[In Imagining Ireland’s pasts: early modern Ireland through the centuries] I attempt to show how, over the course of four centuries, authors representing the interests of competing groups in Ireland strove to explain the traumatic events that transformed Irish society during the early modern era. These various authors were usually concerned to convince those for whom they wrote, no less than the historians they considered their rivals, that the future belonged to their group, and that the traumatic past they described had been but a time of trial for their ancestors.

Nicholas Canny MRIA, is emeritus professor of History and Founding Director of the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at the University of Galway.

My publishing interest as a historian has, throughout my working life, extended over an extensive area geographically and chronologically, as I tried to comprehend how Europeans interacted with populations in other parts of the globe with whom they came into contact for the first time during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. This concern, like that of D.B. Quinn MRIA, of the previous generation, was ignited by an initial interest in England’s involvement with Ireland during those same centuries. My first book, The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland: a pattern established, 1565–76 (Harvester Press, 1976), was on this subject and had been considerably inspired by D.B. Quinn’s The Elizabethans and the Irish (Cornell University Press, 1966). During the following decades, when I was principally involved with undergraduate teaching in Galway, I tried to intersperse publications on Irish history with those on broader topics, even if the more influential of these were associated with collections that I edited. Among these are Europeans on the move: studies on European migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford University Press, 1994), the first volume of the Oxford history of the British empire (Oxford University Press, 1998) and the Oxford handbook of the Atlantic world, 1450–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2011). When I published Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford University Press, 2001), I intended it to be my last comprehensive statement on Irish history, after which I undertook research on a book devoted to a comparison between English and French exploitation of the resources of the West Indies during the early modern centuries. Although I published two papers on this topic, one of them as the Raleigh Lecture to the British Academy for 2011, I failed to bring the promised book to completion, principally because I was distracted by heavy administrative commitments. One of these was the term I served as president of this Academy, in 2008–11.

As a result, when the commissioning history editor of Oxford University Press enquired in 2015 when she might expect copy of the promised book, I had to explain to her not only that I had been distracted from my intended course, but also that I no longer possessed the energy and enthusiasm for the prolonged interludes away from home to work in foreign libraries that the completion of such a book required. Our discussion ended amicably, when I undertook to write instead a book on the variety of ways in which the history of the early modern centuries in Ireland had been investigated and written over time. I began to read for this project straight away and it was my good fortune that I had amassed a substantial body of research material before libraries closed their doors with the onset of the Covid pandemic. This meant that I was able to occupy what might have become idle days of lock-down by writing Imagining Ireland’s pasts: early modern Ireland through the centuries, which was duly published by Oxford University Press on 15 July 2021.

In this book I attempt to show how, over the course of four centuries, authors representing the interests of competing groups in Ireland strove to explain the traumatic events that transformed Irish society during the early modern era. These various authors were usually concerned to convince those for whom they wrote, no less than the historians they considered their rivals, that the future belonged to their group, and that the traumatic past they described had been but a time of trial for their ancestors. The book thus confirms that Ireland’s history has always been a subject of disputation, but it breaks new ground by demonstrating not only that the debates pursued were between men and women who upheld the respective positions of Conqueror or Conquered, Protestant or Catholic, Unionist or Nationalist, but also that authors within each such group argued with each other concerning the nature and meaning of Ireland’s past. I give attention to the vernacular histories composed on competing sides, to the relationships between oral memories and written histories, and to the interconnection in succeeding centuries between histories written by authors who had been exiled from Ireland and the communities who had remained at home.

The chronological structure of the book enables readers who are interested in particular subjects to read about these in isolation. The chronology serves also to illustrate how, through the processes of refuting what had come to be considered accepted wisdom and of introducing fresh evidence and perspectives, authors succeeded, over the course of time, in reducing in number the issues that remained in contention concerning Ireland’s early modern past. It also reveals, however, that the issues over which disputation persisted have never been resolved to the satisfaction of competing parties. This means that Irish people have proven themselves less capable than the populations of most other European countries of reaching an agreed narrative concerning their early modern past.

