Telling tales about Trinity College in the 90s

Trinity Tales: Trinity College Dublin in the Nineties is the fourth volume of this fabled Lilliput series that began with the Sixties. Edited by Catherine Heaney and with a foreword by Louise Richardson, it reins in 40 young shapers and makers of contemporary Ireland, from writers and journalists Claire Kilroy, Belinda McKeon and Turtle Bunbury to actors Dominic West and Mario Rosenstock and sporting hero Mark Pollock.

Catherine Heaney 1991-95 History of Art and English

I had the slightly uncanny feeling of having entered a parallel universe on my first day. Of course it was the sheer physical grandeur of the place that underpinned this sense – that and being liberated from the deadening drill of the Leaving Cert – but meeting new friends was the real awakening. People like Ellen Rowley, who breezed into the history of art department on that first day like a freshening gust of spring air, and a group of funny, whip-smart girls from Belfast, who reminded us that there was a world beyond our middle-class Dublin upbringings, and in whose flat off the South Circular Road we sealed those early friendships over mix tapes and cheap cider.

Mario Rosenstock 1989-93 BESS

I occasionally dipped into the Hist and the Phil but I always found that there was a bit of antipathy towards the fact that I was a performer. The truth is that I was a snob. To my mind, the people in those societies were wannabe actors who weren’t quite good enough. […]In the Phil and the Hist, you’d see these guys who you knew were all destined to become barristers and they all seemed to have that same sense of humour, and that same condescending legalese banter. To me they were robots parroting the same hackneyed old phrases back and forth at each other: “Well I’m afraid that would be a matter for yourself entirely – haw haw haw …” Bollocks. So in the end, I stuck to Players.

There was much more of a drinking culture back then and I saw some young men and women turn into alcoholics before my eyes, in the space of a few months. We were childish and fairly reckless, and part of the reason was that you were more or less guaranteed that no one would find out – or kick you out. […]if you went out and misbehaved in broad daylight (and we did), the only people who’d know about it were the ones you were with. It was madness.

John Boyne 1989-93 English

Between autumn 1989 and summer 1993, a young man attended Trinity College where he studied English literature. He shared the same name as me, looked exactly like me and had the same parents as me. He took the same bus into college as I did, shared my aspirations to be a novelist and was coming to terms with being gay, just like I was. But he wasn’t me. He was someone who, more than twenty years later, I barely recognize. A loner. An introvert. A complete mess, A total disaster.

Trevor White 1990-92 Theatre Studies

The goal of drama school is to shed one’s inhibitions, explore character, become a “thespian” and say that word without blushing. Painfully self-conscious, I never got over the fact that we had to wear a black leotard all the time. In week one I wanted to join the French Foreign Legion. In week two I skipped class to pick magic mushrooms.

Claire Kilroy 1991-94 English

There was a march about the, um, library. We got up on our hind legs and strode down O’Connell Street on a sunny spring afternoon, disrupting the traffic, making noise. There we all were the following day in the paper, to our delight […]prancing around in our element, revelling in our heyday. I think of yearlings bucking in meadows just because they can. The march wasn’t really about the library at all. It was about being young in early spring and having had the tools of the intellect recently handed down to you, and seeing what you could do with them for the few years that you were protected by that lovely walled city, the moral high ground inalienably on your side.

Anna Carey 1993-97 German and History of Art

[T]he Lecky, and indeed the Arts Block as a whole, was a hotbed of hormones. Most of my friends had a library crush at some stage, a stranger who would be referred to by a nickname until his or her real name could be discovered. In a pre-internet age (arts students got email accounts automatically in Michaelmas term 1995, when I was in third year, and we had no access at all to the brand-new World Wide Web), students would share gossip and ask for “any info” on various boys they fancied by scrawling on the backs of the lavatory doors (and all over the frames). I’m not sure that reading scurrilous gossip on the back of a loo door was exactly what I had hoped university would be, but it was always interesting.

Chris Binchy 1997-98 Creative Writing

I spent six months in Kennedy’s drinking coffee that was made from ashtrays, served by Dublin’s glummest barmen. We would gather and complain about the amount of work that had to be done, the degree of freedom that we had been given, the boundaries and the lack of boundaries. Sometimes the coffee would turn into pints and everything would get emotional and more funny. We sat there for weeks on end, going in to Oscar for workshops and occasional broadcasts from writers and publishers who came to tell us, in counterpoint to the encouragement we were getting, what was waiting for us in the outside world. Slush piles and remaindered copies and unearned advances. It did not sound easy.

Belinda McKeon 1996-2000 English and Philosophy

Jack Derrida. That’s how I wrote his name down in my lecture notes those first weeks. Michelle Fuko, too, and John Boodria, and Roland Bart. It’s hard to express the bewilderment I felt, sitting in those lecture halls, or trying to read the texts in the two anthologies we’d been assigned for critical and cultural theory; “a text”? What the hell was a text?

[ Lilliput Press, at €20 ]