Passionate and energetic debate is the hallmark of UCD'sLiterary & Historical society which is celebrating its 150th anniversary,writes alumnus Eamon Delaney

Unlike many who go to university, I have nothing but fond memories of my time there, from 1982 to 1986. Much of this has to do with University College Dublin's debating union, the Literary & Historical Society. It was the largest society in college, and around it revolved a social life and culture of politicking, intrigue and, it was modestly hoped, some class of intellectual or, at least, verbal energy.

The L&H also operated as a sort of opposition to the students' union, which was invariably much more left leaning and republican. The 1980s was the time of the Cold War, the Troubles and the liberal-versus-conservative debate about the country's future. It made for a combustible backdrop to student debating: the North, abortion, divorce, sexism, religion and capital punishment.

Also, without being too fogeyish, students seemed much more readily roused about issues then; the culture now seems to be much more about competitive work pressures and compensatory hedonism.

Entering lecture theatre M on UCD's Belfield campus for the first time was heart-stopping. It resembled a scene from an Evelyn Waugh novel: the participants were like creatures from another age, ringing a bell and prattling away, with their hands on their heads. That the boys were often in dinner jackets and the girls in heels and cocktail dresses only added to the atmosphere.

The amphitheatre also had a lot to do with it. Theatre M was like a cross between an ancient Roman forum and a medieval bear pit, appropriate analogies in both cases. This was very important to the psychology of the society. At, say, Trinity's College Historical Society, pomposity seemed to be tolerated, even encouraged, by having a flat floor, with the speaker talking down to the audience.

At UCD the people are sovereign, the speaker appealing to the serried audience, forced to make a case against the sceptical democracy of the mob. Heckling culture was thus very robust and intimidating, and end-of-year elections were hard fought.

As goggle-eyed freshers we absorbed everything: all the stunts, heckles and characters who would pontificate on their feet, freewheeling without notes. Later we'd see them around campus. "There's the chap from the L&H," we'd say.

If debating culture veers between the serious and the comic, then the L&H had a rich tradition of such satire, harking back to the broadcaster Henry Kelly and the director Gerry Stembridge and forward to the comedian Dara O'Briain. Some of them later formed a comedy group and put on Peig Sayers: The Motion Picture, a show that, with its sketches and routines, was like a forerunner of Scrap Saturday.

The first debate I attended, on Northern Ireland, became infamous. The society invited Danny Morrison of Sinn Féin, Conor Cruise O'Brien and an Ulster Unionist spokesman, then a rare sight in the Republic (the debating societies broke ground here, I believe, for the wider political culture).

Predictably, Cruise O'Brien and the unionist wouldn't share a platform with Morrison, so the chair gave the crowd a choice. They voted to hear the "constitutional" two. It was a tense atmosphere, with Sinn Féin supporters mingling among Special Branch and unionist handlers.

Christy Moore, who was performing on campus that night, was so disgusted by the vote that he immediately wrote a scorching song about it, called The Auditor Of The College L And H. Moore saw the L&H as a training ground for the blueshirt law-and-order culture that was holding back the freedom fighters - a gross distortion, but you could understand some of his prejudice.

One forgets, after all, how Fine Gael UCD used to be - I mean Fine Gael in the wider, now vanished cultural sense - and there was a sense of connection not just to the government of the day, and to the judiciary, but also to an earlier age. Todd Andrews once said that that the Civil War was started by that crowd down in the L&H. It was an outrageous assertion, but it was one that we relished.

You'd look up at the board of auditors and see not only names from the old Fine Gael, or Cumann na nGaedheal, but also right back to the long era of the party of Parnell and John Dillon, the tradition in many ways displaced, or at least overlapped, by the later revolutionary tradition. The L&H was grooming our national advocates for Westminster, and there was also a sense of connection to the original, Catholic UCD, of Cardinal Newman, James Joyce and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

There was certainly a strong political atmosphere, but mostly it was non-party, which was more interesting, as it meant an engagement with the issues rather than a parroting of an ideology. Not only hot political issues but also political parties going through ferment: a Haughey-led Fianna Fáil having the splits, Fine Gael going through its awkward social democrat phase, the Workers' Party visiting the North Koreans and Militant Tendency jostling inside the Labour Party.