The book also draws attention to the wealth of historical literature and ideas about Ireland’s early modern past that were consumed avidly by extensive audiences in succeeding centuries. Furthermore, it reveals that several of the ‘fresh insights’ for which credit has been given either to D.B. Quinn or myself had, in fact, been ventilated several centuries previously by authors as disparate as David Rothe in the seventeenth century and Thomas Carte in the eighteenth.

A woman with short dark hair is smiling, sitting in front of a historic white marble fireplace

Christine Casey MRIA, is professor in Architectural History at the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin

Since childhood I have been absorbed by the structures that human beings make in the world, from the kerbstones of Newgrange to the rubble walls of demesne, farmyard and field that frame and fragment the rural landscape. Great buildings and small opened a way to the past as vivid and enduring as the rare documents that explained how and why they came into being. Architectural history was then an emerging discipline in Ireland, promoted with passion by scholars of international renown. Through their eyes, every-day, taken-for-granted buildings, such as shops, schools, banks and terraced houses became treasure troves of subtle design and ingenious workmanship. Passion engendered zeal and two decades were spent in extensive research and publication on the architecture of Ireland’s regions and capital; no street nor building beneath notice.

Throughout, a persistent interest emerged in the materiality and execution of these structures and the characteristics that distinguished them from buildings elsewhere. Why are the Georgian red-brick terraces of Dublin so consistently plain? Built without the stone stringcourses, cornices and ornaments of British cities? Why has Dublin such profuse plasterwork interiors? Why do the monumental buildings of Dublin have a significantly different colour palette from those of London, Oxford or Bath? In short, how is the material and technological history of Ireland’s cities, towns and countryside written into historic buildings, and what does this tell us about the aspirations and concerns of those who commissioned and built them?

Considering these questions ultimately led me to explore a wider positioning of Ireland’s eighteenth-century craft tradition within a British and European context, a voyage of site and archival discovery that is unfortunately inconceivable in the current restricted circumstances. These investigations revealed shared characteristics with the regions of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Central Europe and a cohesive pan-European craft tradition that ultimately gave rise to a distinctive local practice in Ireland. Craft skills know no boundaries.

My research led me to explore a wider positioning of Ireland’s eighteenth-century craft tradition within a British and European context. These investigations revealed shared characteristics with the regions of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Central Europe and a cohesive pan-European craft tradition that ultimately gave rise to a distinctive local practice in Ireland… Craft skill is, I argue, a primary agent in architectural production.

They do, however, know limitations and loss; this has particularly been so since the mid twentieth century, when traditional craft practice has been progressively displaced by mechanisation and mass production. Finished plaster board now supplants traditional plasterwork. Dwindling opportunity channelled surviving craft practice into architectural conservation, which has provided a lifeline for the maintenance both of tangible cultural heritage in the form of buildings and monuments, and the equally important intangible cultural heritage of carving, modelling, joinery, etc. The Office of Public Works, The Heritage Council, Dublin Civic Trust, Irish Georgian Society, the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, and others, actively promote the maintenance and development of traditional craft skills in architecture.

My current research contributes to this work by developing a skills-based history of eighteenth-century architecture: CRAFTVALUE is an IRC Advanced Laureate project based in TCD, which focuses on the contribution of craft to the achievement of eighteenth-century classicism.—Rejected by modernism, demeaned by the conceptual ‘turn’ and too often reduced to its representative or social functions—craft skill is, I argue, a primary agent in architectural production. In the wider context, this accords with Richard Sennett’s reframing of craftsmanship as a tangible exemplar for a dangerously cerebral society; ‘there is nothing inevitable about becoming skilled, there is nothing mindlessly mechanical about technique itself’. Reflecting a wider scholarship in artisanal and technological history, Sennett developed a compelling critique of societal failure ‘in making connections between head and hand’ and a persuasive argument for craft practice as a behavioural model: ‘prepare, dwell in mistakes, recover form’. This is not simply, to use Joseph Roth’s phrase, to ‘hang sentimental weights on the winged feet of time’, but rather to assess what is worth keeping in an increasingly challenged architectural environment. While the dominance of academic credentialism has militated against valorisation of craft apprenticeship in society, there are encouraging signs that the tide may turn.

