A chara, – Michael McDowell (“Why stop with Berkeley?” Opinion & Analysis, May 3rd), making some useful points on the denaming of the Berkeley Library at TCD, referred to “commemoration of Trinity’s liberal Protestant origins and heritage”. The 1591 royal charter of Queen Elizabeth I does indeed specify that the object of the college was “for the education, training, and instruction of youths and students, that they may be the better assisted in the study of the liberal arts, and in the cultivation of virtue and religion”.
In no sense, however, could the origins be described as “liberal”, as illustrated by his quotation from James Ussher in 1626. As Dr Clare Moriarty, postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College, wrote (“Berkeley an exponent of cancel culture”, Opinion & Analysis, May 1st): “Trinity was not built for the majority of people on the island.”
At the end of the 17th century, parliament required candidates for degrees to take not only an oath of allegiance to the crown but an oath repudiating the doctrine of transubstantiation. Not until 1794 were Catholics admitted as students, when the oath against transubstantiation was repealed, but the oath of allegiance was still required.
Denis Donohoe wrote in the London Review of Books in 1982: “Religious tests weren’t formally abolished till Fawcett’s Act of 1873, when a Catholic was elected for the first time to a foundation Scholarship. The first Catholic to reach the Board of Trinity as a Senior Fellow achieved that distinction in 1958.” The first Catholic chaplain was appointed in 1973. So, thankfully, much has changed.
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Dr Moriarty also wrote: “Tours of Trinity shouldn’t shy away from the reality of the university’s origins.”
I propose, then, that renaming the Berkeley Library take into account a much neglected fact of those origins. The very ground on which TCD stands today was the location of the Augustinian Priory of All Hallows for over 300 years, and from which its community was expelled in 1538 and the land confiscated by order of the crown. Would it not be fitting, therefore, that either Augustine, a prolific writer, or the name All Hallows, now feature in the renaming of this library? – Is mise,
PÁDRAIG McCARTHY,
Sandyford,
Dublin 16.
