friends around the world, Inspiring Generations will benefit many more flagship initiatives across Trinity, from funding access programmes and scholarships to cancer research and a critical plan to safeguard the future of the Old Library and its magnificent collections. You can read about them within the magazine and about the many different ways that you can support the Campaign for Trinity. I hope you will also enjoy the interviews with our renowned alumni, writer Sebastian Barry and Ireland’s former Central Bank Governor, Philip Lane, as well as our Professor of Systematic Botany, John Parnell, who explains last year’s loss of the storied Oregon Maples in Library Square and the challenges of encouraging biodiversity within the College campus. Trinity has over 140,000 alumni in 150 countries. That is some network. I have enjoyed meeting many of our alumni and friends around the world over the last year, at the Inspiring Generations launches and many other events in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, the US, Morocco, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and across Europe. The commitment and enthusiasm I encounter from our worldwide community of supporters will, I am sure, make Inspiring Generations a resounding success in enabling Trinity to inspire many generations to come.
Dr Patrick Prendergast B.A.I, Ph.D., Sc.D (1987) Provost & President
Trinity Today is available online at tcd.ie/alumni 1
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Contents Regulars
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CAMPUS NEWS A selection of news items from this year in Trinity TRAILBLAZERS Eight Trinity alumni blazing a trail in their respective fields BOOK SHELF Some of the books published by Trinity academics FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME Trinity’s sports clubs enjoy sweet success HONORARY DEGREES Nine honorary degrees have been awarded to outstanding individuals INTERNATIONAL EVENTS Alumni events and the international launches of Inspiring Generations BRANCH CONTACTS Find your local Trinity alumni branch NUACHT Nuacht ó Oifig na Gaeilge ALUMNI WEEKEND 2018 Photos from the annual Alumni Weekend CLASS NOTES News from graduates around the world PROFESSIONAL NETWORKING AND MENTORING EVENTS 2018-19 Photos from our mentoring events ALUMNI CHRISTMAS EVENTS 2018 Photos from our annual Christmas events
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Inspiring Generations Learn about the Campaign for Trinity College Dublin
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Safeguarding the Old Library Conservation and digitisation of the Old Library
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Epigenetics on the Mind Dr Kevin Mitchell on the battle of nature versus nurture
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Trinity Business School The new Trinity Business School is open
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Trinity Business School
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Professor John Parnell tells us what happened to our Oregon Maples
Celebrating 25 years of Trinity Access and leading the change in the Irish education system
Farewell to Trinity’s Iconic Oregon Maple Trees
Trinity Access – Transforming Education
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Banking on Prudence Governor Philip Lane’s move from the Central Bank to the European Central Bank
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Join us for Hist250 Announcing events throughout 2019-20 to celebrate 250 years of the College Historical Society
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Sport One-On-One
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Running Trials, Giving Hope
Sport One-On-One
Professor Maeve Lowery on her work in Translational Cancer Medicine
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Sebastian Barry Sebastian Barry tells us why he still feels like a student at 64
Linda Djougang’s journey to the Six Nations
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The Trinity Long Room Hub is exploring what it means to be human today
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Mother
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Actor training in a time of colour-blind and genderblind casting
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By printing the magazine on certified post-consumer recycled paper.
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By distributing the magazine in biodegradable polywrap made from sugar cane waste.
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By sending just one copy to each household.
If you or a person at your address would like an additional copy of Trinity Today, please call +353 (0)1 896 2088 or email alumni@tcd.ie.
Leaving a Legacy
If you or a person in your household would like to update your contact details with us, please do so online at tcd.ie/alumni or email alumni@tcd.ie.
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Trinity Today is addressing climate change in the following three ways:
Harry Clifton’s poem from his new collection Herod’s Dispensations
Rupert Pennant-Rea on leaving a legacy to Trinity
47 Being Seen: Diversity Centre Stage
Alumni Volunteering We want you! Six ways alumni can volunteer with Trinity
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What does it mean to be human in the 21st century?
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CLIMATE CHANGE
One-On-One Interview Trinity Today meets newly appointed Pro-Chancellor Dr Stanley Quek
If you or any other Trinity graduate or friend would like to enter our competition, please do so online at tcd.ie/alumni/competitions. Please check with your local recycling facilities when disposing of the polywrap and magazine.
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
CAMPUS NEWS
CAMPUS NEWS Photo: Paul Sharp
News, views and updates from a year on campus.
Photo: Naoise Culhane
Benita Mbu
Leah Kenny, Senator Lynn Ruane & Eoin Caffrey
Inspiring Generations Campaign Launched In May, Trinity launched the public phase of its a400 million fundraising campaign. Inspiring Generations is the University’s first major philanthropic campaign in its more than 400-year history and the largest ever undertaken in education on the island of Ireland. Inspiring Generations will support transformative educational experiences across the University that will attract the most innovative academics and the most talented students from all backgrounds, from the world over. Together they will research and address some of the major global issues of our time, from environmental challenges to cancer treatments. International launches have taken place in London, Paris, New York and San Francisco. Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney are next on the list.
Books Written and Illustrated by Dublin Schoolchildren join Book of Kells Exhibition An exhibition of 80 handmade books written and illustrated by Dublin primary schoolchildren was unveiled by award-winning children’s book author, Dave Rudden, in the Old Library in April. The exhibition marks the culmination of the Bookmarks programme, which sees children write and illustrate their own books over a two-month period with the help of authors, artists and children’s book specialists from Trinity. The project aims to inspire children to become the next generation of storytellers, artists and creatives. Bookmarks is run by Trinity Access, which supports students from under-represented backgrounds to progress to further education.
Inaugural Organ Concert and Restoration
Photo: Beate Schuler
In November, the Trinity community gathered for the Inaugural Organ Concert, performed by two of Ireland’s leading organists, David Adams and Malcolm Proud, to celebrate the installation of the new Goetze & Gwynn organ and restoration of the iconic 1684 Pease organ case housed in Trinity’s Public Theatre. Built in 1684, the organ is an important part of the cultural heritage of Trinity and of Ireland. Its latest major refurbishment has been made possible through the generosity of the John and Ann Boland Estate, the Trinity Association & Trust and a number of individual donors.
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Success and Celebration for Students with Intellectual Disabilities Graduating at Trinity
Photo: Pixabay
In January, six students with intellectual disabilities graduated from Trinity with a Level 5 Certificate in Arts, Science and Inclusive Applied Practice. They were joined on campus by family and friends and the sense of achievement, celebration and pride was immense. They were the first cohort of students with intellectual disabilities in Ireland to be conferred at this level from a university.
Marian O’Rourke, Mark Hogan, Niamh Biddulph, Hugh O’Callaghan, Dairine O’Rourke & Shane McGilton
Photo: Fennell Photography
Biodiversity Week 2019
Trinity Launches the First Disabled Cycle Parking Facilities in Ireland
Trinity has installed the first disabled cycle parking facilities in Ireland. The facility is accessible, step-free and accommodates all types of non-standard cycles. The spaces, which allow for wider, hand-operated tricycles, as well as regular bikes, are clearly signposted and located next to a ramp. Opened in June, the disabled parking bay located next to Library Square is the first of four planned locations, with two more due to open before September.
Photo: Fennell Photography
Mark Nugent, Owen Keegan, Isabelle Clement & Professor Paula Murphy
During Biodiversity Week, 18-26 May, Trinity highlighted the many improvements made around campus and plans to continue this great work. Some of the highlights included plans to install Swift Calls in the Museum building to encourage these migratory birds to return to campus to nest and breed. Their nesting routine was disturbed by building works in 2010 and they have not returned in the same numbers. This installation is of vital importance, as these birds are on the Birdwatch Ireland’s amber endangered list. Many new pollinator and wildlife friendly shrubs and climbers have been planted in the bike park and around the catering building complex to entice and supply pollinators with a better variety of pollen and flowers to choose from. Other improvements include wild flower planting around College Park and the installation of wild flower turf with enhanced plant diversity in the triangular area between the top end of College Park and the Rugby Pitch.
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Photo: Fennell Photography
Trinity Student Wins 2018 Hamilton Prize
Professor Martin Hairer, Ronan O’Gorman & Salam Al-Sabah
Trinity student Ronan O’Gorman was honoured as one of Ireland’s brightest young mathematicians when he received the 2018 Hamilton Prize along with eight of his peers, one from each of Ireland’s universities. The awards ceremony was held on Hamilton Day, which is the anniversary of Trinity alumnus William Rowan Hamilton, whose discovery of quaternion algebra was made on 16 October 1843. Hamilton Day 2018 began with a masterclass for students and early career researchers in mathematics, given by this year’s Hamilton speaker, Professor Martin Hairer from Imperial College London.
Six Trinity Researchers Win Irish Research Council Advanced Laureate Awards
Professor Luke O’Neill is Awarded Prestigious EU ERC Award of €2.5m
Dr Eavan O’Brien, Professor Michael Zaworotko, Professor Christine Casey, Joe McHugh, Professor John Atkins, Peter Brown & Liz-Anne Worrall
Photo: Marc O’Sullivan
Six researchers from Trinity were among the 12 successful applicants of the Irish Research Council (IRC) Advanced Laureate Awards programme announced in April. The IRC Advanced Laureate Awards scheme was launched in 2018 to support exceptional researchers in conducting research that pushes the boundaries of our current knowledge. All six Trinity researchers receiving funding are at an advanced stage in their careers and will be supported to conduct ground-breaking, world-class research across a wide range of disciplines. Each awardee will receive up to i1 million in funding over a period of up to four years. Their research areas range from the development of novel methods of new magnetic material discovery and new approaches to the early diagnosis of cancer by examining tiny particles released into the bloodstream by cancer cells, to the creation of a bottom-up history of architecture in Ireland and Britain in the 1700s focusing on craftspeople rather than architects and patrons.
Professor of Biochemistry and global pioneer in inflammation research, Luke O’Neill has been awarded an EU European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant valued at €2.5 million. These highly prestigious awards allow exceptional researchers to pursue ground-breaking research. This is the first time a researcher from Trinity has won a second ERC Advanced Grant, the highest accolade among the ERC awards. Professor O’Neill’s work is to make discoveries that might lead to new treatments for inflammatory diseases. His ERC-funded programme focuses on the metabolic changes that occur in a key cell associated with inflammation, called the macrophage. The overall aim of his research project is to elucidate how metabolic reprogramming controls inflammatory macrophage activation, which may lead to new therapeutic targets for inflammatory diseases.
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Photo: Fennell Photography
Dr Conor McGinn & Niamh Donnelly
Trinity’s School of Engineering Leads the Way in Robotics Research Researchers from Trinity’s School of Engineering have showcased their next-gen research at Maker Faire Rome, Europe’s largest conference for makers and inventors. Maker Faire is a family-friendly showcase of invention, creativity and resourcefulness that spotlights hundreds of futurefacing projects from around the world. In May, Trinity robotics engineers unveiled ‘Stevie II’, Ireland’s first socially assistive robot with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) features at a demonstration at Science Gallery Dublin. Stevie II is the successor to Stevie, a prototype assistance robot. Stevie won thousands of admirers and served as a proof of concept that a socially assistive robot could be deployed in long-term care environments to help seniors and people living with a disability.
Scientists Develop Potential New Treatment for Childhood Cancer
Trinity scientists have developed a potential new therapeutic approach for synovial sarcoma, one of the most common soft-tissue cancers in teenagers and young adults. At present, the long-term survival rate for synovial sarcoma patients is below 50%, a fact that underlines just how important new discoveries are in improving the outlook for patients and their families. Using state-of-the-art CRISPR genome screening technology, the team – led by Dr Gerard Brien, Research Fellow in Genetics at Trinity – first identified the protein BRD9 as essential for the survival of synovial sarcoma tumours. They then set about designing new drugs to target this protein. Pre-clinical trials in mice showed that a newly developed drug blocks tumour progression. The next step will be to test the new drug in clinical trials in patients, which the scientists hope will take place in the near future.
Trinity Becomes a Tobacco-Free Campus on National No Smoking Day
Trinity became a tobacco-free campus on National No Smoking Day, 6 March. The University has been building consensus to become a tobacco-free campus over the past five years and is now one with support from more than 70% of staff and students. Tobacco-Free Zones were introduced in 2016 and effected an 83% reduction in frequency of observed smoking in the Zones.
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Professor Owen P. Smith Gives a Lecture: ‘60 Years Since the Discovery of Burkitt Lymphoma’
On 24 September, the opening day of Cancer Week, Professor Owen P. Smith gave a lecture entitled 60 years since the discovery of Burkitt Lymphoma at Trinity. Denis Parsons Burkitt (19111993), a surgeon and research scientist, and a key figure in the medical profession, received his B.A. in 1933 and graduated from Trinity as a physician in 1935. In Africa, he developed exceptional observational and analytical skills which led him to develop a successful treatment for the most common childhood cancer in Sub-Saharan Africa – Burkitt Lymphoma. His contributions to cancer remain salient today as his discoveries continue to generate new research.
Based on 10 years of findings from the Intellectual Disability Supplement to The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (IDS-TILDA), a new research documentary: Ageing with PrIDe was launched at a gala screening in the Samuel Beckett Theatre. The documentary captures a day in the life of Mei Lin Yap, a woman with Down syndrome, as she explores what it is like to age in Ireland. Mei Lin wants to prepare for a happy, healthy ageing experience as she approaches her 30th birthday. The documentary tackles the challenges of ageing in a positive way for persons with an intellectual disability, while highlighting some of the key findings from the IDS-TILDA study.
Photo: Trinity Image Bank
New Research Documentary on Positive Ageing
Museum Building
Hidden History of Stonemasons and Craftspeople who Built Victorian Dublin Uncovered by Trinity Project The quarrymen, stonemasons and craftspeople who cut, carved and constructed Ireland’s splendid Victorian buildings have long been lost to history, overshadowed by the architects and patrons who designed and commissioned them. Trinity has launched a ground-breaking research project, Making Victorian Dublin, which illuminates the hidden history of one of Dublin’s most iconic Victorian buildings, the Museum Building. Built in the 1850s, the building was pioneering in its patriotic use of Irish marble and decorative stone. It established a taste for Connemara marble and Cork red limestone which spread across Ireland to Britain, the United States and even as far as Cape Town in South Africa. To mark the launch of the Irish Research Council funded project, a new interactive website, makingvictoriandublin.com, allows users to explore a 3D digital scan of the splendid building and admire the double-domed main hallway, the richly decorated interior carvings and 32 spectacular columns of coloured Irish stone.
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Trinity in collaboration with Dublin City Council, Dublin City University, and 2GoCup Ltd. have launched the pilot Co-Cup Deposit and Return Scheme. The issue of disposable/single use plastics has garnered national and international attention in recent years. A recent government funded study estimated that up to 200 million single use coffee cups are used in Ireland every year, and these are not recyclable; that is 22,000 cups every hour. The Co-Cup Scheme aims to reduce this figure by implementing a deposit and return scheme for reusable cups in Dublin. Under the pilot scheme, when a tea or coffee is purchased, there is an additional charge of €1, which is refunded when the cup is returned. A lid can also be purchased for €1, which is kept and re-used.
Photo: Fennell Photography
Co-Cup Deposit and Return Scheme
Provost Patrick Prendergast & Dr Mary Robinson
Mary Robinson Portrait Unveiling
A portrait of Trinity’s former Chancellor, Dr Mary Robinson, was unveiled at a special event in May. To celebrate her 21 years as Chancellor, Trinity commissioned artist Mark Shields to paint the first ever portrait of a female figure to grace the walls of the Dining Hall and the first painting to be added to the collection since 1860. The commission was supported in full by the generosity of alumni.
Wakatobi white-eye
Photo: Seán Kelly
Trinity Zoologists Find Two New Bird Species in Indonesia
Zoologists from Trinity, working with partners from Halu Oleo University (UHO) and Operation Wallacea, have discovered two beautiful new bird species in the Wakatobi Archipelago of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Their work sheds light on the complex evolutionary puzzle of how new species emerge. Details of their discovery, of the Wakatobi white-eye and the Wangi-wangi white-eye, have been published in the prestigious Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. This is the same journal in which Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin published their game-changing original ideas about speciation in 1858.
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CAMPUS NEWS
Photo: Naoise Culhane
Two of Ireland’s Oldest Students Inspire Lifelong Learning
Joe McGovern & Joe Veselsky
One hundred-year-old Joe Veselsky and 92-year-old Joe McGovern both attend evening and short courses at Trinity. Mr Veselsky has taken extra-mural courses in the School of Histories and Humanities every year since 2010 and is the oldest student to ever study at Trinity. In 2016, he was awarded an honorary degree by the University. Mr McGovern,a retired Garda, has recently returned to education after a gap of 75 years to study Latin. The two Joes met for the first time at Trinity in March 2019.
Two beautiful gardens designed by Trinity researchers were displayed at Bloom 2019. The Pollinator-Friendly Organic School Garden was designed by Dr Paddy Madden, from Trinity’s School of Education, following extensive research into the state and status of nature in primary schools. The garden promoted understanding of the important role that pollinators play in food production and biodiversity enrichment and featured a fruiting hedge, solitary bee nurseries and vegetable beds made from recycled plastic. Assistant Professor in Trinity’s School of Engineering, Liwen Xiao, led a team that created the E3 Garden to showcase exciting technology that simultaneously removes pollutants and generates electricity from wastewater. The two gardens have been created thanks to interdisciplinary collaboration between experts in botany, education and engineering, with the goal of inspiring children and adults in their appreciation and respect of nature.
Professor Liwen Xiao & Dr Dunzhu Li
Photo: Fennell Photography
Trinity Researchers Showcase Pollinator and Sustainability Friendly-Gardens at Bloom Garden Festival
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Trinity Joins New European University Network
Trinity Remains Ireland’s Leading University
Trinity remains Ireland’s leading university in the latest QS World University Rankings, released in June. Trinity is positioned 108th globally, and 37th in Europe. Trinity was also named 28th best university in the world when it comes to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the new University Impact Rankings from Times Higher Education. Trinity was 10th in the world when it comes to climate action and 18th in the world in partnerships with other organisations. The rankings measure an institution’s commitment to supporting the Sustainable Development Goals through its teaching, research and knowledge transfer.
Trinity is among the first universities in Europe to be selected as part of a newly launched university network part funded by the European Commission. Together with Barcelona, Utrecht, Montpellier and Eötvös Loránd in Budapest, the network was selected from hundreds of competing projects. The project involving Trinity will be called the Charm European University (CharmEU) network and will focus on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Students and research staff will be able to move between the universities as their studies progress, providing a new and exciting interdisciplinary, challenge-based education.
Marguerite Browne, Caoilfhionn Jordan & Cedric Christie
Ruth Christie Prize Ruth Christie was a doyenne of physiotherapy in Ireland. She trained in the Dublin School of Physiotherapy and attended lectures in Trinity. She was a founding member of the Irish Society of Chartered Physiotherapists and in the 1970s she was invited by Trinity to set up a Physiotherapy Department in the Student Health Centre. In the early 1980s, to her delight, Physiotherapy became a full degree course in Trinity with the first graduates qualifying in 1987. Ruth passed away in 2018. The Ruth Christie Prize was established in 2019 following a gift from Ruth’s children, Cedric Christie and Marguerite Browne. Her prize will be awarded annually to the student who obtains the highest mark in the overall degree classification of the B.Sc. Physiotherapy programme at Trinity. It will be administered by the Discipline of Physiotherapy, School of Medicine. Congratulations to Caoilfhionn Jordan, who is the inaugural recipient of the prize.
Photo: Sarah Ling
Scholarship Opportunities for Students in Direct Provision
Provost of Trinity, Dr Patrick Prendergast, revealed in April that the University will be offering scholarships to students in direct provision. Young people in direct provision are classified as non-EU students, which means that under current state regulations, they are obliged to pay the non-EU student fee, which is upwards of €20,000. The University Council has secured 16 scholarships for students in direct provision who receive a place in Trinity through the CAO to cover the cost of fees, laptops, transport and food. These scholarships have been made possible thanks to alumni funding and University supports.
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INSPIRING GENERATIONS
Dr Beate Schuler, Provost’s Council member & Kate Bond, Director of Advancement at Trinity Development & Alumni
Our ambitious goals are: €400 million in donations
150,000 volunteer hours
Photos: Naoise Culhane
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Kate Bond, Director of Advancement at Trinity Development & Alumni, introduces Inspiring Generations – the first comprehensive philanthropic campaign in Trinity’s history.
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INSPIRING GENERATIONS
T
his is an exciting time for Trinity: we have an ambitious vision for the future and a clear road-map of how to realise it. But it’s also a challenging time, with intensifying global competition among universities. We need to rally a worldwide community of alumni and friends who will provide a solid bedrock of support, enabling Trinity to maintain and advance our excellence across education and research and continue to represent Ireland as a leading global university. It’s the powerful combination of philanthropy and a committed volunteer base, together with public funding, that will achieve this. With the public launch of our first philanthropic campaign, Inspiring Generations, we’re calling on alumni and friends to come together, creating the groundswell of support that will enable Trinity to flourish into the future. This is the largest philanthropic campaign ever launched in Ireland and the fourth-largest in Europe: our aim is to inspire a400m in donations and 150,000 volunteering hours. These are ambitious goals, but we believe they’re achievable if together, we harness the great goodwill that exists towards Trinity among alumni and friends around the world. Every contribution, whether of time, expertise or a financial donation, will be very welcome and will make a real difference. Volunteers can engage with Trinity in
a myriad of ways: mentoring students and societies on campus, running our international network of alumni branches and talking to prospective Trinity students abroad are just a few of the invaluable supports they can offer. When it comes to financial support, even the smallest gift can help transform the life of a Trinity student today or can advance Trinity towards the achievement of the major Campaign projects that you will read about within these pages.
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Why are we doing this now?
Today more than ever, the support of a committed base of alumni and friends is of critical importance to Trinity, as it is to all the leading universities of the world. Together, they enable Trinity to do many things that would not otherwise be possible. The gift of time from volunteers adds immense value to the experience of Trinity students and helps to enhance our international reputation. Financial support
“These are ambitious goals, but we believe they’re achievable if together, we harness the great goodwill that exists towards Trinity among alumni and friends around the world.”
