Autumn Conferring Ceremonies, 23 October 2012

650 students will graduate today (Tuesday 23 October) from the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at UCC.

650 students will graduate today (Tuesday 23 October) from the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at UCC.

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Congratulations to the 650 students who graduate today (Tuesday 23 October), on the second day of UCC’s Autumn Conferring ceremonies.

 

Students of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences will graduate with:

The Conferring addresses will be delivered by Matthew Sweeney, Writer-in-Residence, School of English, UCC (at 10.00am and 12.30pm) and Thomas McCarthy, poet and novelist (at 3.30pm and 6.30pm).

Further information is available at: http://www.ucc.ie/en/whatson/Name-169260-en.html

 

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Address by Mr Thomas McCarthy, Poet


 President, Professors, Reverends, graduates and distinguished guests,

I spent most of my undergraduate hours at UCC writing poetry in an armchair that was placed against the window on the third floor of the New Science Building. In that armchair, I wrote at least six of the poems that won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1977; an award that turned my head away from academe towards the peculiar world of literature. As one of the worst students ever to pass through the gates of UCC, floating along poetically on a summer Pass in Archaeology and Geography, before doing the MA Qual in English, it’s a particularly poignant honour for me to be invited by UCC’s President Murphy and Professor Caroline Fennell, to attend an actual HONOURS conferring ceremony. So, I am very moved to be here, and I am equally conscious of how wonderful you are, today’s Honours graduates, to have kept to your studies, to have handed up all your assignments, to have fulfilled the hopes of your Professors and your families. I congratulate you. Well done. You are now graduates of one of the most beautiful and one of the most highly regarded universities on this side of the Atlantic. I know you will mark this day by allowing at least six weeks to elapse before asking your parents or your bank manager for more money.

But before talking any more about you and how terrific you are. And you are terrific scholars:  -- let me say a few words about UCC, this academy, establishment and campus. It is forty years almost to the day since I walked between the laurels, rhododendrons and tricuspidarias, past the tennis courts, on into the galleried lecture rooms of the old West Wing. One of the O’Malley generation caught by the rising tide, I was the first person in my family to go to university. My brother Kevin followed me six years later and he redeemed the academic honour of the family by becoming a Kelleher scholar in engineering all the way through.

What struck me forty years ago as a youth who understood trees and flowers, and it is as true today as it was in 1972, was how well managed the entire establishment of UCC really is. It is impeccably managed. Look at the maintenance of the fabric, the shrewd, long-term planting, the condition of paintwork and door-frames, as well as of glass and steel. We tend to forget that a university has to self-govern; it has to find willing staff who will support committees and write administrative reports in addition to their teaching and research duties. How lucky we are in Munster to share the fruit of all their administration and all their teaching in this lovely place.

But this is about you. About how wonderful you are. How gifted you are. And what a future lies before you.

You would never think it, would you, the way things have been, that there is any future at all? You and your parents have lived through half a decade of relentless decline. In fact, my guess would be that your families have frightened the lives out of you at this stage; my honest guess is that a more anxious generation of university graduates haven’t assembled in this place since October of 1939. The economists and the bankers seem to have got everything wrong. We have inherited a new Congested District, the useless and sterile carcass of our Celtic Tiger. It is all a genuine source of anxiety, and even despair. My economist friends, all of whom wished they’d gone into poetry, or at least stayed in the bar with the poets, tell me that we need about another ten per cent. Ten per cent of what, I ask them. Ten per cent further decline, they say, of wages and costs; and then we can start all over again.

I don’t know. But I can tell you this, as a poet, and as one of the O’Malley generation, the future will be much better than anyone in this hall can ever imagine. There is nothing in the public discourse, nothing in the media, nothing in any political programme presented to us that can give us the equipment of hope.

Hope, as the poet Máire Mhac an tSaoí once explained to me, hope is not a feeling, it is much more powerful than that: it is a virtue. It moves things. It drives enterprise, it forms companies, it assembles community workshops and community-based action groups. Hope inoculates us against inertia. It makes us turn our faces to the sun, despite the stiff breeze.

Why do I tell you that the future will be much better than anyone in this hall can imagine? And I tell you this with complete confidence in Ireland and its people. I tell you because I’ve worked in a library all my life: I’ve stayed close to the archives, the papers, the microfilms, the biographies, the reports, the registers of electors, the constant readers. I’ve handled a book by experts, published by W.H. Allen in 1954, that predicted there would be no one left living in Ireland by the early 21st Century, such was the pattern of migration and population decline: ‘many sober students think that the Irish are already far along on the path to extinction,’ the learned editor wrote.  I’ve handled Colman O’Mahony’s masterful book, In The Shadows: Life in Cork, 1750-1930; a book that will tell you what real Cork slums were like: how, in the summer of 1847, about 15,000 people each day – 15,000 souls! -- were given outdoor relief at Barrack Street, St. Lukes, Shandon, Blackpool and Harpur’s Lane.  Nowadays, as any of you who have worked with the poor will know; now, it is heroin as well as hunger.

 As someone who works in a public library, I hope that there is a scholar in this hall today who will give Ireland its definitive work of historic sociology. Such a sociology is desperately needed. We have had enough of hatred, outrage, disappointment: our editorial writers can’t invent any more honest indignation. What we need now is to explain ourselves to ourselves, and move on.

One thing I am sure of: time is on your side. You have more time than I have. You own more of the future than I do; and not only is it your time, but it is time full of infinite possibilities. No doubt you will see people, as I do in the library every day, trying everything to heal the past, going from Reiki to Chakra crystal healing, from Alexander technique to devotion to Padre Pio. How resilient, how astonishingly resilient, people are in the aftermath of trauma. Ireland is like that. As James Connolly said, Ireland without its people means nothing to me. For certain, you will have time to see Ireland rise again. And you, YOU, will rise with it.

My own generation, the late baby-boomers, will begin to vacate the public service within the next two to seven years. Even if the public service in Ireland is shrunk back to the smallest possible number imagined by a fantasising director of the ECB, there are still a quarter of a million public servants who will have to be replaced over time to run this country. Not now, perhaps not next year, but sooner than any politician thinks, your qualifications and your qualities of caring and advocacy will be needed by Ireland.  And you will be ready for such national work because while others wallowed in inert self-pity you never lost faith in yourself: you studied and you graduated. This is a brilliant personal achievement and must remain an enduring source of pride to you and to everyone associated with you.

When I look at you assembled here on this important day, I am reminded of another fine day in UCC; a day years ago when the great Scottish poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, read to a capacity crowd in this campus. As MacDiarmid said to us in his great poem, ‘Island Funeral’ we may have only a small part to play in the great orchestra of Europe, but it is a real part and only we can play it.  -- Listen to MacDiarmid:

The cornet solo of our Gaelic islands

Will sound out every now and again

Through all eternity.

I have heard it and am content forever.

Thank You. And Congratulations!

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