Remarks at the Conferral of Membership on him by The Royal Irish Academy
27th November 2012
Tá áthas orm bheith anseo libh inniu agus táim thar a bheith buíoch daoibh as an chuireadh a thug sibh dom chun an onóir seo a ghlacadh.
Agus is mian liom buíochas a ghlacadh leis an c-Ollamh Luke Drury, Uachtarán Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann, as an gcuireadh a thug sé dom agus as an gcur i láthair cineálta sin, agus buíochas chomh maith le mo hiar-chomhghleacaí agus mo chara, An tUachtarán Jim Brown, as mé a lua ar bhealach chomh gnaíúil sin, mar is dual dó a dhéanamh.
[I wish to thank Professor Luke Drury, the President of the Royal Irish Academy for his invitation and kind introduction, and may I thank my former colleague and friend, President Jim Brown, for his characteristically generous citation.]
I am deeply honoured and delighted to be introduced to the Academy by the distinguished Nobel laureate, Séamus Heaney.
I am honoured by the presence of and presentation by Nobel Laureate Séamus Heaney, a poet of global stature, is a writer whose humanity and personal decency, and generosity in the public space of our lives at home and abroad, have made an enormous contribution to the public welfare of this island and to Ireland’s reputation abroad.
The Royal Irish Academy holds a special place as a learned society in Ireland, promoting excellence in the sciences, humanities, political economy, history, and all of these in their intersecting possibilities, as tools of understanding for our lives together.
I am well aware of the early members of the Royal Irish Academy’s impatience in introducing new ideas, their competitive spirit in contesting received theories, and the often denunciatory rhetoric with which unstated, or intellectually fragile, assumptions in an opposing scholars’ work, were exposed.
Surely it is of relevance to us today to note, not just their critical scholarship but also these scholars’ conscious attempts to recruit public support for their ideas. The debate on the origins of the Irish language is a good example and the debate involving Charles Vallancey, George Petrie, William Jones and others is an example of a vigorous contest for acceptance of differing scholarly theses. Indeed such scholars attempted a learned opinion in all the areas of intellectual life. Theirs was an intellectual life without borders.
The founding Charter of the Academy makes reference to ‘useful knowledge’ and I choose to interpret this as a suggestion that there is nothing more ‘useful’ than good, generous, open, independent, and dare I say it again, emancipatory scholarship – a scholarship that draws on the discipline of a subject area but is also able to celebrate what constitutes the riches of the interstices between disciplines and subject areas.
While the founding vision, of the members drew on the spirit of the European Enlightenment, it was not the boundary of their scholarship. It is important also to remember that there were scholars in the period of the European Enlightenment that questioned the use of its ideas in the service of empire, as well as those who were willing to accept favour and comply with its tasks.
The scholarship of the early members of the Royal Irish Academy stretched back to earlier times, as well as incorporating the excitement as to what was the new and emerging promise of reason. It made itself aware too of the contribution of Eastern thought and the influences of this thought on the scholarship of the Western world.
After independence was achieved, it may have been doubted if a Royal Academy that encompassed the whole island would survive political developments. But “The Whig” of 4 January 1924 noted that, despite partition, the Academy was to remain the Royal Irish Academy of all Ireland and was thus a ‘symbol of national unity in literature, science and art’.
Indeed in 1925 its continuation was further supported by an annual grant of £3,200, which was double the previous year’s allocation – perhaps a salutary indication of the wisdom, even in hard times, of the executive encouraging and supporting the academy.
Perhaps it is a reflection of the fact that Ireland was in a somewhat authoritarian atmosphere that it was not until 1949 that the Academy elected its first women members: Françoise Henry, art historian; Phyllis Clinch, botanist and plant virologist; Eleanor Knott, Celticist; and
Sheila Tinney, mathematical physicist.
I know that the Academy has played a very important role in bringing awareness of the contribution of science in our history to life in a recent exhibition. Among the work it has celebrated is William Rowan Hamilton whose work on dynamics formed the basis for Erwin Schrödinger’s work in quantum mechanics.
It has also highlighted the contribution of Richard Kirwan, the second Academy President, who played a significant role in the fields of chemistry, geology and meteorology. The father of seismology, Robert Mallet was also remembered as was the botanical fieldwork of Robert Lloyd Praeger and the work of the naturalists Alexander H. Haliday and Richard John Ussher.
