Celebration of the Election to the RIA of Peter Simons, Kevin Devine & Michael Gallagher
Saloon, Provost's House
09 September 2013
Welcome everybody to the Provost’s House. Here we are again, poised on the edge of the new academic year. After the summer months, we await the return of the students. It’s always an exciting and invigorating time, and it’s a great moment to be celebrating the achievement of those Trinity academics who were elected this year to the Royal Irish Academy.
On 31st May – on the Academy’s 228th Admittance Day – 21 new members were admitted to the RIA, including three Trinity professors: Kevin Devine from sciences, and Michael Gallagher and Peter Simons from humanities and social sciences. We are delighted that these three most distinguished professors now join the Academy. And we are also proud that Trinity graduate and former Pro-Chancellor of the University, Susan Denham, chief justice of the Supreme Court, was also elected this year.
Election to the RIA is one of the greatest honours in Irish academia. The right to place ‘MRIA’ after your name is not given out lightly. Only those who have achieved high international recognition and are involved in ground-breaking research are accorded this honour. There are less than 500 MRIAs in the country. And today we also remember Seamus Heaney, whose recent death took from the Academy its brightest star.
Kevin, Michael, and Peter join other Trinity Academicians, many of whom are here with us tonight. A university in Ireland may be measured by the number of its MRIAs, and Trinity is proud to have so many.
Membership of the Academy is not an end-of-career honorific. Nor is it an encouragement for brilliant promise. It is awarded to people who have proven themselves and achieved renown and are expected to go on and achieve more. And indeed MRIAs do not rest on their laurels, as can be seen from a glance round the room this evening.
MRIAs are distinguished by their unceasing intellectual curiosity. All you Academy Members here tonight have brought great work to fruition, but I know there will be more work, more fruit. We remember that just three years ago, Heaney published his twelfth poetry collection, Human Chain, which came 44 years after his first.
Our newest Academy Members are in the great tradition:
Peter Simons is Professor of Moral Philosophy (1837) at our School of Social Sciences and Philosophy. His was a high-level appointment; just three and a half years ago, we poached - or persuaded! – him from the University of Leeds where he was Professor of Philosophy for fifteen years. Previous to that, he lectured at the University of Salzburg in Austria.
He was also, for twelve years up to 2001, a philosophical consultant to the software company Ontek Corporation, and in his work he has consistently emphasised the importance of keeping his research area, metaphysics, relevant to contemporary life.
In his inaugural lecture to this college in 2010, he said: “Like any other science, metaphysics must prove its worth by being applicable”. His aim, he continued, was “to show how such diverse areas as biology, geography, engineering, information systems and enterprise management may be informed by metaphysical considerations.”
This aligns to Trinity’s core mission of interdisciplinarity. I’m excited by what Peter has done, and will do, to bring to bear his discipline, metaphysics, on other disciplines in this university. He is here tonight with his wife, Susan. I congratulate both.
Michael Gallagher is Professor of Comparative Politics and outgoing head of department in our Department of Political Science. He is unusual among political scientists in that he started as a computer scientist, doing a degree and a masters in the area of artificial intelligence before switching to Politics. His background in computer science has informed his expertise in comparative electoral systems. He is almost a household name because for the past eight elections, since 1989, his How Ireland Voted books have recorded and analysed our voting patterns.
He has used his vast research and knowledge to look at contemporary issues of political reform. His weighing of the questions round the abolition or reform of the Seanad, posted on the Irish Politics Forum five days ago, should be required reading for all voters.
Michael cannot be with us this evening. I congratulate him for this recognition of his seminal work.
Kevin Devine is head of School of Genetics and Microbiology. He leads a research group at the Smurfit Institute of Genetics which is part of the EU-funded BaSysBio consortium, and looks at how the bacterium Bacillus subtilis adapts to changes in its environment.
Kevin’s research has established a blueprint as to how bacteria respond to environmental and nutritional changes at a global and dynamic level. Such research has potential to optimise the growth and production of bacteria used industrially – to increase product yields while minimising production costs. It also informs us how bacteria respond to the antibiotics used to kill them. When bacteria adapt to antibiotics, this leads to resistance. Kevin’s research group is establishing how such resistance develops in pathogenic bacteria – this will allow for the development of new strategies and therapeutic agents to kill them.
Kevin’s research has been funded by Science Foundation Ireland as well as the EU. He is now recognised by the Academy. I congratulate him and his family. He is here tonight with his wife, Susanne, and their three daughters.
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These three new Academy members, like our other MRIAs, demonstrate Trinity’s great strength and diversity. This university is committed to education and research and to putting knowledge at the service of society and humanity.
At this year’s Admittance Day, the president of the RIA, Luke Drury, said that this country’s long-term aim should be “to make Ireland one of the most culturally rich and intellectually stimulating places in the world, an island of creative ideas capable of attracting the brightest and most interesting minds from around the world.”
In one of Heaney’s last poems, ‘Hermit Songs’, he celebrates the life of the scholar, interweaving the ancient monkish scholars with his own Derry school days. He finds a wonderful metaphor for scholarship and the transmission of scholarship – the linking chain of human knowledge:
“…and then Cuchulain
Entertained the embroidery women
By flinging needles in the air
So, as they fell, the point of one
Partnered with the eye of the next
To form a glittering reeling chain –
As in my dream a gross of nibs
Spills off the shelf, airlifts and links
Into a giddy gilt corona.”
Thank you.
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