Launch of Inspiring Generations in Trinity’s Public Theatre
Leah Kenny, Eoin Caffrey, Fergal Naughton & Sharon Ní Bheoláin
Joe McGovern, Benita Mbu, Joe Veselsky & Adam Fodor
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INSPIRING GENERATIONS
supplements other income, kickstarts major developments and very importantly, can enable us to leverage additional funding from other sources: the State, research grants and bank lending. It also plays a crucial part in enabling Trinity to attract brilliant people and give them the freedom to work on research that can yield world-changing results and contribute to Ireland’s economic success and reputation. Philanthropy is not new to Trinity. The University has survived and thrived through the centuries with the help of benefactors, who believed in the importance of Ireland having a world-class university to act as an independent centre of education, learning and research excellence. From the bequest of James Ussher’s 10,000-volume private library in the 17th century, to 20th-century benefactors including those who enabled Trinity to build the O’Reilly Institute, the Panoz Institute, and the Smurfit Genetics Institute, Trinity would not be the place that it is today without support from friends and alumni.
Leah Kenny, Fergal Naughton, Senator Lynn Ruane, Provost Patrick Prendergast, Kate Bond & Eoin Caffrey
Over the last twenty years, as Ireland has changed and evolved, become more closely linked to Europe and the global economy and come through a major financial crisis, we have been working diligently with a growing group of people who want to support Trinity. Their conviction has encouraged us to take this campaign public, calling on alumni and friends around the world to join in support of Inspiring Generations.
What will Inspiring Generations achieve?
The great universities of Europe have endured for centuries through times of social turbulence, war and economic crisis partly because they have never been solely dependent on government funding. Different governments have different priorities: one may invest in
education and research into climate crisis, its successor may not. But research and education are long-term games. Inspiring Generations will enable Trinity to continue its ground-breaking work in widening access to education, inspire many future generations of students and give talented researchers the freedom to pursue ideas that could change the world. Ideas like those of William Rowan Hamilton, the Trinity Professor of Astronomy still revered by mathematicians and scientists around the world for his 1843 discovery of the Quaternion formula that enabled space flight and the development of quantum mechanics; or Trinity graduate Professor William Campbell, joint winner of the Nobel Prize in 2015 for his discovery of a treatment that has saved many millions of people around the world from river blindness.
“Inspiring Generations will ensure that Trinity can continue to make a positive impact on the world today and for many future generations.”
Photos: Naoise Culhane
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Across Trinity today, researchers are doing exciting work with real potential for positive impact on the world. In the sciences, just some of the areas where Trinity is at the cutting edge include research into cancer, dementia and motor neurone disease, where our teams are working to identify causes, improve our defences and, ultimately, discover cures. The complex global challenges facing a rapidly changing world demand new thinking and collaboration across disciplines to find solutions that work. Trinity is at the forefront of this shift to interdisciplinary work; for instance, researchers from the Arts and Humanities are exploring how humanity will interact with Artificial Intelligence, leading an international team working to identify and address the root causes of crises of democracy and driving the development of Digital Humanities and Environmental Humanities. Interdisciplinarity is at the core of Trinity’s landmark new E3 Institute that will tackle urgent global issues across Engineering, Environment and Emerging Technologies. E3 has been enabled by the single largest private philanthropic donation ever made in Ireland, the gift of a25m from the Naughton family. The E3 Learning Foundry on campus will educate the 21st-century engineers and scientists we need for a sustainable world. The E3 Research Institute will be the heart of Dublin’s Grand Canal Innovation District, acting as a catalyst for collaboration between the enterprise, start-up and
research communities and playing a key role in Ireland’s drive to become a European leader in innovation. Inspiring Generations will benefit E3 and more key initiatives in education and research across campus, ensuring that Trinity can continue to make a positive impact on the world today and for many future generations.
Dr Stanley Quek & Dick Spring
Senator Ivana Bacik, Sharon Ní Bheoláin, Catherine McGuinness & Senator Lynn Ruane
TRINITY TODAY 2019
How Can You Help?
People have many different motivations for supporting Trinity: many are proud of how Trinity represents Ireland on the world stage and recognise that innovation in Trinity strengthens our national economy; others want to support particular areas of research like cancer or sustainability; some want to develop education in their own fields, whether the Creative Arts, Medicine, Engineering or others. Many alumni choose to support students and societies in ways that would have made a big difference to their own student days, whether through scholarships, mentoring or offering financial support to the Trinity sports stars of today. But the one thing all of our volunteers and donors have in common is that they want to make a positive difference and they believe that by joining together to support Trinity they will achieve just that. There are many different ways you can join Inspiring Generations. Every contribution is very welcome and whether yours is the gift of time, expertise or finance, you will be playing a part in Trinity’s role as a positive force in Ireland and the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kate Bond is the Director of Advancement at Trinity Development & Alumni.
Leah Kenny & Joe Caslin
Professor Maeve Lowery, Ann Dalton, Professor Áine Kelly, Lorcan Birthistle, Dr Stanley Quek, Professor Veronica Campbell & Professor Paul Browne
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INSPIRING GENERATIONS
Artwork created by Joe Caslin
The Youth Need to See Greatness Reflected in Our Eyes
Photo: Naoise Culhane
TRINITY TODAY 2019
T
he Youth Need to See Greatness Reflected in Our Eyes was an artwork created by Joe Caslin at the Campanile in Front Square to celebrate the public launch of Inspiring Generations. Featuring Samuel Beckett, Nobel Laureate and one of Trinity’s most celebrated alumni, alongside Trinity student Leah Kenny, who wrote her final year thesis on Beckett and his work, the piece was a visual representation of Inspiring Generations. It showed Beckett passing on his knowledge and inspiring the next generation to rise up and make their mark on the world. Samuel Beckett graduated in 1927 and spent most of his life in France, but remained a lifelong supporter of Trinity. In 1969, the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, he gave important working documents to Trinity Library and later that decade he donated proceeds from the New York performance of his play, Krapp’s Last Tape, to the fund that built Trinity’s Berkeley Library. Today, our Library holds a unique collection of Beckett manuscripts and letters that inspires students and scholars from around the world. Leah Kenny came to university through Trinity Access and has written about how Beckett’s work seemed inaccessible to her at first, until she came to study his original manuscripts and letters in the Trinity Library. She brought her love of Beckett’s work home to her grandparents for whom, she has written, watching Waiting for Godot was “like a key being turned in a lock, the lifting of an intellectual curtain”. Artist Joe Caslin describes the piece: “Trinity’s Campaign, Inspiring Generations, highlights the University’s past and present achievements as a means of charting its future. In the piece, Beckett looks directly at us and holds a pen pointing to his heart, but gestures towards Leah who, holding her thesis, represents a new generation of scholarship in Trinity. The other character in the piece, if you like, is the Campanile, representing Trinity as the constant source of inspiration – as people come and go, Trinity will continue to inspire many future generations.”
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INSPIRING GENERATIONS
Get involved in Inspiring Generations Key Inspiring Generations Projects
New Generations
• Academic Talent • Scholarships • Science Gallery Dublin • Trinity Access – Transforming Education
A Campus for the 21st Century
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Donate There are many ways you can support Inspiring Generations. Every contribution, whatever the size, can have a life-changing impact.
Volunteer Choose how you would like to give your time. Become a mentor, join a local alumni branch or offer an internship. Find all the ways you can get involved on page 56.
• E3 Institute and Grand Canal Innovation District • Old Library Redevelopment and Research Study Centre • Trinity Law School • Trinity Business School
Cherishing the Humanities
• Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute • Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation • Trinity Centre for Asian Studies
Healthcare Challenges of our Generation
Find Out More
If you are interested in making a gift now, remembering Trinity in your will, volunteering or supporting the Campaign in any other way, please email campaign@tcd.ie or find out more at tcd.ie/campaign.
• Trinity St. James’s Cancer Institute • Ageing Research
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
OLD LIBRARY
T Old Library Safeguarding
the
Photo: Antti Viitala
FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS
By Niamh O’Flynn
An ambitious and critically-important plan to safeguard Trinity’s world-renowned Old Library is one of the flagship projects of Inspiring Generations.
rinity is working with Dublin-based, internationally acclaimed firm Heneghan Peng, architects of the recent award-winning refurbishment of Ireland’s National Gallery, on a plan that will deploy the best 21st-century design and technology to make urgent structural and environmental upgrades to the Old Library. This will protect the building and its precious collections from deterioration and damage, conserve them for future generations and make them more accessible to students, visitors and researchers from around the world. The recent devastating fires in other national cultural institutions have, sadly, underscored the critical importance of this work. The Old Library is the heart of Trinity’s historic campus and is known around the world not just as a symbol of Trinity, but of Ireland. Its magnificent Long Room and Book of Kells exhibition attract over one million visitors each year, 80% of them from overseas. In 2018 alone, over 50,000 schoolchildren visited the Library, many of them with the Trinity Access team that works closely with schools in disadvantaged areas to support students’ progression to higher-level education. The Old Library also plays an important role in Ireland’s cultural diplomacy by hosting almost every international head of state and global leader on official visits to Ireland. The building was completed in the 1730s, although the famous barrel-vault ceiling of the Long Room was added in 1861. It is home to over 350,000 printed books, manuscripts and artefacts including some of the most important touchstones of Irish history: the medieval Book of Kells and Book of Durrow manuscripts; the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic (one of the last few surviving originals); and the national symbol of Ireland, the Brian Boru Harp. The collections chart the evolution of the Irish nation across the creative arts, literature, politics and the sciences and also include many works of global significance, from 2,000-yearold Egyptian ‘Books of the Dead’ to the Fagel Collection, a library amassed by generations of a powerful Dutch family that includes rare and unique items across every area of knowledge and exploration in the 17th-18th centuries. The Old Library is a national treasure and Trinity takes its custodial responsibilities very seriously. Advanced conservation work takes place in the Glucksman Preservation and
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Conservation Studio, generously funded by Lew Glucksman and Loretta Brennan Glucksman as part of the Ussher Library building, opened in 2003 by then President Mary McAleese. In this beautiful, lightfilled space, a laboratory-style hush is the order of the day and Keeper of Preservation and Conservation, Susie Bioletti, heads a dedicated team of conservators. The support of alumni and friends has been fundamental to preservation and conservation work over recent decades. The Save the Treasures of the Long Room appeal that launched in 2004 elicited support from alumni around the world and has funded one-year positions for 42 preservation assistants since then. This year’s team of three assistants, trained and supervised by the conservation department, is working systematically through the Long Room; cleaning, assessing damage and carrying out stabilising repairs. On average, it takes one day to complete works on one shelf. The funding of these positions has allowed the Library to treat almost 100,000 items to date. The assistants also engage visitors in learning about the Library and its conservation work in a popular 15-minute demonstration every afternoon at 3pm in the Long Room. Preservation assistant positions are advertised annually and attract an international response. Most of the programme’s alumni have gone on to pursue careers in museums and libraries around the world and are proving an invaluable asset to the global network of the Library. On a recent typical day in the Studio, conservation interns from Italy and France, supervised by Trinity’s senior conservator Andrew Megaw, were all skilfully applying the tools of their trade – including delicate brushes, sponges and selections of beautiful papers, bindings and silk threads. Angelica Anchisi was carefully removing centuries of grime from an 18th-century Register of St Kevin’s School in Dublin’s city centre and Morgane Vaucher was conserving a collection of letters recounting the 1798 rebellion, while Andrew Megaw was resewing the pages of an 18th-century manuscript of unpublished writings by Dean Jonathan Swift (author of Gulliver’s Travels and one of Trinity’s most famous alumni) entitled A Whimsical Medley. The Glucksman Preservation and Conservation Studio and the Save the
Treasures of the Long Room appeal together enabled a dramatic step change in conservation work across the Library of Trinity College Dublin. But now, the Old Library building itself is in critical need of attention, to prevent further deterioration of both the structure and the precious collections within. Substantial work on the Old Library structure was last undertaken in the 1970’s and the Book of Kells exhibition was designed 30 years ago to cater to c. 200,000 visitors annually – one-fifth of today’s number. And although the Old Library is very much a working library, attracting students and scholars from around the globe, the research study facilities do not match the world-class standards of the collections. The design by Heneghan Peng addresses all of these concerns in a holistic way. Trinity Librarian and College Archivist Helen Shenton has also brought her experience in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Library and Harvard Library to bear, in developing this landmark plan to secure the future of the Old Library. The main elements of the plan are: • Critical work on the Old Library building to restore the structure and install more sophisticated fire protection and environmental controls that will preserve the precious collections for future generations. • Creation of a new Research Collections Study Centre; a new Book of Kells exhibition; and new visitor facilities to accommodate the one million visitors now hosted annually, putting the Old Library on a par with the best library and museum visitor experiences around the world.
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Photos: Trinity Conservation Department
OLD LIBRARY
• Scaling of digitisation across nine priority areas of the collections to preserve the materials, reveal more of their secrets and make them accessible to students, scholars and citizens around the world. The Old Library Redevelopment Plan will secure the future of the historic building and its precious collections that together form part of Ireland’s national heritage. The total cost will be raised from the University, the State and philanthropy. Comparable projects in other leading libraries around the world have cost between a80m-a100m. Inspiring Generations will play a critical role in securing philanthropic support from alumni and friends that will help leverage the State funding needed to achieve this criticallyimportant plan for Trinity and for Ireland.
FREE ENTRY FOR ALUMNI See tcd.ie/alumni to find out how to access the Old Library and Book of Kells, free of charge.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Niamh O’Flynn M.A. (1987) is the Development Writer at Trinity Development & Alumni.
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KEVIN MITCHELL
Epigenetics
on the
Mind By Kevin J. Mitchell
Epigenetics is a cellular mechanism involved in the long-lasting regulation of profiles of gene expression. Does epigenetics offer an escape from genetic determinism?
I
n the battle of nature versus nurture, nurture has a new recruit: epigenetics. Brought in from molecular biology, epigenetics gives scientific heft to the argument that genes are not destiny. The overwhelming evidence for genetic effects on our psychological traits conjures up a fatalistic vision for many people, one in which we are slaves to our biology, not in control of our own psyche and our own behaviour. Epigenetics, a mechanism for regulating gene expression, seems to offer an escape from genetic determinism, a means to transcend our innate predispositions and change who we are. This view is well represented by Deepak Chopra MD and Rudolph Tanzi MD, Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, who write: “Every day brings new evidence that the mind-body connection reaches right down to the activities of our genes. How this activity changes in response to our life experiences is referred to as “epigenetics”. Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate.”
Epigenetic mechanisms involve packaging the DNA into active or inactive states, such that the initial profiles of gene expression put in place in the developing embryo are maintained over the lifetime of the cells.
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This hope arises from research that suggests that certain types of experiences in animals can indeed result in an epigenetic mark being attached to certain genes, with long-lasting effects on behaviour. Epigenetics thus gives some mechanistic credentials to the idea that we can override or overwrite the genes that would otherwise dictate our innate traits and predispositions. To evaluate the claims that epigenetics can break us free from our predetermined psychological traits, we need to look at the details of how our genes affect those traits, and what epigenetics really entails. We all have encoded in our genome a programme for making a human being, with a human brain, that confers our general human nature. But that programme varies between people because of the many millions of genetic differences we all carry. So the programme for making my brain differs from the programme for making yours. And the precise way that the programme plays out varies from run to run, so the outcome differs even between genetically identical twins. Our individual nature is thus a unique variation on a general theme. We come wired differently, with innate predispositions affecting our intelligence, personality, sexuality and even the way we perceive the world. These innate psychological traits do not necessarily determine our behaviour on a moment-tomoment basis, but they do influence it, both at any given moment and by guiding the development of our habits and the emergence of other aspects of our character over our lifetime. Can epigenetics really overwrite these genetic effects on our psychology? In molecular biology, epigenetics refers to a cellular mechanism for controlling the expression of genes. It is particularly important for the generation of different types of cells during embryonic development. All our cells contain the same genome, with about 20,000 genes, each encoding a specific protein, such as collagen, liver enzymes or neurotransmitter receptors. Different types of cells need a different subset of those proteins to do their respective jobs. So, in each cell type, some genes are “turned on”, that is, the gene is transcribed by an enzyme into messenger RNA, which is then translated into the appropriate protein. Others are “turned off”, so that piece of
Photo: Paul Sharp
KEVIN MITCHELL
Associate Professor Kevin J. Mitchell
DNA is just sitting there and the protein is not actually being made. Epigenetic mechanisms involve packaging the DNA into active or inactive states, such that the initial profiles of gene expression put in place in the developing embryo are maintained over the lifetime of the cells. So it acts as a kind of cellular memory. The epigenetic state of a cell can even be passed down through cell divisions. Unfortunately, several terms in that description are open to misinterpretation. First is the term “gene” itself. The original meaning of the word came from the science of heredity and referred to some physical thing that was passed from parents to offspring and that controlled some observable trait. We now know that genes in the sense of heredity are actually variations in the sequence of DNA coding for some protein. For example, the “gene for” sicklecell anaemia is really a mutation in the gene that encodes the protein haemoglobin. Second, and related, when we say a gene is “expressed” we mean that in terms of molecular biology. It may sound as though it is meant in terms of heredity, as though it refers to the effect of a genetic variation on some trait being either evident or not. But these are not at all the same thing. In reality, the relationship between expression levels of any given gene and our traits is typically highly complex and indirect. This is especially true for psychological traits. Third, the term “cellular memory” inevitably suggests that epigenetics may underlie psychological memory and so form the basis of our response to experience. Though dynamic changes in gene expression
TRINITY TODAY 2019
are required for the formation of memories to happen, there is no evidence that the memories themselves are stored in patterns of gene expression. Instead, they are embodied in changes in the strength of connections between nerve cells, mediated by very local, subcellular changes in neuroanatomy. Finally, the idea that epigenetic modifications of the DNA can be “passed down” is intended in terms of cell division but makes it sound like epigenetic responses to experience can be passed down from an organism to its offspring. Though such a mechanism does exist in plants and nematodes, there is no convincing evidence that this is the case in mammals, especially not in humans. Overall, there is thus no reason to think that epigenetic mechanisms somehow can alter our innate predispositions. However, none of this means that we are genetically programmed automata whose behaviour is hard-wired from birth. We certainly have innate predispositions, but these provide only a baseline for our behaviour. We are, in fact, hard-wired to learn from experience – that is how we adapt to our particular circumstances and how our patterns of behaviour emerge. But this occurs through changes in our neuroanatomy, not in our patterns of gene expression. Nor are those structures fixed. Change remains possible. We can still control our behaviour. We can work to overrule and reshape our habits. We can to some degree transcend our own subconscious inclinations. This requires self-awareness, discipline and effort. The one thing it does not require is epigenetics. Available from Princeton University Press.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kevin J. Mitchell B.A. (1991) is Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin and author of Innate – How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are (Princeton University Press, 2018). Follow him on Twitter: @WiringtheBrain This article is reproduced courtesy of the UK edition of the conversation.com
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TRINITY BUSINESS SCHOOL
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Trinity Business THE GAME School RAISING FOR TRINITY AND DUBLIN By Bridget Hourican
The flagship new Trinity Business School is helping develop Dublin into a global innovation hub.
I
n 2013, Trinity announced an ambitious plan to transform its Department of Business into a full-suite, international business school catering for undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive audiences. Six years on and it’s been an extraordinary journey, involving massive growth in degree programmes, a doubling of faculty, innovation across the curriculum, EQUIS accreditation, and now a state-of-the-art new building – a six-storey, a80 million, flagship Scott Tallon Walker design opening out to Pearse Street, brought in “on budget and on time” as the Provost announced at the official launch of the new School on 23 May. This transformation was made possible through the support of donors – the global community of alumni and business leaders determined to see Trinity Business School play its part in developing Dublin into a global innovation hub to rival London, Amsterdam and Barcelona. Provost Patrick Prendergast frames the opportunity: “Ireland is European headquarters to nine of the top ten global software companies, and nine of the top ten US technology companies – including Facebook, Twitter, and Google – and it’s also headquarters to Medcare giants Pfizer and Merck. A world-class Trinity Business School is about providing an interface between the University and the innovation ecosystem on our doorstep, to help take Dublin and Ireland to the next level.”
Photo: Fennell Photography
“A sleeping giant”
Patrons and friends from the Trinity Business community gather at the launch the new building
Trinity was the first university in Ireland to begin teaching commerce back in 1925, but by the new millennium, the school required serious investment and needed to refocus to take things to the next level. “A sleeping giant” is how Professor Andrew Burke described Trinity Business School when he was appointed its new Dean in 2015: “Trinity’s location is second to none: we’re in the centre of a world-class capital city, surrounded by cutting-edge firms in the financial services, technology, professional services, retail, and cultural industries. Our university is internationally renowned and our graduates do really well on the job market. Many business schools now in the international Top 50 started without those advantages.”
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TRINITY BUSINESS SCHOOL
Professor Burke is adamant that investing in a world-class business school raises the game for the whole University: “The top universities all have a leading business school: MIT has Sloan, University of Pennsylvania has Wharton, Cambridge has Judge and Harvard has the Harvard Business School. High performing universities in major cities typically have leading global business schools, and that’s what I want for Trinity.”
Accreditation and accelerators: EQUIS, LaunchBox and PitchBook
Professor Burke’s first three years as Dean focussed on expansion and growth in degree programmes and research and prioritising staff hire and accreditation. Having grown by 127% over three years – making it the fastest-growing established business school in Europe – Trinity Business School (TBS) was EQUIS accredited in December 2018, placing it among the top 1% of business schools worldwide (EQUIS is a quality assessment accreditation awarded by the European Foundation for Management Development, EFMD). Concurrent with the focus on expansion and accreditation for the Business School has been the college-wide prioritisation of innovation and entrepreneurship training for all students in all disciplines. In 2013, Trinity established a business incubation programme for undergraduates, LaunchBox, which, in its first year, entered the prestigious University Business Incubator index as a ‘Top Challenger’, placed just outside the world’s ‘Top 25’ from 800 incubator schemes assessed. Now in its sixth year and supported by the Bank of Ireland, LaunchBox has enabled Trinity undergraduate teams from all disciplines to create 50 start-ups that have gone on to raise over a6 million. These include the social enterprise FoodCloud, as featured in Time magazine, which aims to close the gap between food need and food waste. Founded in 2013 by a business student and an environmental science student, FoodCloud today employs over 30 people and works with over 9,000 charitable organisations in Ireland and the UK. LaunchBox is now located in Tangent, Trinity’s Ideas Workspace, which takes up the whole of the first floor of the new TBS building. The Tangent floor is open plan and geared towards team learning, with large tables, a ‘hangout’ zone, a coffee dock, a prototyping workshop and an ideation space. At any one time, it might bring together students from any or all of Trinity’s 24 Schools, brainstorming on their latest ideas for products, apps, or social enterprises.
