THE director of the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies has resigned following a report which was critical of the workings of the school.
Professor Mairtin O Murchu resigned earlier this month, a few days before the school's board was due to discuss the report of a subcommittee it had set up to review its activities. He remains a senior professor in the school.
It is understood that the report, which was accepted by the board, concluded that the school had defined its role as a publisher of old and medieval Irish texts too narrowly. Ia recent years the school has closed its summer school and stopped giving public seminars in order to concentrate on publishing, but has published little.
Prof O Murchu moved from the position of Professor of Irish at Trinity College Dublin in the mid1980s to become one of three senior professors at the School of Celtic Studies. He became the school's director shortly afterwards.
When the School of Celtic Studies was established by Mr Eamon de Valera in 1940 as part of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, it had a wide, high level research brief, covering everything from spoken Irish to placenames. It has suffered from significant underfunding in recent years.
One problem is that, under its founding statute, the school's director has to be appointed from among its senior professors. Prof O Murchu is currently the school's only senior professor, so before a new director is named, one or two new senior professors will probably have to be appointed.
The chairman of the school's board, Prof Breandan O Madagain, of University College Galway, said yesterday he was confident that whatever difficulties there were in the school would be resolved in "a very short time and amicably".