On the front cover of Donal McCartney's book are three buildings - a sunny 86 St Stephen's Green, a brooding Earlsfort Terrace, and Belfield by night. The difficulty confronting anyone attempting to write the history of UCD lies in the fact that the story is one that sprawls not only across 145 years but concerns three institutions on separate locations, each with a rich tapestry of personalities, problems and achievements.
McCartney does not attempt to treat the three equally. Oddly for a historian, his account is brusque to the point of dismissiveness when dealing with the origins and early years of UCD, whereas it devotes much analysis and space to events during quite recent times. Thus, Newman's Catholic University and the Royal University, although they account for about a third of the entire life to date of UCD, receive short shrift, being disposed of in a relatively brief chapter. This lack of balance leads to some oddities indeed. For example, while McCartney, ever ready to quote Michael Tierney, happily repeats the latter's jaundiced remark about the "long sad list of numerous brilliant young people for whom the bright promise that they gave in the Literary and Historical was almost the whole of their achievement", he fails to inform his readers that it was at the same L and H in January 1900 that the young James Joyce delivered his paper "Drama and Life". This was the work which, in the words of Richard Ellmann, was Joyce's "strongest early statement of method and intention", leading directly to his first publication in the prestigious Fortnightly Review and Henrik Ibsen's recognition of the young literary genius. How UCD has shamefully neglected Joyce, a neglect emphasised again in this history, is reflected in the fact that today he is more associated in the public mind by way of David Norris's fine work with TCD, a university with which he had absolutely no connection, than with the University in which he began the journey that has made him the novelist of the century.
Half the book is devoted to the battle over Belfield and is none the less interesting for that. What emerges heartbreakingly from McCartney's fascinating - and, for the most part, dispassionate - account of the decisions that led to the move is the fact that much of the impetus behind it came from the conviction of Tierney and others running UCD in the 1950s and 1960s that unless and until UCD got out from under the shadow of TCD and away from Earlsfort Terrace to Belfield there would never be parity of esteem in the public eye or equality of treatment by government. Had the insights of Roger McHugh and Aodhogan O'Rahilly triumphed, there might now be a truly great university in Dublin, one College at Earlsfort Terrace surrounding Iveagh Gardens and including all the many buildings that since the 1950s have been acquired and developed for other purposes, the other at Trinity. Both would now embrace St Stephen's Green and Grafton Street, the very heart of the modern city of Dublin.
McCartney's history shows how many alumni of UCD have contributed in various ways to the success of Belfield. Many others have worked within the new university and have helped it develop into the largest in the state. But few of those who graduated out of Earlsfort Terrace have ever grown to love or identify with the new leviathan. McCartney captures well the political atmosphere of dissent and debate throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the confrontations with the two massive hate-figures of McQuaid and Tierney, and the way these two men worked together in a mighty yet doomed effort to turn UCD into a publicly proclaimed and legally established Catholic University. He describes with feeling the chronic overcrowding and lack of facilities at Earlsfort Terrace and is scrupulously fair to those who insisted that the only solution was to move out to Stillorgan.
What he fails to capture is the enormous vitality and energy of that congested campus and the extraordinary, indeed unique phenomenon that was the Main Hall, where the dream of a truly integrated, multi-faculty university was for a brief, shining moment enacted as a daily reality in the post-war years. While Tierney sulked in his office and eyed Trinity resentfully, his students exuded an energy, chutzpah and a confidence which far outweighed their equivalents across the Green. It is truly a story not merely of what was and is but what might have been.
Anthony Clare is medical director of St Patrick's Hospital and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at TCD. His book, The Dying Phallus, is to be published by Chatto & Windus next year