Academies can do many things, and we are fortunate in Ireland that the Academy’s Charter permits such great versatility. A key function of the Academy in these challenging times is to raise issues, stimulate discussion and promote greater communications and constructive dialogue between policy-makers, academics and researchers, and making it a function of critical scholarship to examine these connections. I strongly feel that such a stimulation of well argued, constructive debate has never been more important for our country.
In recent decades, much ground has been lost in terms of the public realm; that shared essential space of scholarly discourse and contestation of an independent people free to participate and change their circumstances, to imagine their future – be it in Ireland, Europe or at global level has to be reclaimed by generous and open scholarship.
Public intellectuals are now challenged, to engage with the, often unstated, assumptions upon which taken-for-granted versions of our world are offered, often in the form of what it is suggested to be inevitable, rather than constituting any serious invitation to new understanding or, and even more important, compassion.
I believe that the choice facing intellectuals constitutes a moral choice – to be part of a passive consensus that accepts an insufficient and failed model of life and economy, for example, or to seek to recover the possibility of alternative futures.
The challenge is to ethically reconnect economy, culture, science and society and in the process of so doing, to recover or reinforce an ethos of emancipatory scholarship.
Independent thought, from home and abroad, and scholarly engagement with our current circumstances are crucial.
We need a scholarship that is genuinely centred on originality rather than imitation: one that rejects the notion of inevitabilities supinely accepted; that restores the unity between the sciences and culture in their common human curiosity, discovery and celebration of the life of the mind; and that encourages and enables not only new visions to emerge, but new forms of inclusive, warm and celebratory forms of life to be experienced, in conditions of real freedom including affective freedom, freedom from the deprivation of the essentials of life, and the obstacles to participation in society.
In our current times our intellectuals are challenged to be brave; to have the courage of their convictions and to defend their conclusions; to speak truth to power and false inevitabilities. I am reminded of the injunction of “The Master” in Seamus Heaney’s poem of the same name:
“Tell the truth. Do not be afraid.
Durable, obstinate notions,
Like quarrymen’s hammers and wedges,
proofed by intransigent service.”
To weather the storm currently assailing our country, we are all called to ‘intransigent’ service.
We all need to declare confidence in our capacity as a nation, in our Irish people wherever they may be, to overcome the current problems and to begin again, as we have so often done, with a vision of the potential that can be realised if we can draw on our strengths ‘ár bhféidireachtaí gan teorainn’ as I called them in my inaugural speech.
To navigate successfully through today’s troubled, uncertain, and probably uncharted, waters, now, more than ever before,
we need vision, foresight and bold strategies based on strong scholarship. And we need this Academy and other centres of intellectual thought to continue to pose the important questions to our times and our world as Immanuel Kant did in his own time – what might we know, what should we do, what may we hope.
We meet in late November and it is in the winter that we can see the bare trunks of trees, the encroachment of that which threatens the growth of our spring. We need to use a sharp gaze in our intellectual winter to prepare for our spring – a spring that I remain certain will arrive.
Tá ról an-lárnach glactha ag Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann i gcosaint, i gceiliúradh agus i gcur chun cinn cultúr, oidhreacht agus scoláireacht ár náisiúin. Cuireann an obair atá ar siúl faoi láthair agaibh, ar an Athbhreithniú Straitéiseach, deis ar fáil chun ullmhú d’earrach na hathnuachana, lena chinntiú go gcoimeádfaidh an tAcadamh gnóthach agus é á athsaolú agus go leanfaidh sé leis an tógáil ar a oidhreacht bhródúil den oirirceas agus den saothar.
[The Royal Irish Academy has played a pivotal role in safeguarding, celebrating and promoting our nation’s culture, heritage and scholarship. The work that you are currently doing on your Strategic Review provides an opportunity to prepare for the spring of renewal, to ensure that the Academy keeps busy being born and continues to build on its proud legacy of distinction and achievement.]
In conclusion, may I reiterate my thanks to you all once again for the invitation to become a member of the Royal Irish Academy. I am most gratified to be so honoured, and I remain humbled by your invitation to join you.