One of the many tragedies of my life is that it never blossomed into a political career, in which I should have closed down most Irish universities. King Kevin VIII’s Dissolution of the Monstrosities would have been hailed by history as one of the turning points in Irish Civilisation. But tragically, this did not happen, and so we are still burdened with these ghastly academic assembly-lines mass-producing tawdry, Americanised clones by the thousand every year.
The apex of academic idiocy is TCD, which may as well be Trinity College, Delaware, a long baseball throw from the Liffey. I recently referred to its infamous decision to jettison the name Berkeley because of some recently-discovered but thin connection to slavery in the Americas. What was not recently-discovered was his well-known role as a beneficiary from and clerical enforcer of the Penal Laws, which helped impoverish the majority Catholic population, a vital process in the journey towards the Famine. This (rightly, in my view) was not enough to prevent the university from honouring Berkeley’s intellectual distinction: but any protection vanished when the issue was his marginal connection with American slavery, and instant cancellation followed. TCD’s beating, witless heart is a mere coronary artery away from BLM: Banality Loves Mediocrity.
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