Conferring Address by Dr Pat Donlon, former Director, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Wednesday, 7th December 2011, 10am.

Well – you made it! Congratulations.

In your hands you hold a passport to a whole world of ideas and experience. The parchment you hold tells us a lot of things. It tells of hours and hours of study, research, cogitation – of term papers, exams and theses – but most of all of determination and dedication. It tells of moments of excitement but also of despair – a despair by the way shared by your parents along the way.

Today you are charged with a just one little task – go out and change the world. Oh go on – you can do it. Now mind you it’s a pretty messy worldwe’re leaving you and one that is full of pessimism, doubts and despair. We, in this lovely country of ours are in a tight corner. This is something Bilbo Baggins knew all about - but remember Hobbits are not like ordinary people.

“Now certainly Bilbo was in what is called a tight place.

"Go back?" he thought. "No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go

forward? Only thing to do! On we go! " So up he got, and trotted along with his

little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart

all of a patter and a pitter.” As for Bilbo, so for you and me: “ On we go!

I think also of Charles Dickens and the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness.”

But in these best of times and worst of times we hold so much hope that our salvation is in your hands, that you can make a difference; you can set some wrongs to right. I feel I should be apologising to you for the state of the country but I’m not because you have the opportunity to help change this country, to reshape it, to make it a place where honesty is the best policy, where we have a political system in which we can have pride rather than contempt, where people no longer consider shopping as a hobby, where investment in education is seen as the only way forward, where kindness and respect are givens. As I said, a little task. Be brave and hold on to your integrity. It is something very very precious – so guard it carefully – just like your virginity you can only loose your integrity once.

For today allow yourself to bask in the glory of what you've accomplished. And pledge to yourself that you will cherish what you have learned here — and use it as a foundation to build a wonderful life. Most of the chapters of your life are still to be written. Most of the pages are blank. In that sense, too, these are “the best of times.”

Yes, it’s a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity. That is precisely what is rolled up in your parchments. It’s all yours. You earned it. You deserve it. And, no one can take it away. I wish you way more than luck. Go and change the world.

Is there anyone here today, of any age, who does not have within them some deep longings – for other things, better ways, and different drums; some unfulfilled dream? I believe that each of us has within us deep wells of creativity. We need you to go to that well and draw on it to help you dream powerful dreams and to chase them whole-heartedly. The values you have were developed through your family and through your time here at UCC – This is the legacy you have been given and these are your roots – so don’t forgot to water them.

One of my favourite authors and storytellers is Rumer Godden and in her book of memoirs she gives us her vital ingredient for living life to the full. ‘There is an Indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time, but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.’

Now I know that I’m supposed to look back on my life and career or indeed careers and drawn on some wisdom to inspire you. The trouble with the potted biography is that is can make it all seem very easy and seemless – and believe you me it was far from that. However, I will share two anecdotes: when I was in my early thirties and my children had just begun school, I went back to college to research and write my doctoral thesis. Evenings at home were full of scholarly activity - my daughters were doing their homework and so it seemed to them was I. ‘So, what are you going to be when you grow up? one daughter enquired one evening, clearly puzzled. Well, daughter dear, the years have gone by and you now have your own daughters, but the answer remains the same: I haven’t quite made up my mind.

And the second anecdote: in 1989 – against all the odds – I was appointed Director of the National Library – the first woman to be director of a national cultural institution. It was , in that wonderfully euphemistic word, a ‘challenging’ job. But I was a woman with a mission and I threw myself into it wholeheartedly – working all the hours God gave and some that He didn’t. And that was before the phrase 24/7. Then in 1995 totally out of the blue I ended up in hospital on a trolley with Maurice Neligan standing over me telling me that I was on my way into theatre for a coronary by-pass. That put a halt to my gallop. Whilst I was in hospital one of my visitors, the then Secretary General of the Department of the Taoiseach, brought me a book ‘First Things First’ by Stephan Covey. Covey’s philosophy is simple: it is to live, love, learn a little and leave a legacy – in that order. And my visitor said to me – ‘I think you started the wrong end’. He was right. But thanks to the wonders of modern medicine I got a second chance. Miind you, I am a slow learner and it took a stroke two years later for me to sit up and take notice and to learn to define myself by who rather than what I am: so for the record - I am a wife, mother, grandmother, friend and colleague. I have and continue to try to learn a little and leave my legacy. And I so love and empathatise with poet Fleur Adcock whose poem Future Work was written as a response to yet another rejection slip with this note from the editor ‘please send ufutre work.’