“No public money was invested in the building – it’s financed from private philanthropy, the university’s own resources and some borrowing.” Trinity graduates are notably entrepreneurial. For the past five years, Trinity has been placed the number one university in Europe for educating entrepreneurs, according to private equity and venture capital-focused research firm PitchBook, whose independent survey looks at undergraduate alumni who go on to found companies that receive first-round venture capital funding. The new TBS building, housing Tangent and LaunchBox, is reinforcing this strength, bringing synergy to the University’s innovation and entrepreneurship activities and building links to industry in the Dublin region.
Philanthropy
The entrance to Trinity Business School displays the names of 15 ‘founding patrons’ and inside the atrium, the names of 45 further donors are elegantly mounted on panels of grey and white. This captures the role that philanthropy played in the new building: of the a80 million cost, a quarter – a20 million – came from donations which in turn leveraged loan finance from the EIB. The Provost elaborates: “No public money was invested in the building – it’s financed from private philanthropy, the university’s own resources and some borrowing.” The transformative role of philanthropy in TBS is a game-changer and a milestone for the whole University.
Photos: Fennell Photography
A showcase of 21st century design
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar with Business students Marie-Louise O’Callaghan, Dina Abu-Rahmeh & Henry Adedeji, joined by Chair of the Trinity Business School Advisory board, Sean Melly, Provost Patrick Prendergast & Dean Professor Andrew Burke
Plant-life is the first thing that strikes you about the new Trinity Busines School. A tapestry of green blooms at the Pearse Street entrance – 6,720 plants belonging to seven different species, selected to thrive in a north-eastern aspect, makes this the largest ‘living wall’ in Dublin. At the School’s south-facing campus entrance (formerly the site of
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TRINITY BUSINESS SCHOOL
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The new building fulfils the remit to continue the regeneration of Pearse Street that started with the launch of the Naughton Institute and Science Gallery in 2007 and 2008, and to be a showcase of 21st century design in the way that the Berkeley Library showcased mid-century Brutalism. As well as the ‘green walls’, its sustainable features include low energy ventilation systems, motion and timecontrolled LED-based lighting, photovoltaic rooftop panels offsetting 35 tonnes of carbon per annum, and lavatory water provided by recycled rainwater. The health and wellbeing of staff and students has also been prioritised: all workspaces have natural light and good quality air. High-standard acoustic design reduces noise distractions and staff have the option of site-stand desks, rather than sitdown, to help them stay active and fit.
Grand Canal Innovation District
Attendees of the Global Business and Tech Forum networking in the Luce Foyer
Luce Sports Hall) 13 ‘brise-soleil’ screens are planted with sun-loving plants – including geranium, winter heathers and rosemary. The screens reduce heat gain within the building by deflecting sunlight. Inside, the first cohort of business students to be educated in the new building are greeted by a huge light-filled atrium, with impressive art, including a large geometric painting by Richard Gorman, himself a graduate of the Business School. The students mill upstairs to the lecture theatres, seminar rooms, research centre, undergrad trading room and prototyping workshop unless there’s a conference on, or a prominent guest lecture, in which case they walk a few steps down to the A&K Dargan Theatre which has stadium seating for 600 people, making it the largest auditorium on campus, overtaking the Public Theatre in Front Square.
The choice of location for the new Business School was primarily about repurposing the Luce Hall site and continuing the regeneration of Pearse Street, but it may prove to have been particularly apt and prescient. In July 2018, Trinity, UCD and DCU signed a memorandum with government and stakeholders (IDA, Enterprise Ireland, Dublin City Council) of their intention to build an innovation district at Grand Canal Dock, modelled on districts in London, Barcelona, Rotterdam and Boston. At the signing, An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, said that “the plan to further develop Silicon Docks as an innovation district, involving the collaboration of business, government and the university sector, speaks eloquently to our vision of making Ireland the tech capital of Europe and our plans to ensure that the jobs of the future are created first here in Ireland.” TBS is one of the lynchpins that will support the Grand Canal Innovation District, or GCID. The distance between TBS and GCID is a short seven-minute walk up Pearse Street – very helpful for the future innovators and job creators currently brainstorming in Tangent.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bridget Hourican is a freelance journalist, historian and writer whose work has appeared in The Irish Times, IMAGE, Sunday Independent and The Sunday Times.
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TRINITY’S TRINITY’S TREES TREES
Photo: Trinity Image Bank
TRINITY TODAY 2019
O Oregon
Farewell to Trinity’s Iconic
Maple Trees By Sandra Rafter
Following the dramatic fall of our majestic Oregon Maple in 2018, we met Professor John Parnell in his laboratory, the Trinity herbarium, to discuss the cause of the great collapse and more.
ne of the iconic trees that stood in Library Square for 175 years collapsed unexpectedly on a warm summer’s night in June 2018. No one was injured in the incident and there was no damage to the surrounding buildings. John Parnell, Professor of Systematic Botany, Senior Dean and Chair of the Grounds and Gardens Advisory Committee, explains what happened to three of Trinity’s most beautiful trees. Q: Tell us about your own area of research. A: My base of botanical experience is European, but since coming to Trinity, I have focussed my research interests on the palaeotropics. Most of my palaeotropical work has concentrated on revisions for the Flora of Thailand; recently published work covers the Lentibulariaceae and Buxaceae of that country.
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TRINITY’S TREES
Q: What caused the fall of the Oregon Maple tree? A: Stress, disease, old age and lack of a sufficient supply of water are the probable causes of death of the 175-year-old Oregon Maple trees. This species is native to river banks and lake shores of the Pacific Northwest of America, where the average rainfall is about 3,500mm (ca. 650mm in Dublin). The Trinity Maples were therefore growing in exceptionally dry conditions and coming towards the end of their natural life. Trinity frequently gets its trees surveyed by international experts, Bartlett. The April 2018 survey raised concerns about the condition of three of the Oregon Maples on campus. It was not believed, however, that any were in immediate danger of collapse. The hope was that their lives could be prolonged by remedial work for at least another 10 years. It is probable that the collapse was at least in part also due to climate change – the very hot weather and the summer drought caused physiological and physical stress for a tree that was not in the best condition. Q: Why were two further Oregon Maple trees removed a month later? A: Unfortunately, both trees contained wooddecaying fungi and the risk of them falling and causing injury or damaging the surrounding buildings was simply too great. Q: Who originally planted the Oregon Maple trees? A: Trinity does not hold a record of who planted the Library Square Maples or precisely when, though the tree rings indicate that they were planted around 1845, most likely by a former Trinity student, Thomas Coulter. The species was introduced to Britain for cultivation purposes by the explorer David Douglas, who sent seeds to the Royal Horticultural Society in London in 1827. All of the oldest remaining specimens in Britain date from this time and most are reaching the end of their normal lifespan (80-200 years). Douglas met and worked with Thomas Coulter in Monterey, California. Coulter became the first curator of the Trinity; herbarium in 1840. On 9 July 1840, Coulter wrote: “My arrangement with College is this – I make over to them by deed my whole herbarium, a pre-gift, and they make me Curator of it with Fellows chambers and commons (worth about £40 per annum) and £100 cash per annum for the present, to be made £300 (per annum) on the death of Dr Stokes.”
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of Library Square, for which the College was to pay £110”. The same minute had a reference to fire precautions for the Old Library, and in the following April the Board directed that “the fire engine is to be put in order.”
Q: What happened to the trees after they were removed? A: The salvaged wood is being stored safely in the correct environmental conditions in Trinity. There have been discussions about making commemorative pieces of furniture or plinths with the large pieces of remaining timber. A wonderful range of wood products from Trinity’s felled trees has been made in collaboration with Caulfield Country Boards. These are on sale on campus in the Trinity Gift Shop and online at trinitygiftshop.ie. Q: Tell us about the plans for replanting in Library Square. A: There are no immediate plans to replant in Library Square. We have received the preliminary results of a ground-penetrating radar survey. The archaeology of the area certainly needs to be considered before we replant, there are definitely items requiring further investigation beneath the square itself. For example, during the removal of one of the Oregon Maple trees, we discovered a large water tank. We subsequently discovered that the construction of the tank likely followed direction by the Board in June 1836. The Board’s minutes note that the “corporation was to bring a four-inch water main to the centre
Q: What considerations now need to be made before planting new trees on campus? A: There are a number of factors that we need to take into account before we plant any trees on campus. The primary considerations are that the soil in Trinity is quite poor and the climate of the University is really quite difficult. Although pollution levels have dramatically fallen over the past 20-25 years, there are other changes that make it problematic for trees to do well on campus. In general, we now know it is really difficult to get trees to survive. So, one of the first things to take into account is experience: what trees have done well here in the past? The second consideration is climate change and what impact that will have on the trees over their lifespan. The third factor is how a new tree would fit into the landscape of the campus as a whole: we need to plant in a sympathetic way using trees that do not overwhelm the fine architecture of the University. Finally, we are very keen to encourage biodiversity and so trees that are pollinator-attractive for bees are highly desirable. Q: How do students benefit from studying our trees/plant life in Trinity? A: The students benefit enormously from doing hands-on work outside. A lot of what we do now in the University is largely indoors and to some extent divorced from hands-on outdoor experience. I believe that if you don’t have people who can go into the outside world – into the field, as I would call it – and identify plants and see how they perform, then nothing really works. Training people in these sorts of skills has, perhaps, become less popular in Europe than it used to be, but it is still vitally important in developing countries where people are very conscious of the loss of the natural environment and want to do everything in their power to try and prevent that loss.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sandra Rafter is a Communications Officer at Trinity Development & Alumni.
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
TRAILBLAZERS
Trailblazers Trinity has a proud tradition of inspiring those who study and work within its walls to challenge norms and think creatively. Many who have walked through Front Gate have gone on to make a big impact in their disciplines. This is a small selection of those brilliant trailblazers.
Ed Guiney B.B.S. (1988) Ed Guiney is a producer and co-founder of film production and distribution company Element Pictures. Ed has been nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Picture (The Favourite and Room) and has won two BAFTAs (The Favourite and Omagh). Recent productions include The Favourite, which won seven BAFTAs and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, with Olivia Colman winning Best Actress; Disobedience, starring Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams and Alessandro Nivola; and Room, directed by Lenny Abrahamson and starring Brie Larson, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, with Larson winning Best Actress. The film was also nominated for three Golden Globes, with Larson winning a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award. Previous productions include Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Ed Guiney Original Screenplay. Element’s current television productions include Normal People, adapted by and based on Sally Rooney’s novel of the same name, directed by Lenny Abrahamson and filmed partly in Trinity. Element Pictures operates the Light House Cinema, one of Dublin’s premiere art house cinemas, and Pálás, a three-screen cinema in Galway.
Anna Davies M.A. (2005) Professor of Geography, Environment and Society at Trinity, Anna Davies won the highly prestigious Irish Research Council Researcher of the Year Award in 2018. She is the director of the Environmental Governance Research Group, Principal Investigator of the ERC project SHARECITY and a Principal Investigator within the SFI Spoke ENABLE. Anna is a Governing Board member of the International Science Council; the European Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production; the Future Earth Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production Knowledge Action Network; and the Rediscovery Centre. She currently advises the Irish Government as a member of the National Climate Change Advisory Council. Widely published, Anna has produced more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, books, chapters, digital media shorts, exhibition installations and policy reports.
Sally Hayden M.Sc. (2016) Sally Hayden is a freelance journalist and photographer reporting on migration, conflict, humanitarian crises and human rights across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. She has worked for outlets including VICE News, The Washington Post, Time magazine, Newsweek, ELLE magazine, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Magnum Photos, RTÉ, The Irish Times, BBC and CNN. She won first prize in the European Migration Media Awards last year, as well as the Foreign Coverage Award at the Newsbrands Ireland Journalism Awards, for her reporting on Syrian refugee returns, Boko Haram in North East Nigeria, and smuggling routes through Sudan. Sally was also a finalist of the Amnesty International Gaby Rado Award for Best New Journalist and is listed as one of Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30 for media in Europe in 2019.
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Ciara Clancy B.Sc. Ph.D. (2012)
James Patrice B.A. (2011) James Patrice is a presenter and one of Ireland's leading social media influencers, with an online following of over 160,000. James is a regular on our TV screens, appearing as a reporter on RTÉ Today each week. After graduating from Drama and Theatre Studies and French in Trinity, James acted in numerous shows and shorts, but it was social media that allowed him to flourish. His popular Instagram and Snapchat channels saw him reach a wider audience and led him to bag the role of backstage reporter on RTÉ One’s Rose of Tralee. He later nabbed the very same role on the station’s highly successful version of Dancing with the Stars. James won the hearts of the nation when he appeared on Celebrity Operation Transformation, becoming an advocate for body confidence. He recently returned to his theatrical roots by starring in the Olympia Theatre pantomime.
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Professor Aljosa Smolic
Entrepreneur Dr Ciara Clancy worked with people with Parkinson’s disease for a number of years before founding Beats Medical. Beats Medical is a digital therapeutics company which provides therapies for people with neurological conditions including Parkinson’s and children with developmental conditions, in partnership with VHI. Her entrepreneurial work has received international recognition including her selection as the Laureate for Europe in the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, inclusion in Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30, and a finalist in the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards.
Mark Pollock B.A. (1998) Becoming blind in 1998 during his final year at Trinity, Mark became an adventure athlete, competing in ultraendurance races across deserts, mountains, and the polar ice caps, including becoming the first blind person to race to the South Pole. He also won silver and bronze medals for rowing at the Commonwealth Games. In 2010, a fall from a second story window left him paralysed. Now he is on a new expedition, this time to cure paralysis by exploring the intersection where humans and technology collide. As a speaker, Mark is best known for his 2018 TED Talk with his fiancée, Simone George, focused on resolving the tension between acceptance and hope. Co-founder of the global running series ‘Run in the Dark’, Mark has been selected by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, is a former member of the Global Futures Council on Human Enhancement and is on the Board of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation.
Aljosa Smolic is the SFI Research Professor of Creative Technologies at Trinity. Before joining Trinity, Professor Smolic was the Senior Research Scientist and Head of the Advanced Video Technology group with Disney Research and a Scientific Project Manager with the Fraunhofer HeinrichHertz-Institut. At Disney Research, he led over 50 industrial R&D projects that have resulted in technology transfers to a range of Disney units, including film studios and TV broadcasters. Professor Smolic was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. At Trinity, he is leading V-SENSE, a team of over 20 researchers in visual computing at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics and media signal processing. They are building a dynamic environment where enthusiastic young scientists with different backgrounds get together to shape the future in fundamental and applied research projects. He has published over 150 referred papers in these fields and filed more than 35 patents.
Saint Sister: Gemma Doherty B.A. (2014) and Morgan MacIntyre B.A. (2014) Saint Sister are a duo from Northern Ireland. Since forming in 2014, the band has quickly established itself as one of the most talked about in Ireland. 2015’s album Madrid was a breakout success, playlisted on BBC Radio1, RTÉ and across European radio, enabling the band to tour extensively around Ireland, the UK and Europe. Festival highlights at Glastonbury, Electric Picnic and Latitude and support slots with Lisa Hannigan and Hozier have secured their reputation as a phenomenal live band. At home, they were voted the best band in Ireland by the readers of The Irish Times. The band released its debut album, Shape of Silence, to rave reviews and embarked on a 50-date world tour. Saint Sister was nominated for Choice Music Prize Song of the Year as well as the prestigious Album of the Year. The band completed a month-long tour of the USA with Henry Jamison, during which they filmed an NPR Tiny Desk concert to promote the new single Is it too early? (Kilmainham).
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
TRINITY ACCESS
TRINITY ACCESS:
Transforming
Education By Ciara Kenny
Dr Cliona Hannon on 25 years of Trinity Access and how the programme is inspiring generations of students and leading change in the Irish education system.
T Dr Cliona Hannon, Trinity Access Director
Photo: Paul Sharp
here’s barely a white space free on the walls lining the stairway up to the Trinity Access offices in Goldsmith Hall. In frame after frame, groups of smiling students hold degrees and awards. Thank-you messages from graduates declare how “Trinity Access made my life”, or was “the best thing I have ever done”. Headlines from newspaper clippings proclaim how Trinity Access students are “bucking international trends” by securing comparable jobs to the wider student body, with case studies of teachers, trainee solicitors and social workers who owe their careers to Trinity Access, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. The framed articles tell the story of just a tiny fraction of the thousands of students who have
benefitted from the initiative over the past two and a half decades. Trinity Access was set up in 1993 to widen access to under-represented groups at the University. Since then it has worked with schools, community groups and businesses to develop a broad range of initiatives encouraging new admissions, in an effort to reflect the diverse composition of Irish society on campus. “Not all schools are similarly resourced, and not all families have the means to support young people to reach their potential,” Trinity Access Director Cliona Hannon explains. “But if you take students in on reduced points from certain schools and give them some supports when they transition into higher education, they have enough innate talent and drive to achieve just as well academically as anyone from any other social background.” Outreach begins with primary school children in designated disadvantaged areas, in a bid to spark an interest in third-level from a young age. Summer programmes bring secondary school students on campus to experience the physical, academic, cultural and social aspects of student life at Trinity, while shadowing days and mentoring initiatives connect them with undergraduate students from a similar background to their own, giving them a relatable role model from their own community. Around 50 students annually – split between school-leavers and mature students – are accepted onto the Trinity Access foundation year. Their Leaving Certificate points don’t matter, but they must demonstrate an ability and interest in one particular subject area. During the foundation year, they study core subjects including IT, educational guidance, and study skills. They also choose other subjects that they are particularly interested in, such as History, Law or Economics, before progressing on to first year in their chosen degree course. This year, there are more than 900 Trinity Access
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participants studying for undergraduate degrees in all areas of the college, from Medicine and Human Genetics to Business Studies, Law, Engineering and Computer Science. Retention rates and academic results are similar for Trinity Access participants and students who enter college through the general admission route. Trinity Access students have “gone on to do extraordinary things,” Hannon says, citing the “obvious example” of Senator Lynn Ruane. A single mother who left school at 15, Ruane returned
Trinity Access currently works closely with 20 primary and 20 secondary schools, but this will scale up to 70 nationwide by 2021 under the Trinity Access 21 initiative, which has been funded by Google and Social Innovation Fund Ireland, and many individual and corporate supporters. About 30 per cent of participants are now from ethnic minority backgrounds, with some living in direct provision. “It is great to see Trinity change,” says Hannon. “Students are making the case for greater diversity in education.”
“If you take students in on reduced points from certain schools and give them some supports when they transition into higher education, they have enough innate talent and drive to achieve just as well academically as anyone from any other social background.” to education as a mature student. As President of the Students’ Union in 2015, she became a strong advocate for social justice issues including housing, migration, minority rights and climate change, before taking her talents to a national platform when she became the first undergraduate student ever elected to the Seanad in 2016. “We have had surgeons, academics, politicians, writers, journalists, teachers, social workers – you name it, Trinity Access graduates have done it,” Hannon says. “And apart from what they are doing professionally, three-quarters of them are active in their own community in encouraging further study. They do a lot of giving back.” Although Government funding has not increased in recent years, corporate and alumni funding has allowed Trinity Access to build new programmes and expand their reach. “We try to secure additional financial support for our students while they are on the undergraduate courses. This helps enormously with financial crisis management, but also day-to-day costs of travel, lunch, books, and lab equipment. It makes a huge difference.”
Since 2016, Hannon has been working with Lady Margaret Hall (LMH) in Oxford and has recently announced plans to roll out the programme to other Colleges in the University. Cambridge University is currently fundraising for a similar initiative, which they hope to launch in 2021. “Seeing some of the programmes we have built being scaled and taken up by leading institutions internationally is very satisfying,” Hannon says.
Dr Cliona Hannon’s new book Capital, Capabilities and Culture: A Human Development Approach to Student and School Transformation is now available from Vernon Press.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ciara Kenny B.A. (2006) is Acting Editor of The Irish Times Magazine and Editor of Irish Times Abroad, an online section for Irish-connected people around the world. Follow her on Twitter @ciaraky.
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Alexander Fay “I was a bit of a nerd at school,” says Alexander Fay, who grew up in North Wall in Dublin’s north inner city. He loved astronomy and astrophysics and popular science, so when a teacher suggested a science summer school at Trinity when he was in 6th class, he decided to give it a go. “We went on a trip to the Science Gallery and made LED lights. It was my first time in Trinity College. Maybe the first time I was in any college.” Throughout secondary school, he went back to Trinity a few times a year for events and workshops, and received grinds before his Junior and Leaving Certificate exams. “I had the push at home from my parents to get a better education than they had the opportunity to receive. Both my Ma and Da left school at around 14 or 15. I was the first person in the family to give it a serious go. I had no shyness about it.” In 6th year, he applied for the Trinity Access foundation year. “All I had to do was pass the Leaving Cert. I got into college because I was me, not because of my points. I am proud of that,” he says. He spent two weeks studying each subject, and was drawn back to science, applying at the end of the year to the Science degree course. He is now in second year. “Most of the class were from Dublin and around, but ethnicity-wise and nationality-wise, there were people from a lot of different backgrounds. That was enlightening, to see there were people who look different to me, talk different to me, had a different experience than me, but had the same grounding and interest in education. There was no reason that these people should not have been in college, which helped me see there was no reason that I should not have been in college. We were all on an equal ground, despite the huge differences between us.” Fay is now a Trinity Access ambassador, which involves giving talks in schools, and bringing students on campus tours. He also runs the Edmund Rice summer camps, “for kids in the inner city who might need a break from something that’s going on at home or in school”, managing a team of 70 leaders. “You do encounter active and passive discrimination, and there are social differences that have to be overcome unfortunately. But Trinity Access has given me confidence and pride in where I am from. I might be different to a lot of other people here, but that doesn’t make me any better or worse.”
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TRINITY ACCESS
Deirdre McAdams first became involved with Trinity Access in primary school as part of the Bookmarks Programme, when a writer and illustrator visited to help the pupils design and write their own books. She visited Trinity for the first time when her book went on display in the Old Library and visited regularly with her grandmother after that. In 6th year, she applied for the Trinity Access foundation year, and went on to achieve the highest grade on the course, which led her to a degree in Medicinal Chemistry. “I won a travel award to Thailand in the summer of my first year, became a Trinity Scholar and attended prestigious conferences in second year, participated in academic internships in third year and graduated with an excellent degree in final year, all possible through the guidance and support I received through Trinity Access,” she says. Following her degree, she worked for a year with a partner organisation, College for Every Student (CFES) in New York, developing and delivering leadership workshops, and conducting peer mentor training with schools in Boston, New York, Indiana and Ohio. After a second year working in the chemical industry in America, she returned to Ireland last October to begin her Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry. McAdams is now the Biology Tutor on the Trinity Access foundation course, as well as a tutor with the Scholars Ireland Programme, an initiative run in conjunction with Trinity Access. She also tutors 12 students from the Assumption Secondary School in Walkinstown, where she went to school. “Trinity Access shaped who I am and what I want to do in the future, as a person, as a researcher, as an advocate for fair and equal access to education,” she says. “Before I started with Trinity Access, I didn’t even know I had an interest in these things, and now they are pivotal to who I am. It brings so much hope and joy to so many people.”
