Sir,—After Trinity College Dublin’s Berkeley Library was stripped of its title (because the bishop-philosopher, and sometime college librarian, owned slaves and upheld the institution of slavery in early eighteenth-century colonial America), TCD’s Legacy Review Working Group invited online suggestions for a new name. Accordingly, in the conclusion to my ‘Platform’ piece, ‘Wolfe Tone today’ (HI 32.1, Jan./Feb. 2024), I encouraged readers to nominate Tone. One of Ireland’s most historically significant figures, as well as one of Trinity’s most distinguished graduates, in my opinion the case for Tone was, as the Americans say, ‘a no-brainer’. His mission, to unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter under the common name of Irishman, ticked the inclusivity box, while the slave-trade was routinely condemned in the pages of the United Irish Northern Star. The United Irishwoman, Mary Ann McCracken, abstained from the consumption of slave-plantation sugar, and also had much to say about gender equality. It is not surprising, then, that, coming in at 264 submissions, Tone ran away with the ‘popular vote’. The runner-up (61 submissions), former chancellor of the university Mary Robinson, was presumably ruled ineligible. Naming buildings after still-vertical persons would be a tad too North Korean.
But, as with the American electoral college and the British first-past-the-post system, the popular vote does not always decide who wins. Online suggestions are not even ‘votes’ anyway, although the numbers in this instance are suggestive. Where or why did Tone—prima facie a compelling candidate—fall short? Historically, Trinity long stood as a bastion of Protestant unionism, whereas Tone’s nomination would have paid tribute to, celebrated and ratified the college’s proud legacy as institutional host to the dissenting, radical voice in a clericalist, censorial and conservative state: Owen Sheehy Skeffington and—once upon a time—Conor Cruise O’Brien, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Noel Browne, David Thornley and Kadar Asmal, founder of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement and Dean of the Faculty of Arts.
One problem with the current, intellectually slack, fashion for retiring dead people is its tendency towards a frivolous ahistorical reductionism; and dismissing any nominee as merely another eighteenth-century man is inappropriate as well as reductive. We are all sinners after all, and the further back into the past we delve, the more sinful our ancestors (including Tone) seem to get—and the more glaring becomes their abject failure to conform to 21st-century ‘core values’. In light of that iron law of human fallibility, perhaps the safest and most sensible proposal for renaming the library was Molly Bloom, who has no connection with Trinity College but who, as a fictional character that we know everything about, would never bring the college into disrepute.—Yours etc.,
JIM SMYTH
(a graduate of Trinity College)