AMONG the more intriguing items to turn up in my Christmas stocking this year was Trinity Tales, a series of "time-capsule" recollections of TCD in the 1970s. You might argue that this is one oeuvre targeted at a very limited audience, namely those who, like your correspondent, spent formative years in the early 1970s at Trinity.
This is, of course, true. To read the recollections of some of those with whom one shared grubby flats, lousy coffee, wonderful music and lofty ideals is utterly fascinating. One of the “time capsules” is written by film director Peter Kavanagh with whom I shared a less than splendid Rathgar flat and another is written by Ted Smyth, room mate of my organ scholar brother, Dermot.
This is, of course, interesting for me, but for the rest of the world? Yet, as I nosed my way through the insightful " mémoires" of fellow students, one rather more universal, not to say obvious consideration kept asserting itself. Namely that for all that we were ostensibly living in a post-1968, post-Woodstock, My Sweet LordGeorge Harrison world of brown rice, incense sticks and sexual liberation, there was always a very ugly elephant in the china shop of early 1970s Ireland.
Many contributors recall the Troubles and, in particular, the day that the British embassy in Dublin was burnt down by protesters enraged at the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry, a day previously. Many students, from TCD, UCD and all over the country, formed part of that day’s angry protest.
Many people write of their sense of shock and outrage. As a northerner of staunch Presbyterian lineage, I recall being outraged, yes, but not shocked. For my generation of Northerners, the “Troubles” were no discovery, they already had had a habit of raising their ugly head when least wanted.
I was saddling a horse at the races in Dieppe, France on a beautiful summer’s day in 1969 (I was working as a stable lad), when my boss, trainer Hubert D’Aillieres burst into the box to tell me that there was serious trouble “chez vous”, back home. That, of course, was the summer of the “civil rights” marches, a summer when any right-thinking Northern Protestant (there were very few about) was forced to conclude that perhaps the little Northern Ireland statelet was indeed a nasty, bigoted “Protestant country for a Protestant people”.
One decade later, as Ireland first voted in an anti-abortion referendum and then followed that up with a vote against divorce, it became clear to many that the Republic of Ireland was an equally nasty, bigoted little “Catholic country for a Catholic people”. Two further decades later, and with Ryan, Murphy, Cloyne and other reports under our belt, that observation is hardly earth-shattering news.
Back in the mid-1980s, some of us simply opted for “a curse on both your houses” policy. We departed, there and then, and years later many still have not returned.
The ugly reality of “The Troubles” forms a persistent if discreet backdrop to many of the accounts in Trinity Tales. This was an uncomfortable sensation in a 1970s world where students were otherwise much involved in what students do – parties, Trinity Balls, mystery plays in Front Square, music, etc.
Donald Taylor Black recalls that one of his team mates in the TCD football club was a skilful midfielder called Pat Finucane, the Belfast Catholic solicitor who was brutally murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in February 1989. Finucane, too, would have been one of that first generation of Catholics to defy the ban on Catholics attending such a Protestant den of iniquity.
Trinity Tales did, I’m glad to report, rekindle more than the above grim memories. It represents a fascinating glimpse at the Zeitgeist of the time (I am allowed to use that word because I “read” German – still not sure what it means, mind you).
Those were days when, rather than read the required Molière, Racine and Goethe, your correspondent got lost in Herbert Marcuse and RD Laing.
(Does anyone read them now?).
Old friend Roger Greene recalls how we once acted together in a TCD Players' production of Max Frisch's Bierdermann Und Die Brandstifter. (You see, I really did study German). Kindly, Roger neglects to offer any assessment of my thespian talent.
Suffice to say that a great genius was most definitely not lost to the Irish stage.
Many of us in those days were classic “rebels without a cause” – I left Trinity after three years, in a pompous fit of pique and without completing my degree (It turns out that a number of us did this trick).
That, however, was not my most hideous crime against humanity. The crime in question came when old D. Joseph Groocock drafted me in to play second trumpet in the orchestra for a Choral Society rendition of Bach's Magnificat.
The problem was that I played the “trumpet” part on a clarinet, making a horrendous cacophony of squeaks and shrieks. I have been anxiously awaiting my summons to the European Court of Human Rights, ever since . . . but I did enjoy the concert, although I’m not sure whether the audience did.