Photo: John Cairns
Deirdre McAdams
Louise Richardson, Vice-Chancellor, University of Oxford
University of Oxford and Access Oxford has long experienced difficulties in recruiting academically qualified applicants from diverse backgrounds. An environment like ours – in which entrance requirements are high and competition for places intense - tends to privilege those who have already experienced advantage in their pre-university education. Many of us have sought to change this, but it is not easy in a system in which prospective students apply, not to the University, but to one of our 34 colleges and halls that admit undergraduates. It was against this background that the Principal of one of our colleges, Alan Rusbridger, met Provost Patrick Prendergast and learned about the Trinity Access programme. He decided to adapt the Trinity Access idea to his college, Lady Margaret Hall (LMH) and give it a try. Not only did we get the idea for a foundation year from Trinity, we also received lots of encouragement, support and advice. Cliona Hannon was a regular visitor helping us to learn from Trinity’s experience as we adapted it to Oxford’s collegiate structure.
“The foundation year has made me realise that I can fit in to Oxford – and there is no one typical Oxford student and I’m just as much an Oxford student as anyone else. I’ve found a place here that I didn’t think I would find.”
2016-17 foundation year student
The two programmes are not identical. Ours is smaller, admitting 12 students a year. A more significant difference is the fact that our foundation year students leave home and live in the College for the academic year. Finally, our students are not guaranteed a place at Oxford, rather, they apply during the course of their foundation year. The majority of the participants have been offered a place at LMH, but not everyone. Whereas Trinity Access has been running in Trinity since 1993, we are only in the third year of our foundation programme. Other Oxford Colleges are watching the LMH experience closely, and we hope that once its effectiveness has been demonstrated, other Colleges will decide to adopt a foundation year too, and we will be able to roll out a university-wide programme.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Louise Richardson M.A., LL.D. (H.C.) (1980) is a graduate of the School of Histories & Humanities at Trinity College Dublin.
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PHILIP LANE
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Banking on Prudence By Simon Carswell
Trinity Economics Professor Philip Lane reflects on life after academia, the economic risks facing Ireland and four post-crisis years at the helm of the Central Bank before his move to become Chief Economist at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.
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here is a painting of a west of Ireland landscape by famed artist Paul Henry hanging in the office of Central Bank Governor Philip Lane. It sets the pale blue and grey colour scheme throughout the bank’s interior on Dublin’s north quays. This should not be interpreted as a sign that everything emanating from Lane’s office sets tone and policy too among the 2,000 staff working up and down the eight-storey building on North Wall Quay.
Looking back on his four years leading the Central Bank before he becomes the European Central Bank’s Chief Economist in Frankfurt, Lane prefers to see one of the most powerful roles in Irish public life as similar to the position he previously held as a Professor of Economics at Trinity: as a collaboration. Like his time at Trinity, Lane sees colleagues at the Central Bank as collaborators and the bank as a “knowledge institution”. The main difference between them is scale: where he worked with up to six people in academia, specialising in international macroeconomics, he works with dozens across the bank. “My life is not that far different to my Trinity life because in the end, it’s trying to understand what’s going on in the economy, trying to use economic analysis to make sense of the world,” he says. Lane buys into the simple theory of British economist John Maynard Keynes on the relevance of academic research: in the end, “we are all the slaves of some defunct economist” and that “ideas do matter”. In central banking, the week-to-week, month-to-month decision-making and access to information – be it the detail of every mortgage loan or, from this summer, every major commercial loan across the EU – makes the role more immediate and “invigorating” with “a more direct type of engagement with the world”.
Lane is excited about the collaborators he will work closely with in his next role at the European Central Bank (ECB) and the “intellectual firepower” that will surround him in Frankfurt, which he describes as “extremely impressive”. A month before taking up the influential new role in Europe in June 2019, Lane reflects on the completion of another tumultuous phase of change at the economic watchdog that has to supervise not just the behaviour of banks and financial institutions, but monitor the wider economy for signs of risks and overheating. New Zealand Treasury Head Gabriel Makhlouf takes over as the 12th Governor of the Central Bank in September. To say the job, in the wake of one of the world’s worst financial crises, came with pressure is a massive understatement. Lane succeeded another Trinity academic, Patrick Honohan, in 2015, breaking decisively the tradition of picking a senior civil servant to run the bank. Honohan took charge at the height of the crisis, taking over as the property and banking sector crashed. Lane has had to maintain a careful watch. While the recovery in the economy is apparent – however uneven it may be geographically across the country – Lane does not believe the light over the Irish economic system is flashing red or green, but amber. There are still “corrective measures” required to protect against risks in the system, he says. “To some people, what we see now is that the economy has recovered, the crisis was horrible, but let’s make sure it never happens again, and let’s assume it’ll never happen again. And if you assume it will never happen again, you will complain
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PHILIP LANE
about high mortgage rates, because you think why would we still be in high rates, even though the crisis is over, even though a lot of reform has happened,” he says. “The amber light view of the world is: yes, we have gone through a lot, we’re not in a red zone, but no analyst, no bank anywhere, when they look at the Irish market is going to forget the crisis.” Lane is not fearful of another property crash. Housing prices are “still far below peak,” he says, and the effects of loan-toincome restrictions “seem to be kicking in”. The banks are less exposed to the sector than during the Celtic Tiger era, as much of the commercial property development is funded by the international sector. If a downturn came, the banking system would be much more able to absorb “that reversal”. “The first order of business is to say: if such a reversal happens, let’s try and build a lot of buffers, so it doesn’t lead to that kind of amplified crisis,” he says. This is where Lane’s “macro-prudential toolkit” comes into play. It is one of his legacies he is most proud of from his time at the Central Bank. Interest-rate setting and other monetary policies moved to the European centre in Frankfurt, depriving national central banks of a powerful tool to act quickly, but Lane believes preemptive measures can still be taken at a national level to ward off an acute crisis. These are restrictions applied to the supply of credit, forcing the Irish banks to set aside more capital in the good times so they are ready for the bad. “That was the big motivation for why I wanted to take on this job. I am convinced that national central banks are more important than ever for these reasons,” says Lane.
“Lane does not believe the light over the Irish economic system is flashing red or green, but amber. There are still ‘corrective measures’ required to protect against risks in the system.”
Philip Lane, Outgoing Governor of the Central Bank
About Philip Lane
Philip Lane started at Trinity in 1987. He was a Scholar in Economic and Social Studies and was the top-ranked Economics student when he graduated with first-class honours and a gold medal in 1991. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1995 and then became Assistant Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Columbia University from 1995 to 1997. He returned to Trinity in 1997 where he ran the Department of Economics. He was Professor of Macroeconomics and Director of the Institute for International Integration Studies. He remains affiliated with Trinity as Whately Professor of Political Economy and has been on leave from this position while Governor of the Central Bank and Chief Economist at the European Central Bank.
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PHILIP LANE
Photo: Courtesy of the Central Bank
“The amber light view of the world is: yes, we have gone through a lot, we’re not in a red zone, but no analyst, no bank anywhere, when they look at the Irish market is going to forget the crisis.”
There is another tool Lane wants in the kit. He believes banks should hold extra capital to protect against systemic risks facing the economy. Surprisingly, those risks do not relate to Brexit. The UK’s departure from the EU will, “wherever it ends up,” be an economic negative, he says, but Ireland’s open economy means populism and anti-globalisation pose bigger challenges for the future of the multinational sector that Ireland relies so heavily on. “Trade, tax and those other things – they’re actually bigger issues. They are less visible. They are a little bit more abstract but the Irish economy is much more dependent on the future of the multinational sector than it is on the range of possibilities of Brexit,” he says. Although Lane has sat on the ECB governing council as Central Bank Governor, his new role on the executive board puts him in a powerful agenda-setting role on the eve of change at the institution. Italian Mario Draghi retires as ECB President in October 2019 at the end of an eightyear term. France’s Christine Lagarde, International Monetary Fund boss, has been nominated as the next President so, with Lagarde coming from another big country, will Lane be in a critical role coming from one of the smaller states? “That really is not the way it works,” says Lane. He points out that even the physical layout of their meeting room, with seating arranged in alphabetical order by first names, stresses the importance of hearing all opinions equally. “It is an effective reminder that you are there as individuals. It is not acceptable even to phrase any kind of argument in that kind of national perspective,” he says. Lane says that by training and inclination he tends to come up with “synthetic positions” to challenge two different extremes in opinion where a solution is “much more likely to be somewhere in between”. “Economists are accused of having two hands,” he said, referring to their oft-ridiculed ‘on the one hand and on the other’ equivocation. “I think that’s a positive, not a negative”. Despite the requirement to shed his green jersey in Frankfurt, Lane still sees the ECB as an “Irish institution” and a “shared institution” because the country has chosen to share monetary policy with 18 other countries and Ireland is a part of that. “There are about 100 Irish staff there. We make a lot of contributions to how this works, and that is a very important part of being committed to the EU,” he says.
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Lane’s Biggest Challenge as Central Bank Governor: The Tracker Scandal
The banking crisis may be in the rear-view mirror, but the behaviour of the banks is not. Lane’s term at the Central Bank was dominated by the tracker mortgage scandal, where banks deprived customers of the chance to stay on or move back to a low-cost interest rate that tracked the ECB rate. He was criticised for not moving fast enough and forcing banks to recognise the problem and fix it earlier. At last count, almost 40,000 customers were affected and the public heard horror stories of people losing homes in a scandal that is set to cost the banks more than €1 billion and millions of euro more in fines. Lane admits in hindsight that the banks could have moved more quickly and that they should not have made people who lost so much money wait as long as they did. “The best way for this to run was the banks move quickly on a voluntary basis. The fact that we had to intervene more aggressively was regrettable, but it had to be done and we did it,” he says. The outcome has “shown the power of the Central Bank” and that it is willing to stand up for consumers, he says.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Simon Carswell B.A. (1998) is the Public Affairs Editor with The Irish Times. Follow him on Twitter @SiCarswell.
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
HIST250
Join us for
Hist250 By Luke Fehily and Ursula Quill
Over the next year, the College Historical Society of Trinity College Dublin will celebrate two and a half centuries of excellence in debate, discourse and oratory.
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to preserve the records and archives of the Society as invaluable historical sources. The celebrations will include the launch of the first complete history of the Society, based on these records, written by Dr Patrick Geoghegan and generously supported by the Trinity Association & Trust. The anniversary provides a unique opportunity not only to reflect on the past, but also to look to the future. The Hist has always been at the forefront of Irish intellectualism and, at a time when democratic institutions and multilateral cooperation are under attack, it is more important than ever. Hist250 will focus on
Photo: Fennell Photography
he College Historical Society, more commonly known as the Hist, is commemorating the anniversary of its foundation with a series of special events – Hist250. As the world’s oldest student debating society, the Hist has much to celebrate and the programme aims to exhibit the Society’s auspicious history as well as demonstrate its continuing relevance. During spring 2020, the original records, dating to 1770, will be exhibited in the Long Room of the Old Library. Significant work is being undertaken by the Manuscripts Room
the future of democracy and the challenges it faces. Together with global leaders, the Hist will explore these issues through fair and balanced discussion. The General Committee has organised events with the aim of showcasing the very best of the modern Society. The weekly meetings will include showcase debates with gold medallists for oratory, world championship speakers, and Irish Times Champions. Hist250 will also mark the reinstatement of collaborative events with our corresponding societies (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and Edinburgh) and a celebration of our historic ties with UCD’s Literary and Historical Society. A series of special guest lectures, from Honorary Members and Hist Vice-Presidents, will engage students from across the University. Illustrious guests will also be awarded the Society’s Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse and the Burke Medal for the Contribution to the Arts. These events will culminate in a celebratory week of 2-6 March 2020 with prestigious guest speakers from Ireland and abroad, including former President of Ireland Dr Mary Robinson, an international student debate, as well as panel discussions, dinners and much more. The programme of events is being co-ordinated by the General Committee and a very active Hist250 sub-committee, with members in Dublin, London, New York and beyond. This year in particular we welcome all our former members to get involved with the Society. Hist250 events will also be held in the UK and USA. If you would like to learn more, support the Society through donation, or play an active part in Hist250, please contact Luke Fehily at auditor@thehist.com. For more information, visit the Society’s website thehist.com. If you would like to donate photos or memorabilia of your time at the Hist, please contact hist250@thehist.com. We look forward to welcoming many of you back to the Hist during the year.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS Luke Fehily is a Senior Sophister Nanoscience student and a scholar with the Naughton and Laidlaw Foundations. He has previously served as the Society’s Treasurer and is the Auditor of the 250th Session. Professor David McConnell, Fellow Emeritus, Pro-Chancellor of the University and President of The Hist; The Honorable Sir Donnell Deeny, Lord Justice of Appeal in NI, Pro-Chancellor of the University; Ursula Quill, Director Hist250; Caoimhin Hamill, Debates Convenor of the 250th Session; Luke Fehily, Auditor of the 250th Session
Ursula Quill B.A. (2012), ex-Auditor, is Director of Hist250 and is currently reading Law at King’s Inns. She is parliamentary assistant to Senator Ivana Bacik.
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MAEVE LOWERY
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Running Trials,
Giving Hope
By Paul Cullen
Back in Ireland after almost a decade in the US, oncologist Maeve Lowery says current treatments for difficult cancers “just aren’t good enough.”
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t used to be known as the Big C, but it is fair to say cancer has lost some of its reputation for villainy in recent years. It’s scary still, of course, but no longer necessarily a death sentence, as groundbreaking new therapies have boosted survival rates and improved patients’ quality of life for many forms of the disease. This progress, unfortunately, has been uneven. Improvements seen in areas such as childhood leukaemia and melanomas, where scientists can validly talk of having cured some forms of the disease, have not been replicated in other areas. Many forms of internal cancers, for example, remain stubbornly difficult to treat, with
low survival rates and highly intrusive and debilitating treatments the norm for far too many patients. It’s a challenge Maeve Lowery, Professor of Translational Cancer Medicine at Trinity College Dublin and Consultant Medical Oncologist at St. James’s Hospital, is only too well aware of. Lowery works with recalcitrant, hard to treat, cancers – of the pancreas, oesophagus, stomach and liver. What she has to offer her patients with these cancers at present “really isn’t good enough”, she freely admits. “There has been progress, but I’m still prescribing chemo for most of my patients, sometimes with radiotherapy and life-altering surgeries.” Take her specialty of pancreatic cancer, for example, which over time has claimed the lives of Steve Jobs, Aretha Franklin,
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MAEVE LOWERY
Luciano Pavarotti and, in Ireland, Brian Lenihan. While not the most common of cancers, it is fast becoming the variant that claims the most victims, not surprising given the survival rate in Ireland is just 8 per cent after five years. “We haven’t made the same progress as in other areas. Immunotherapies don’t have the same effect on most cancers of the gut,” she tells me. “The symptoms are often vague, they tend to present late and usually have spread by the time they are found.” In any case, the treatment of cancer isn’t just about survival curves, Lowery firmly believes. “We’re curing a lot of patients with the most common cancers, but what are we doing to them in the process? It’s not good enough. We need to set the bar higher than cure. Are women fertile after their treatment? Are patients going to get secondary cancers? Or blood diseases? What’s their quality of life afterwards?” Addressing these challenges – by raising survival rates and improving cancer
“To close the translational arc, you have to bring that information back to the clinic by, for example, designing a clinical trial and selecting patients based on those biomarkers.” None of this is as easy as it might sound, she emphasises. “Biopsies have to be obtained, and informed ethical consent given by the patient, and then the person in the lab needs to know what the question is and research has to be directed at answering that question. “Engagement with industry is a very important part of this work, but true innovation happens in academia, where you have freedom of process and disparate groups of researchers working together. You have the freedom to test hypotheses that may or may not work and you have a proper spark between people from different disciplines.” This is where the Trinity St. James’s Cancer Institute, where Lowery is a clinical trials lead, plans to play a significant role. The first of its kind in Ireland, the Institute
“We’re curing a lot of patients with the most common cancers, but what are we doing to them in the process? It’s not good enough. We need to set the bar higher than cure. Are women fertile after their treatment? Are patients going to get secondary cancers? Or blood diseases? What’s their quality of life afterwards?”
patients’ quality of life during treatment – is at the heart of Lowery’s work in Trinity and St. James’s Hospital. But what is the “translational” part of her job title about? Is it a form of applied research? Translational medicine is about “connecting laboratory findings to the clinic,” she explains, but it also works in the opposite direction, linking the clinical experience to further work in the lab. In the clinic, the core clinical question is often a variant on a single theme – why does a therapy that works for one patient not work for all of them? By taking biopsies and blood samples back to the lab, Lowery and her fellow researchers aid the search for the crucial biomarkers that can signpost the potential success of a treatment.
aims to consolidate cancer care into one centre providing treatment, research and education under the one roof. There are plans for a dedicated centre at St. James’s but the Institute is “wider than just a building,” she explains. “It’s about the ability to innovate and interact with the right variety of people in the right environment for innovation.” The Institute is one of the core projects in the Inspiring Generations fundraising campaign, launched in May 2019, but already the process of being audited by the Organisation of European Cancer Institutes (OECI), which sets standards for top-flight cancer centres across the continent, is well underway. The OECI auditors were in Ireland recently to inspect facilities here: “The immediate feedback
Maeve Lowery, Professor of Translational Cancer Medicine, Trinity College Dublin and Consultant Medical Oncologist, St. James’s Hospital
was very positive; they said they were really impressed, particularly with our nurses.” One of the principal goals Lowery has set herself is to increase the proportion of Irish patients taking part in clinical trials. At present, a lowly 2 per cent of patients get the opportunity to access the latest therapies in a trial, well below the international average of 6-8 per cent. “The aim is to have something to offer most patients. Then, when you have enough trials, you can be more choosy. You’ll always want the most innovative and the best for your patients.” The reasons for the low availability of clinical trials are many – geography, the relative under-representation of research and development within Ireland’s pharma sector, and a lack of resources.
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Photo: Anthony Edwards
MAEVE LOWERY
More engagement is needed with the pharmaceutical sector to secure earlier access to new drugs, she says. “We have the research talent and the industry presence, but it will take the academic partnership to make it worthwhile for them.” Modern, cutting-edge therapies can work wonders, but they come at a high price. Lowery says she doesn’t have any easy answers to the ethical issues posed by high drug costs. “It’s not unique to Ireland, it’s a problem worldwide. The only way to tackle it may be to engage with industry and other stakeholders. Trials are certainly one way to access drugs without these cost issues. “If you explain to a patient what the actual benefit of a drug is, sometimes they also agree it’s not worthwhile; for example, where it extends life by an average of a
number of weeks. In a system with limited resources, you cannot give every drug to every person. We have to identify the correct biomarkers to be able to say which patient will benefit.” Maeve Lowery grew up in a non-medical family in the north Dublin suburb of Clontarf, where she attended Holy Faith school, which can also claim credit for educating the current Coombe hospital master Sharon Sheehan and former National Maternity Hospital master Rhona Mahony. She went on to study medicine in University College Dublin and after graduating, was halfway through medical training when she was awarded a scholarship to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the largest and oldest private cancer care centre in the
TRINITY TODAY 2019
world. There, she specialised in pancreatic cancer and was made a consultant at 31. “My husband moved over too and worked as a surgeon in New York Presbyterian, Cornell. We were there eight or nine years and I was very happy in the job. They have endless resources. They pioneered translational research, and it was a great place to work.” You sense a “but” coming, and it does. “I was in a comfortable position, it would have been a lovely life, but there’s always a draw towards Ireland.” When the academic consultant position she now occupies was advertised, it was the deciding factor. “The job description was right up my alleyway. It was a great opportunity to be involved in something new here at Trinity. And by then, we had our first son (of two) so that was another element in the decision to come back to Ireland. “I’ve felt very welcome at Trinity from the beginning and I am seriously impressed by the students.” And a good work/life balance is probably easier to achieve in Ireland than the US, she reckons: “Of course, if you love your job, it becomes easier.” Now firmly ensconced back in Ireland, the core health issues she sees are the same on both sides of the Atlantic. “I see the problems in the health service here, as they struggle to get resources. I’m ashamed my patients have to wait to see me, when there aren’t enough chairs in the waiting room, but I also see the equity of care we provide in Ireland, which compares so well with the United States, where the fact that so many people just couldn’t access healthcare really bothered me.” The development of the Trinity St. James’s Cancer Institute into Ireland’s first comprehensive cancer centre will, says Professor Lowery, be a major advance for the country. “Already, the Institute is bringing cutting-edge scientific expertise together with highly specialised patient care and innovative education programmes. This is the way forward, to improve patient outcomes now and transform cancer care in Ireland for generations to come.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Paul Cullen B.A.I. (1985) is Health Editor of The Irish Times. Follow him on Twitter @paulcullenit.
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SEBASTIAN BARRY
INTERVIEW:
Sebastian
Barry
By Nadine O’Regan
Photo: Naoise Culhane
In the most successful period of his career to date, Sebastian Barry tells Nadine O’Regan why the storyteller still feels like a student at 64.