Some of this material may also derive from earlier sources compiled, for instance, as far back as the thirteenth century, but this does not at all mean that scribes of this period… slavishly copied what they had in front of them. Far from being passive transmitters, they felt free to adapt or edit the text that they were writing down, often based on their canny awareness of the tastes of the patron who commissioned their work. Overall, we can say that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish scribes revised, corrected and emended at will.

Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail MRIA, is head of Modern Irish at the School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore, University College Dublin

I grew up in what was then the parish of Carraig na bhFear (Carrignavar), on the outskirts of Cork city, and was acutely aware from a young age of the important contribution of the scribes from that area to Irish manuscript production in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Many of these were also poets, whose compositions I encountered in the school classroom and subsequently during in-depth treatments in lectures and tutorials as a student in UCC. On reflection, it was inevitable that my area of research would focus primarily on Irish scribes and manuscript production in the modern era.

The contribution by the Ó Longáin scribal family has informed my research on textual transmission in the Irish language. The extraordinary dedication of four generations in one family has left us today with over 600 manuscripts written entirely or in part by them. A substantial proportion of these is kept in the Royal Irish Academy library. Four Ó Longáin scribes—twins Peadar (1801–c.1860) and Pól (1801–1866), their younger brother Seosamh (1817–1880), and Seosamh’s son, Mícheál (1856–1877)—were employed by the RIA to copy scribal texts and to produce indexes of manuscripts kept in the library. Following his employment as Academy Scribe in December 1865 on a yearly salary of £100, however, it was Seosamh, the family’s finest penman, who came to be regarded as the most distinguished of the later Irish scribes. These scholars drew their inspiration from their grandfather, Mícheál mac Peadair (d. 1770), and their father, Mícheál Óg (1766–1837). The latter is on record for regarding a scribe’s primary function as that of ‘encouraging the people of Ireland to learn Irish and to keep it alive and permanent, as would be due and proper for them to do’ (ag gríosú bhfine Gael fán nGaeilge d’fhoghlaim agus do choimeád ar bun agus ar buaintseasamh, amhail ba d[h]leacht agus ba chuí dóibh do dhéanamh).

The scope and diversity of the Ó Longáin oeuvre reflect the overall contents of manuscripts compiled in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Any of the following may comprise the subject-matter of the manuscripts associated with this family: genealogy; grammar and lexicography; historical texts; medical and religious material; poetry and songs; tales and sagas. Some of this material may also derive from earlier sources compiled, for instance, as far back as the thirteenth century, but this does not at all mean that scribes of this period, like those of the Ó Longáin family, slavishly copied what they had in front of them. Far from being passive transmitters, they felt free to adapt or edit the text that they were writing down, often based on their canny awareness of the tastes of the patron who commissioned their work. Overall, we can say that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish scribes revised, corrected and emended at will.

I came upon a fine example of the innovative approach adopted by Irish scribes to their craft while trawling through well over 100 manuscript ‘copies’ of what would become my edition of Cath Cluana Tarbh (Irish Texts Society 64 (2011)). Essentially a literary re-enactment of the historical battle of Clontarf in ad 1014, this tale was particularly popular with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholar-scribes. By the late 1640s, the tale was in circulation in Ireland, but rather than there being one fixed, uniform text that scribes worked from, the subsequent manuscript evidence over the course of some 200 hundred years of transmission points to its having developed a series of different versions. The Ó Longáin scribes played their part in this process, creating their own particular literary version of the historical event at Clontarf. Here, then, is handwritten material produced by highly accomplished editors who engaged actively with what they were writing down, even to the point of being conscious modernisers. All of this, of course, calls into question the fixity or permanence of the scribal text in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. In other words, instead of dealing with an authoritative text in Irish, we have a variety of texts to negotiate, each with a potential for uniqueness.