It is going to be a splendid summer. The apple tree will be thick with golden russets expanding weightily in the soft air. I shall finish the brick wall beside the terrace and plant out all the geranium cuttings. Pinks and carnations will be everywhere.

She will come out to me in the garden, her bare feet pale on the cut grass, bringing jasmine tea and strawberries on a tray. I shall be correcting the proofs of my novel (third in a trilogy - simultaneous publication in four continents); and my latest play will be in production at the Aldwych starring Glenda Jackson and Paul Scofield with Olivier brilliant in a minor part. I shall probably have finished my translations of Persian creation myths and the Pre-Socratics (drawing new parallels) and be ready to start on Lucretius. But first I'll take a break at the chess championships in Manila - on present form, I'm fairly likely to win. And poems? Yes, there will certainly be poems: they sing in my head, they tingle along my nerves. It is all magnificently about to begin.

So for you today it really is all magnificently about to begin.

So live life with no regrets. Just remember…There is no undo button.

Congratulations and thank you.

ENDS

 

Honorary Degree of Master of Education Brother William Gerard O’Shea, 7th December 2011, 10am delivered by Professor Neil Buttimer

President, Academic Colleagues, Graduates, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

In honouring Brother William Gerard O’Shea, one thinks of the Irish phrase, Molann an saothar an fear, ‘His deeds praise the man’. I look forward to listing them shortly.   Regarding those achievements, An Bráthair Ó Sé does not see himself working apart from others, but rather as a faithful member of the community he serves and from whom he receives support. This community is principally the Congregation of Christian Brothers. Here, the religious of Our Lady’s Mount, North Monastery, Cork, together with its lay staff and students, are his main fellowship. We know that famous academy primarily by its abbreviated forms, the North Mon or simply the Mon. An Mhainistir Thuaidh now celebrates not alone Brother O’Shea’s career and work but also its own story. It is two hundred years young in 2011.   Our less aged institution, University College Cork (a sprightly 166), is delighted to salute its older partner on reaching such a magnificent milestone. We shall reflect briefly on the North Mon’s heritage. UCC was and still is a substantial beneficiary of that School’s legacy. Accordingly, we shall also recall some highlights in our mutual relationship, while expressing the hope it prospers in the future as fruitfully as in the past.

Brother O’Shea is a native of Killeens near Blarney. Educated first in nearby Rathpeacon, most of his primary and all of his secondary schooling took place in the North Monastery. He left there in 1958 to enter the Christian Brothers’ novitiate in Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin. At that stage, in addition to spiritual formation, each entrant trained for twelve months as a National Teacher. This was followed by a period of four years’ class-work. The celebrated Synge Street Primary School in Dublin is where William Gerard O’Shea completed his teaching practice. By the late 1960s, he was set to obtain further qualifications, among them a Bachelor of Science degree which brought him on to second level. After assignments in Limerick and Dublin, he became Principal of Coláiste Odhráin in Tramore, Co. Waterford, as well as Brother Superior. A major school rebuilding phase characterised his eight years in this picturesque coastal town. During 1988-1995, he fulfilled the same two roles in the Christian Brothers’ Secondary School, Doneraile, in his home county of Cork. Those years saw the amalgamation of that boys’ school with the local Presentation Convent Secondary School. Brother O’Shea continued as principal of The New Nagle Rice Secondary Co-Educational School. A final phase of principalship ensued in Doon, Co. Limerick, where he was placed in charge of St Fintan’s C.B.S. Secondary School. The headship of even one institution would be sufficient for most for a lifetime. To be entrusted with responsibility for four such operations in different locations during periods of reconstruction or restructuring is sure testimony to his fortitude and resilience.

