Fond memories from three former students
JEANANNE CROWLEY
"Anyone who wants to know where the teenyboppers' contribution to the UCD radical movement bought her blue plastic boots will find them in Tyler's of Henry Street priced at a very affordable 5/11d." My first ever press mention. Campus the paper, 1969 the year - but hold on just a minute I wasn't even in the student radical movement and how dare Mick Sheridancall me a teenybopper? The only reason Kevin Myersasked me to join Students for Democratic Action was because I'd happened to be in Paris in May 1968 (a Zeilig moment if ever there was one) and jumped up on a bench in Front Hall in my blue plastic boots to say so: "Etudients dans la rue!" I cried in an effort to swell the crowd. "All follow Duncan Stewartdown to Hume Street now." I couldn't go, as I was fiendishly busy putting up posters for the Law Society. As social secretary that was one of my duties. The other was entertaining guest speakers with lukewarm sherry before proceedings began. Civil eh? I wasn't even a law student but that didn't matter.
Everyone sort of knew everyone and given we were mostly Irish middle-class city dwellers with parents who were paying for the privilege of our further education, that's hardly surprising. There were students from the country, of course, mostly tongue-tied and shy, so bashful in fact that rather than face the daily scrum, they would walk up one set of wrought-iron stairs and down another just to avoid ever having to cross Front Hall, a ritual the rest of us thrived on. Front Hall was where I first met (in no particular order) John Feeney, Yvonne Murphy, Frank McDonald, Liz McManus, Dermot Gleeson, Jim Sheridan, Lyn Geldof, Barry McGovern, Caroline Walsh and Adrian Hardiman, to name but a few. See what I mean about privilege?
The study body of Earlsfort Terrace circa 1969 was so tiny compared with the student population of UCD 2007 that the competition wasn't fierce at all. In fact there was little or none. Front Hall was the place we socialised and negotiated the beginning of our adult lives. It wasn't particularly combative or exclusive. However if you didn't have the initial confidence to join the throng, well naturally enough you weren't going to be included. Thus I felt a bit sorry for the country mice scurrying from lecture to lecture too mortified by self-consciousness to even enter the mill.
Some of those very students (still in denial) tell me this is typical revisionist nonsense! They were not, I repeat not, just holding up the radiators and talking Gaelic (the game not the language) but in truth forming fierce political machines right under our uppity little noses. Whatever. In any case they well made up for it by getting better degrees and going on to all sorts of great things when they finally did throw off the shackles of Church-led misogyny and a fearful 1950s upbringing that didn't depart these shores until, I would suggest, the late 1960s. Due perhaps to the air in Malahide I'd managed to leave all that behind ever so slightly earlier. In fact I was called into the Dean's Office over it.
"What religion are you?" I was asked. "You've left the space on the form blank."
"That's because I don't have one," I said.
"You can't leave it blank."
"Why not?"
"You have to put in something. Are you Catholic?"
"In my tastes certainly."
"Protestant?"
"Well to protest, I would suggest, is both a right and a democratic inclination."
"I see. Taking first-year philosophy are you?"
"Yes actually."
"Grand. I'll put a question mark so."
She also promised to introduce me to Denis Turnerand Philip Pettitand I duly did take philosophy, only to quickly realise that the last place I wanted to be was bent over old books in a stuffy student library disagreeing with Descartes. Dramsoc beckoned and as soon as I found myself under lights playing Ophelia in the Aula Maxima I knew I'd found my psychic home, and until I could afford bricks and mortar of my own that would jolly well have to do.
• Actress and writer Jeananne Crowley graduated from UCD in 1971. She now lives in Cleggan where she is the arts editor of Connemara View
MAEVE BINCHY
I can't have been happy all the time. I suppose there were some dark nights of the soul. There can't have been laughter every single day. But that's how I remember it: groups of us laughing heartily at nothing in particular. The weather must have been punishing, with sleet and driving rain and icy winds. But, oddly, I don't recall any of it. I only remember the good bits. Four happy years of good bits. In my case there was only a minimal brush with learning. I wish now, of course, that I had studied longer, better - or, as some might suggest, at all.
But I didn't. I was too excited. And there's no going back and regretting. And, yes, I wished that I could have lived in a flat on Leeson Street instead of having to run and catch the 11.27pm train home to Dalkey. It wasn't really a Bohemian lifestyle. Lord, in the 1950s we were terrified of getting pregnant and being banished, career, future and marriage possibilities in tatters. We were afraid fellows would think we were slags. No, all I wanted was to lurch around to Dave Brubeck music, holding on to the shoulders of some guy in a thick sweater, and to sit drinking small strong coffee, discussing the future of the world. It would have been lovely to have had the money to buy those stiff petticoats that we thought were the last word in elegance. But nobody has everything, and we were so lucky not to have gone into secretarial college to learn shorthand, typing, book-keeping and commercial French, like so many of our schoolfellows had. They were moaning about awful places with miles of stairs, much worse classrooms than school and terrifying shorthand grammalogues to learn.
They had that kind of life while we had the freedom of the Terrace and the campus that other people thought was called St Stephen's Green and believed belonged to them instead of us. And thousands of fellow students prowling around the place.
What was there not to love? I joined everything that would have me. The drama society - where I once played Hecuba in Tiger at the Gates - the musical society, the history society, the L&H. I had appointments to discuss the world all over Dublin, from the DBC to the Singing Kettle, from Bewley's to Roberts. I had friends in the engineers, the ags and the BCLs, which was a new course that we all thought might open up huge horizons, but it was as yet unproven or unknown. The day wasn't long enough to discuss all that had to be thrashed out, and because I had to be home on the last train, the nights weren't long enough either.