The Ó Longáin scribes certainly honoured the Irish language ‘as would be due and proper’, in that their manuscripts represent textual traditions that are otherwise unattested. Apart altogether from revealing this family’s range of interests, the manuscripts they produced also tell us something of the sources that were available to them at the time of writing, and greatly enhance our knowledge of scribal practice in Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Humans are living through a period of unprecedented environmental change, with many of the planet’s natural systems being altered at alarming rates. The speed of this change is driven by the impact we are having on the planet’s finely balanced environmental system. At the coast, where the atmosphere, land and oceans meet, we can see the signs of climate change sometimes more vividly than elsewhere. Here, we are experiencing at the global level, increasing sea levels, more storms, bigger storms and rapid changes to the coastline itself.

Derek Jackson MRIA, Professor of Coastal Geomorphology, School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Ulster University, Coleraine

As a coastal geomorphologist, my research examines the physical landforms found within coastal and nearshore zones, how these change over time, and what processes drive these changes.

Humans are living through a period of unprecedented environmental change, with many of the planet’s natural systems being altered at alarming rates. The speed of this change is driven by the impact we are having on the planet’s finely balanced environmental system. At the coast, where the atmosphere, land and oceans meet, we can see the signs of climate change sometimes more vividly than elsewhere. Here, we are experiencing at the global level, increasing sea levels, more storms, bigger storms and rapid changes to the coastline itself. My research involves examining how this change takes place. I study the physical fluctuations at coasts through various timescales; making use of numerical computer modelling as well as field measurements in coastal environments, I examine the important dynamics involved in these physical changes that are picked up through the alteration of coastal landforms over time.

My specific area of research involves studying the physical processes happening at the coast and how these create change in the (sandy) landforms that we find there. The coastal system is not simply a thin line between the sea and the land; instead, it includes a zone stretching distances of several kilometers offshore (the shoreface) as well as many kilometers inland, incorporating many types of landforms. Examination of the processes that are causing coastal change must begin much further seaward from the beach than most people realise. Using high-end computing, we can run wave and current models from the offshore zone and then right across the nearshore and beach, to inform us of the predicted movements of water, and of sediments.

The shoreface is where large stores of (mostly) sand and other material are located and therefore acts as an important supplier of sand to beaches: waves and currents help to move sand from the shoreface onto the shore, where eventually, if conditions are right in terms of shelter and low energy impacts, it forms a beach. These processes shape our coastlines and give us the beaches that we see today. I am interested in how this system operates over timescales of millennia.

I am also interested in actual events such as high-energy marine storms. With the acceleration in climate change, we are experiencing more and more storm events with more extremes being recorded, and the coast reveals this usually in the form of severe erosion. My work has taken me around the world, examining beach and dune systems and looking at extreme events that strike coasts in many parts of Europe, South Africa, America and the Caribbean. Recent work has involved studying the Category 5 Hurricane Irma in 2017 and its devastating impact on Antigua and Barbuda. Using computer wave modelling and remote sensing images to extract sea-bed depths, we were able to examine before-and-after-event scenarios. We intend to use this information for local emergency planning for future events. Our research here also provides information about where on the coasts of low-lying islands is most vulnerable to wave erosion from these mega events; having this knowledge can help save lives and reduce infrastructure loss.

When the sand on the beach dries and it becomes windy enough, sand will blow inland, collecting in the form of sand dune landforms, which can stretch up to several kilometers from the shore. Coastal dunefields in Ireland are some of highest and most extensive in the world. They represent a unique catalogue of environmental events in the last 6000–7000 years, since the beginning of conditions favourable to the formation of dunefields. Wind is a key driver of change to the dunes, as is the presence of vegetation. In recent years I have made use of 3D computer modelling of wind over beaches and dunes to examine its role in driving change. For such modelling, a detailed record of the underlying terrain surface is required; data on the terrain is incorporated into the model along with data on atmospheric physics and used to simulate complex flow over various surfaces.

