Diarmuid WhelanDIARMUID WHELAN, who has died at the age of 37, was responsible for the publication of Peter Tyrrell's harrowing memoir of life in Letterfrack Industrial School in the 1920s and 1930s.
The memoir – Founded on Fear– was published by Irish Academic Press in 2006. In 2003-2004, Whelan was an Archive Fellow at the National Library of Ireland.
It was while working on the Owen Sheehy-Skeffington collection in the National Library that Whelan discovered Tyrrell’s unpublished memoir. Tyrrell was a victim of abuse at the Letterfrack Industrial School in the 1920s and 1930s.
The book had a tremendous public impact, and helped to shape the tone and content of the debate in Ireland concerning abuse during the era of the industrial schools. The author of a commissioned history of the Christian Brothers in Ireland, Dr Dáire Keogh, of St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, noted that Whelan’s introduction to Peter Tyrrell’s memoir was thoughtful, and it led to a change in the debate on child abuse in Ireland.
Prof Diarmaid Ferriter's Limits of Libertydocumentary series currently airing on RTÉ 1 television mentioned the memoir, and quoted from it in his discussion of Ireland in the 1920s.
In 2008, Whelan published Gerald Goldberg– a tribute to the first Jewish mayor of Cork, co-edited with Dermot Keogh.
Whelan's third book, The Coldest Eye: the Politics of Conor Cruise O'Brien, was an intellectual biography of the former diplomat, politician and polemicist, published – again to great acclaim – by Irish Academic Press in 2009. The O'Brien book was launched by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Micheál Martin, himself a first-class honours history graduate from UCC, who praised the book's eloquence.
Diarmuid Whelan was born in Cork in August 1972. Educated first at the Christian Brothers College and then University College, Cork, he graduated with a degree in English and History in 1994.
In 1998, he was awarded a PhD for his thesis, Conor Cruise O'Brien and Nationalism,supervised by Prof Joe Lee.
Taking a break from academia, Whelan worked as a sculptor from 1998 to 2001, and received many public and private commissions. He was later a skipper on a ship. He returned to UCC in 2002-2003 when he won a Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Having worked in the National Library, he later collaborated with another holder of the library's archival studentship. The collaboration was on an essay about the Sheehy-Skeffington papers, which was published in Librarians, Poets and Scholars: a Festschrift for Dónall Ó Luanaigh(edited by Felix M Larkin, Four Courts Press, 2007).
Whelan had worked on the papers of both Frank and Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, while his co-author, Ellen Murphy, had worked on the papers of Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. Their essay is regarded as a very interesting and valuable introduction to one of the most remarkable collections of papers held in the library.
Whelan’s editor at Irish Academic Press, Lisa Hyde, remembers him as a compassionate man with a powerful sense of justice. If he had been spared the cancer that felled him at such a young age he would certainly have produced more seminal work.
After Whelan was appointed lecturer in International Politics at UCC in 2005, his energy, vision and intellectual understanding led him to play an important role in the development of the teaching of politics at UCC at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.
More recently, his research focused on terrorism, US foreign policy and decolonisation. He did everything with grace and dignity. Many of his students wrote that they were privileged to be in his class.
He was a brilliant scholar, an esteemed colleague and a popular teacher. He will be greatly missed by all his friends, colleagues and students, past and present.
He is survived by his wife, Alex, their two-year old son, Gabriel, and his siblings and mother. In the words of Joe Lee, he had a “truly beautiful personality”.
Diarmuid Whelan: born August 11th, 1972; died May 31st, 2010