His Order granted Brother O’Shea a sabbatical between his time in Doneraile and Doon. Implicit in that word is the sense of ‘rest’, such as one finds on the Sabbath or the Lord’s Day. If I said you could go to Trinidad on leave of this kind, images of sea and sand in the Carribean would immediately come to mind as you set about relaxing by the beach. Brother O’Shea had different ideas when he spent 1995-56 in this small island near Venezuela. While possessing substantial natural resources, Trinidad then witnessed significant disadvantage and income inequality. It saw communal and military tension during the early 1970s. At that point, a group of local people came together to protect the social conditions of the poor. This led to the creation of SERVOL, ‘Service Volunteered for ALL’, a voluntary organisation which collaborated later on with Trinidad’s authorities to realise its ambitions. Among these were to assist the underprivileged and help them achieve their goals. Brother O’Shea heard of SERVOL from colleagues, and undertook to spend from 1995 to 1996 with them. His particular contribution was to give opportunites to young people in their late teens to progress to training in trades. Those occupations could include becoming electricians or participating in child care. Helping teenagers who up to that point might not have prospered in the formal education system was the objective.

Before Trinidad, Brother O’Shea was familiar with the Vocational Preparation and Training Programme in Irish education. VPTP sought to cater for the needs of pupils who had left school after the Junior Certificate. Our honorand’s understanding of secondary schooling showed him how sizeable a cohort of students this is. He would also have been aware of limitations on provision for those young people. His Irish and Carribean experiences became linked after An Bráthar Ó Sé’s retirement. You will see from what has been said up to now that notions like a career break have an alternative meaning in his case, and so does superannuation. He saw the latter as a means to undertake an alternative but equally robust challenge. In 1999, Gerard O’Shea established the Life Centre in the Christian Brothers’ Sunday’s Well Monastery in Blarney Street. The Sunday’s Well Life Centre is one of four similar units in Ireland. The project seeks to look after boys and girls who have major difficulty in coping with normal secondary-school pressures. The Centre arranges for volunteer teachers to offer instruction in the students’ own home settings on a one-to-one basis. Pupils are facilitated in returning to complete the Junior or Leaving Certificate. Last year, this end-of-school examination was taken by over twenty in the Centre’s care. The numbers are on a continuous upward curve. It is to the great credit of those involved with it that dignity, self-respect and the chance of fulfilment are thus restored to young people at a sensitive moment in their personal development during our economically demanding times.

The Sunday’s Well Centre promotes the concept of care. Br O’Shea witnessed similar ideals when a pupil in the North Monastery. Its values motivated him to seek membership in the Irish Christian Brothers as a sixteen-year-old during the late 1950s. Historian Dr Daire Keogh sees the creation of that Order in the early 1800s as ‘vital to the modernisation of Irish society’ and a ‘revolution in Irish education’. Established by Kilkenny-born widower and merchant, Edmund Rice, the Congregation, while accomodating pupils of all backgrounds, emphasised instruction and basic literacy for the less fortunate. Its growth helped Ireland’s majority population come to greater prominence in public life. By the early 1900s, the Brothers had ten centres in Dublin alone catering for 6,000 pupils. Towards the 1960s, its school network throughout this island was this country’s main provider of secondary education for teenage boys. The Order also prospered in centres of large emigrant Irish settlement overseas. These included places like Liverpool, various parts of Australia during the 1860s and locations such as New York by 1907. The Congregation generated its own pedagogical materials in the sciences and the humanities. Some of those, such as its Irish-language grammar, are still standard reference points. Many of its members were scholars as well as teachers. Thus the late An Bráthair Liam Ó Caithnia, a Corkman and distinguished graduate of UCC, published the authoritative biography of Michael Cusack, founder of the GAA, as well as two monumental studies of Gaelic Hurling and Football, all within a five-year period in the early 1980s. The Brothers have long been associated with championing these codes as well as others, to the enrichment of Irish sporting and social life.

Within a decade of the Congregation’s beginnings in Waterford, Brother O’Shea’s alma mater would be set up in 1811 in Cork’s north side. That suburb was then the heart of the local provisions trade, comprising activities like butter production, distilling, tanning and allied crafts. Its sizeable population contributed to making Cork the fifth largest city in these islands by 1800. The Christian Brothers’ arrival met the surrounding community’s growing educational need, particularly when an extensive site was acquired in 1814. The North Mon expanded throughout the nineteenth century, pioneering from the 1850s onwards technical instruction suited to the requirements of its catchment. Its Brother Burke Memorial School later became the model for vocational education in Ireland. Cultural subjects were not neglected as the presence of poet and novelist Brother Gerald Griffin on its staff indicate. The School’s promotion of Irish language and literature was also a natural consequence of its situation in a city precint which derived many of its inhabitants from rural Co. Cork drawn to the urban area for employment.

