The late 1960s tend to be associated, in the memories of those who lived through them, with the heady days of the student revolutions in Paris and Berlin and Berkeley, writes John Horgan. Not even Dublin was immune: UCD had its own "gentle revolution" with Ho Chi Quinn to the fore.
Behind the scenes, there was covert support for the students from young lecturers like Benvenuta McCurtain OP, Denys Turner, Philip Pettit and Hilary Jenkins.
Another revolutionary from that era, who has just died, was already 40 when that spirit of protest swept across the world, but remained a revolutionary long after the embers of 1968 had fizzled out. This was Ivan Illich, whose death in Bremen last month revived memories of an extraordinary man, and of a brief, typically tantalising visit he paid to Dublin almost 30 years ago.
Illich was a polymath in the George Steiner or Umbert Eco league, the child of a Dalmatian nobleman and a Sephardic Jew from Vienna. he spoke five languages fluently, and others well enough to get by, and boasted a degree in theology from the Gregorianum in Rome as well as a history PhD from the University of Salzburg. He was also a Catholic priest.
I first met him in 1968. He was at that stage running a language school in Cuernavaca in Mexico which taught Spanish to Catholic missionaries for Latin America. I had heard of his establshment some years before, when working for the Irish Times in Rome during the Vatican Council. Now the paper was sending me to Cuba to report on ten years of Fidel's revolution, and I persuaded them to let me go to Cuernavaca for three weeks first to acquire at least a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish (those were the days!)
In trouble with Church
Cuernavaca itself was an extraordinary mixture of holiday villas owned by Mexico's super-rich, their well-watered lawns hidden away behind high walls and iron gates, and slums of unbelievable poverty. The language school sat incongruously in the middle of it all: its earnest students were more likely to be discussing the recent massacre of university students by the Mexican security forces than Spanish irregular verbs. Illich himself, looking like an escaped figure from an El Greco painting, was a constant presence.
Visitors might include such radicals as Archbishop Helder Camara from Brazil, or the local archbishop, Mendez Arceo, whose cathedrao echoed every Sunday to the powerful, haunting strains of mariachi music - and was, in sharp contrast to almost all the other Catholc churches in the region, filled to overflowing.
Illich was already in bad odour with his Church, not least because of his increasingly vocal (and witty, which was worse) opposition to the clericalisation of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. In 1969, he was to be summoned to Rome to explain his heretical views to the officials of the Holy Office. he found the questioning so absurd that he asked permission to leave the interview for a cup of coffee, and kept walking - right out of the institutional Church.
For the rest of his life he continued to explore, as a teacher in a wide range of institutions including the University of California at Berkeley, the political and social questions which had long fascinated him - particularly questions of education, technology, energy and equality.
His modest ambition for humanity was to find a way in which "technology could be put at the direct service of the majority of the world's people, so that each person would be able to feed himself, to house himself, to move easily around his world, and to learn what he wants to know."
Early in 1974, he visited Dublin, and I reported on a two-hour seminar he conducted with a bevy of educationalists, including Paul Andrews SJ, Pat Heeran of the ASTI, and, from the ESRI, John Raven.
The best definition of a radical teacher, he remarked impishly, was as Mary Magdalene - "a saintly, loving prostitute." Asked whether Irish might be at risk in the schools because many students found it boring, he deflected the query (whose explosive nature he clearly recognised) with the remark that, in Californian schools, there was a much higher rate of absenteeism from sex education classes than from maths.
Iconoclast
Unlike some other radicals, however, he was not opposed to schools as such, and even criticised what he described as "school-baiting". This, he argued, was a tactic sometimes adopted by people who wanted to avoid personal responsibility by claiming the status of victim.
The following year, Bill Hyland, that great advocate of educational equality in Ireland, reviewed one of Illich's books in The Education Times and found it by turns fascinating and annoying.
Not all of the empirical assertions in Illich's text, he pointed out mildly, were necessarily evidenced by the book's bibliography, despite the fact that it ran to five pages and included some 112 references to works in six different languages!
Illich - most of whose devoted students never knew he had been for many years a Catholic priest - continued to stimulate, annoy, and prophesy, right up to the end. At his final teaching post, in the University of Bremen, he taught a course on "Iconoclasm."