Trinity College Dublin and the New Political Order

Abstract

The history of the ex-unionist community in the Irish Free State has been written of largely as the history of a benign silence.1 FSL Lyons wrote that in the 1920s and 1930s, the unionist minority had ‘fallen back on the defensive’ in society, politics and the arts. He found the persistence of the ghetto mentality ‘the most striking characteristic of the minority’.2To Professor W.B. Stanford, a fellow of Trinity College Dublin (TCD) writing in the 1940s, ‘there was a wait and see policy, a lie low and say nothing policy, a policy dictated by a leadership that was old, conservative and cautious. Dr E.C. Hodges, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Limerick and one-time principal of the Church of Ireland Teacher Training College in Dublin, writing at the same time as Stanford believed that ‘In relation to a majority whose objectives and standards are inscrutable for the outsider in religion. Criticism and co-operation alike, must remain unprofitable, misleading and open to misrepresentation’. Such avowed stocism belies the volubility of the Irish Times, Trinity College, and the Church of Ireland at a time when their collective attitude toward the new state was nothing less than querulous. This chapter will look anew at one of these three institutions, TCD, and assess its alleged and much vaunted stoicism and support for the new order.