The North Monastery would respond to new demands early in the twentieth century. Various Free State governments undertook housing schemes to alleviate overcrowding in old Cork central wards. This resulted in the creation of what was virtually a new city in the Mon’s hinterland. It adjusted to this as well as to other situations in the past, surviving the Napoleonic Wars, the Great Famine, the War of Independence, two World Wars and the best efforts of various past pupils who shall remain nameless. By now, the numbers of scholars to pass through its doors is to be reckoned not in the thousands but the tens of thousands. These mainly anonymous figures deserve to be remembered if only for the scale or size of the totals involved. It is largely the Mon’s more famous alumni who are justifiably spoken of: the Lords Mayor of our city, including the renowned Tomás Mac Curtáin and Traolach Mac Suibhne, our esteemed Taoiseach and former UCC student, Mr Jack Lynch, and those many other occupants of high office locally and nationally. The fine commemorative volume, North Mon 200: Comóradh 200 bliain na Mainistreach Thuaidh, the work of Jim O’Connell and Dick Lehane, ably assisted by a committe comprising former teachers and pupils like Mr Tony Duggan, summarises the story from modest beginnings in Chapel Lane to a cumulative impact on the shaping of this society’s self-awareness and self-actualisation which has few parallels in the Irish primary or secondary sector.

The School influenced higher education in equal measure, not least on this campus. Its graduates have held chairs and lectureships here across the full spectrum of our activities, from Chemistry to Electrical Engineering, from Education to Quantum and Classical Mechanics. Uniquely in UCC’s experience, two of our fourteen presidents were North Mon pupils, Henry St John Atkins in the 1950s and Tadhg Ó Ciardha in the 1980s. Bhí baint mhór ag an Uachtarán Ó Ciardha le Bord na Gaeilge a thosnú san Ollscoil, an bord sin a fhéachann i ndiaidh úsáid na teanga a spreagadh i measc na mac léinn is na foirne. Lena linn siúd ba dhuine dár lucht teagaisc an tOllamh Seán Ó Tuama, scríbhneoir ina cheart féin a chuir bonn proifisiúnta faoin léirmheastóireacht liteartha san Nua-Ghaeilge. San tréimhse chéanna leis an mbeirt úd, ba theagascóir inár measc Seán Ó Ríordáin, príomhfhile an 20ú hAois agus duine de mhórúdair na hÉireann riamh anall. Sin é an Ríordánach a ghluais ó Bhaile Bhúirne go bruach na Laoi agus a d’fhreastail ar an Mhainistir Thuaidh i dtríochaidí an chéid d’imigh tharainn sula gcuirfeadh comaoin a tuigtear a bheith as cuimse ar litríocht is ar shaíocht oidhreachtúil ár muintire.

This University continues to set great store by its engagement with the North Monastery, whether through recruitment of the School’s pupils as our undergraduates or via the input of its alumni on external boards which advise us.   Students and colleagues who came to UCC from the North Monastery share with us and Brother O’Shea one tenet central to the overall philosophy of education inherent in the connotations of that term itself: its leadership role.   It is the function of education to draw us towards new horizons in the acquisition of learning or the enlargement of our moral compass. These opportunities must remain open to us as individuals or be available to society at large. They are not the privilege of a few but the province of all. One may conclude by asserting with what remarkable distinction our honorand and his confreres have brought such aims as these within the reach of so many. We wish Brother O’Shea enduring success, while saying ad multos to him as well as to his timeless School and its affiliates.

Praehonorabilis Pro-Vice-Cancellarie, totaque Universitas!

Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur ad Gradum Magisterii in Arte Paedeutica (Honoris Causa); idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.

ENDS

 

 

 

<<Previous ItemNext Item>>

« Back to 2011 Press Releases