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S
ebastian Barry has won myriad plaudits for his novels and plays over the years, but when it comes to the art of storytelling, the Irish writer considers himself an eternal student. “In a funny way, you’re always starting out,” Barry says, as he settles himself in the Alumni Room, looking out onto a cold and rainy day in Trinity, where he once studied Latin and English. “It’s always new for me – because whenever I’m starting a book, you’ve never written this book before. I think it was Günter Grass who said he always comes to writing as if for the fi rst time.” It’s an energetic and sparky approach to fiction and it’s one that has seen Barry’s career flourish through the decades. At 64, Barry, an erudite and engaging presence with a flair for a colourful anecdote, has entered perhaps the most successful period of his career. Having already been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker Prize, in 2017, the Wicklow-based author became the fi rst author to win the prestigious Costa Book of the Year prize twice, for his novels The Secret Scripture and Days Without End. With a fi lm adaptation of Days Without End in the pipeline, Barry’s latest play, On Blueberry Hill, recently premiered in an off-Broadway production Stateside. Barry is also the Laureate for Irish Fiction, having taken over the three-year post from previous incumbent Anne Enright, who was the fi rst person to occupy the prestigious role, an initiative of the Arts Council which seeks to reward the contribution of writers to Irish cultural life, while also supporting them to promote Irish literature and encourage a new generation of readers and writers. “The moment that Michael D reached up to put the medal around my neck was a scrumptious moment,” he recalls. “But I was worried, because you have to invent yourself – and do something meaningful. So my idea was to do book clubs with people who were temporarily constrained, whether in hospital, prison or direct provision. And I have found it quite overwhelming in a good
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Photo: Naoise Culhane
SEBASTIAN BARRY
Sebastian Barry & Nadine O’Regan
way, just to go down as an ordinary citizen, father and writer, and be with people who were maybe having to do their dialysis three days a week. They engage with you in this beautiful way.” Barry has always rooted his creative energy in other people, and in the stories and secrets they might tell him. Although he has a difficult relationship with his architect father, Barry’s mother was the late Joan O’Hara, a member of the Abbey Players, best known for playing the role of Eunice in Fair City. “She was wonderfully indiscreet – if there were any family secrets, they were there to be told to me,” he says. “But the minus side of that was that we were told things far too young.” A comforting contrast came in the shape of Barry’s grandparents. “I made a sanctuary of them,” he says. “One taught me how to paint and the other taught me how to listen to stories. I wrote a novel called The Temporary Gentleman and it was the hardest thing I’ve done, because it was about my grandfather.” More recently, Barry’s inspiration has stemmed from his three children, Toby, Merlin and Coral. The central relationship in Days Without End was sparked by Barry’s son Toby, who was 16 when he revealed to his parents in 2014 that he was gay. Barry and his wife Alison had been worrying a
lot previously about Toby, who had seemed depressed, but the effect of coming out was transformative for him, even though Irish society sometimes remains an inhospitable place. “Toby has told me that not a week goes by without something being said to him in the street,” Barry says. “There’s no such thing as a hate crime in this country. There’s no specific law against homophobic remarks made in public, which I think is very serious.” As part of his fiction laureateship, Barry has begun giving occasional courses to university students – and he hopes that part of what he will teach them is to remember that they must be themselves, both in real life and, if they seek to become writers, in how they compose their fiction. “It’s the shape of your inner mind [that’s important], and not somebody else’s shape,” he says. “You make sentences out of an inchoate sense of something. To my mind, it’s easier to write like James Joyce than yourself, even if your own work makes no stain upon the silence, and is of no worth. Nonetheless, that is the higher thing to do. It’s your birdsong.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nadine O’Regan M.Phil. (2001) is a journalist and broadcaster. She is Books and Arts Editor with The Sunday Business Post. Follow her on Twitter at @nadineoregan.
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SEBASTIAN BARRY
Days Without End EXTRACT FROM DAYS WITHOUT END BY SEBASTIAN BARRY
Chapter One The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake. Like decking out our poor lost troopers for marriage rather than death. All their uniforms brushed down with lamp-oil into a state never seen when they were alive. Their faces clean shaved, as if the embalmer sure didn’t like no whiskers showing. No one that knew him could have recognised Trooper Watchorn because those famous Dundrearies was gone. Anyway Death likes to make a stranger of your face. True enough their boxes weren’t but cheap wood but that
was not the point. You lift one of those boxes and the body makes a big sag in it. Wood cut so thin at the mill it was more a wafer than a plank. But dead boys don’t mind things like that. The point was, we were glad to see them so well turned out, considering. I am talking now about the finale of my first engagement in the business of war. 1851 it was most likely. Since the bloom was gone off me, I had volunteered aged seventeen in Missouri. If you had all your limbs they took you. If you were a oneeyed boy they might take you too even so.
“Swear to God, army was a good life. I was seventeen or thereabouts beginning, I could not say for certain. I will not say the years going up to my army days was easy. But all that dancing put muscle on me, in a wiry sort of way.”
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The only pay worse than the worst pay in America was army pay. And they fed you queer stuff till your shit just stank. But you were glad to get work because if you didn’t work for the few dollars in America you hungered, I had learned that lesson. Well, I was sick of hungering. Believe me when I say there is a certain type of man loves soldiering, no matter how mean the pay. First thing, you got a horse. He might be a spavined nag, he might be plagued by colic, he might show a goitre in his neck the size of a globe, but he was a horse. Second place, you got a uniform. It might have certain shortcomings in the stitching department, but it was a uniform. Blue as a bluebottle’s hide. Swear to God, army was a good life. I was seventeen or there-abouts beginning, I could not say for certain. I will not say the years going up to my army days was easy. But all that dancing put muscle on me, in a wiry sort of way. I’m not speaking against my customers, I’m speaking for them. If you pay a dollar for a dance you like a good few sweeps of the floor for that, God knows. Yes, the army took me, I’m proud to say. Thank God John Cole was my first friend in America and so in the army too and the last friend for that matter. He was with me nearly all through this exceeding surprising Yankee sort of life which was good going in every way. No more than a boy like me but even at sixteen years old he looked like a man right enough. I first saw him when he was fourteen or so, very different. That’s what the saloon owner said too. Time’s up, fellas, you ain’t kids no more, he says. Dark face, black eyes, Indian eyes they called them that time. Glittering. Older fellas in the platoon said Indians were just evil boys, blank-faced evil boys fit to kill you soon as look at you. Said Indians were to be cleared off the face of the earth, most like that would be the best policy. Soldiers like to talk high. That’s how courage is made most like, said John Cole, being an understanding man. John Cole and me we came to the volunteering point together of course.
We was offering ourselves in a joint sale I guess and the same look of the arse out of his trousers that I had he had too. Like twins. Well when we finished up at the saloon we didn’t leave in no dresses. We must have looked like beggar boys. He was born in New England where the strength died out of his father’s earth. John Cole was only twelve when he lit out a-wandering. First moment I saw him I thought, there’s a pal. That’s what it was. Thought he was a dandy-looking sort of boy. Pinched though he was in the face by hunger. Met him under a hedge in goddamn Missouri. We was only under the hedge as a consequence the heavens were open in a downpour. Way out on those mudflats beyond old St Louis. Expect to see a sheltering duck sooner than a human. Heavens open. I scarper for cover and suddenly he’s there. Might have never seen him otherwise. Friend for a whole life. Strange and fateful encounter you could say. Lucky. But first thing he draws a little sharp knife he carried made of a broken spike. He was intending to stick it in me if I looked to go vicious against him. He was a very kept-back-looking thirteen years old I reckon. Anyhows under the hedge afore-mentioned when we got to talking he said his great-grandma was a Indian whose people were run out of the east long since. Over in Indian country now. He had never met them. Don’t know why he told me that so soon only I was very friendly and maybe he thought he would lose that blast of friendship if I didn’t know the bad things quickly. Well. I told him how best to look at that. Me, the child of poor Sligonians blighted likewise. No, us McNultys didn’t got much to crow about. Maybe out of respect for the vulnerable soul of John Cole I might skip ahead violently and avoid an account of our earlier years. Except he might also acknowledge that those years were important in their way and I cannot say either that they constituted in any way a time of shameful suffering in particular. Were they shameful? I don’t see eye to eye with that. Let me call them our dancing days. Why the hell not. After all we was only children obliged to survive in a dangerous terrain. And survive we
TRINITY TODAY 2019
“First moment I saw him I thought, there’s a pal. That’s what it was. Thought he was a dandy-looking sort of boy. Pinched though he was in the face by hunger.” did and as you see I have lived to tell the tale. Having made our acquaintance under an anonymous hedge it seemed natural and easy to join together in the enterprise of continuing survival. That is John Cole in his minority and I placed our steps side by side on the rainy road and proceeded into the next town in that frontier district where there were hundreds of rough miners working and a half dozen tumultuous saloons set up in a muddy thoroughfare endeavouring to entertain them. Not that we knew much of that. In these times John Cole was a slight boy as I have laboured to illustrate with his river-black eyes and his lean face as sharp as a hunting dog. I was my younger self. That is though I was maybe fifteen after my Irish and Canadian and American adventures I looked as young as him.
Published by Faber and Faber. Available in bookshops nationwide.
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TRINITY LONG ROOM HUB & ACCENTURE
What does it mean
to be human By Caelainn Hogan
From AI-operated elevators to data-driven algorithms deciding our futures, the Trinity Long Room Hub is exploring what it means to be human today.
F
in the 21st century?
rom algorithms driving our decisions to smart devices tracking our lives, even the most basic integration of technology into our daily existence is so advanced and ever evolving that it has become urgently necessary to question how this might be changing our understanding of what it means to be human. “Content is king, but context is God,” Jane Ohlmeyer tells me. We are sitting inside her office at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute, a modern architectural Tetris opposite what was once the cutting-edge Brutalism of the Arts Block in Trinity. Since opening in 2010, the Hub has become a dedicated research institute, supporting interdisciplinary collaborations in Trinity and championing the humanities as crucial to future innovations. As Director of the Hub, Ohlmeyer is now pioneering new collaborations between the humanities and the tech industry, with the launch last year of the new speaker series: “What does it mean to be human in the 21st century?” With public talks from leading minds in academia, industry, arts and the media on the interaction between humanities and technology, the series interrogates and explores what it means to be human in a digital age. Ohlmeyer believes the humanities can provide the context needed to ethically ground technological innovation. While humanities in Trinity are top-ranked, there is a chronic issue of underfunding. In breaking down the binary between humanities and tech, one that she says employers themselves never seem to be limited by, Ohlmeyer believes the Hub can future-proof the humanities.
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
Professor Jane Ohlmeyer
The Trinity Long Room Hub series looks at the impact of tech on what it means to be human, but also raises questions about how human beliefs and social constructs become ingrained in emerging technology. “Machines are doing a lot of the screening of applicants,” she said when speaking about diversifying employment within the tech industry. “Algorithms that are designed by very middle class white men.” In what ways are inherent biases written into the technologies being designed today? One of the speakers at the launch of the series was technoanthropologist Genevieve Bell. A few years ago, she was speaking at the Other Voices festival in Dingle about being on the “edge” of things. The 3A Institute that Bell founded at the Australian National University is on the cutting edge of the “next industrial revolution”, not only researching how cyber-physical-systems will impact humanity, but designing education models to face the challenges ahead. While visiting Ireland, Bell became connected with the Hub and found herself gravitating back to it. “Everyone at the the Trinity Long Room Hub is incredibly welcoming,” she said. “The ways in which you have the tech innovation sector growing in Ireland attracted me.” When Bell started working at Intel in 1991, being an anthropologist, she was considered “odd”. But she has spent more than 20 years working in tech innovation, in many ways more fixated by people’s interactions with technology than the technology itself. Now, there is recognition of the urgent need to understand the deep social, economic and cultural shifts technology is causing. She believes it is important to recognise that technology has a past, not only a rapidly evolving future. From illuminated manuscripts to the transatlantic telegraph cable in Ireland, technology has been radically changing our societies and our world for centuries. Bell was invited to participate in the 160th anniversary of this cable, which stretches from a station on Valentia Island, off the coast of Kerry, to a tiny fishing village called Heart’s Content in Canada. “What did it mean when you connected those cables?” she wonders. “Time, distance and social relationships are some of the most important indices in a culture.” A distance that once took weeks and days to cross contracted into a space traversed in minutes, affecting cultural distances, imagined differences, how news moves, how ideas circulate. “History gives us better questions to ask,” she says. “What is the intent? Who is going to use it?” The intentions of the designer, imaginings about who is going to use a product and why, lives on within the technology that is created. I think of what that says about the fact social media started off as a way to rate if people were hot or not.
Photo: Marc O’Sullivan
Trinity Long Room Hub & Accenture
Trinity’s Arts and Humanities is the only faculty area ranked in the QS World University Rankings global top 50, and are top overall in Ireland. However, despite the strength of their disciplines and reputation internationally, there has been traditionally little engagement between enterprise and the Arts and Humanities, while relationships overall between education and enterprise have been growing in recent years. In April 2018, the Trinity Long Room Hub worked with Trinity Research and Innovation to remedy this and invited potential enterprise partners to explore how to broaden these relationships and to discuss the changing needs of business, the need to insert ethics into the design and tech conversation as well as the potential for creative solutions to organisation needs. Present at that conversation was Accenture, keen to hear more on the human-centric approach which could be explored in a new partnership and a major new speaker series “What does it Mean to be Human in the 21st Century?”. Organised by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute and The Dock, Accenture’s global flagship R&D and Innovation Centre in Dublin, the series aims to ask some of the disruptive questions that can only be addressed when academia meets industry, and the sciences join the humanities. How do we understand ourselves, the world, and our place within it? How does technology account for gender, culture, ethnicity, art and class? In a data-driven world, organisations such as Accenture recognise the urgent need to place the human perspectives embedded in the Arts and Humanities at the core of new developments in business and intelligent systems. See tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub
What does it mean to be human in the 21st century? Next up: 26TH SEPTEMBER 2019: Mark Pollock, explorer and Simone George, human rights lawyer
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TRINITY LONG ROOM HUB & ACCENTURE
Data is artificial intelligence’s “original sin”, Bell explains, when I ask about how inherent human biases and prejudices are replicated through artificial intelligence. “If you’re not thinking really critically about your data sources, your assumptions,” she warns, “all those things lurking within that data get built into those systems.” A ProPublica investigation in 2016 found that software already used in the criminal justice system, to predict whether people arrested would break the law again, was falsely flagging black people as “future criminals” at twice the rate of white people. During the 1950s, the power of computing grew in parallel with an existential fear that computers would replace people. Innovation was narrowly focused on the mathematical science and purely instrumentalist thinking. Could human intellect be broken down into sufficiently small pieces so a machine could replicate it? Could you teach a machine to make sense of how humans talk? Now Bell believes we need to move beyond what is strictly rational. “Who wasn’t in the conversation?” Bell asked of those times. She believes that the environmental, emotional and cultural forces need to be central considerations when designing new technologies. She reminds me that “autonomous” artificial intelligence is still within a framework. There are autonomous elevators now that predict where people are likely to be in a building and launch themselves accordingly. “Let’s be clear, though, they can only go
Claire Carroll, Portfolio Director for The Dock
Photo: Courtesy of Accenture
up and down,” she laughs. “They can’t leave the building.” The Dock is Accenture’s flagship research and development centre in Dublin. In a shiny modern office in the area of the inner city now dubbed Silicon Docks, prototypes are designed and emerging technologies incubated. The last time I was in the area was during the South Docks festival, a parade organised by the local St Andrew’s Resource Centre for communities in the area, now surrounded by some of big tech’s biggest headquarters. The Dock says it seeks to “pioneer new ways to fulfil human needs using emerging technology.” I was interested in how tech was addressing urgent human needs such as housing. I was led through the open-plan office space, with free-standing, phone-box-style pods for private calls. In a simple meeting room in
Photo: Tegan Osborne
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Professor Genevieve Bell
the back, I meet with Claire Carroll, the Portfolio Director for The Dock. We talked about their completed work on “Future Home”, international market research on smart devices in the home that found companies needed to adopt a “human centric” approach to designing products. The research highlighted concerns about smart devices in homes increasing isolation and becoming a barrier to social interaction. Younger respondents were the most negative about the way technology was affecting their lives, concerned about their privacy and smart devices in their homes knowing too much about them. The Dock was also involved in developing digital identification using block chain and biometric technology, as part of their ID 2020 project, in partnership with Microsoft. With a UN consortium held on ID 2020, the project aimed to address the challenges facing the estimated 1.1 billion people without formal identification. Carroll described their challenge as showing “the art of the possible”, designing the prototype, a database system enabling multiple parties to share access to data, promising a high level of security and giving individuals consent over who can access their information, without a need for a central authority. In conclusion, could digital identity change what it means to be human? Displaced, stateless and homeless people often need identification, from maintaining legal residence and voting to accessing services and securing accommodation. Could such a technology be used for the tracking and surveillance of migrants by governments, at a time when anti-immigration sentiment is on the rise in many countries? Once this technology was developed, how would it evolve or be commercialised? What did it mean to be a human with an identity on the block chain? The Hub’s interdisciplinary approach to technology engaging anthropologists, journalists, neuroscientists and artists attempts to ask both the how and the why.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Caelainn Hogan B.A. (2011) has written for The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, The New Statesman among others. Her first book, Republic of Shame, will be published by Penguin Random House. Follow her on Twitter @CaelainnH.
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DIVERSITY
TRINITY TODAY 2019
DIVERSITY CENTRE STAGE:
Being seen Acting, at its simplest, is the art of representation. Can The Lir Academy and the Samuel Beckett Centre ensure a student body that is diverse enough to represent the nation?
I
n a way, Clinton Liberty could always see himself attending The Lir, the National Academy of Acting at Trinity College Dublin, until he actually got there. In the foyer of its modern building hangs a gallery of headshots of each year’s graduating class, facing into an intensive year of productions and a future in the industry. Liberty, a warm and confident speaker with an easy smile, remembers thinking, “Oh, there’s nobody there who looks like me. I guess there’s not a lot of black actors in third year at the moment.” In a school in which class sizes are necessarily small and competition for places is high (16 students are admitted to the Bachelor in Acting course each year, selected by a rigorous audition process), it wasn’t a realisation that had escaped the attentions of The Lir Academy’s Director, Loughlin Deegan, either. Five years into The Lir’s existence, a strategic review resulted in new objectives for the dramatic arts conservatory (which also provides a bachelor’s degree in Stage Management and Technical Theatre, master’s degrees in Playwriting, Directing and Stage Design, a foundation course in Acting, and a growing list of short courses). Of those objectives, one has been made a top priority: to help diversify the student base through the encouragement of access and outreach programmes, strategic partnerships, and wherever possible, by putting a face on The Lir Academy’s achievements in equality so far.
“We feel the need to do it, because we feel an absolute obligation to reflect Ireland back at itself.”
Clinton Liberty, Bachelor in Acting (2019)
Photo: Kevin Newcomen
By Peter Crawley
“We feel the need to do it,” says Deegan, “because we feel an absolute obligation to reflect Ireland back at itself.” Acting is the business of representation – you take on another identity, inhabit a role, invite people to see lives imagined on stage or on screen. But how well are Ireland’s rapidly changing demographics represented by professional acting? Places at The Lir Academy are always assigned by merit, but its pool of applicants is not a broad panoply. At a time when there has been much soul-searching in the industry about the decline of working-class artists, a renewed emphasis on enshrining gender and sexual equality, and a better appreciation for Ireland’s burgeoning intercultural identity, the field of higher education, as much as the culture at large, is encouraged to check its privilege. “We realise that we have got to get out there, particularly to talk to young people, to let them know that the opportunity to train to work in the creative arts at The Lir exists,” says Deegan.
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
DIVERSITY
“Acting is a particularly difficult career to proselytise for, so we need to do that creatively and sensitively, just by really making people aware of the opportunity. That’s where the new Diversity Champions come in. It’s the classic idea: If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.” To some extent, when Clinton Liberty first arrived to The Lir Academy, the wall of white faces that greeted him was the exception rather than the rule. Since its first graduates emerged, in 2014, The Lir has been able to point to some diversity among its former students, including David Fawaz (from Nigeria who graduated in 2018), the Ghanaian-Irish actor Kwaku Fortune (2017) and the IrishFilipina actor Vanessa Emme (one of The Lir’s first graduates in 2014). In 2019, Liberty is one of two Nigerian-Irish actors to graduate from the Academy, together with Patrick Martins. “I had just about become used to the idea of being the only black person in [Irish] acting,” says Martins. “So when I first saw Clinton, it opened up the possibility of actually acting with another black person in this country.” Now, both Liberty and Martins will be The Lir’s first official Diversity Champions, visiting schools and communities to give talks about their experiences in the Academy, and partaking in social media campaigns to highlight the possibilities available
at The Lir and in the acting profession. “Encouraging students to come to the arts and acknowledge the arts is something that I’m very passionate about,” says Martins, whose own journey persuaded skeptical peers that acting could be more than a hobby. “It’s something I really want to encourage.” It also serves a pressing need in the industry itself. One frank question that Liberty and Martins had for Deegan, in their first year at The Lir, was whether they would find sufficient work in Ireland after graduation. Deegan, then fielding requests for actors of colour from casting directors in the wake of 2016’s #OscarsSoWhite protest, told them, “You’re going to be fine.” As with heightened awareness within the Irish theatre industry since the #WakingTheFeminists movement, #OscarsSoWhite has helped to spur a greater equality of opportunities in filmmaking. “There is a lot of work out there for actors of colour,” says Deegan, referring to the booming film and television industry. “People are actively looking for diversity in the cast of TV and film dramas.” Presently, in fact, there are barely enough actors of colour to meet demand. That might come as a reassuring sign of cultural shift to Vanessa Emme, one of the first graduates of The Lir Academy, whose earlier experience as an actor with Irish and Filipina heritage was a sobering lesson in the politics of “being seen”.
Vanessa Emme, Bachelor in Acting (2014)
Photo: Faye Thomas
“I think there is also the notion of colour-conscious casting, which does take ethnicity into account. Why shouldn’t actors of colour be able to play certain characters?”
“I told Loughlin that, based on some previous experiences, maybe I wouldn’t be seen professionally for the kind of parts that I was getting to play in university,” she says. “It is an utter joy how the world has been moving since towards colour-blind casting. And, on the flipside, I think there is also the notion of colour-conscious casting, which does take ethnicity into account. Why shouldn’t actors of colour be able to play certain characters? Opening up that conversation was really helpful for me, and for the school too, I think.” If The Lir Academy must be proactive when it comes to promoting diversity – “to ensure that the application pool is as diverse as the population,” as Deegan puts it, “while still keeping it a meritocracy” – in matters of gender, sexuality and ability, it must necessarily be responsive. “A younger generation is leading us,” he says. “We have non-binary students, genderqueer students and transgender students. In most courses, it’s straightforward – as a designer, a playwright or a technician, your gender is irrelevant. It’s a particular challenge within actor training, though, where almost every day you are asked to choose [to play] a binary gender. Our focus at the moment is on how can we better support gender-diverse students.”
