2009 Press Releases
Conferring Ceremonies at University College Cork – September 8th 2009
08.09.2009
Conferring ceremonies continued today (September 8th 2009) at University College Cork with over 500 undergraduate and postgraduate students graduating from the College of Arts, Celtic Studies & Social Sciences.
08.09.2009
Conferring ceremonies continued today (September 8th 2009) at University College Cork with over 500 undergraduate and postgraduate students graduating from the College of Arts, Celtic Studies & Social Sciences.
The Conferring Addresses were delivered by Mr Tom Fannon, Property Manager, Irish Heritage Trust and Professor Áine Hyland, former Professor of Education and Vice-President, UCC
Conferring Address by Mr Tom Fannon, Property Manager, Irish Heritage Trust, September 8th 2009
President, Head of the College, Academic members of the College, Graduates, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is wonderful for me to be here today, right now, in Devere Hall, UCC – or as we used to say when we were kids – Devere Hall, UCC, Cork, Ireland, Europe, Planet Earth, the solar system, the Milky way Galaxy, the Universe. Many of you may have wondered if you would ever get to this exact spot. But here we all are – each of us in our exact place that we can define very clearly. We know where we are.
Of course where we are going – that’s a different matter. Each of us has our own plans, expectations, dreams, and goals. Each of us will be following a different path that may or may not work out the way we plan. We don’t really know exactly what will happen to us in our lives. We don’t know where we’re going.
In March, 1926 a man called Heisenberg was working away in the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen, and made a very important discovery which is now called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It basically says that the more you know about an item’s location, the less you can know about its direction of movement, and the more you know about its direction, the less you can know about where it is. It basically has something to do with the fact that to measure one causes you to disrupt the other.
Of course he was talking about sub atomic particles, and not people, but since I am among scholars, I think, the simile is worth analysis.
For me – when I was leaving Cornell University, (Ithaca, New York, USA, North America...) I thought I had a pretty good idea of where I was going. But my path has taken some very radical and unexpected turns, including several moves across the Atlantic, raising a family in a foreign country, and more recently, a major career change – from a Captain of Industry, to a Property Manager for the Irish Heritage Trust. So now, my life is focusing on heritage – our past, where we’ve come from, and how we got to this exact point. My Physics is a bit rusty, but as far as I know, Her Heisenberg was silent on the topic of knowing where an atomic particle has been. So I hope you’ll indulge my explorations of the subject of heritage:
These explorations will take the form of what I call the Fannon Principles of Heritage:
Principle number one states that, Heritage only exists in the minds and customs of people alive today. I suggest within the context of this principle, that heritage is in essence our collective memory. It has aspects of religion, music, architecture, art, customs, and the list goes on. It is only how we remember these things that form what we class as our heritage. And only people who are alive can remember things. Therefore, objects, buildings, songs or stories do not contain heritage in and of themselves. Rather, and I will use a JK Rowlings creation, they are merely ‘port keys’ – physical things that afford us a link to the past, and allow us to maintain continuity with what has gone before. They jog our memories.
Principle number two is the opposite of one of Newton’s theories about matter – and it says that, Heritage is always being created and destroyed. Time - each moment, each idea, each feeling - slips quietly into the past. Many of these snippets of time are lost – not remembered – simply due to the sheer quantity of them. Sure, today we have lots of modern storage techniques to preserve physical items and to electronically store vast amounts of data. So perhaps fewer of the ‘port keys’ will be lost. But we’re also battling against some pretty powerful forces such as population growth, Mother Nature, and economics. Civilizations need to build and grow – and this means we have to excavate. Erosion, climate change, and people will continually wear away structures. Preserving and keeping port keys costs money – and in some cases lots of it. But the biggest force causing the destruction of heritage is new ideas. Certainly the sense of continuity that heritage provides cannot and should not stop the development of new ideas. Quite the opposite, as new ideas are our new heritage.
To illustrate this point, I refer to the various laments within the heritage world of the destruction of some of the finest demesnes of country houses in Ireland to allow golf courses to be built. Shouldn’t we be preserving these original 18th century landscapes into posterity? Is it not possible that in 175 years the Irish Heritage trust could be working to protect and preserve some of these very golf courses from destruction, which by then may be considered (by those alive then) to have formed a critical piece of our heritage!
Another example: In the USA there was a great deal of controversy in the early 20th century over the sprawl of highways into the west, destroying the natural beauty which was considered part of the heritage of America. Now, to travel on Route 66 across the continent is an iconic cultural activity which connects people to the ideas and customs of America’s expansion years.
