The Christina Murphy Memorial Prize in Communications and Journalism was presented last night to joint winners Ms Trina Rea from Cahir, Co Tipperary and Mr John Moriarty, from Brittas, Co Dublin.
The prize, presented by the National Council for Educational Awards, honours the memory of the long-time Education Editor of The Irish Times. The awards were given at a special ceremony in Dublin before the annual Christina Murphy lecture, given by Prof Declan Kiberd, professor of Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin.
Students from seven colleges competed for the prize with a variety of work ranging from poetry to audiovisual projects. Ms Rea (21) is a media studies student at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, whose particular interest is radio documentary work.
Mr Moriarty (25) a mature student at the Institute of Technology in Tallaght, Co Dublin, studied audiovisual media production studies and made a multimedia CD-ROM about the film Orlando.
In his lecture, Prof Kiberd said there was much evidence in modern literature to suggest that artists profoundly distrusted journalists, who were often accused of "coarsening public taste and of using slipshod language".
Ireland, however, was an exception. The gap between art and journalism "scarcely existed at all". Some of the best writing of the Irish Renaissance was journalistic, with Yeats, Joyce and Synge all writing for newspapers at home and internationally. Far from sneering at journalism, Joyce was mesmerised by "the daily miracle of a newspaper with as much reading in it as a book". The word "journalistic" however was now pejorative when used by academics and the word "academic" carried similarly negative implications when used by journalists. Newspapers had done much in Ireland to promote the arts. "Some of our foremost authors, from Ben Kiely to John Banville, have served as editors of the literary pages of our newspapers, but above and beyond all that, journals such as the Irish Press and the Sunday Tribune have actually discovered new writing talent."
Prof Kiberd said it was fitting, that The Irish Times should be commemorating one of its major writers of the past three decades, Christina Murphy. "By her work in tirelessly amplifying the educational debates for the wider public, she had carried forward the legacy of Yeats, Frank Fay and Patrick Pearse."