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DIVERSITY
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Patrick Martins, Bachelor in Acting (2019)
Indeed, everything from the IT systems of The Lir (where applicants once chose titles from a dropdown menu) to the facilities have been made gender neutral. “I think we have been showing leadership within Trinity in this regard,” says Deegan. At Trinity’s School of Creative Arts, which now hosts the Drama, Film and Music departments, the diversity of its students, faculty and course materials is something to keep its eye on. As with The Lir Academy, students at the School’s Drama department at the Samuel Beckett Centre are also admitted by audition, with most offers dependent on the CAO process. The department can also award ten discretionary places, a boon to disadvantaged applicants, which in tandem with Trinity Access has helped to broaden the social-class backgrounds of its students and in turn brought a more interrogative dynamic to its classrooms and political charge to its work. According to Dr Melissa Sihra, Head of Drama, the most significant development in her department’s diversity in recent years has been in gender identity. In the past five years, for instance, students who identify as transgender, nonbinary or gender-queer have come to make up ten per cent of the Drama department, while training from Transgender Equality Network Ireland, together with guidance from Trinity’s Equality Office, has helped to inform a sympathetic, accommodating environment. As with classes and coursework that respond to the needs of students with physical disabilities, that signals a comparatively rapid evolution in equality. This year, in fact, there are more female employees than male at the department for the first time in its 27-year history.
Photo: Lorna Fitzsimons
As with The Lir, a department concerned with how art and society correspond must itself keep pace with that society. “I think we are really on top of it in Drama,” says Sihra, “because so much of theatre is about identity, human exploration, sexualities, the body on stage... So we are already thinking about these questions in our work.” The department could point to its own unofficial diversity champions, graduates who exemplify inclusivity and might encourage a broader field of applicants, although Sihra is hesitant to tokenise. “Well, Ruth Negga is our star, an Irish woman and a woman of colour,” she says. Negga, who graduated from the Bachelor in Theatre Studies in 2001 (The Lir’s predecessor), was nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars for her role in 2016’s Loving, and soon returns to play the lead role in the Gate Theatre’s production of Hamlet, which transfers to New York in early 2020.
“I think we are really on top of it in Drama, because so much of theatre is about identity, human exploration, sexualities, the body on stage... So we are already thinking about these questions in our work.” That Negga is an inspiration goes without saying: it’s easier to think of her Hamlet, for director Yaël Farber, not so much as colour-blind or colour-conscious, gender-blind or genderconscious, than as an invitation to see the play differently. Before Negga’s performance, Martins never recalled seeing an actor of colour on the stage of the Gate before, and similarly hopes Irish theatre can absorb African-Irish experience. Emme, who remembers struggling to find “examples of me in the arts” as a young actor, long considered Negga to be “the only person I could see as a beacon of hope.” But Negga might be just one extraordinary example of what diversity makes possible, rather than the answer. As The Lir’s graduates dive into the industry – Emme has just finished work on the prestigious television show Dublin Murders, and both Liberty and Martins had work already lined up before graduating – the benefit of a diverse classroom, or diverse campus, or ultimately a diverse nation, will champion itself. “We can see things differently,” Martins says of the broader perspective that two cultures afford. That might as well go for the shared benefits of diversity itself. “It brings more options to how you tackle something,” he says. “You have a lot more to choose from.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Peter Crawley B.A. (2000) is a journalist and critic for The Irish Times. He is a graduate of the School of English and the Drama Department at Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College Dublin.
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
THE BOOK SHELF
The Book Shelf A selection of recent books published by some of Trinity’s academics.
100 DAYS TO A YOUNGER BRAIN
The aim of living a brain-healthy life is not just to reduce the risk of dementia and other serious health issues, but also to improve the quality of your life and brain performance today. By Dr Sabina Brennan 100 Days to a Younger Brain will empower you to make informed choices every day about your sleeping, eating and lifestyle habits that will benefit all aspects of your life, from work to relationships, and achieving your personal goals. This book will inspire you to do one small thing every day to radically improve your brain health. Orion Publishing Group
THE CONSTITUTION OF IRELAND: A CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS Hart Publishing
SUPPORT, TRANSMISSION, EDUCATION AND TARGET VARIETIES IN THE CELTIC LANGUAGES
REFRAMING IRISH YOUTH IN THE SIXTIES
Routledge
Liverpool University Press
Edited by Dr Noel Ó Murchadha and Professor Bettina Migge
By Dr Carole Holohan
By Dr Oran Doyle
Presenting the 1937 Constitution as a seminal moment in an ongoing constitutional evolution, rather than a foundational event, this book demonstrates how the Irish constitutional order revolves around a bipartite separation of powers. Beginning with an overview of Irish constitutional history leading to the enactment of the 1937 Constitution before exploring the foundational decisions made by the Constitution in relation to territory, people and citizenship, it details the key institutions of state and analyses how different constitutional actors exercise their respective powers of governance, contestation and oversight.
Shedding light on the main issues facing the Celtic languages into the future and showcasing different approaches to studying such contexts, this book presents contributions interested in explicating the modern condition of the Celtic languages. It engages with attitudinal support for the Celtic languages, modes of language transmission, choosing educational models in minority settings, pedagogical approaches for language learners and perceptions of linguistic practices. These issues are considered within the context of language shift and revitalisation in the Celtic languages.
While emigration was the key youth issue of the 1950s, young people became a pivotal point around which a new national project of economic growth hinged. Transnational ideas and international models increasingly framed Irish attitudes to young people’s education, welfare and employment. In using youth as a lens, this book takes an innovative approach that enables a multi-faceted examination of the sixties, providing fresh perspectives on key social changes and cultural continuities.
MUSIC AND SOUND IN SILENT FILM
Despite their name, the silent films of the early cinematic era were frequently accompanied by music and other sound elements of many Routledge kinds, including mechanical instruments, live performers, and audience sing-alongs. Edited by Dr Ruth Barton and The 12 chapters in this concise book explore Dr Simon Trezise the multitude of functions filled by music in the rapidly changing context of the silent film era, as the concept of cinema itself developed. With contributors drawn from film studies and music disciplines, and including both senior and emerging scholars, Music and Sound in Silent Film offers an essential introduction to the origins of film music and the cinematic art form.
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THE BOOK SHELF
TRINITY TODAY 2019
WHY SCIENCE NEEDS ART
Reflecting on a time when art and science were considered inseparable and symbiotic pursuits, this book discusses how they have historically informed and influenced each other, before by Dr Richard Roche, Dr Francesca considering how public perception of the Farina and Dr Seán Commins relationship between these disciplines has fundamentally changed. Using examples from diverse areas including microscopy, brain injury, classical art, and data visualisation, the book delves into the history of the intersection of these two disciplines, before considering current tensions between the fields. The emerging field of neuroaesthetics and its attempts to scientifically understand what humans find beautiful is also explored, suggesting ways in which the relationship between art and science may return to a more co-operative state in the future. Routledge
INTERPRETING AND THE POLITICS OF RECOGNITION
FEMALE COMBATANTS AFTER ARMED STRUGGLE
Routledge
Routledge
Edited by Dr Christopher Stone and Professor Lorraine Leeson
Covering key topics from colonialism to representation, ethics and power, this book looks at the different linguistic modalities (signed and spoken) used within communities to investigate equality of citizens. The contributors include leading authorities in their fields and use a wide spread of examples from a variety of disparate cultures – including deaf and ethnic minority groups. This volume will be of interest to practising interpreters, researchers and advanced students in the areas of Interpreting Studies, Translation Studies, and Linguistics and Communication Studies.
THE HISTORY AND HERITAGE OF ST JAMES’S HOSPITAL, DUBLIN
By Dr Niall Gilmartin
Based on in-depth interviews with 40 research participants, mostly former combatants within the Irish Republican Army (IRA), this book offers a critical exploration of republican women and conflict transition in the North of Ireland. It represents an important intervention in the field of gender, political violence, and peace, and more specifically, female combatants and conflict transition. It is analytically significant in its exploration of the ways in which gender operates within non-state military movements emerging from conflict and will be of interest to students.
The history of St James’s Hospital stretches back to 1703 when an act was passed to build a workhouse on its site. Just under 30 years later, a foundling hospital was added to the workhouse. Four Courts Press The opening chapters discuss this period and the pitiful treatment of abandoned children. When the Foundling Hospital was closed in 1829, the buildings were used to house the South By Professor Davis Coakley Dublin Union Workhouse. The workhouse played a crucial role and Mary Coakley during the Great Famine, giving shelter to thousands of starving people. The buildings of the workhouse were commandeered by the 4th Battalion of the Irish Volunteers during Easter Week 1916. After Independence, the South Dublin Union was renamed St Kevin’s Hospital and became a municipal hospital for the poor of the city. In 1971, three of the oldest voluntary hospitals in Dublin – Mercer’s, Sir Patrick Dun’s and Baggot Street Hospitals – amalgamated with St Kevin’s to form St James’s Hospital. Over a very short period of time, St James’s Hospital became the largest teaching hospital in Ireland. This book describes the history of these developments and their impact on the city of Dublin.
MARINA CARR: PASTURES OF THE UNKNOWN Palgrave Macmillan By Dr Melissa Sihra
Dr Melissa Sihra locates the theatre of Marina Carr within a female genealogy that revises the patriarchal origins of modern Irish drama. The creative vision of Lady Augusta Gregory underpins the analysis of Carr’s dramatic vision throughout the volume in order to re-situate the woman artist as central to Irish theatre. For Carr, “writing is more about the things you cannot understand than the things you can”, and her evocation of “pastures of the unknown” forms the thematic through-line of this work. Lady Gregory’s plays offer an intuitive lineage with Carr which can be identified in their use of language, myth, landscape, women, the transformative power of storytelling and infinite energies of nature and the Otherworld. This book reconnects the severed bridge between Carr and Gregory in order to acknowledge a foundational status for all women in Irish theatre.
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LINDA DJOUGANG
Photo: Laszlo Geczo
TRINITY TODAY 2019
SPORT ONE-ON-ONE:
Linda Djougang By Helen Hanley
Trinity nursing student Linda Djougang’s three-year journey from social tag rugby to representing Ireland at this year’s Six Nations.
L
inda Djougang first heard about Trinity Access from her guidance counsellor in school. She knew instantly it was something she wanted to do. However, her dream of going to Trinity almost didn’t come true. Facing tough competition from the hundreds of others who apply annually to do the Trinity Access Foundation Course, Linda didn’t make the initial cut of 25. Fast forward to Leaving Cert results day. It’s raining and Linda is in the bank trying to pay the enrolment fees for a Post Leaving Certificate (PLC) course. This is her plan B, not having gotten in to Trinity. But the money will take too long to transfer into the relevant account, so she’ll miss the deadline. “I remember standing outside the bank and crying, not knowing what to do next. I was thinking – this future that I’d envisioned for myself is never going to happen.” But just at that point, Linda’s luck took a turn for the better. When she took out her phone, she noticed she had a missed call. She rang the number only to discover that it was Trinity Access who had been trying to ring her. Someone had dropped out of the Foundation Course and would she like to take up the place instead? Call it serendipity, call it good things happening to good people – whatever explanation you choose, it’s fair to say that since that fateful day back in 2015, Linda has never looked back. In fact, her life story seems to be a series of unplanned-for events that have happily altered the course of her life. Take her involvement
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LINDA DJOUGANG
next day, but I’m loving it. The rugby girls, from Ireland, Leinster and Trinity, are like my family now. We spend almost every day together, travel together, train together, talk rugby together.” The other thing competing for her attention is the course she’s studying in Trinity. She’s just finished her third year of General Nursing and may go on to do Midwifery. “I always wanted to have a career where I would help people. That’s something that has stayed with me since I was a child in Cameroon. My grandpa was sick and there are no nursing homes there – we take care of our family members ourselves. I enjoyed that. Also, I want to do something that gives back, because growing up, so much was given to me.” Linda is also keen to learn as much as she can about rugby, so that she can continue to improve and to achieve her dreams. “There’s so much to learn. I’m learning all the time and haven’t nearly reached my peak. My goal this year was to get capped for Leinster, and that happened in September. But playing for Ireland is a dream come true. “After Six Nations last year, Adam Briggs took me aside and told me he sees me as more of a front row. But since moving into prop, there’s so much technique involved, there’s so much to learn that I’m enjoying the game even more because I’m learning something different.” She now plays loose and tighthead for Ireland and earned two caps in this year’s Six Nations tournament, against England and Scotland. Linda was joined on the squad by fellow Trinity Rugby and Ulster player Kathryn Dane. As for the future, she hopes to remain part of the Ireland set-up. “I definitely want to stay in the squad, improving my game and hopefully qualifying for the World Cup – that would be a dream come true. Not a lot of people have that opportunity, so that’s a big goal I’m setting for myself.”
Photo: Cathal Noonan
with rugby. While she earned her first cap for Ireland in this year’s 2019 Six Nations, Linda only discovered the sport in 2016. Following the Foundation Course, Linda spent time interning at Grant Thornton. “I come from an environment where you don’t see many people wearing suits and the like. Getting over that barrier where you feel more comfortable with people was a big help. I changed so much over the 10 weeks of that internship.” It’s also thanks to Grant Thornton, in a way, that Linda’s rugby career took off. “When I was working there, I saw on my computer that there was a social event featuring tag rugby coming up. Someone asked me if I’d ever played tag rugby before, and I said no but I’d always loved sport growing up, so I decided to give it a go.” The game was held in Wanderers and afterwards, the women’s manager for that team approached Linda. “She asked me if I wanted to play more of a physical game – real rugby. I’d enjoyed myself at the tag, so I said yes, why not? That was really my first experience of rugby.” After playing with them for a season, Linda got a call to try out for Leinster. “I was so nervous,” she says. “I remember it was the last of my summer exams and everyone was going out partying, but I couldn’t go because I was training for the Leinster trials.” Leinster obviously saw what Wanderers saw in her. Linda was selected for the squad and has been part of it ever since. The downside was that she had to leave Wanderers, the club that had given her a start, as they were a division four team and she needed to mix with a more experienced side in order to develop as a player. So she joined Belvedere, which had won the All Ireland League for three years running. “I wanted to be with the best club, and they have so many international players in their team. People said to me, ‘Are you worried that you mightn’t get any game time because they have so many highcalibre players?’ But I thought, I’m willing to take that risk. My mother always told me that if you want to be the best, then you have to hang around with the best.” Even before the rugby, Linda’s involvement with sport also came about almost by chance. When she moved to Ireland from Cameroon at the age of nine, she couldn’t speak English. What ended up bridging the gap for her in those early days was the universal language of sport. Not only did it help her settle in to her new home, she also discovered – again – that she had a previously untapped sporting ability. “A while after I arrived here, my neighbour, who was involved in athletics, asked me to try out for the shot-put. So I rested it in my shoulder, like he showed me, and threw it. He just said, ‘Wow – I’m going to talk to your dad!’” Linda ended up competing in Morton Stadium, where she won a gold medal, setting a new record into the bargain. She also went on to set up an athletics club with her friend just after she started in secondary school. Despite her obvious sporting talent, she’s not sure where it comes from. “Neither of my parents are sporty, but I was quite a tomboy growing up and played a lot of sport – especially football. Cameroon is a big footballing nation!” Nowadays, everything revolves around rugby – and she loves it. “It plays such a big role in my life – it’s all consuming. I finish lectures, go training, get home around 11pm, then repeat the same again the
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Linda Djougang
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Helen Hanley B.A. (1995) is a communications professional with a particular interest in sport.
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
SPORTS ROUND-UP
Victorious DUFC 1st XV celebrate their Colours win
Victorious DUFC (Trinity Rugby) 1st XV celebrate their Colours win
Students competing at the first ever Trinity Archery Open
Game For the
Love of the
Maura Gallahue and Helen Hanley recall Trinity’s sporting successes over the past year.
O
ne of the stand-out events for anyone involved with Trinity’s 50 sports clubs is Colours, the annual showdown with our biggest rivals University College Dublin (UCD). The 2018-19 season represented a mixed bag of Colours results. DUFC men (Trinity Rugby) claimed victory out in Belfield although their female counterparts lost out to UCD. Equestrian had a Colours win for dressage and they also won the show jumping team competition at Intervarsities. There were
SPORT IN NUMBERS 2019
50 sports clubs
Colours wins too for tennis while Trinity and UCD shared the honours in this year’s rowing Colours. After a rocky start (quite literally – the wind was buffeting the boats so much at the start line they found it hard to get into position), each university won two of the four races. In Trinity’s case, this meant wins for the novice men (Dan Quinn Shield) and senior women (Corcoran Cup). There were Colours wins for both the men’s and women’s sections of Harriers (DUHAC), which had some very strong results this year. The profi le of women’s basketball was elevated thanks to the formation of new team Trinity Meteors, a combination of players from Trinity and Meteors. They fi nished just shy of the top spot in Division 1 while the women’s varsity team fi nished the season as Division A winners. It was a high-profi le year for Harriers (DUHAC) who enjoyed successful outings at the Irish Universities’ Indoor Championships, held in Athlone, and the Cross-Country Championships, hosted by National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG). At the latter, the ladies secured silver while Trinity took third overall in the competition. At the former, highlights included a silver in the long jump for Shane Keane, while Sorcha McAllister won gold in the 3,000m. Sorcha, who is on the high-performance programme with Trinity Sport, made her debut for Ireland this year at the European Cross-Country Championships in The Netherlands at U23 level.
64 sport scholarships awarded
12 University Pinks awarded
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SPORTS ROUND-UP
Squash Club team photo
For a while, ladies’ hockey (DULHC) looked like they might be heading back up to the top-fl ight women’s EY league. However, the play-offs didn’t go their way and their consolation had to be fi nishing the season as Leinster Division 1 winners. It was a quiet enough year for GAA in Trinity with memorable moments from the Fresher Hurlers, who won the league for the second year in a row. A highlight for the senior men was winning their Fitzgibbon match against Garda College where they came from six points down to fi nish the game 1-15 to Garda’s 0-13. High-performance athlete Lorcan Tucker made his Ireland senior debut in cricket when he was part of the squad that played England in Malahide in April. While these are all great achievements, there was one sport that stood out in the 2018-19 season and that was Trinity Rugby. The senior men’s team had their best ever fi nish in Division 1’s All Ireland League, completing the season in fourth place, two places above UCD. The U20s men won the Fraser McMullen Cup, beating UCC 41-24, and becoming the fi rst side to claim back-to-back All Ireland titles since 2012. Trinity Rugby’s senior women also had one of their best seasons in recent years, earning promotion to Division 2 following a year of consistently strong results. Keeping with rugby, the club had several players line out for interprovincial and international duty with Linda Djougang earning her fi rst cap for Ireland senior women’s team in the
social sport participants
Table Tennis Club team photo
DULBC Senior 8 celebrating moments after winning the Colours boat race on the River Liffey
Cricketer and sport scholar Lorcan Tucker in action on College Park
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
Six Nations and DUFC man Jack Dunne earning his first Leinster cap. One of the last big events of 2018-19 was the annual Sports Awards, which reflected rugby’s year of dominance when they picked up six of the 11 awards. Other notable mentions go to Archery, which won Club of the Year; Fencing, which won Administrator of the Year; and Association Football’s Áine Tucker, who picked up the inaugural Game Changer of the Year Award. The Sports Centre also won the National Quality Standard Award for the fi fth consecutive year. The awards, formerly known as the White Flags, are given to facilities around the country that meet strict operational standards for leisure and fitness facilities across 250 quality-based criteria. The Sports Centre was deemed to be ‘outstanding’ within the awards’ remit of safety, hygiene, customer service and human resources. Winners are compiled following an extensive audit by Ireland Active, the representative body for the leisure, health and fitness industry.
Find out more at tcd.ie/sport or follow us on Twitter @tcdsports
ABOUT THE AUTHORS Maura Gallahue M.Sc. (2013) is a Communications Officer in Trinity Sport. Helen Hanley B.A. (1995) is a communications professional with a particular interest in sport.
6246 students joined a sports club
Photos: Oisín Keniry, Cathal Noonan and Ivan Rakhmanin.
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
VOLUNTEERING
Alumni
Volunteering WE WANT YOU TO GET INVOLVED
One of the ambitious targets for our Inspiring Generations campaign is to achieve 150,000 hours of volunteering for Trinity. There are several ways that you can give your time.
BECOME A MENTOR Spotlight on a Professional Network: Trinity Business Alumni This year saw the Trinity Business Alumni Network (TBA) go from strength to strength, with over 500 alumni attending professional networking events. This vibrant network is open to all alumni from every discipline who are interested in Business. Events included masterclasses on topical issues like the gig economy, blockchain and developing a career as a non-executive director. TBA sponsored the Business and Technology Forum, student professional development events and organised various Dinner in Camera and social networking events. The TBA president also hosted a sold-out dinner in the Dining Hall in February, with Minister for Finance, Paschal Donohoe, as the guest speaker. See tba.ie for more information.
Whether you are a recent graduate or have a lot of professional experience, your advice and guidance is invaluable to students starting out on their career path. As a mentor, you join fellow graduates from a wide range of industries and backgrounds to support student employability and help our students to pursue challenging and rewarding careers. You can provide valuable support including CV tips, interview advice and professional insights into your industry. Your knowledge has a direct and long-lasting impact on current Trinity students, providing both reassurance and direction to those who are deciding what path to take after their studies. There are many opportunities and ways to mentor, both in person and online.
Annual Time Commitment: approx. 10 hours
VOLUNTEER WITH A PROFESSIONAL NETWORK Trinity has a vibrant alumni community spanning business, entrepreneurship, science and cultural sectors. These professional networks require committee members to support their activities, source guest speakers or give masterclasses and workshops. Volunteers help to provide fellow alumni with networking and lifelong learning opportunities. Members also provide students with the opportunity to network, as well as learn and develop professional skills. Three of Trinity’s most prominent networks are the Trinity Business Alumni (TBA), the Trinity Women Graduate’s Association (TWG) and the TCD Association & Trust (A&T).
Annual Time Commitment: approx. 10-20 hours 56
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VOLUNTEERING
TRINITY TODAY 2019
BECOME AN INTERNATIONAL AMBASSADOR Our alumni are the greatest voices of encouragement for new students from around the world. The International Ambassador Programme enlists alumni living abroad to connect with prospective students and help them decide if Trinity is right for them. Ambassadors provide invaluable support by giving testimonials, attending Trinity recruitment events in their cities, visiting schools and more. Many Ambassadors also participate in the International Welcome Programme, which partners Trinity students who will be studying abroad in non-EU countries with Trinity graduates who live locally. Our volunteers advise students on everything from how to eat like a local, to what places to visit.
Annual Time Commitment: approx. 8 hours
ORGANISE A CLASS REUNION As a Class Champion, you can help get your former class together for a reunion event or organise a class gift for a worthy campaign project. The Alumni Office will assist you with planning and getting in touch with your class.
