When it comes to Irish studies, other countries leave our institutions in the shade, argues Belinda McKeon

It's a tough time to be a medievalist, on either side of the Irish Sea. The Times Higher Education Supplement recently painted a depressing picture of the future in Britain for lovers of Chaucer, Canterbury and all things medieval. Charles Clarke, the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, had, it reported, dismissed the study of the period's history and heritage as unworthy of state funding and tolerable only "for ornamental purposes".

Almost simultaneously, the letters page of this newspaper alerted readers to a crisis in early and medieval studies in this State. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, professor of history at University College Cork, diagnosed an "alarming philistinism" at the heart of the Irish university system, an "appalling neglect" that found its most obvious expression in the sore lack of university chairs - professorships - in the early and medieval subjects.

Ó Corráin reminded readers that the chair of medieval history at Trinity College in Dublin, once held by the esteemed scholar James Lydon, had been vacant for 10 years. Had he extended his focus beyond the Dublin universities, he might have mentioned the empty chair in Old Irish at UCC. But by far the worst offender was University College Dublin, where five chairs had been vacant for up to 14 years. These were in medieval history, early Irish history (a chair once held by Eoin MacNeill), Welsh, Old Irish, and Latin and palaeography - the only chair in the world of Irish Latin.

Coincidentally, the chair of medieval history had been advertised on the day before Ó Corráin's letter appeared. But as the chair had lain empty throughout the nine-year presidency of Dr Art Cosgrove, a member of the university's medieval-history department, this did little to dispel the potency of his accusations.

In the universities' defence, it might be said that chairs are expensive investments - one estimate puts the establishment of a chair, allowing for a salary of €100,000, a five-year factoring into the university budget and the provision of a pension, at a cost of about €1.5 million.

Perhaps, in the face of the argument that without the prestige afforded by a chair a university department will be virtually invisible to international scholars and offer limited prospects to its staff in the way of progression, universities might reasonably reply that such a cost places too serious a demand on an institution's finances at a time when State grants to institutions are down by an average of 8 per cent.

Ó Corráin points out, however, most of the vacant chairs were filled in the 1920s and 1930s, "when we were truly impoverished". And most of the chairs remained empty, too, throughout the boom.

In coming weeks, Ó Corráin's diagnosis was supported by letters to The Irish Times from academics at universities in five countries, from Harvard to Hamburg. One letter, from the Dutch city of Utrecht, bore 11 signatures. The level of international concern was striking. Although, since the prominence of science and technology, as subjects and as profit-generating activities, for universities in the 1980s and 1990s, chairs in every humanties subject are vulnerable to abandonment or abolition, Ó Corráin's identification of the empty chairs in Irish studies struck a chord. Why?

Ironically, because departments and chairs that deal with Irish studies are flourishing elsewhere. From Oxford to Edinburgh, from Bonn to Paris and from Antigonish in Nova Scotia to Falun in Sweden, there now exist sufficient outlets in other countries to accommodate any students lacking confidence in the troubled Irish departments.

But the absurdity - that foreign departments might thrive while those in Ireland atrophy - is unacceptable to academics both home and abroad, hence the level of protest. Not only do most foreign centres devoted to Irish studies take a largely modern focus, spanning the period from 1800 to the present; even those centres that specialise in earlier history and linguistics regard themselves as conditional upon, rather than compensation for, the strength of centres in Ireland.

Irish subjects require Irish bases, argues Jacqueline Borsje, a Dutch celticist working on early Irish literature. And Johan Corthalis, a medievalist working on early Irish texts at the University of Hamburg, agrees. "Without the support of relevant departments in Ireland," he says, "professional research in these fields would be very difficult."

Even at the prestigious department of Celtic studies at Harvard, Prof Tomás Ó Cathasaigh feels that his doctoral students would be in Irish universities if funding had permitted. "There needs to be a critical mass in the home country," he says. "If Ireland can't be that, and can't fund the National Library, the university chairs, and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, another great resource, then what country will?"

What country indeed, ask some academics here, who believe our cultural institutions have been chronically under-funded for decades.

Liam Irwin, who lectures in history at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, argues that the National Library, the National Archives and the National Museum all suffer from a lack of space and resources and that their day-to-day administration is lagging far behind that of similar institutions in other countries.

"We are at the bottom of the league when it comes to national libraries," argues Donnchadh Ó Corráin. "Ours is the smallest in Europe bar Luxembourg. Serious money is not being spent on book-buying." Where respect for heritage sites is concerned, the blight of interpretative centres and the recent indifference to the proposed destruction of the site at Carrickmines Castle speak volumes.

