Trinity College is not the outlier it once was

As the deadline for the CAO application approaches, my thoughts go back to my own CAO form many decades ago. It is 30 years this year since I applied for a place as a student in Trinity College. Many things that happened last year have slipped my mind: the day I learned I was going to Trinity is as vivid as if it were last week. We all remember the landmark moments in our life.

Why did I go there back in 1994? It was simple really: I didn’t want to go where everyone else from home was going. I wanted different. I got it. This young Mayo kid walking through those gates thought he was leaving the earth’s orbit, making a lunar landing.

In some ways I was. Founded in 1592, Trinity has had complicated history with the island of Ireland. In the older part of the campus – the part everyone recognises – it looks and feel different to any other university in the country and for very good reason. It was established to further the English colonial interest in Ireland, and to service the educational needs of those driving it. That mission also included the promotion of the Protestant Reformation. Training Protestant clerics was to Trinity like producing milk is to the dairy farmer. Those related goals meant it was always likely to be an unpopular operation in large parts of Ireland during our history, our own part of it most especially.

Trinity was not just part of the British imperial project in Ireland: it was the imperial project in Ireland. Nowadays young people on the campus are very exercised by how Trinity’s past was shaped by colonialism and slavery around the world, so much so that one of its largest libraries is no longer named after the slave-owning Bishop Berkeley. 

Passion about, and interest in, Trinity’s involvement in worldwide colonialism is a worthy cause. But many of Trinity’s most beautiful buildings were constructed in the 18th century, and paid for in fees from students whose families had extracted the money from the Irish Catholic peasantry, either in the form of rents or tithes. Many of those rent and tithe payers were, we might say, our crowd – west of Ireland people. My own people were among them.

So in the west of Ireland, Trinity College was an exploiter before it ever became an educator. That well-deserved reputation stuck. In the west of Ireland, the name of Trinity didn’t quite have the same pejorative meaning as ‘Dublin Castle’ or ‘The Big House’, but it was in the same league, and it lingered. And the way we were conditioned to respond to anyone from the Castle or the Big House extended to Trinity. Up until the end of the last century, if you told someone in the west of Ireland that you had been educated at Trinity, chances are they would first pretend to be impressed and, second, they would tell you nothing. Come to think of it I’m not so sure how much of that has changed.

Trinity’s relationship with the West when I walked through its gates was still quite complicated. It was certainly presumed there would be very few West of Ireland people around, with the exception of those whose parents at home got a specially marked copy of The Irish Times from the newsagent. But the presumption that Trinity was full of posh people from Dublin was far from true. Sure there were a good number of posh people from Dublin, but if you wanted to find them in very large numbers, you had to go to UCD. But notwithstanding that, Trinity and the west of Ireland were further than 150 miles or so apart.

To a 17-year-old boy at the time it felt so different to Mayo, and not just because of those impressive buildings paid for by my ancestors. In many ways, Trinity in 1994 was like Ireland is now. It was liberal, relaxed about sexuality, a place where all the churches were more or less an afterthought, with an environment and community open to ideas and people from all over the world. David Norris – who has just recently retired – was one of its Senators. I remember him speaking to us students and opening our eyes to a world we had guessed at but not experienced. To my eyes then, it seemed so different, so remarkable, so far away, from home.

But even then things were changing. In Trinity in 1994, the person who ran the place – the Provost – was from Belcarra. In a sign that the Protestant domination of Trinity was at an end, he was also the first Roman Catholic to be elected Provost, a role that is won by vote among members of the college community. In that year, Mary Robinson was President of Ireland, and she had been shaped by her experience in Trinity and later went on to become its ceremonial head, its Chancellor. By the time I eventually left the place, the new Provost was from just outside Claremorris.

The first of those two Provosts, Tom Mitchell, and the second, John Hegarty, had a combined 20 years in charge of Trinity. They weren’t – you will be unsurprised to hear – elected to that job because they were from Mayo. They were elected because of their brilliance. But their election did show something of how the place had greatly changed from the start of the 20th century, let alone from the days of its founding. There wasn’t a green and red flag flying over College Green, but the wind was certainly blowing.

If I had wanted to see another example of the green and red flying, the late great Seán Freyne, of Kilkelly and Tooreen, was a distinguished theologian and a much-loved member of the academic staff. If I had known then what I know now, I would have beaten a path to his door to talk not about divinity but about football. In respect of both those sacred things, he was a true authority.

The more time I spent in the place the more I realised that there were Mayo people all around. When I was involved in the debating society, three of its six officers were from Mayo: one from Breaffy and one from Claremorris along with myself. The person who took me under his wing when I was a homesick 17-year-old was another officer of that same society, one Dara Calleary, while a guy I really looked up to in my first years there was from Enniscrone. Before too long, two classmates from my old school came to the college, and various first cousins made their appearances. Like many things in the mid to late 1990s, the pace of change was escalating.

Over my time in Trinity, the place began to feel much more like a microcosm of Ireland, with students from all the over the country and beyond. My own nephew and niece have been through those gates in more recent times, along with many of their friends and fellows from the west of Ireland. As the CAO application deadline approaches, Trinity is now just one more option for students from home, no more remarkable to attend than anywhere else. But if any student from the west attending it enjoyed it half as much as I did, then it will seem pretty remarkable to them.