Professor John Horgan
Extracts from address at Conferring of Degrees at University College, Cork, on Monday, 25 September 2000
 
Arts for Arts Sake

At the outset, I must warn you that when your President invited me to address you on this occasion, he was perhaps unaware of how unsuitable a choice he was making. My initial encounter with UCC was a bit like Columbus's initial encounter with America: when he set out, he didn't know where he was going; when he came back, he didn't know where he'd been, and he did it all on borrowed money. When I came to UCC in the autumn of 1958, I didn't know what I was coming to, I didn't want to be there, and I rebelled against or disobeyed almost every rule and regulation that the college could devise, including the most draconian edicts of all - the ones that required us to wear gowns to lectures, and forbade us to sit on the grass in the quad.

You will see that we have come some way since then.

I must have broken some of my lecturers' hearts. On one occasion, an eminent professor, now gone to her reward, called the roll, as she always did. My absence, as ever, pained her, and at the end of the roll-call she lifted her head and enquired: "Has Mr. Horgan got any friends in the class?" The ensuing silence was dramatic. Let's put it this way: would any of you have volunteered?

And yet . . . and yet. I left the College as an Arts graduate, with an unfocused feeling of confidence in my future which was in no way related to my examination results - the courses I did had no direct relation to journalism, which was my intended career. But it owed a great deal to something else the College gave me: the opportunity to grow up, to take some measure of responsibility for myself, and to do all of that in an atmosphere in which the rules and regulations mattered less, in the end, than the sheer excitement of finding your feet in a new world.

In some ways, today's new world is different from the one we were entering at the beginning of the Sixties. It is more full of hope, certainly, and much more replete with opportunity. But some things are as true now as they were then - even truer perhaps. And they are of particular relevance to people like yourselves, graduates in the humanities, whose role in the future of our country will be critical.

One of the things that remains true is that adaptability - elasticity of mind, a capacity to go on learning until your dying day - is, in the end, more important than any of the facts or formulae you may also have mastered. Since I left UCC, I have had three quite separate careers, of more or less equal length - as a journalist, as a politician, and as an academic. And I don't think I'm finished yet. If UCC has given you, as it gave me, that sense of a willingness to try something new, a perennial curiosity about what lies around the corner, and a readiness to continue the learning process indefinitely, it will have served both you and the country well.

But UCC also gave me something else, and I hope it has given it to you too. This was a burning desire, not only to make my mark in the world, but to change it. It taught me this lesson in a rather negative way: I still have a vivid memory of walking through the Quad after some confrontation or other with the forces of College authority and vowing silently to myself that if, ten years after leaving college, I had lost interest in changing things, I would regard myself a failure. It was that impetus that made me, in turn, education correspondent on a national newspaper, and education spokesman in Dail Eireann for a major political party. I'm not sure that I managed to change very much, but I hope I have never stopped trying.

But that's a lesson that can be learned positively as well as negatively, and indeed today is more likely to be learned positively. Forty years ago those of us who went into university to do Arts - two honors was all we needed then - were sheltered in some ways from many of the realities of the world outside. And it was, certainly until the late Sixties, very much a static world, a world in which everyone had their place, and little changed.

Today we are more conscious of change as the only constant in life. And we are more conscious, too, of the many ways in which our society could do with improvement. We still live in a world where, too often, politics are driven by demands rather than by needs, where the nestling that cries the loudest will get the juiciest worms, where we avert our eyes from the casualties of progress. If your education has given you a sense that this pattern of things is not pre-ordained, that it is a human creation and capable of being changed by human intervention, then the last few years will have been well worth while. And, as graduates in the humanities, you will have a particular responsibility, in the many and varied areas in which you will work, in the schools and universities themselves, in administration, in the social sciences and in the world of commerce. In these arenas your continuing adaptability, your ability to blend knowledge and experience, and your belief that things can always be changed for the better, are all of vital importance for the future of our country. And never forget that we have to plan, in times of plenty, for times of adversity. I always get a little nervous when I hear Ireland described as the Celtic Tiger, and not only because the noble animal after which it is named is, more or less everywhere, in imminent danger of extinction. Remember that, however difficult it is to change society and to tackle its inequalities when things are going well, it is ten times as difficult when we go over the top of the economic hill and start sliding down the other side.

Above all, I would like you to remember that much of the future that awaits you has been fashioned, not only by your own hard work and by the ungrudging support of your parents, but by a conscious pattern of public investment which has not, and never will be made to any comparable extent by any private institution.

In saying this, I do not wish to downgrade in any way the contributions you and your parents have made to your education. Your own dedication, in working to the standards set by an exacting teacher, is never easy, especially when there are always distractions on the horizon. And, if your parents are sitting comfortably here today, it is probably not only because they are proud of you and your achievements, but because their wallets have been so slimmed down in the last few years that they now barely make a dent in their hip pockets. You - and we - have a lot to thank them for too, and it is important that their contribution should be recognised here today.

The public contribution to your education has been made, not by any politician or civil servant, but by hundreds of thousands of Irish taxpayers, many of whom have not been to university themselves, and whose children will have little or no prospect of higher education. These are people who have been - more or less willing - participants in an overall plan which makes sense only if it is a plan for everyone, not just for its immediate beneficiaries, like yourselves. And it is a plan in which the university fulfils a vital role, as a public space within which you and others will have had the freedom to unfurl your wings.

So, there is a debt to society, of a kind, here. But it is easier to repay than most debts, because it does not involve painful cash transfers. The best way it can be repaid is for you to remember the value of this public space which you have inhabited for the past few years, and to learn how to protect it, by your words and actions, in the years ahead. I would argue, indeed, that it needs not only to be protected but to be developed and extended, and its objectives sharpened and refined, if it is to become an even more useful instrument of public policy than it has been up to now.

You don't have to work in a university to carry out this work of protection and development. All you have to do, in a sense, is to remember that you are the beneficiaries, not only of your parents' generosity and your own hard work, but of a public trust that can be repaid in a million different ways in future years. How you do it is, at the end of the day, a question that only you can answer. Your contribution will be not only important, but unique. I hope - and feel - that we can rely on you to honour that trust.