UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Monday, 25 April 2016 at 11.30 am
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR JOHN McCAFFERTY, School of History on 25 April 2016, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa on J. JOSEPH LEE.
President, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,
Historians are poor predictors, pathetic prophets. Nonetheless in 1958 one future historian, Joseph Lee, won a senior prize essay competition in his final year at Gormanston for ‘Ireland 2000 AD’. Actually over half of the sixteen year old student’s prognostications were correct. Not least his ringing endorsement of a system to which he has given over four decades of his life: ‘the glories of our ancient schools had been restored and Irish universities were the pride of Europe’.
In 2008, Joe’s wonderfully titled The Modernization of Irish Society 1848-1918 had its 3rd edition. His new preface contained four revisions. An upward estimate of famine mortality. A free admission that he’d inadequately assessed Dubhglas de hÍde. A recalibration of the role of the ‘British gun’ in Irish politics. And, finally, he thought he’d oversimplified the 1916 Rising. Of course that’s what historians do: write, revise, rewrite. But look at the themes. Numbers. Language. Force. Ideas. All of these and so much more make up Lee’s historical practice.
And it’s easy to trace the genealogy of his concerns. The boy educated by the Franciscans went on to UCD to take a Double First in History and Economics. The graduate went briefly to the Department of Finance but resumed his academic gait with a NUI Travelling Scholarship which brought him to the Institute for European History in Mainz and from there to be a PhD student, Fellow, Tutor, Lecturer and Director of Studies at Peterhouse, Cambridge. In 1974 he became Professor of Modern History at UCC and in 1992 proved beyond doubt that even if historians can’t predict the future then they can make it by overseeing the unification of the Cork history departments. Beating his Dublin alma mater to that unitary post by several years!
From 2002 Joe has been Director of Glucksman Ireland House at New York University. Five monographs, five edited collections and a stunning 101 scholarly articles. But we’re here to honour Joe rather than recite his cursus honorum. So let me talk about Joe Lee the historian.
Ideas ignite everything he writes. His books and articles are, above all, machines for thinking; machines made by a historian who deems intellectual infrastructure to be as essential to a nation’s well-being as roads and rails. He insists on intelligence – intelligence understood in every sense of the word. He also insists on the word itself. In Lee’s work we see a sensitivity to language not always found in historical writing combined with a determination to use his linguistic japes to jolt and jar the reader’s thought. Here’s one from Ireland 1912-1985 where one aspect of university life is depicted as: ‘an amiable form of indoor relief’. I leave it to you all to decide which one!
His sustained account of History at Earlsfort Terrace in Ireland 1912-1985 shows him to be the ideal UCD graduate. He loves us, admires us but is also a clear-eyed critic with an itch to explain. Even the barbs bite brightly. [Thanks Joe!]
If you are looking for a capsule Joe Lee - read his 2009 Dictionary of Irish Biography entry on Padraig Pearse. Here chronology is a loose binding for tight analysis of character and ideas. Here is interpretation instead of plodding reconstruction. The result is electric. Lee excites sympathy and revulsion at once, so that the more we recoil, the more we warm to Pearse. And the more we are gripped by Joe’s insistence – and this is so characteristic – the more we are gripped by his and FSL Lyons’ insistence – (Lee is such a historiographical historian) that a ‘balanced view’ of Pearse is yet to emerge. He ends with an interim assessment, an invitation to the reader to be a co-conspirator in an open-ended - never-ending - process of historical reflection. If earlier on Joe Lee plays Tom Clarke and P.H. Pearse off each other as conspirator and communicator he shows himself to be a conspiratorial communicator and a communicating conspirator. Clever. But not clever for its own sake but rather - to mangle MacLiammóir – but rather clever ‘all for Clio’.
Joe Lee’s insistence that historical perspective - Clio’s clothes – are essential to both policy and administration also led him to public service. It led him to the rarest of Irish combinations – Sunday Columnist and Senator (1993-97) – a pundit and a politician.
So here we are today rightly honouring a wise word player who has compelled us all to think more clearly, more deeply and more accurately about the whole history of Ireland, of its neighbour and of its European fortunes.
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Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad Gradum Doctoratus in utroque Jure, tam Civili quam Canonico; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.