Fine book celebrates renowned historian

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

One of Ireland’s most popular and respected historians, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh is being honoured with a major new publication, Culture and Society in Ireland since 1750, which will be officially launched at NUIG next month.

The collection of 23 essays from Professor Ó Tuathaigh’s former students at NUIG and from his academic peers at universities in Ireland and abroad has been edited by John Cunningham and Niall Ó Ciosáin, both lecturers in history at NUIG. The two men were colleagues of Gearóid’s before he retired from NUIG four years ago. Both also have essays in the collection as well as being its editors.

Themes dealt with in the handsomely produced book include The Irish at War by Thomas Bartlett (formerly of NUIG, UCD and now Professor Emeritus the University of Aberdeen). ‘Gandal is Good’: Ag Aistriú Martin McDonagh has been penned by author and publisher Mícheál Ó Conghaile. No Good Days but the Present Ones? Readers’ Letters to Woman’s Way, 1963-9, is by Catríona Clear of the NUIG History Department.

Other contributors include Professor Emeritus of Economics at UCD, Cormac Ó Gráda; Professor of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam Joep Leerssen; and Úna Ní Bhroiméil, who lectures in history at Mary Immaculate College Limerick.

Not surprisingly, NUIG, where Gearóid lectured for so many years and where – as Professor Emeritus – he remains very supportive of his former colleagues, is well represented with essays from a range of academics across various departments. They include Laurence Marley, Méabh Ní Fhuartháin, Tony Varley and Margaret Hughes.

The broad-ranging introduction to this book is the work of Gearóid’s fellow historian, Joe Lee. The two men first met as postgraduate students in Cambridge in the late 1960s and have been friends since. They co-wrote The Age of de Valera in the early 1980s, to accompany an RTÉ series of the same name.

He may be from Limerick originally, but Gearóid has been synonymous with UCG – later NUIG – for much of his life.

He did his BA and Masters degrees in Galway before continuing on to do a PhD on Home Rule in English Politics, in Peterhouse, Cambridge, in the late 1960s.

He returned to Galway where he began lecturing in the university’s history department, where his academic record, combined with his fluency in Irish and English, made him an invaluable staff member.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.