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Honorary Conferrings
Honorary Conferrings The National University of Ireland (NUI) conferred honorary doctorate degrees at University College, Cork, on 11 May 2001, in recognition of the valuable contribution the five recipients made to Irish life.
Doctorates and Proposers

1. Nurse Tutor Sr Margaret Healy, LLD, and Professor Eamon Quigley, Head of the Medical School
	2. Historian and journalist Emeritus Professor John A Murphy, DLitt, with Professor Seán Ó Coileáin, Roinn Na Nua-Ghaeilge
3. Professor Áine Hyland, Vice President and Professor Howard Gardner, DLitt, Head of Education, Harvard University
	4. John J Murphy, LLD, Civil Engineer and Philanthropist and Professor Philip O'Kane, Civil Engineering
5. Writer Aidan Higgins, DLitt, Professor Gerry Wrixon, President and Dr Garret FitzGerald

Professor Seán Ó Coileáin delivered the following citation on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Literature on Professor John A Murphy, Emeritus Professor, UCC

John Augustin Murphy was born in Macroom on January 17th 1927. The world in which he grew into boyhood was very different from the dreary stereotype of Irish life of the period. Not far removed in family background and rural hinterland lay the newly respectable Irish language.

Professor John A Murphy (seated) with his family, from left, Eileen, Hugh, Cliona, Brian and his wife Cita on the day of the conferring

It would come to town on fair days and with visiting relatives; at school Eibhlín Dubh's lament for Art Ó Laoire would light up the placenames and history of the area and fire the imagination. At home there was music and song, ranging from Verdi and Schubert to the nationalist ballads of Thomas Davis and T D Sullivan. And the young John A would 'devour' the novels of Charles Dickens. In retrospect, it would seem to have been an ideal nurturing for one who would become a standard bearer for political and cultural pluralism. The songs might change but the song would remain, as would his love of literature and literary quotation. The Irish language itself would remain a constant presence in his life, being the medium of a good part of his writing from Stair na hEorpa to Seán Ó Ríordáin and providing him with insights (as, for instance, in its barbed yet familiar anticlericalism) that he would use to good effect in seminal essays such as 'Priests and People in Modern Irish History' and 'Daniel O'Connell and the Gaelic World'. He entered UCC (then a College of less than 1000 students) on a County Council scholarship, one of only three available, in October 1945. That it was the centenary year of the founding of the Queen's Colleges was scarcely noted by the authorities; fifty years later the publication of John A Murphy's The College would be the central event of the sesquicentennial celebrations of a more mature and self-confident institution. But UCC had its figures of national importance in 1945 and, of these, he came into contact with three in particular: Daniel Corkery, James Hogan and, in a very different way, Alfred O'Rahilly. He never quite warmed to Corkery and would later come to reject him. But where Corkery stifled, James Hogan, Professor of History, perhaps the most remarkable scholar that that remarkable Department has produced, liberated and inspired, ranging freely in his lectures over the whole history of ideas.

John A Murphy, described by Hogan as the best student he ever had, graduated with a first-class honours BA and first place in both History and Latin in 1948. His MA research, the results of which were published in a series of articles in the JCHAS, was on Lord Inchiquin, Murrough O'Brien, called in Irish 'Murchadh na dTóiteán', and regarded by tradition as a byword for national and religious apostasy. This was followed by work on Justin MacCarthy, Lord Mountcashel, commander of the first Irish Brigade in France, 'the prototype Wild Goose'. From there his work extends into the twentieth century - his Ireland in the Twentieth Century, published in the Gill History of Ireland series, has achieved classic status.

Recalled from the diocesan seminary at Farranferris, where he had taught for the previous decade, John A Murphy became assistant lecturer at UCC under Hogan in 1960, and was appointed Professor of Irish History in 1971, a position he held until his early retirement in 1990. His contribution to History at UCC is second to none, and that in a department which is itself second to none. He was an inspiration to an entire generation of students, particularly to those many who carried out postgraduate research under his direction, drawing on his wide expertise and on a great fund of human understanding which extended both to subject and student. History to John A Murphy was more than an academic discipline: it was his life and he lived it and he made it part of the lives of others. His interest in regional and local history; his work with the Cork Historical and Archeological Society, whose Journal he edited from 1964 to 1979 and to which he made many significant contributions by article and review; his radio lectures (at least six) in the Thomas Davis series; his continuing engagement in public debate on issues critical to the future of this country, having played no small part in shaping its present by his courageous and incisive commentary, not least on Northern Ireland - these are all of a piece. As is, indeed, his membership of Seanad Éireann (on which he served terms from 1977 to 1983 and again from 1987 to 1992), of the Governing Body of UCC and of the Senate of the National University. Knowledge, wisdom, ideas, the very joy of living - these were things not to be hidden away but to be communicated, and there has scarcely ever been a better communicator.

Lord Chesterfield once said that 'Nobody should tamper with a University who does not love it well'. John A Murphy loves every limestone step of the old College stairs hollowed by successive generations of students, every knotted uneven floorboard of this Aula Maxima, where he and his wife, Cita, danced in the days and nights of their student courtship. He has written the history of the College, but he has also been part of that history for more than one third of its existence, still the same eager student of its triumphs and of its foibles. In honouring him the National University in a very profound sense honours itself.

Issue 148, Summer 01

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