Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 24 January 2013

“Technical Memories (Part 41) – O’Rahilly’s Lament”

 “I have no use for ideas in themselves- they must be translated into life or literature. Too many of us are quick on the uptake but might be slow on the output” (Professor Alfred O’Rahilly, 10 October 1927, lecture to the members of the Economic and Literary Society of the Cork Municipal School of Commerce).

Professor O’Rahilly’s lecture in one sense gives an insight into his personal thoughts on the problems of the Irish Free State. Indeed, much of what he noted in his lecture has echoes in any age of Irish history, no mind in his time. Some of his ideas are thought provoking at any rate to refer to especially in building the story of the more social theory side of technical education in Cork. In his lecture entitled “Efficiency” he noted that he was not much of a believer in brains, which he had found “did not count for very much in life at all”. He believed in character, grit, will power, and ‘spunk’. He believed not so much in the man but in his capacity for getting out what was in him. He commented that most people only owned a very small bit of themselves, and that bit they had no control over. He noted that he had met printers to carpenters, who were as good “as any man”, but they lacked power of concentration. Some people he noted “just go along with half minds on the jobs”. What was required he commented was to be all there- the majority of the people, he believed, were “half-witted and need to have their minds mobilised for the work in hand”.

Professor O’Rahilly had seen much change in Ireland in years previous to his lecture. He had led Irish delegations to the International Labour Organization conferences in 1924, 1925 and 1932, and took on a conciliatory role in trade union and employers disputes in Munster. Standing as a candidate in the Cork Borough for Cumann na nGaedheal, he was elected to the 4th Dáil at the 1923 general election. He resigned in 1924. He had became Registrar of University college Cork in 1920, and held the post until 1943 when he became President of the University. He spent a year, in 1927, at Harvard studying social and political theory. Indeed he had a huge interest in adult education as advocated by one of his biographers Denis O’Sullivan in 1989. O’Rahilly would in time set up an adult education programme that extended university education in social and economic subjects to a much wider audience.

In his 1927 lecture O’Rahilly noted that the primary motive force in life should be religious and social. In a country like America he observed that the “mere exercise of power seemed to be an end in itself and seemed to enable them to be efficient in a sense. Through the mere exercise of power they were looking for money, enjoyment, Ford cars, and pictures”. He did not think that was desirable and it was not very applicable to a “poor country” like Ireland.

Referring to obvious cases where a sense of social obligation was not sufficiently present, O’Rahilly went on to instance the Irish political system, about which there was a great deal of discussion at that time. He noted: “In a lot of ways we must only admit we deserve it; we know we have not been carrying out these things with the high sense of public duty that we should do…Our obligations should not be to the candidate for the position, but to the people he is going to serve who are very often poor people. Their bounden duty was to vote for the man who was efficient but very little of that was found in the country…They [politicians] had a solemn obligation to the public and to the poor but they had little consciousness of it. The first thing necessary was the motive force that would drive them on and give them something to live for”. However, he followed this up by commenting that the “social sense cut both ways”. Those elected had also got to live and work in the country; They were not unique. They were not sports or supermen. They were not capable of working in isolation from their party fellows; “Even Newton or Einstein had first to master the accumulated store of knowledge and only by piecing together what other men had thought and done”.

In a wide ranging lecture, Professor O’Rahilly found that a great number of Cork men were receptive to new ideas. With a strong theme of what Americans were doing in America, he finished up his delivery speaking about the national diaspora and their potential; “let us not forget that the greatest of them all are the millions of our kith and kin beyond the seas…we have got to close up our ranks and make a united appeal; I do not mean a begging expedition…they are willing to organise on the other side, and there are three or four big business men who would gladly place their services at the disposal of their country if asked, but they never were”.

To be continued…

Wanted: looking to talk to people about their memories who attended the “Crawford Tech”, c.1930-c.1970, contact Kieran, 087 655 33 89

Caption:

675a. Professor Alfred O’Rahilly, UCC (source: Boole Library, UCC)