Peirce among four honoured at NUI Galway

The British lawyer, Ms Gareth Peirce, and the Palestinian writer, Prof Edward Said, had honorary doctorates conferred on them at NUI Galway yesterday for their "remarkable contributions to contemporary Ireland".

Also honoured were the Celtic scholar and former judge, Mr Justice Seamus Henchy, and the sports broadcaster and chairman of Bord na Gaeilge, Mr Micheal O Muircheartaigh.

Describing her as "an excellent criminal lawyer and a champion of human rights", the university's president, Dr Patrick Fottrell, paid tribute to Ms Peirce's work on cases involving Irish people and people from minority ethnic groups in Britain.

The most celebrated appeals concerned the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, Judith Ward and the Tottenham Three. "Behind her resolute and determined personality is a very humble, self-effacing person who shuns publicity and has respectfully declined many awards offered to her," Dr Fottrell said in his citation for her doctorate of laws. "It is appropriate that the honorary degree is awarded in this university where the new Irish Centre for Human Rights will open next month."

Born in Yorkshire, Ms Peirce studied history at Oxford, but developed an interest in journalism after her first year and moved to New York in the early 1960s to report on the civil rights struggle of Martin Luther King.

She returned to Britain to study law at the London School of Economics, where she graduated in 1973.

Prof Said, who was awarded a doctorate of literature, is "among the few distinguished critics of Western culture to notice the dissonance of Irish literature in English and to discover its colonial resonance," Prof Kevin Barry of NUI Galway's Department of English said in his citation.

Author of 16 books, he is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, New York, and president of the Modern Language Association of America.

"Prof Said's achievement has been deliberately to free himself from academic jargon and to become what he calls a `worldly' critic," Prof Barry said. "He has refused the consensus of identity politics and of nationalist or ethnic self-study, preferring to be `out of place'. He has sustained the value of critical consciousness against theory that dulls it."

Mr Justice Seamus Henchy had been "one of the most outstanding judges and jurists of 20th-century Ireland," Prof Iognaid O Muircheartaigh, registrar of NUI Galway, said in his introduction. A native of Clare who was called to the Supreme Court in 1972, he had made a unique contribution to knowledge of early Irish laws and institutions", Prof O Muircheartaigh said.

He had also embellished the law with "numerous superbly crafted judgments, which invariably advanced the cause of justice and bore the hallmarks of learning, sound judgment and stylistic elegance". In 1988, he was appointed first chairman of the Independent Radio and Television Authority.

The broadcaster, Mr Micheal O Muircheartaigh, who was born in Dingle, Co Kerry, and made his first radio broadcast in 1949, had touched the lives of countless people, Dr Ruth Curtis, vice-president of NUI Galway, said in her citation for his doctorate of laws.

The chairman of Bord na Gaeilge had associated the Irish language with "fun, excitement and challenge. He has become a role model extraordinaire for young and old, fluent and hesitant speakers of our native language, inculcating a desire in numerous people to learn more Irish."