Shining a light on bygone days at UCG
Lifestyle - A new oral history of Galway’s university from 1930-1980, with contributions from students and staff from that era, offers a refreshing insight into Ireland’s social and economic history as well as charting the development of UCG from a small university to the institution it has become today. Its author Jackie Uí Chionna tells JUDY MURPHY how it came about.
When Waterford student Bobby Curran entered UCG on a scholarship in 1955, having achieved one of the top five Leaving Cert results in Ireland, he intended taking up medicine.
But his dream came to an end on registration day, following a discussion with the college registrar and secretary, Professor James Mitchell.
Professor Mitchell asked the young Bobby about his background. Bobby explained that his mother, a widow, was a farmer while one of his brothers worked at home and the other was in England.
Professor Mitchell told Bobby there was a problem. If the young man were to qualify as a doctor, he would then have to buy a medical practice. The registrar asked Bobby if his mother could afford that expense and Bobby quickly realised medicine wasn’t an option.
Instead, he studied maths and maths physics and did brilliantly. Bobby graduated in 1958, going on to become Director of Computer Services at UCG.
That story, about how his background dictated Bobby’s choice of course and career, is one of many fascinating memories from former students and employees of UCG included in a new history of the college.
An Oral History of University College Galway, 1930-1980: A University in Living Memory, offers an insight into life in UCG during that a 50-year period. It also shines a light on the broader social and economic landscape of the newly independent Ireland.
Its stories capture the struggles faced by people whose families couldn’t afford to send them to university and the transformation that began in the early 1970s as government’s Free Education scheme began to have an impact. It also details how women began to have greater access to third-level education – among them Budge Clissmann (formerly Elizabeth Mulcahy), who graduated in the 1930s, and quickly learned that women (even those highly qualified in French) were unofficially prohibited from employment in the Department of Foreign Affairs.
An Oral History of University College Galway, 1930-80 is the work of historian Jacki Uí Chionna, who feels “it will add enormously to the understanding of the history of education in Ireland”.
It will and the real pleasure of this book is how accessibly the information is presented.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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