REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN LAW SOCIETY
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN LAW SOCIETY, TRINITY COLLEGE
Dia dhíbh a chairde. Tá an-áthas orm bheith i bhur measc anseo ar an ócáid speisialta seo. Míle bhuíochas díbh as an gcuireadh agus an fáilte a thug sibh dom.
Thank you very much for your warm welcome. I’m delighted to be part of this special night of celebration to mark the 75th anniversary of the Dublin University Law Society. My thanks to Christopher O’Reilly of the Law Society for the kind invitation and to the members of the Society for all their work in organising this Jubilee event.
I don’t know how many DULS events I have been at over the years, going back to my own days as a member of staff at the Trinity Law School and since, but I know those years have spanned many different Irelands. I arrived into a life that featured DULS in its forties in 1975. Hard to believe it but free second level education was just cranking into gear here. It had arrived twenty years earlier in Northern Ireland and its transformative power was to be brilliantly captured by Seamus Heaney in his poem:
“From the Canton of Expectation”. “We lived”, he says “deep in a land of optative moods/ Under high, banked clouds of resignation/….. And next thing suddenly this change of mood./ Books open in the newly wired kitchens./ Young heads that might have dozed a life away /against the flanks of milking cows were busy/ paving and penciling their first causeways/across the prescribed texts.”
So a new generation with what Heaney describes as “intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars” began the difficult trudge from widespread underachievement to prosperity and peace. Both are still works-in-progress and just as the peace process occasionally stalled so now our prosperity has stalled. How do we react, how do we act? Maybe before we head into the less than auspicious opening chapters of the next seventy-five years we should scroll back for a moment and think about those other Irelands those other DULS days and people.
1934, the year of the birth of DULS and Éamon de Valera is serving his first term as Taoiseach, Ireland has appalling problems to judge by the newspapers of the day. There is a major global recession and Ireland is in the throes of an economic war with Britain. Male unemployment stands at 35%. Our exports have fallen by 25%. The United States is facing its first general strike. France is on the verge of civil war as a result of a massive national financial fraud. In Germany Adolf Hitler becomes Head of State. Ireland’s problems are about to be put into an altogether different perspective. Europe would write the worst chapter in human history and then its chastened and battered people would try to write its best.
Here in that fateful year both Ronnie Drew and the Dublin University Law Society were born. Ronnie gave us Seven Drunken nights and the DULS- well nobody was counting.
Trinity College was about the size of today’s Gorey Community School. An intimate and elite environment with a history that would not have endeared it to the government of the day and a future that would in time endear it to every Irish citizen. The University which had started that century, its fourth, resolutely against the admission of women, was now the employer of the legendary Fran Moran, the first woman professor of law in the country. Two of her female successors as Reid Professor would become Presidents of Ireland, and Susan Denham, another Trinity graduate, would, in 1993 become the first woman judge of the Supreme Court. Throughout the 1930’s there were rarely more than two women among the law students in any year and under College bye-laws they had to be off the premises of College by six o’clock each evening which must have made for either very early meetings of DULS, very male meetings of DULS or very illegal meetings of DULS. It would be the 1960’s before women could be seen in College at the entirely shocking hour of five past six.
Luckily those restrictions were just about gone before a famous daughter of Trinity and former President of DULS arrived on the scene. Mary Robinson was succeeded as DULS President first by her husband and then by her brother, an order very gratifying to women everywhere. Scrolling forward through a litany of names associated with DULS is like a social history of Ireland - so many talented men and women who forged careers in the law, in academe, in business, politics, the arts, the media, in sport, in religion, in fact in every area of civic life. Theirs has been a proud imprint and a proud ambassadorship for Trinity College and its famous Law Society.
Surviving for 75 years is not a given for any society. Other societies flamed for a while and burnt out, but not this one. Makes you wonder why? At one level it is no great mystery - each generation of students did their best to keep the society alive and vibrant. Each generation added its own chapter and colour to the narrative of DULS. Why they bothered to do that has to do with what the Society provided for them, a place not just to listen but to confer with the best intellects from far and wide who appeared as guests. It was sociable, friendly, occasionally a bear pit, never dull, always fun. Debates, mock trials, moots, publications, seventy-five years of tangible and intangible but real memories, each one a gift, a voluntary gift from one generation of law students to the next. No-one dropped the baton. That is why we are here tonight.
No two generations lived in the same Ireland or attended the same Trinity or took part in the same DULS. Contexts changed, characters changed. Given the choice and knowing what we all know about the years from 1934 to now I think I would prefer to be here this evening to celebrate seventy five years rather than at the inaugural event, if there was one. Somewhere in the middle I started work in Trinity Law School. Ireland was then in the middle of a recession. Twelve years later I left it and DULS behind to go to Queens, Belfast at a time when unemployment was 20 per cent and interest rates were 17 per cent. There are people who drop batons when the going gets tough and then there are people who don’t. The going is getting tough and we need people like the members old and new of this now venerable society, to have the self-belief, the determination, the commitment, the responsibility, and the generosity that allows the centre to hold, that keeps us all together as a community, as a society.
Twenty-five years from now when DULS celebrates its 100th birthday, when today’s members have graduated and carved their life’s paths how will this moment of crisis be remembered from the perspective of the longer term view. I suppose the answer is really up to us and how we shape up. We will, I hope, have had twenty-five more years of solid peace-building, twenty-five more years of great DULS memories and importantly, twenty five years of commitment to building a republic of equals whose children are cherished equally and who proved to themselves and to the world that they could pick up the baton of prosperity from where it had dropped, dust it off and carry it safely to “that farther shore”. We are, once again, if not in the Canton of Expectation, then in the canton of foreboding. We cannot allow ourselves the indulgence of sliding back under those high, banked clouds of resignation. As Heaney says how vital it is
“to know that there is one among us who never swerved/ from all his instincts told him was right action/ who stood his ground in the indicative/ whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens”.
I hope maybe, by our efforts, we will be celebrating that cloudburst a lot sooner that your next big birthday. Meanwhile to DULS members and supporters, past and present, a very Happy 75th Birthday.
May I thank everyone associated with making this event such a success.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.