Yet, however embarrassing this might seem alongside the support accorded by other European countries to their own cultural heritage (both men cite Scandinavia as exemplary) far more shameful is the situation asserted by Ó Corráin and backed by Dáibhi Ó Cróinín of NUI Galway's history department.

They argue that our heritage, specifically our medieval heritage, is more highly and more widely valued on in continental Europe than it is here. This, they explain, is because Irish scholars from 600 to 1200 were the most precocious in Europe in almost every field, and a grateful Continent benefited from their skills in the creation of everything from a vernacular literature to a complex mathematical system.

"It is a disgrace to allow all the work on this rich period, this period when the Irish saved civilisation, to be done by non-Irish scholars," says Ó Crónín.

"Any self-respecting nation will do this work itself."

Certainly, the mathematics of the present illustrates obstacles to the development here of such scholarship. Unlike chairs in the US, which are supported largely by private endowment, departments here are almost entirely dependent on public funding. Even the existence of an endowment is no guarantee; the chair of medieval history at Trinity was endowed by the historian William Lecky, but the university has left it vacant for almost 11 years, and the funds from his endowment have gone elsewhere.

"We are told that it can be accounted for," says Sean Duffy of the medieval- history department. A colleague in the Irish department, Damien McManus, worries that the chair of old Irish, soon to be vacated by Liam Breatnach, will suffer a similar fate despite being endowed privately.

And while the Higher Education Authority has increased investment in research at postgraduate and postdoctoral level in the last five years, the numbers assisted in the humanities fall well below those in the sciences. "We have one or two HEA scholarships," says Duffy. "But at the science end of campus, virtually every research student is lucratively funded." McManus praises the provision of project and grant aid by the HEA but points out that it is not long-term funding; that, while it may aid the three-year toil of a PhD, it won't aid the provision of permanent employment for the recipient of that PhD.

The poet and academic Michael Longley, who protested strongly against the recent abolition of the classics department at Queen's University Belfast, feels the decline of Irish studies will have serious consequences here. "Irish studies is one of the foundation stones of our culture," he argues. "And, as with classics, if we remove such foundation stones, there will be subsidence some time in the future. Sooner or later, our short-sighted institutions will collapse."

There is more to the "foundation stone" of Irish studies than the existence of university chairs, however, and some guilt for its neglect may lie closer to home than with the funding bodies and the university authorities.

Certainly, much blame can be levelled at these quarters: for the fact that the catalogue of Irish manuscripts has not been fully updated since 1921; for the under-resourcing of the university libraries, the quality of which are crucial factors in attracting postgraduate students; for the pitiful state of publishing at Irish universities - the publication of books on Celtic and medieval subjects in this country is left largely to a commercial source, Four Courts Press. And a secondary school curriculum that dispatches students to university with patchy Irish grammar and a hazy memory, from Junior Cert classes, of any history prior to the 19th century leaves much to be desired.

Responsibility lies, too, however, within the university departments. Only at Trinity, for example, do first years have the chance to study medieval history; in other colleges it is taken as a module in a subsequent year, by which time potentially interested students may have dropped history and pursued the other subjects of their arts degree. Departments with such an optional approach to medieval studies are ill-placed to protest at its indispensability to unsympathetic university authorities. Nor, as Daibhi Ó Crónín admits, do the writings of academics offer any favours for the expansion and support of the field.

Intelligent, non-specialist interest in early and medieval history and culture is attested to by the popularity of night classes and part-time courses. There is a need, in publishing in these fields, to serve potential readers between the contrasting markets of tourism and academia.

Ultimately, however, it is up to the university authorities to take the lead. The glory days of MacNeill and Lydon may be gone, but a new era for Irish studies must be allowed to take their place - without dumbing down or being eclipsed by the sciences. Indeed, a recent work of early Irish scholarship would seem an example of how the entrenched opposition of humanities versus sciences can be approached. Ó Crónín's book Early Irish History And Chronology owes much to the number-crunching of an academic and Early Irish enthusiast in Trinity's computer-science department, Dan McCarthy, and suggests there is some hope of healthy co-existence of, and even collaboration between, the sciences and the humanities.

One constant source of hope for the future of Irish studies is the wealth of students who continue, against the odds, to commit to postgraduate research; Peter Crooks, for example, who, faced with the choice between a promising career as a classical musician and the long haul of medieval history, opted for the latter and has embarked on PhD research at Trinity. And, far from being merely ornamental, the presence of such students stands as a defiant vote of confidence for a troubled but much-loved field. It's not a medieval ruin just yet.