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RTÉ Europe Editor Tony Connelly delivers annual Dermot Keogh Memorial Lecture
RTÉ Europe Editor Tony Connelly this week delivered the annual lecture recognising the lasting legacy of Professor Dermot Keogh, the prolific historian, former journalist, and founder of European Studies at University College Cork.
“I am delighted and honoured to deliver the second Dermot Keogh Memorial Lecture. I did not have the good fortune to have been a student of Professor Keogh, but his pioneering work here and at the European University Institute in Florence, marks him out as a colossus among historians in understanding independent Ireland’s difficult embrace of the European project,” Mr Connolly said.
Mr Connelly’s address covered 25 years of covering European politics first hand, detailing a turbulent quarter of a century – from the EU’s response to 9/11 through to the financial crash, from the shock of Brexit to the war in Ukraine and the rise of the Far Right on the continent.
Mr Connelly said he hoped to “explain how we got from the promise of ever closer union to an era of fragmented and discontented politics that feels more like disintegration, indeed where the European Union seems under assault, both from without and within.”
He quoted the tribute paid by John Banville to Dermot Keogh, who said Keogh “was steely when he needed to be, especially in his political and social convictions, but in person he was a delight, possessed of the driest wit and the largest generosity of spirit.”
Ending his address Mr Connolly said :
“These are, perhaps, the strengths the European Project now needs like never before.”
Dr Damian Bracken, Head of the School of History praised Mr Connelly’s address.
“Tony Connelly gave an extraordinary tour d'horizon of the challenges facing the European Project from his perspective as an observer at close hand of events in Brussels, Kiev, and Moscow. But working from the famous line of Jean Monnet that 'Europe will be forged in crises', he talked about Europe's resilience and its creative responses to events that test is cohesion, from burst banking systems to Brexit to the war in Ukraine.
“The talk was a remarkable tribute to the memory of Dermot Keogh who had the foresight to establish the discipline of European Studies in the School of History, a discipline that has developed into a field of strategic importance for the School and the University, as was seen last Summer when UCC was venue for the highpoint of Ireland's EU presidency as host to the College of Commissioners,” he said.