Annual Time Commitment: approx. 10-20 hours
OFFER AN INTERNSHIP Are you in a position to offer a current student a valuable work experience placement in a professional environment? There are a number of ways that the Trinity Careers Service can work directly with you to connect you with students, including through career fairs, panel speaker events and job postings.
Annual Time Commitment: approx. 10-20 hours
JOIN YOUR LOCAL ALUMNI BRANCH
JOIN TRINITY ALUMNI ONLINE TODAY CONNECT // NETWORK // MENTOR
Wherever you are in the world, you can stay connected. Trinity has active alumni branches in over 30 countries worldwide. These groups play a vital role in building a strong, vibrant global alumni community. Managed by volunteers with support from the Alumni Office, they run a wide range of social and networking events and activities throughout the year to help keep international graduates connected to Trinity and to each other.
Annual Time Commitment: approx. 15+ hours
Simply‌ 1. G o to trinity.aluminate.net 2. Register as a graduate 3. Activate the mentor tab For more information see tcd.ie/alumni/services
BECOME A VOLUNTEER
If you would like to volunteer see tcd.ie/campaign/volunteer Call +353 (0)1 896 2088 or email alumni@tcd.ie 57
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
HONORARY DEGREES
Honorary Degrees Michal Lipson (Sc.D.)
Between winter 2018 and summer 2019, Trinity awarded nine honorary degrees to outstanding individuals. Among them were a major 20th-century poet, Thomas Kinsella, patron of Irish art, and architecture Carmel Naughton, and Ireland’s Ambassador to France, Patricia O’Brien.
Michal Lipson, an American physicist known for her pioneering work in silicon photonics, is currently the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering and Professor of Applied Physics at Columbia University and was formerly the Given Foundation Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She works at the interface between physics and electrical engineering and since 2014 has been named by Thomson Reuters as one of the top 1% most cited physicists. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the CRANN Nanoscience Research Institute at Trinity.
Photos: Maxwell Photography
Carmel Naughton (Litt.D.)
Provost Patrick Prendergast, Dr Mary Robinson, Thomas Kinsella, Catherine Corless & Michal Lipson
Thomas Kinsella (Litt.D.)
Catherine Corless (LL.D.)
Thomas Kinsella is recognised as a major 20th-century Irish poet. His work is included in all of the major anthologies and critical surveys of Irish poetry in English. Kinsella is widely known for the contribution he has made to the understanding of the Irishlanguage tradition, from his engagements with early Irish in The Táin through to the translations gathered in An Duanaire and, in the New Oxford Book of Irish Verse. His poems are celebrated for their profound personal candour sensitivity. He is considered a poet of searing political and public critical insight.
Catherine Corless is a historian whose research focussed on the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam. Having been informed that no specific records regarding the institution existed, she requested records of 796 deaths at the Home. The meticulous cross-referencing of records of births, deaths and burials led to the uncovering of a mass grave and the shameful history of the institution. She pursued this work in the face of many obstacles and without the support of an academic institution. She received the Bar of Ireland Human Rights Award in 2017.
Carmel Naughton is a pre-eminent advocate of the visual arts in Ireland. Her contribution has been recognised by numerous organisations including the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Prince Charles Medal for services to the Arts in Northern Ireland. Together with her husband Martin, she was named Philanthropist of the Year by the Community Foundation for Ireland in 2016. Serving on the Board of the National Gallery of Ireland, she oversaw the fundraising and construction of the new Millennium Wing. She was also the driving force behind the publication of the first comprehensive reference text on Irish art and architecture Art and Architecture of Ireland, coordinated by the Royal Irish Academy.
Carmel Naughton
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HONORARY DEGREES
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Carmel Naughton, Patricia O’Brien, David Cabot, Provost Patrick Pendergast, Shelley McNamara, Yvonne Farrell, Cormac Ó Gráda & Dr Mary Robinson
Patricia O’Brien
Patricia O’Brien (LL.D.)
Cormac Ó Gráda (Litt.D.)
Patricia O’Brien is a Trinity Law Graduate who served as Under-Secretary General and Legal Counsel to the United Nations from 2008 to 2013. Appointed by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, she advised on all legal issues faced by the Secretary General, the UN Secretariat and the other principal organs of the United Nations. She was the first, and still the only, female UN Legal Counsel. In 2013, she returned to Irish public service and was appointed Permanent Representative and Ambassador of Ireland to the United Nations and other International Organisations in Geneva. She is currently Ireland’s Ambassador to France and Monaco.
Cormac Ó Gráda, Emeritus Professor of Economics, University College Dublin, has been an outstanding Irish economic historian for the last three decades. In 2010, he was awarded the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal in Humanities. His research interests range from 18th-century France to 19th-century Manhattan to Mao’s Great Leap Forward. His profound insights into the Irish Great Famine have broadened to a reinterpretation of famine in global history and to a rethinking of the impact of the bubonic plague. He was elected president of the Economic History Association for 2017-18 – the first time an Irish-based historian has been so honoured.
David Cabot (Sc.D.) Ornithologist and writer David Cabot has devoted his life to the study of Ireland’s flora and fauna. A graduate of Zoology from Trinity, he has written several books on wildlife in the Collins Natural History series from Irish Birds, Ireland, to a new work, The Burren. In praise of the wildlife expert’s contribution and observation of nature, the Public Orator Professor Chahoud added: “Birds preserve the harmony of a place and it is for us to preserve the harmony of their places, our candidate says. He has done that all his life.” He was conferred with a Doctorate in Science.
Shelley McNamara, Yvonne Farrell, Cormac Ó Gráda & Dr Mary Robinson
Yvonne Farrell (Litt.D.) and Shelley McNamara (Litt.D.) Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara co-founded the Grafton Architects in 1978. They have received many accolades for their pioneering work including an appointment as the sole curators of the Architectural Biennale in Venice in 2018. Their University commissions are particularly celebrated including work at the Luigi Bocconi University, Milan and at Universidad de Ingenieria y Technologia, Lima, Peru. They have described their first building at Trinity (the Parsons Building) as an important turning point in their career. Both have taught in numerous European and American Schools of Architecture, including jointly holding the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard Graduate School of Design. They are Fellows of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland, Honorary Fellows of the Royal Institute of British Architects and elected members of Aosdána.
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
INTERNATIONAL EVENTS
International Alumni Events Trinity has over 140,000 alumni living in 150 countries worldwide. In 2018-19, we travelled across the UK, USA, Europe and Asia to brilliant alumni events as well as the international launches of Inspiring Generations – The Campaign for Trinity College Dublin.
BELFAST
Eithne Ryan & Caroline Feeney
BOSTON
Kyle Wallace & Uchenna Aneto
Michaela Sawicki, Caleigh Sawicki, Denali Murphy, Robin Keane, Eleanor Minogue & Lauren Kettler
Liam Noonan & Cassandra Barci
Alex Millstrom & Ciarán O’Neill
Mark Conlon, Philip McEvoy, Tom Fee & Aine Kervick
Amira Graham & Ben Lynch
Ruth Collins, Robin Collins & Vanne Campbell
Amy Walsh, Peter Walsh, Sarah Walsh & Trevour Smith
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INTERNATIONAL EVENTS
LONDON
Chris Haden, Kim Humphreys & Colin Nicholls
Edwin Draper & Stephen Thorpe
TRINITY TODAY 2019
SINGAPORE
Prashanth Kanakamedala, Kelvin Koh, Peggy Lee & Sebrina Abdul Malik
Peter Plunkett, Meghan Donaldson & Ruth Beattie
Kieran Joseph Ebbs, Celeste Ebbs & Ye Dt Gao
Brendan Hick & Tamara Quinn
Ruairi Brown, Rebecca Haywood, Provost Patrick Prendergast, Tze Yean Kong, Christina Prado Souto & Vyas Prasad
Sheelagh Draper & Edwin Draper
Stanley Quek, Julie Bogaars, Chye Yam Theng, Hung Soo Loh, Hwee Leng Lim, Woei Jack Pan & Jonathan Lee
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
INTERNATIONAL EVENTS
NEW YORK
MELBOURNE
Lani Smith, Patrick Bannon, Louis Murray, Kevin O’Donoghue & Michael Willoughby
Cariosa Kennedy, Paraic McGarty, Emily Joyce, Cormac McManus & Kate Lenihan
Mel Hardie, Francis Ennis, John Wilson, Peter Hutchinson & Nanda Pillai Victoria Dillon & Michael Dillon
Eoin Mitchell & Fiona O’Mahoney
Maria Shtilmark & Samson Shatashvili
John Rawlins & Roo Rawlins Lindsey Siferd, Niamh Burke, Jessica Sarles Dinsick, Sara Ede & Victoria Rosner
Padraig O Rourke, Ed McManus, Eleanor Treanor, Grainne Gillett, Juliette Hussey & Grainne O’Halloran
Diana Chiavetta & Helen Shenton
Louise Mulrennan, Niall Harty & Laoise McCauley
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INTERNATIONAL EVENTS
KUALA LUMPUR
TRINITY TODAY 2019
SAN FRANCISCO
Dato Hamzah bin Abdul Majeed & Max Ng
Niall Murphy & Iain McNally
Oliver Guinan, Sinead Coyle, Nina Milosavljevic & Alex Fritz
Dorothy Yong, Margaret Leow, Soek-Siam Tan, Chai Leng Lim & Aaron Lim
PARIS
Alexander Mann, Liv Lopez & Jarrod Silva
Lindsey Watters, Kezia Wright & Harry Johnson
Robert O’Driscoll, Stuart Coulson & Provost Patrick Prendergast
Inspiring Generations Launch Event
Gilliane Quinn & Sean Ryan
Louise Taylor Scott, Gabrielle Puget, Emer Murphy & Gráinne Dirwan
Gerry Maguire, Paul Kavanagh & Maggie Greaney
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
BRANCH CONTACTS
Trinity Alumni Branches From Cork to Chicago, Munich to Moscow, wherever life takes you, there is a Trinity Alumni branch for you.
B
ranches organise activities and social events on behalf of alumni within their region. They also provide a channel of communication between their members and the University, keeping you up to date with Trinity news. Branch events range from casual get-togethers and black tie dinners, to cultural excursions and networking lectures by visiting academics. For graduates new to a region, joining a branch is a great way to make friends while maintaining the link with your alma mater. Our branches always welcome new members.
AFRICA LIBYA Dr Mohamed Daw E: mohameddaw@gmail.com SOUTH AFRICA & WESTERN AFRICA John Murphy E: johnmurphy@worldonline.co.za UGANDA Henry Tumwebaze E: tumwebah@tcd.ie
ASIA BANGALORE Sai Prakash E: saierin@hotmail.com BEIJING Xusheng Hou E: houx@tcd.ie
If there is no branch in your area and you would like to set one up, please contact alumni@tcd.ie or visit tcd.ie/alumni
DELHI Rahul P. Dave E: rpdave@yahoo.com HONG KONG Henry Au E: henrywau@gmail.com
NEW ZEALAND (CHRISTCHURCH) Bernadette Farrell E: tcdalumninz@gmail.com QUEENSLAND (BRISBANE) Georgia Chenevix-Trench E: georgia.trench@qimberghofer.edu.au
ONTARIO (TORONTO) John Payne E: trinitydublin@rogers.com OTTAWA Ian Ashe E: ian.ashe77@gmail.com VANCOUVER Hannah Clark E: hclark@tcd.ie VANCOUVER ISLAND Mary Pike E: tyrrell.me@gmail.com
EUROPE
JAPAN Leo Glynn E: lglynn@hotmail.com
SOUTH AUSTRALIA (ADELAIDE) James Smyth E: smyth153@gmail.com
PAKISTAN Tahia Noon E: tahianoon@gmail.com
WESTERN AUSTRALIA (PERTH) Ă ine Whelan E: awhelan@bigpond.net.au
SHANGHAI Nick McIlroy E: mcilroyn@tcd.ie
VICTORIA (MELBOURNE) Ciaran Horgan E: chorgan@internode.on.net
SINGAPORE Bill McCormack E: william.mccormack@shearman.com
CANADA
SOUTH KOREA Gaya Nadarajan E: gaya.nadarajan@gmail.com
CALGARY Eoin Bates E: eoinbates1@gmail.com
AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND
EDMONTON Kevin Magill E: kevin.magill@aspencpm.ca
LUXEMBOURG Caroline Mangold E: caroline.engelchetrit@gmail.com
NEW SOUTH WALES (SYDNEY) Eithne McSwiney E: committee@tcdsydneyalumni.com.au
MONTREAL Megan Lee E: lee.megan00@gmail.com
GERMANY (BAVARIA) Elisabeth Mayer E: elisabethmayer@fau.de
AUSTRIA Eudes Brophy E: brophyandhand@netscape.net BELGIUM George Candon E: belgiumirishalumni@gmail.com DENMARK Carolyn Rutherford E: rutherfc@tcd.ie FRANCE (PARIS) Gabrielle Puget E: tcdalumniparis@gmail.com
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BRANCH CONTACTS
TRINITY TODAY 2019
GERMANY (BERLIN) James Löll E: loellj@gmail.com
CORK David McGovern E: david.mcgovern@ucc.ie
NORTH OF ENGLAND Suzanne Temperley E: d.s.temperley@gmail.com
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA Thomas Browne E: dr.thomas.browne@neurenics.com
GERMANY (FRANKFURT) Enda Jordan E: jordanem@tcd.ie
KILDARE & WICKLOW Michael McCann E: translations@infomarex.com
NOTTINGHAM & EAST MIDLANDS Sydney Davies E: sydney.davies@ntlworld.com
PACIFIC NORTHWEST Aly Gardner-Shelby E: tcdalumnipnw@gmail.com
MIDLANDS Noelle O’Connell E: noellespeaking@gmail.com
OXFORD Martin Gaughan E: martinigaughan@yahoo.co.uk
PHILADELPHIA Paul Maguire E: pmaguire@maguirehegarty.com
NORTHERN IRELAND Cecil Bates E: phenomenon4711@outlook.ie
SCOTLAND Niall McGuinness E: nialljpmcguinness@gmail.com
SAN DIEGO Rob Mullally E: robmullally1@gmail.com
CHINESE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION (IRELAND) Tao Zhang E: info@tcdchinesealumni.org
WEST COUNTRY (BRISTOL) Douglas Henderson E: tcdwest@yahoo.co.uk
GERMANY (MUNICH) Dominic Epsom E: Dominic.epsom@bmw.de ITALY Pamela Maguire E: pamela.maguire@tiscali.it MALTA Mathew Agius E: agiusm@tcd.ie MOSCOW Daria Voronina E: daria.voronina5@gmail.com
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Helen Norris E: helnorris@gmail.com SOUTH FLORIDA Ronald Ferguson E: fergusonrng@gmail.com
UNITED KINGDOM
USA
BIRMINGHAM & WEST MIDLANDS Edward Sweeney E: e.sweeney@aston.ac.uk
ATLANTA Julie Jones E: julie@juliejonesconsulting.com
CAMBRIDGE Brian Bromwich E: brianbromwich@googlemail.com
BOSTON Peter Lennon E: tcdbostonalumni@gmail.com
GLOUCESTERSHIRE Jonathan Moffitt E: jonathan_moffitt@blueyonder.co.uk
CHICAGO Brian Cronin E: croninbj@tcd.ie
IRELAND & NORTHERN IRELAND
LONDON ALUMNI ASSOCIATION Lucy O’Sullivan E: secretary@TCDLondon.co.uk
NEW YORK Fiona Stafford E: tcdalumninyc@gmail.com
ISRAEL David Rivlin E: tcd.alumni.il@gmail.com
ANTRIM & DERRY Margot Caldwell E: margotcaldwell@icloud.com
LONDON DINING CLUB Geraldine Dooley E: secretary@TCDDiningClubLondon.co.uk
NEW YORK (UPSTATE) Ronald Ferguson E: fergusonrng@gmail.com
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Eithne Treanor E: et@etreanor.com
PORTUGAL Ben Power E: benpower@sapo.pt SPAIN Emma Naismith E: emma.naismith@gmail.com SWEDEN (STOCKHOLM) Jack Ryan E: jackityjack@gmail.com SWITZERLAND Malcolm Ferguson E: malcolm.ferguson@ieee.org
WASHINGTON DC & MID-ATLANTIC REGION Dan O’Brien E: danobrien1102@gmail.com
REST OF THE WORLD COLOMBIA Laura Dixon E: dixon.laurajayne@gmail.com
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
POETRY
Poetry
By Harry Clifton
MOTHER You were shouting at me, from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Get up, get up, get on with your life!’ I had no job to go to. It would be twenty years And various women, before I had a wife Let alone dependants – and the rest, as they say, Was poetry. You were only a voice, The rest of you invisible. The day So far advanced, and the illusion of choice Already fading, what was there to get up for? I could imagine you, though. Still can, Octogenarian, tense, on the ground-floor Of a house with so many mansions, listening Even yet, for a single word of answer that might sing To the tune of money, and not scan.
Photo: Pat McGuigan
After many years abroad, Harry Clifton lives in Dublin and teaches Creative Writing at Trinity. Besides his many collections of poems, he has also published a travel memoir called On the Spine of Italy. His new collection, Herod’s Dispensations, is published by Bloodaxe Books. WHY DID YOU NAME YOUR NEW COLLECTION HEROD’S DISPENSATIONS? Originally this text was called Art, Children and Death, but the title was changed and the text dismantled by myself, and reassembled with the addition of new poems out of a sojourn in China. At this time the combined old themes of art, children and death, with the new themes of migration, decay of collective belief, and defence of innocence suggested Herod’s Dispensations, a catch-all title meaning roughly ‘the world as it is’, and drawn from the sonnet A Flight into Egypt with the lines: Protection of innocence, Herod’s Dispensations Transit lounges, midnight railway stations
HOW HAS LIVING IN MANY COUNTRIES INFLUENCED YOUR POETRY? I come from an international (British-Chilean) background and grew up in mid-century Ireland, an ingrown self-obsessed country at the time. So, living in other places – Africa, Asia – was rectification of an imbalance, an attempt after ‘contemplative’ years at university to become ‘active’ in the world. Living in other places has given me constantly changing angles and perspectives on what would have obsessed me anyway had I never lived away – namely the search for absolutes in a world of relative values, as explored in an early poem The Walls of Carthage.
TELL US ABOUT YOUR TEACHING WORK IN TRINITY COLLEGE. I love the gregariousness of teaching as an antidote to solitude. Being in touch with the young teaches you that nothing fundamental – love, loneliness, social fear – really changes. Their conflicts were/are my conflicts, give or take their lives in the new technology.
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NUACHT
Nuacht ó Oifig na Gaeilge
An Cumann Gaelach
Ag Áine Ní Shúilleabháin
Bhí go leor cúiseanna ceiliúrtha i saol na Gaeilge i gcaitheamh na bliana mar a rinneadh comóradh ar Bhliain Idirnáisiúnta na dTeangacha Dúchasacha de chuid na Náisiún Aontaithe, éachtaí mac léinn agus an obair dhíograiseach atá ar bun i saol na hollscoile agus lasmuigh trí bhronnadh Ghradaim Ghaeilge Choláiste na Tríonóide.
Caolán Mac Grianna, Ciarán Wadd, Seán Kyne TD, Cúnla Morris, Áine Ní Shúilleabháin, John Coman, Aonghus Ó Lochlainn, Dillon Cotter & Malachi Ó Marcaigh
Gradaim na Gaeilge Bronnadh Gradaim Ghaeilge Choláiste na Tríonóide 2019 i Seomra na Gaeilge i mí Aibreáin. Reáchtáladh na Gradaim chun aitheantas a thabhairt don tréanobair atá ar siúl ar son na teanga san ollscoil agus sa phobal i gcoitinne. Bhí an tAire Stáit don Ghaeilge, don Ghaeltacht agus do na hOileáin, Seán Kyne TD, i láthair ag an ócáid cheiliúrtha chun an bronnadh a dhéanamh. Bronnadh gradaim ar na daoine seo a leanas ar an oíche:
Bronnadh teastais ardmholta ar na daoine seo a leanas:
• Gradam an Mhic Léinn: Cúnla Morris (mac léinn dara bliana le NuaGhaeilge & Fraincis) • Gradam an Chéimí: Aonghus Ó Lochlainn (Ceol & Stair 2012)
• Céimí: Ciarán Wadd (Nua-Ghaeilge & Fraincis 2018) • Mac Léinn: Malachi Ó Marcaigh (mac léinn dara bliana le Stair & Polaitíocht) • Mac Léinn: Dillon Cotter (mac léinn dara bliana le Fisic Theoiriciúil)
Grianghraf: Fennell Photography
Lá Idirnáisiúnta na Máthairtheangacha Rinne Oifig na Gaeilge agus Roinn an Staidéir Chliniciúil ar Urlabhra agus Teangacha ceiliúradh ar Lá Idirnáisiúnta na Máthairtheangacha ar an 21 Feabhra 2019. Thug na filí Ciara Ní Eanacháin (Gaeilge), Sara Margrethe Oskal (Sámi) agus Matyas Le Brun (Briotáinis) taispeántas filíochta i Seomra na Gaeilge, áit ar cuireadh fáilte roimh Ambasadóir na hIorua go hÉireann, Else Berit Eikeland. Is as tuaisceart na hIorua do Oskal agus tógadh í mar chainteoir Sámi i dteaghlach a thógann réinfhianna mar shlí bheatha. Úsáideann sí cantaireacht ina cuid filíochta. Oibríonn Oskal agus Le Brun le chéile chun saothair filíochta a chumadh agus a fhoilsiú i Sami, Fraincis agus Briotáinis. Is céimí de Choláiste na Tríonóide í Ciara Ní É (NuaGhaeilge & Litríocht an Bhéarla 2013) a bhunaigh REIC, imeacht dhátheangach atá bunaithe ar an bhfocal labhartha. Bhain sí amach gradam Oireachtas na Gaeilge d’Fheachtas Meán Sóisialta na Bliana 2018 don haischlib #Nílsécgl.