Do I remember what we were talking about? Not a bit of it. All I know is that I made friends who have lasted for life. We all grew confident and capable of earning our livings. We didn't think we were better than anyone else, but we learned we were just as good.
I have a tendency to paint the colours of my past in a glorious rosy pink. So, naturally, I remember lecture halls with decent professors and lecturers doing their best to open doors for those of us with attention spans longer than a gnat's. If some of us left with the minimum it wasn't their fault. And they must have had serious students who made their lives worthwhile. But I always thought that, as a university, it gave to me and my friends the best start in life that we could have wanted.
I had to go and teach outside Dublin the year after I got my HDip. And in many ways that was no harm. It would have been torture to have lived on in Dublin and had to hand over the Terrace to the next lot. It would have been too nostalgic and lonely to bear.
• Maeve Binchy completed a BA in 1959 and an HDip in education in 1960. Her novel Circle of Friendsis set in Earlsfort Terrace
CONOR BRADY
The late 1960s at UCD on Earlsfort Terrace was a memorable period of vitality, difficulty, idealism and confidence. I have never encountered anything quite like it elsewhere since. And I feel sure that most of us who passed through college at that time would share these sentiments in some degree. My primary graduation was in 1969. We were, I believe, the last cohort within the arts faculty to complete our degrees at Earlsfort Terrace. When I returned to UCD in 1973, for postgraduate study, it was to the open spaces, the mud and the concrete of the new Belfield. It wasn't the same thing at all. How could it be? It would have been impossible to re-create the cheerful chaos, the intimacy, the intense atmosphere of the overcrowded, dysfunctional, marvellous "Terrace".
The original college had accommodated about 3,000 students through the 1950s. But by 1969, with the boom in the economy and the expansion in education, more than 9,000 were cramming the place. Some faculties and departments had already been dispersed elsewhere, so it was possible to keep the bigger faculties - arts, commerce and law - going at the Terrace. The engineers were on Merrion Street. The ags were in Glasnevin. The architects were confined to the basement at Earlsfort Terrace along with the pre-meds. The scientists were in the process of being relocated to Belfield, where their new block had just been completed. We pitied them in their glass-and-steel egg box.
For those of us left at the Terrace, life was a daily battle to secure a library seat and to get the books one required, to beat one's way along crammed corridors to a lecture theatre and to struggle through the queues at the restaurant to get a coffee or a plate of hot food.
When the weather was wet, windows fogged up as overcoats came to steaming point in the crowded theatres and tutorial rooms. A warm day was a blessing, enabling tutors to bring students out to the Iveagh Gardens or to St Stephen's Green for a couple of hours.
Yet in these conditions of adversity - perhaps, in part at least, because of them - the Terrace buzzed with excitement. The societies and clubs were packed to the doors. There was at least one political event every evening. Student newspapers and periodicals flourished. And hardly a day passed without a rally or meeting on the front steps, in the Main Hall or on the street outside, either to protest or to support some issue.
It was a period of extraordinary change and of challenge, both within Ireland and abroad. The values, the conventions and the institutions of our parents' and our grandparents' era were under assault. These were years of great ideological intensity, and it was inevitable that this would be reflected in university life.
Most of us at UCD had been brought up in conventional Catholic values, guided by parents, schools and a church that allowed few doubts or uncertainties. But Pope John XXIII's Vatican Council changed much of that. Intense debates on religion and faith were part and parcel of life at the Terrace. Ultraconservative views contended with those of left-wing and socialist Christians.
I was involved in the college's main newspaper, Campus UCD News, becoming editor in my second year. There were no NUI exams - merely a college exam - in second arts. For those of us interested in journalism or politics it afforded a gap year in which to indulge ourselves without significant risk to our academic future. My memories are of endless, passionate debates over pints or coffees, frenetic attempts to get the latest college news into print, and rows with the various factions and groups that vied for space in our pages. It was great. We were 17 or 18 or 19 and we knew everything. We were, or we felt we should be, masters of the universe.
For many of the student body - and, naturally, for the staff - the biggest issue in these years was the proposed merger between UCD and Trinity College.
The merger was the brainchild of Donagh O'Malley, the charismatic if headstrong minister for education who had earlier championed the introduction of free secondary education for all. O'Malley's concept was simple. Central Dublin had two major universities within walking distance of each other. He believed that, rather than have them duplicate each other's facilities, they should be made to develop complementarily. There was an initial welcome for the proposal. But it swiftly turned to doubt and outright hostility. Too many vested interests were at risk. And the argument was made convincingly that competition leads to excellence. The proposal, in time, withered away, and after O'Malley's early death, in 1968, no more was heard of it.
As the 1960s drew to a close, so too did the unique experience that was the crowded, bustling place on Earlsfort Terrace. A few university offices and the medics remained, a token garrison, reduced and facing ultimate surrender. Some would argue - and I would be among them - that in some ways the Terrace in those years came close to Cardinal Newman's idea of a university. It was a place where ideas were thrashed out, where values were defended and challenged, where the important issues of a changing world and a changing society were the everyday agenda. It was a challenging, levelling, exhilarating experience. I know that I was fortunate to have been part of it.
• Conor Brady attended UCD in 1966-9 and 1973-5. He was editor of The Irish Timesfrom 1986 to 2002