THE IRISH TIMES Debates are 50 years old this winter, a milestone that could not be allowed to go uncelebrated. So the estimated 130 former winners of the competition still alive are currently being tracked down for a commemorative dinner to be held on the weekend of this season’s final, next February. If nothing else, the affair promises to be noisy.
The task of finding them all has fallen to the 2010 convenor, Frank Kennedy, himself a winner in 2005. His detective work was eased by the fact that, unsurprisingly, many former champions have blazed a trail in communications. Broadcaster Marian Finucane talked her way to the individual award in 1971 and has been talking ever since. Likewise the comedian Daire Ó Briain, a team winner in 1994.
Other trails were not so easy to follow. One former champion, or a namesake mistaken for him, vigorously rebuffed initial queries about his identity, but without leaving Kennedy any the wiser as to whether he had the right man. A polite follow-up was repulsed with even greater vigour and no less ambiguity. Skilled debater that he is, the convenor finds himself temporarily at a loss for a new line of inquiry.
Another obstacle – "infuriating" he complains – were the misspelled names of former winners. Yes, even The Irish Times, reporting its own debates, has occasionally continued that great newspaper tradition immortalised in Ulysses when Leopold Bloom reads the Evening Telegraph's obituary of Paddy Dignam and sees himself listed among the mourners as "L Boom".
But at least we had the excuse that the debates, being late-night events, are covered under severe deadline pressure. Thus Trinity College’s “Ian Black”, reported winner of the 1962 individual award, proved on further investigation to be Ian Blake.
Similarly “Donal Deeny”, part of the same university’s 1971 team, is better known as “Donnell Deeny”: a high court judge and knight of the realm in Northern Ireland.
Of course, and sadly, some former winners – 12 by Kennedy’s count – are no longer with us. The dearly departed include both members of UCD’s winning team from 1963 and 1964 (champions could defend their titles then): Anthony Clare and Patrick Cosgrave. Clare went on to become a distinguished psychiatrist, although his brilliance as a communicator saw him combine this with a career in broadcasting – as a serious version of Frasier Crane – before his untimely death in 2007.
Cosgrave’s life was even more remarkable. The Christian Brothers-educated son of a Dublin carpenter, he fell in love as a teenager with the writings of Kipling and Churchill and, it seems, never recovered.
Thereafter he evolved into the persona of an English arch-conservative: as which he became a prolific journalist, author, and adviser to Margaret Thatcher. He seemed destined to be an MP himself until heavy drinking took its toll: his prospects suffering a particular setback when – it is claimed – he once threw up on Mrs Thatcher in a taxi. He died in 2001, just short of his 60th birthday.
February’s event will be less colourful for such absences as these and the much-loved barrister Greg Murphy, who died in 2002. But other former winners whose attendance is hoped for – the invitations haven’t gone out yet – include Derek Davis, Henry Kelly, Adrian Hardiman, Eamon McCann, Dermot Gleeson, and Gerry Stembridge. So the dinner-table conversation will hardly drag.
Thanks to Kennedy’s diligent sleuthing, the list of former winners whose current whereabouts are still unknown is now a short one.
But the already mentioned case aside, it includes John Murtagh, who won with Queen’s University in 1962 and was later an accountant with the European Court of Auditors; Desmond King, who took the individual award in 1963 for Royal College of Surgeons and worked as a dentist in the Middle East before settling in Greystones; and Terry McMahon, the 1964 individual winner with King’s Inns, last known to be running his own business.
Anyone with information about these men is asked to contact the debates incident room, at the address in the last paragraph below.
Like Ireland itself, the competition has changed much in 50 years. As Henry Kelly memorably recalled during a previous retrospective, the 1960s were an era in student debating during which women – future president Mary Robinson among them – could still expect to be on the receiving end of such audience witticisms as “Show us your knickers!”.
When Marian Finucane became the first of her sex to triumph in the IT finals, the result was challenged by one of the men present – later a prominent public figure – who loudly suggested it had to be a mistake. Being both a woman and a student at Bolton Street College of Technology, Finucane was a double shock to the debating establishment.
A later, merely procedural, change saw former winners precluded from defending their titles, as Adrian Hardiman and others had done. This coincided with the introduction of a newly lucrative winning prize, in the form of a three-week tour of the US.
All expenses paid (with cash thrown in), the trip involved a whirlwind circuit of American university campuses, with a series of debates along the way.
It has been an unforgettable experience for most winners, and it will again await the victors of the 2009-10 competition, the finals of which are scheduled for the Helix Theatre on February 19th, the day before the dinner. Entries are invited now.
Inquiries (and information about former winners) should be addressed to debates@irishtimes.com