My final principle is the tricky one: Some heritage is more important than other heritage.
There are 146 “heritage centres” in Ireland. There are 890 UNESCO World Heritage sites in 148 countries, and more being proposed. I have no idea how many listed properties there are in Ireland. Add to that all our museums and their contents, and then add in my stamp collection and this is still just the tip of the iceberg.
Since we’ve already accepted that heritage is always being destroyed, and there are large costs associated with maintaining the physical port keys of heritage, we need to decide which ones to save. Obviously it makes sense to save the ones that are the most valuable, but how do we measure value when it comes to heritage? One possibility is to place our trust in the various Trusts and bodies charged with looking after it. However, we have quite a few:
The Military Heritage Trust of Ireland, The Irish Genetic Resources Conservation Trust, The Mining Heritage Trust of Ireland, as well as the more well known an Taisce, The Heritage Council, the OPW, and even the Department of the Environment, Heritage, and Local Government.
Another way to place value on items is to get “experts” to identify, catalogue, compare, and complete risk analysis, etc. They can clearly pick items that represent outstanding feats of human ingenuity, or talent, things that we have lost the skills for, or are unable to recreate due to the cost. Obviously this should be included.
But there is a third even more important determiner of value, and that is the public – you and I. We can very easily make our wishes known, voting with our patronage or our volunteering activities or our donations. Which port keys afford you the most opportunity to connect with your past? Which ones invoke the most memories for you, instil pride, or inspire your creativity?
OK, OK – enough of the Fannon Principles of heritage. One must be reminded of the pertinent lines from the Brian Friel play Translations about a piece of Ireland’s past – how its place names became anglicized. The pertinent phrase is, “To remember everything is a kind of madness.”
On this momentous day in your lives, it is appropriate for someone like your parents or grandparents, your professors, or even someone like myself – to pass on a few words of wisdom – to perhaps remind you where you’ve come from, to help you appreciate where you are, or to help guide you on your way to where you are going.
Many learned people would suggest to you that there are times – the most critical times that occur - that will really test your resolve and define who you are. You will be faced with a “Worst case scenario” that if you can manage to come through successfully, you will be remembered or perhaps even lauded.
I’d like to put to you an alternate suggestion. Think of life as a continuum of scenarios that will happen to you – from the very worst case all the way through to the very best case scenarios. Of course in the statistical world of normal distributions forming the familiar bell curve, it is statistically likely that there will be very few of these best and worst case scenarios in your life. As such, I suggest that these will NOT be the times that define you as a person. Rather, the vast majority will be every day, garden variety, middle of the road scenarios.
I say this not to limit your ambitions, but merely to understand the nature of the beast. In your life, you will come into contact with a great number of people and you will have varying degrees of interaction with these people. Some you will simply brush up against, some you will bounce off, others will stick to you, some you will swerve away from, and there will be others with whom you will dance. Many – and again the vast majority of these interactions will occur without your even thinking about them. They just happen. Another snippet of time slips into the past.
How you manage these “normal” scenarios, due to their sheer volume of occurrence, will be what really defines you. Sure, when the chips are down, we all hope we will be there and do the right thing. In fact, most of us probably will, and those of us who don’t will likely be forgiven because of how tough the situation was.
The greater challenge is to be yourself - all the time, every day. That is how you will be judged.
My second thought for you on this important day is that up until now, you all have been net takers from our society. You have enjoyed 3 meals a day, clothing, a roof over your head, and a world class education. You’ve been given braces, medication, hugs, plenty of toys, and... the list goes on. Your parents know all too well the cost. This isn’t to say that you haven’t given anything back – of course you have. But when it’s all summed up, you have been a net receiver (perhaps a taker is too strong of a word.)
But for a society to survive there has to be more put in that taken out.
Today - from today on begins your transition. Today you start to move from being a net receiver, to a net giver. Yes there will be a small period of time when you’ll be neutral and simply struggling to look after yourself. But one day, soon, you will be expected to take on the mantel of giving back to society. Some of you will be fortunate enough to give more than others. Some will be able to raise a family, and pass on the morals and values you have learned to your children. Others may be able to donate time to charitable organizations. Some of you will solve major world problems, write important works, or entertain us. Some will become academics. And still others will have been successful enough financially to allow them to make large contributions to fund various causes – perhaps even UCC.
All of these are essential elements in the continuation and creation of our heritage.
