Sir, – Trinity College Dublin has announced it will “consult” the general public about renaming the Berkeley Library (“Trinity invites public to help choose new name for library”, News, November 15th). That is not exactly a promise of a public vote, but at least it ensures it will not be named for some millionaire donor.
Since no one can guarantee that anyone will not be cancelled in the future, would it not be safer to avoid naming the library after any individual, but instead name it to collectively honour the forgotten people whose labours paid for Trinity at its foundation?
Trinity was originally funded by endowing it with great swathes of confiscated land in Munster after the Desmond Wars, most famously the lands around Abbeydorney in Co Kerry.
The unfortunate inhabitants of these parts (my own ancestors doubtless among them) effectively became TCD’s first donors, albeit very reluctant donors.
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Whatever surplus was produced by these peasants, over and above mere subsistence, went toward the upkeep of this alien institution in the centuries of apartheid that we call our Penal Times.
Ó dTorna was the name of the tuath thereabouts in pre-Norman times, while “O’Dorney” is the colloquial name of the village. If the library were renamed “O’Dorney Library” it would be an honest recognition that there are few things in the past that we can celebrate unreservedly, even so noble a thing as the founding of a university.
It would also be a humble acknowledgement that academia is privileged, and always dependent on the labour of others, whether the rent-paying peasants in the 1590s or taxpayers today. – Yours, etc,
TIM O’HALLORAN,
Finglas,
Dublin 11.