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Tá an Cumann Gaelach ag dul ó neart go neart le os cionn 700 ball cláraithe i mbliana. Ó bunaíodh é in 1907, tá spiorad an Chumainn le feiceáil san iliomad imeachtaí a reáchtáiltear go rialta agus iad ag cur chun cinn na teanga agus an chultúir Ghaelaigh. Is í Éigse na Tríonóide an imeacht is mó i bhféilire an Chumainn ina mbíonn níos mó ná 20 imeacht eagraithe ar an gcampas i gcaitheamh seachtaine. Don chéad uair riamh, chuir an Cumann ceoldráma, Oisín i Tír na nÓg, ar stáitse i mbliana. Léiríodh an ceoldráma, a bhí scríofa agus cumtha ag an Oifigeach Drámaíochta, Dillon Cotter, os comhair lucht féachana in Amharclann Players thar 3 oíche le linn Sheachtain na Gaeilge. Is léiriú ar shárobair an Chumainn é gur bhain siad an chéad áit amach i gComórtas Ghlór na nGael do Chumainn Ghaelacha sna Coláistí Tríú Leibhéal don 7ú huair le 8 mbliana anuas i mí Feabhra. Bronnadh an dara háit i gComórtas Chonradh na Gaeilge don chumann is fearr orthu chomh maith.
CIORCAL COMHRÁ
Bíonn teacht le chéile seachtainiúil i mbialann an Bhutraigh (The Buttery) gach Céadaoin ó 10.30am – 12.00pm. Bíonn mic léinn, baill foirne agus muintir an phobail i láthair agus fáiltítear i gcónaí roimh dhaoine nua a bheith inár measc chun an Ghaeilge a labhairt i dtimpeallacht chairdiúil, réchúiseach agus cuairt a thabhairt ar champas galánta Choláiste na Tríonóide.
OIFIG NA GAEILGE
tcd.ie/gaeloifig E: gaeloifig@tcd.ie / 01 896 3652 • Twitter/FB: @GaeloifigTCD
FAOIN ÚDAR
Is í Áine Ní Shúilleabháin B.A. (2007) an tOifigeach Gaeilge i gColáiste na Tríonóide. Áine Ní Shúilleabháin is Trinity’s Irish Language Officer.
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
ALUMNI EVENTS
ALUMNI WEEKEND 2018 FRIDAY BANQUET 2
3
4
5
6
1
1 Dorothy McDonald M.B. (1986), Alison McDonald M.B. (1998) 2 Eithne McKenna B.Dent.Sc. (1988), Justin Moloney B.Dent.Sc. (1988), Catherine Houlihan B.Dent.Sc. (2000), John Molloy B.Dent.Sc. (1989), Roisín Horneck B.Dent. Sc. (1988), Claire Healy B.Dent.Sc. (1988), Tom Houlihan B.Dent.Sc. (1988), Kathryn Heslin, Dermott Finnerty B.Dent.Sc. (1988) 3 Debbie Miller M.B. (1988), William Miller M.B., M.A (1956) 4 Hazel Allison, James Allison M.B. (1978) 5 Donal Weir M.A., M.D., F.T.C.D., F.R.C.P.I., F.R.C.P., F.A.C.P. (1958), Paul Burke M.D., F.R.C.S., F.R.C.S.(I) (1978), Geoff Chadwick M.D. (1975) 6 Fionnuala Hollywood, Paul Hollywood B.Sc. (Pharm.) (1998), Fiona Kerley B.B.S. (Lang.) (2003), Karl Levis B.Sc. (Pharm.), Ph.D. (1998) 7 Grainne Cussen B.Sc. (Physio.) (1993), Eileen Lynn B.Sc. (Physio.) (1993), Caroline Reynolds B.Sc. (Physio.) (1993), Joan Scannell B.Sc. (Physio.) (1993), Mary Keany B.Sc. (Physio.) (1993), Catherine O’Sullivan B.Sc. (Physio.) (1993), Catriona Quigley B.Sc. (Physio.) (1993), Emer Kinsella B.Sc. (Physio.) (1993)
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ALUMNI EVENTS
TRINITY TODAY 2019
ALUMNI WEEKEND 2018 SATURDAY BANQUET 2
3 6
5
1 4
7 9
1 Declan Budd LL.B., M.A. (1968), Bettina Harris, Breda Cotter, Michael Cotter M.ED. (1978) 2 Paul Giacobbi, Lopa Guha-Giacobbi M.A. (1978), Peter Gillespie M.A., A.C.A. (1978), Simon Bowles M.A. (1979) 3 Geoffrey Stone B.A. (1968), Joan Stone, Tina Zandona, Geoffrey Kelly M.A. (1968) 4 Marjorie Neill B.A. (1970), Denis Murphy B.A.I., M.A. (1968), Barbara Hutchinson B.A. (1968) 5 Melanie Sheridan B.B.S. (1988), Eleanor Bryan B.A. (1988), Maria-Begõna Fallon B.B.S. (1988) 6 Alistair Milliken B.B.S., M.A., F.C.A. (1968), Liz Milliken 7 Peter Bates, Aine Bates B.A. (1997) 8 Ryan Bond B.A.I. (1968), David Abrahamson B.A.I., M.A., Ph.D., C.Eng. (1972) 9 Anthony Lunn, Joy Lunn B.A. (1968), Adrienne Symes, Glascott Symes M.A. (1968)
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Legacy Giving Legacy gifts have supported Trinity through the centuries. Please consider leaving a gift in your will, to help Trinity inspire many future generations of students, educators and researchers.
For more information visit tcd.ie/alumni/support-trinity #InspiringGenerations
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LEGACY
As a Trinity graduate, the University has many happy memories for you. Tell us a little about why it is so special for you.
Four magical years, to grow up (sort of), make lifelong friends, live in Rooms, discover Dublin and Ireland, learn how to learn (eventually), and then launch into adult life. How lucky we were.
Photo: Sam Lane
You have very generously made the decision to leave a legacy to Trinity. Is this an important decision for you and what impact do you hope it will have?
Leaving a
Legacy Rupert Pennant-Rea is a businessman, journalist, and former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. He was Editor of The Economist and chairman of The Economist Group.
As students, we were naturally going to live forever, and the idea of wills and legacies seemed laughable. When it does dawn on you, you think of your children, of course, but also of the debts you never properly repaid – and the biggest debt I owe is to Trinity. On its own, my legacy will make little difference, but if all alumni start thinking the same way, we would help Trinity to cast its spell for new generations.
Do you think it is important for individuals to make gifts to education and if so, why?
Apart from today, nothing matters more than tomorrow, and education creates boundless tomorrows.
In May 2019, we saw the launch of Inspiring Generations – The Campaign for Trinity College Dublin. As someone living in the UK where the culture of philanthropy is more developed, do you see a value in this type of campaign?
Definitely. The habit of giving comes naturally to only a small minority, but the rest of us can develop it too. Unless you believe everything should be the state’s responsibility, the arguments for private philanthropy are powerful.
Would you encourage others to consider the gift of a legacy to Trinity?
TRINITY TODAY 2019
The Grattan Scholars
The School of Social Sciences and Philosophy at Trinity has developed a prestigious scholarship programme – The Grattan Scholars. The Grattan Scholars supports exceptional Ph.D. students who have the potential to become future academic leaders and influential voices for social and economic development. Grattan Scholars are chosen not only for their academic achievements, but also for their commitment to teaching and ambition to understand and improve society through their research and education. They also play a vital role in delivering highquality and engaging teaching, enriching the learning experience of undergraduate students. The Grattan Scholars programme honours the Irish statesman Henry Grattan, a celebrated Trinity graduate.
Trinity was there long before us and will be there long after too. A legacy gives us a ticket for the ride.
About Rupert Pennant-Rea
Rupert Pennant-Rea B.A. (1970) has had a varied career as an economist, journalist, central banker and businessman. Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, Rupert read economics at Trinity and the University of Manchester. He has held the roles of Editor of The Economist and Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. Rupert was Chairman of Henderson Group plc, a fund management company based in London. He was also on the Board of Gold Fields Ltd, various other public and private companies and was Chairman of the Shakespeare Schools Festival. Today, he is on the board of Times Newspapers. Rupert is a long-time supporter of Trinity and the Grattan Scholars.
ABOUT LEGACY GIVING For more information on legacy giving see tcd.ie/alumni/support-trinity/legacies/ Email: gareth.crowe@tcd.ie or call +353 (0)1 896 8994
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
CLASS NOTES
Class Notes
News from Trinity alumni around the world.
Vawn Corrigan B.A. (2014)
Vawn (Siobhán) Corrigan came to Trinity as a mature student through Trinity Access to study English. After graduating in 2014, she worked as an editor for the Heritage Council and feature writer for magazines such as Irish Arts Review and Ireland of the Welcomes. Vawn was commissioned to write two heritage books for O’Brien Press, both on Irish textile heritage: Irish Aran (March 2019) and Irish Tweed (Spring, 2020). “Trinity really changed everything for me; it gave me the tools to turn my life around in my fifties. The path I’m on now is exciting and alive with possibilities.”
Kate Perry M.Phil. (2011)
Kate Perry graduated from Trinity with an M.Phil. in Creative Writing. She has written for Woman’s Hour, BBC R4, BBC NI and RTÉ. Her onewoman show, The Very Perry Show, won the Best Comedy Show award at the United Solo Theater Festival, New York in 2017. It has toured both nationally and internationally to critical and popular acclaim. Her short film Ruthless, originally commissioned as a short story for BBC NI/R4, is in production. She is also a recipient of a John Brabourne Award for Film/TV, 2019. Her passion is comedy.
Derek F. Butler B.A. (2004)
Derek F. Butler is a Business and Economics graduate and former Central Societies Committee officer. Having worked abroad with PWC and Goal, he returned home in 2013 and founded GRID Finance. With its Dublin head office in the Trinity Enterprise Tower, GRID Finance also has offices in Limerick and Portugal. Derek likes to share the lessons learned along the way in the hope of helping fellow alumni on their own journey.
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CLASS NOTES
TRINITY TODAY 2019
Beatrice Whelan B.A., M.Sc. (2001)
Beatrice Whelan studied History of Art and Multimedia Studies at Trinity. Since graduating, she has worked in digital marketing for Google and Kildare Web Services. She joined Sage in 2011, progressing to Senior Manager for Global Content Platforms in 2019. In 2016, she published her first book, Trending: The Complete Guide to Social Media for Events. Beatrice has received numerous awards for her work including Best Use of Social from the Advocate Marketing Academy, an Irish eGovernment Award for Best Accessible Website, and the Going Global award for Sage Advice at the Think Global awards.
Marco Herbst B.A.I. (1999)
Upon graduating, Marco founded jobs.ie which became Ireland’s leading jobs website. After an extended career break living in Berlin, Marco returned to Dublin to co-found Evercam along with his original business partner, Vinnie Quinn. Evercam, which offers project management and timelapse cameras for construction sites, has led Marco back onto the Trinity campus to provide services to the new Business School and Oisín House developments.
Joe Cummiskey B.B.S. (Lang.) M.A. (1996)
Following graduation, Joe returned to France, where he spent his Erasmus, to work with the Disney Company in the video game business. Next stop was Australia in 2000 to coach tennis in Manly. Following a stint in education on anti-doping in sport and as a teacher, Joe moved into technology. Having led international sales teams at both Google and Facebook, he now works for SurveyMonkey with a view to expanding their revenue from customers outside of the US in key international markets. He’s a big fan of a game of tennis and golf and loves to meet for a cup of coffee.
Stephen Morris B.A.I. (1986)
Since graduating from Engineering in Trinity, Stephen has worked in international software development in a range of industries. In 2003, he became an author with US publisher Prentice Hall and has since written several books and over 100 articles for InformIT, IBM, and others. Stephen is an independent, self-employed software consultant and continues to work in IT, helping firms with digital transformation, strategic and tactical projects. Writing has invariably helped inform Stephen’s work and his books are available on Amazon.
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
CLASS NOTES
Genevieve Smyth B.A. (1990)
Genevieve Smyth discovered dramatherapy while studying at Trinity. She has developed her practice in 16 countries and has been published in texts in Latvia and Sri Lanka on her assessment methods. She is a British Association of Dramatherapists representative and first created a unique service for adults with mental illness in Dundee Rep Theatre, then managed Scotland’s first creative therapies and counselling hub in Edinburgh primary schools, before treating adolescents in NHS mental health. Currently, she offers patient-led dramatherapy in dementia care and is developing work on dramatherapy and trauma with families in the Philippines.
Jillian Godsil M.A. (1987)
Jillian Godsil has been named one of the top 50 women globally in Blockchain and actively speaks and chairs Blockchain conferences across the world. She has 30 years of international PR and journalism experience in the fintech industry. She is a former European Parliamentary candidate and in 2014 her legal challenge prompted legislation allowing undischarged bankrupts to run for Dáil and European elections. Jillian is the founder of blockleaders.io and is a radio broadcaster with East Coast FM and Dublin City FM. She sits on the board of EOS Dublin Blockchain and is a founding member of the London Trinity Business Alumni.
Mary FitzGerald B.Ed. (1979)
Since graduating from Trinity, Mary FitzGerald worked as a teacher, an RTÉ television and radio broadcaster, a journalist and a PR manager in the horse racing industry. In 2001, she set up her own public relations company working with corporate and consumer clients. Mary also qualified as a barrister having studied in the evenings in King’s Inns. She then established a legal recruitment business for private practice and the in-house sector. Mary previously set up an adult education course on horse racing, called ‘Horses for Courses’, to educate and inform people about the sport and business. It returned successfully in the spring 2019 and will run again in the autumn.
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Ingrid Nachstern B.A. (1976)
Ingrid is a director, screenwriter, dancer and award-winning filmmaker. Since graduating, she has worked as a translator in Toronto, London and Oxford. She established Night Star Dance Company in 2003 and ran her school of classical ballet until 2017. Her debut as a choreographer was Bow-Tie like ‘Chioni. Ingrid has performed in New York for Steve Paxton and Jacqulyn Buglisi. Since 2014, she has made three films; the most recent, Shoe Horn/ Office, won Best Experimental Film at the Los Angeles Movie Awards 2019. She lives in London and Dublin.
Robin Knight B.A. (1966)
After graduating from Trinity, Robin Knight went on to Stanford University where he did an M.A. in Political Science. He then spent 28 years roaming the world as a foreign correspondent for the American news magazine US News & World Report, based in London, Moscow, Johannesburg, Rome and Washington DC. In 1997 he joined BP plc as the company’s Editorial Writer. Since 2003 he has owned and run the corporate writing company Knightwrite Ltd and reviewed books for Time magazine. He is the author of six books himself including most recently in 2018 The Extraordinary Life of Mike Cumberlege SOE.
Rosalind Pritchard B.A. (1967)
Naiter Chopra Ph.D. (1955)
Naiter Chopra received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Trinity in 1955. He is a retired Professor of Chemistry from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He recently published a book entitled Religions and Followers, a dispassionate study on the constructive and destructive role of religions and their followers.
Rosalind Pritchard is Emeritus Professor of Education at Ulster University where she was Head of the School of Education, Research Co-ordinator and Distinguished Research Fellow. She is deeply interested in higher education and has authored The End of Elitism? The Democratisation of West German Universities and Neoliberal Developments in Higher Education: the United Kingdom and Germany, among others. She established and for years directed a Master’s Degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages that incorporates school experience in Hungary. She is a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
To share your class note visit tcd.ie/alumni/class-notes 75
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Trinity Alumni Room Our alumni room, in East Chapel, is a welcoming space for visiting alumni to relax, work, meet friends and catch up with the latest developments at the University.
Free Wi-Fi access
Capacity for group events
Conference room
Complimentary tea & coffee
For more information visit tcd.ie/alumni/services #InspiringGenerations
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PROFESSIONAL NETWORKING EVENTS
PROFESSIONAL NETWORKING AND MENTORING EVENTS 2018-2019
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
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Alumni Mentor Reception at the Provost’s House, 2019
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Mentoring Launch Event 2018-19: STEM
Alumni Mentor Reception at the Provost’s House, 2019
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Trinity Business Alumni President’s Dinner 2019
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School of Education Anniversary Celebration 2019 Mentoring Launch Event 2018-19: Media, The Arts, Government and Not for Profit
1 Wendy Hederman LL.B (1989) Paschal Donohoe B.A. (1996), David Norris M.A. (1968) 2 Chad Gilmer B.A.I. (1996) and student mentee 3 Susan Moran B.B.S (2004), Lucy Mueller M.Sc. (St.) (2017) 4 Laura Kidd B.A. (2009), Teresa Crowley B.A., MPhil. (1993), Chiara Popplewell B.A. (2005) 5 Denisa Baciu B.A. (2016) and student mentees 6 Prof Darryl Jones, Marita Kerin Ph.D. (2017), Damian Murchan, Georgina Jackson (2000), Dr Seamus Mc Guinness 7 Conor O’Toole B.B.S (2010), Sue Rainsford B.A. (2011), John Mannion B.A. (2005) 8 Jim Bracken Msc. (1992) and student mentee 9 Liam Booth B.B.S., A.C.A. (1982), Rosheen McGuckian B.Sc (1987) For information on the many ways to get involved with one of our Professional Networks or Mentoring Programme Events see pages 56-57 or see tcd.ie/campaign/volunteer
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Celebrating 25 Years of the Business Student of the Year Awards
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Foresight Business Mentoring Breakfast 2019
Trinity Business Alumni Dinner in Camera with Rosheen McGuckian
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
CHRISTMAS EVENTS
CHRISTMAS COMMONS DECEMBER 2018 3 4
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5 1 June Stuart M.A. (1966), Brian Lucas, Beatrice Aird B.A. (1984) 2 Oilbhe Belfast B.A. (2014), Vitalia Bikmametova B.B.S. (2015) 3 Hazel McClean, Vanessa Holland 4 John Tierney Dip. (2014), Ronan Keeley, Ray Bolger M.Phil (2015) 5 Mary Finan B.Sc. (PHARM.), M.Sc. (1984), Robert Swan B.B.S., M.A. (1967), Dorothea Finan 6 Deirdre Sweeney B.A. (1987), Grainne Sweeney, Annie Sweeney, Fintan Sweeney 7 Marianne McGiffin M.Phil., M.Ed., M.A. (1971), Sheila Chamberlin 8 David Norris M.A. (1968), Des Burke-Kennedy B.B.S., M.A. (1968)
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CHRISTMAS EVENTS
TRINITY TODAY 2019
CHRISTMAS HOMECOMING DECEMBER 2018 2 4
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1 Ciara Houlihan B.Dent.Sc. (2012), Ciara O’Reilly B.Dent.Sc. (2012), Caroline Marron B.Dent.Sc. (2012) 2 Niamh Callaghan B.A. (2011), Roisín Donnelly B.A. (2011), Anthony McDonnell B.A. (2011), Kimberly Moran B.A. (2011), Daniel Farrell B.A. (2011), Shane Jackson B.A. (2012), Christoph Walsh B.A. (2011) 3 Cita Crefeld LL.B. (2006), Ben Byrne LL.B. (2007), Catherine O’Donnell LL.B. (2007) 4 Alice Vajda B.A., Ph.D. (2007), Mary Tallant M.A. (2007) 5 James O’Callaghan B.A. (1999), Karl Richardson B.A. (1999), Steven Moody B.B.S. (1996) 6 Conal Campbell B.A. (2008), Yulia Yehorova, Andrew Saul B.A. (2008) 7 Rebecca Coll B.A. (2007), Aimee Byrne B.A.I. (2007), Kieran Clarke B.A., Ph.D. (2007), Niamh Scanlan B.A. (2007), Gerard Lyons, Robert O’Byrne B.A. (2007)
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TRINITY TODAY 2019
STANLEY QUEK
Describe your route from Singapore to Trinity.
Photo: Fennell Photography
My family had emigrated from Singapore to London in early 1960. I took my O and A levels in a grammar school in Highgate. I applied to study Medicine in Trinity on a kind recommendation from a family friend who happened to be giving a lecture at Trinity in 1967. I was delighted to be accepted into the first medical year on my A levels, and have not looked back since!
One -onOne
Trinity Today meets Dr Stanley Quek, M.B., M.A. (1970), newly elected Pro-Chancellor of the University of Dublin.
Are you in touch with many friends from your time in college?
I really enjoyed the five years I spent in Trinity and made many friends from Ireland and all over the world. Our last class reunion, our 45th anniversary, was attended by many of my classmates, and it was as if it was yesterday! Most had either retired or were about to, and many were grandparents. I had kept up with quite a few of them – some I see regularly and others at class reunions and special events. It’s wonderful when you think it’s more than half a century since we were all students dissecting and taking notes from great teachers at medical school.
How many countries are you currently working across?
My work as a property developer and investor takes me to seven countries monthly. It’s exciting to be in so many countries regularly and to be involved with so many cultures and climates. It’s important to keep busy and active.
Role of the Pro-Chancellor Appointment to the office of Chancellor or Pro-Chancellor is the highest accolade the University can bestow. Over the centuries, the role of the Pro-Chancellor has been to act on behalf of the Chancellor during periods of absences from the University. Trinity’s six Pro-Chancellors have all the powers and privileges of the Chancellor when acting in place of the Chancellor, such as when awarding degrees of the University of Dublin, but they also hold office in their own right.
“I am humbled and honoured to be elected a Pro-Chancellor of my alma mater and I hope to contribute more to making Trinity A TRULY GREAT GLOBAL UNIVERSITY.”
How has your connection to Trinity developed over the years?
I have been involved with Trinity since graduation with my work with the Trinity Association and then with recruiting Singaporean students to study Medicine in Trinity since the early 1980s. I have worked with four Provosts and many of the Deans of Medicine and am now sitting on the Provost’s Council and Campaign Cabinet. It’s all been very exciting, especially when you see how Trinity has grown to become the foremost university in Ireland and its vision to become a significant global university.
What advice would you give to a Trinity student today? Study hard, make lots of friends, enjoy the campus and all that it offers. Do not forget what Trinity has offered you – an excellent education and your first step into the commercial world. Remember Trinity into your future.
What are your special interest projects within Trinity’s Inspiring Generations fundraising campaign?
Trinity inspired me in my education, in setting me up in my career, and in my love for both Ireland and the University itself. I am inspired to give back to the Trinity St. James’s Cancer Institute and the Old Library. In doing that, I’m giving to St. James’s where I trained and giving back to Ireland as well.
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Trinity 1592 Collection A unique range of gift items inspired by our historic University and its alumni. Created by leading Irish designers and craftspeople, the Trinity 1592 Collection boasts the hallmarks of quality and originality. All revenue from sales goes directly to supporting Trinity’s academic mission, research work of global consequence and the ongoing preservation of the library collections.
See the full selection at trinitygiftshop.ie
Alumni can enjoy a 10% discount with the code TALUMNI
#InspiringGenerations
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Inspiring Generations since 1592 Your support will drive Trinity forward for the next 400 years.
Show your support at tcd.ie/campaign #InspiringGenerations
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