I want to thank you all for the opportunity to address you today, and hope that my words will fuel your thoughts. Certainly I hope they may encourage you, if nothing else, to visit a heritage site and help define its value. I hope you will learn to love and understand how you got to the exact place you are in, and to use it to support the every-day scenarios of your life. I challenge you to take up the mantle of being a net giver in society, to create some new heritage, and to pass it on.
Thank you.
ENDS
1130MMcS
Conferring Address by Mr Tom Fannon, Property Manager, Irish Heritage Trust, September 8th 2009
President, Head of the College, Academic members of the College, Graduates, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is wonderful for me to be here today, right now, in Devere Hall, UCC – or as we used to say when we were kids – Devere Hall, UCC, Cork, Ireland, Europe, Planet Earth, the solar system, the Milky way Galaxy, the Universe. Many of you may have wondered if you would ever get to this exact spot. But here we all are – each of us in our exact place that we can define very clearly. We know where we are.
Of course where we are going – that’s a different matter. Each of us has our own plans, expectations, dreams, and goals. Each of us will be following a different path that may or may not work out the way we plan. We don’t really know exactly what will happen to us in our lives. We don’t know where we’re going.
In March, 1926 a man called Heisenberg was working away in the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen, and made a very important discovery which is now called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It basically says that the more you know about an item’s location, the less you can know about its direction of movement, and the more you know about its direction, the less you can know about where it is. It basically has something to do with the fact that to measure one causes you to disrupt the other.
Of course he was talking about sub atomic particles, and not people, but since I am among scholars, I think, the simile is worth analysis.
For me – when I was leaving Cornell University, (Ithaca, New York, USA, North America...) I thought I had a pretty good idea of where I was going. But my path has taken some very radical and unexpected turns, including several moves across the Atlantic, raising a family in a foreign country, and more recently, a major career change – from a Captain of Industry, to a Property Manager for the Irish Heritage Trust. So now, my life is focusing on heritage – our past, where we’ve come from, and how we got to this exact point. My Physics is a bit rusty, but as far as I know, Her Heisenberg was silent on the topic of knowing where an atomic particle has been. So I hope you’ll indulge my explorations of the subject of heritage:
These explorations will take the form of what I call the Fannon Principles of Heritage:
Principle number one states that, Heritage only exists in the minds and customs of people alive today. I suggest within the context of this principle, that heritage is in essence our collective memory. It has aspects of religion, music, architecture, art, customs, and the list goes on. It is only how we remember these things that form what we class as our heritage. And only people who are alive can remember things. Therefore, objects, buildings, songs or stories do not contain heritage in and of themselves. Rather, and I will use a JK Rowlings creation, they are merely ‘port keys’ – physical things that afford us a link to the past, and allow us to maintain continuity with what has gone before. They jog our memories.
Principle number two is the opposite of one of Newton’s theories about matter – and it says that, Heritage is always being created and destroyed. Time - each moment, each idea, each feeling - slips quietly into the past. Many of these snippets of time are lost – not remembered – simply due to the sheer quantity of them. Sure, today we have lots of modern storage techniques to preserve physical items and to electronically store vast amounts of data. So perhaps fewer of the ‘port keys’ will be lost. But we’re also battling against some pretty powerful forces such as population growth, Mother Nature, and economics. Civilizations need to build and grow – and this means we have to excavate. Erosion, climate change, and people will continually wear away structures. Preserving and keeping port keys costs money – and in some cases lots of it. But the biggest force causing the destruction of heritage is new ideas. Certainly the sense of continuity that heritage provides cannot and should not stop the development of new ideas. Quite the opposite, as new ideas are our new heritage.
To illustrate this point, I refer to the various laments within the heritage world of the destruction of some of the finest demesnes of country houses in Ireland to allow golf courses to be built. Shouldn’t we be preserving these original 18th century landscapes into posterity? Is it not possible that in 175 years the Irish Heritage trust could be working to protect and preserve some of these very golf courses from destruction, which by then may be considered (by those alive then) to have formed a critical piece of our heritage!
Another example: In the USA there was a great deal of controversy in the early 20th century over the sprawl of highways into the west, destroying the natural beauty which was considered part of the heritage of America. Now, to travel on Route 66 across the continent is an iconic cultural activity which connects people to the ideas and customs of America’s expansion years.
My final principle is the tricky one: Some heritage is more important than other heritage.
There are 146 “heritage centres” in Ireland. There are 890 UNESCO World Heritage sites in 148 countries, and more being proposed. I have no idea how many listed properties there are in Ireland. Add to that all our museums and their contents, and then add in my stamp collection and this is still just the tip of the iceberg.