Also particularly strong was a renew-ed Catholic conservatism, more aptly described as an intellectual antiliberalism, and a reaction to the materialism and woollier left-wing thinking of the 1970s. Fiery meetings were held about the visit of Ronald Reagan, and it was usually L&H members who stood up waving copies of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 and shouting: "Cop yourselves on. You live in a democracy!"

Heckling was, of course, a large part of debating culture, and it could have the most devastating effect, such as the time Tomás MacGiolla, the Workers' Party leader, was in the middle of attacking the Just Society ideas of Declan Costello when someone shouted: "Never mind Declan Costello, tell us about Seamus Costello."

Seamus, leader of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, had been shot dead in Dublin; there had been strong speculation about his feud with the Workers' Party. A stunned silence fell over the theatre and MacGiolla fumbled for his notes.

Or there was the persistent heckle. During the motion "This House Would Die For Its Country", an extraordinary meeting where Monk Gibbon, the writer and first World War veteran, who was well into his 80s, spoke in powerful detail about encountering German atrocities during the war. Later in the debate, another speaker attacked modern republicans and asked the audience to name a single one who would willingly lay down his life for the cause, as in 1916. "Bobby Sands," said a crisp voice. "Yeah, well, I mean, apart from Bobby Sands," said the speaker. "He's different."

"Francis Hughes," offered the voice. Again, said the speaker, they were exceptions. It was like the Monty Python sketch asking what the Romans ever did for us. The heckler continued to calmly name all the hunger strikers, at which point the speaker gave up.

Or there were rhetorical own goals. One was scored by a speaker who, again debating the hunger strikes, urged sympathy for their sacrifice because, "ladies and gentlemen, they weighed so lightly what they gave". Only when the laughter started did the speaker realise his gaffe.

I later became auditor, experiencing what it is like to be on the other side of the bear pit, but not before coming through a bruising election. The ballots, and the long campaigns before them, were a large part of the society's activity, and in our time they caused rifts that took years to heal.

For the mob one of the best parts of elections was stunts night, for which the candidates were expected to put on elaborate theatricals, Gothic-Gaelic comedies that were like early versions of Martin McDonagh plays.

During the session the auditor delivers an inaugural paper; mine was on "terrorism" old and new. We had an impressive line-up to respond: Lord Henry Mount Charles, the barrister Gerry Danaher, the historian Michael Laffan and the then very elderly Seán MacBride, an extraordinary figure, swimming inside his big old suit. Danaher, a former auditor, was always a lively speaker. And heckler.

When MacBride was introduced as a great man who had won both the Nobel and the Lenin peace prizes, Danaher quipped loudly: "Jaysus, and you'd want to be some chancer to win both of them." I think even MacBride's wizened head swung around.

Towards the end of our term the taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, addressed us, but the meeting was attacked by protesters, both from the students' union and by people upset that he refused to condemn the recent US air strikes on Libya.

Gardaí teamed up with tuxedoed committee members - and there was a great photograph in the Sunday Tribune of us leading the taoiseach through jostling protesters, among them Tom Humphries, the Irish Times sportswriter. "Garret protected by L&H minders" was the headline. Ah, the student radicals of old.

When the meeting began FitzGerald spoke at length about the state of the nation. He loved college life - and had been a member of the L&H in the 1940s at the same time as Charles Haughey.

The freshers around me were taking in the glamour and drama of it all, just as we had when we arrived at UCD. But it was also somewhat surreal, seeing these youngsters in tuxedos when the country was in the midst of recession, not to mention the barracking outside. And yet FitzGerald stayed on for ages afterwards to talk to the students. It was said at the time that he loved talking so much he would wander the country in search of a talk.

And in a way that's just what we were like: Rome could have been burning, but just so long as we could talk.

This edited extract is part of a forthcoming history of the last 50 years of the L&H, which will include a reprint of the original Centenary History of the Society. The new history will be edited by Frank Callanan and published by A & A Farmar in the autumn. The project is financed by pre-publication subscriptions. To order a Special Subscriber's Limited Edition copy or to add your name to the society's 150th anniversary alumni database, visit the project's website at www.landh150.com or contact Paul Brady at 01-872 5330