Since we’ve already accepted that heritage is always being destroyed, and there are large costs associated with maintaining the physical port keys of heritage, we need to decide which ones to save. Obviously it makes sense to save the ones that are the most valuable, but how do we measure value when it comes to heritage? One possibility is to place our trust in the various Trusts and bodies charged with looking after it. However, we have quite a few:
The Military Heritage Trust of Ireland, The Irish Genetic Resources Conservation Trust, The Mining Heritage Trust of Ireland, as well as the more well known an Taisce, The Heritage Council, the OPW, and even the Department of the Environment, Heritage, and Local Government.
Another way to place value on items is to get “experts” to identify, catalogue, compare, and complete risk analysis, etc. They can clearly pick items that represent outstanding feats of human ingenuity, or talent, things that we have lost the skills for, or are unable to recreate due to the cost. Obviously this should be included.
But there is a third even more important determiner of value, and that is the public – you and I. We can very easily make our wishes known, voting with our patronage or our volunteering activities or our donations. Which port keys afford you the most opportunity to connect with your past? Which ones invoke the most memories for you, instil pride, or inspire your creativity?
OK, OK – enough of the Fannon Principles of heritage. One must be reminded of the pertinent lines from the Brian Friel play Translations about a piece of Ireland’s past – how its place names became anglicized. The pertinent phrase is, “To remember everything is a kind of madness.”
On this momentous day in your lives, it is appropriate for someone like your parents or grandparents, your professors, or even someone like myself – to pass on a few words of wisdom – to perhaps remind you where you’ve come from, to help you appreciate where you are, or to help guide you on your way to where you are going.
Many learned people would suggest to you that there are times – the most critical times that occur - that will really test your resolve and define who you are. You will be faced with a “Worst case scenario” that if you can manage to come through successfully, you will be remembered or perhaps even lauded.
I’d like to put to you an alternate suggestion. Think of life as a continuum of scenarios that will happen to you – from the very worst case all the way through to the very best case scenarios. Of course in the statistical world of normal distributions forming the familiar bell curve, it is statistically likely that there will be very few of these best and worst case scenarios in your life. As such, I suggest that these will NOT be the times that define you as a person. Rather, the vast majority will be every day, garden variety, middle of the road scenarios.
I say this not to limit your ambitions, but merely to understand the nature of the beast. In your life, you will come into contact with a great number of people and you will have varying degrees of interaction with these people. Some you will simply brush up against, some you will bounce off, others will stick to you, some you will swerve away from, and there will be others with whom you will dance. Many – and again the vast majority of these interactions will occur without your even thinking about them. They just happen. Another snippet of time slips into the past.
How you manage these “normal” scenarios, due to their sheer volume of occurrence, will be what really defines you. Sure, when the chips are down, we all hope we will be there and do the right thing. In fact, most of us probably will, and those of us who don’t will likely be forgiven because of how tough the situation was.
The greater challenge is to be yourself - all the time, every day. That is how you will be judged.
My second thought for you on this important day is that up until now, you all have been net takers from our society. You have enjoyed 3 meals a day, clothing, a roof over your head, and a world class education. You’ve been given braces, medication, hugs, plenty of toys, and... the list goes on. Your parents know all too well the cost. This isn’t to say that you haven’t given anything back – of course you have. But when it’s all summed up, you have been a net receiver (perhaps a taker is too strong of a word.)
But for a society to survive there has to be more put in that taken out.
Today - from today on begins your transition. Today you start to move from being a net receiver, to a net giver. Yes there will be a small period of time when you’ll be neutral and simply struggling to look after yourself. But one day, soon, you will be expected to take on the mantel of giving back to society. Some of you will be fortunate enough to give more than others. Some will be able to raise a family, and pass on the morals and values you have learned to your children. Others may be able to donate time to charitable organizations. Some of you will solve major world problems, write important works, or entertain us. Some will become academics. And still others will have been successful enough financially to allow them to make large contributions to fund various causes – perhaps even UCC.
All of these are essential elements in the continuation and creation of our heritage.
I want to thank you all for the opportunity to address you today, and hope that my words will fuel your thoughts. Certainly I hope they may encourage you, if nothing else, to visit a heritage site and help define its value. I hope you will learn to love and understand how you got to the exact place you are in, and to use it to support the every-day scenarios of your life. I challenge you to take up the mantle of being a net giver in society, to create some new heritage, and to pass it on.
Thank you.
ENDS
1130MMcS