In an unusual twist, I have recently investigated how we can also use this modelling method on the surface of Mars, enabling for the first time fine-scale investigations of how sand gets moved on another planet. This has led to funded research via the UK Space Agency and linked to the European Space Agency’s 2022 Rover mission to Mars. In that work, we are investigating the area around the landing zone for the Rover and modelling the winds moving across it, sculpting the surface and shifting material. For me, this is exciting science in action, and I look forward to seeing the project unfold successfully.

If we ask ourselves who is represented in Irish cinema, how they are represented, and why, then we must delve into issues of identity that traverse time and place… let’s go back to those names and ask where are the leading Irish female filmmakers, or how many of our filmmakers tell stories about our new immigrant population? How many creative voices from the Traveller community are presenting their stories on film?

Ruth Barton MRIA, School of Creative Arts, Trinity College Dublin

I have been immersed in the study of Irish cinema since undertaking the Masters’ degree that started my journey through research. It has been extraordinarily rewarding, not least because my critical approach—considering the relationship between Irish cinema and Irish society—has made me ask questions about our culture that go far beyond the stories that we see on the screen.

If we ask ourselves who is represented in Irish cinema, how they are represented, and why, then we must delve into issues of identity that traverse time and place. Watching The quiet man, John Ford’s love letter to Ireland of 1952, reminds us that the diaspora, and the dream of owning a ‘wee humble cottage’ in Connemara, are intrinsic to how the Irish have been imagined in cinema. If those were the days of the bucolic Irish village, and the feisty Irish colleen, then we have come a long way to films like Rosie, written by Roddy Doyle and directed by Paddy Breathnach in 2018, which charted the experiences of an ordinary Dublin family, who could no longer afford to live in a home, let alone own one.

When I started studying Irish cinema, Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan were just entering their long ascendance in the filmmaking scene; Sheridan with films like My left foot (1989) and In the name of the father (1993), Jordan with The crying game (1992) and Michael Collins (1996). It was they who propelled Irish cinema into the wider consciousness, winning Academy Awards and creating stars of their leading actors. Now we have Lenny Abrahamson, who like Sheridan and Jordan, has moved between small, intimate stories of Irish life (Adam & Paul, 2004) and films that seem at first to have little to say about Irishness (Room, 2015). Abrahamson’s later work is part of a new Irish film culture, epitomised by the output of Element Pictures, that circulates within a global production environment of transnational funding. It was Element who produced 2020’s television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal people, part-directed by Lenny Abrahamson, and it is they who are working on Conversations with friends, another Rooney adaptation.

Lest it seem that my vocation is to celebrate Irish filmmaking uncritically, however, let’s go back to those names and ask where are the leading Irish female filmmakers, or how many of our filmmakers tell stories about our new immigrant population? How many creative voices from the Traveller community are presenting their stories on film? Yes, Screen Ireland, the body responsible for supporting Irish filmmaking, has introduced measures to support women directors and writers, and these efforts are slowly making a difference. But, as Denis Murphy and I demonstrated in our report for the Creative Ireland Programme, Ecologies of Cultural Production, access to cultural production, whether in film, theatre or TV drama, needs to start in early life or at university, and through education. It’s here that the networks are formed that determine how later careers are made.

As well as writing about and teaching cinema, I also review films on RTÉ Radio’s weekday arts programme, Arena. I do it because I enjoy it, but also because it forces me to articulate my response to cinematic productions in a less formal way than I might when I’m writing a journal article or monograph. I’m still analysing the films as I would have in the classroom or on the page but, I hope, in a way that encourages listeners to think critically. We need a stronger critical culture, and it is, I believe, our role as academicians, to bridge that gap between the university and wider society.

What I hope I have achieved in my career to this point is to encourage wider debate about Irish cinema and to share my own pleasure in studying it.

A man with short grey hair wearing glasses, stands with his arms folded, in front of a bookcase filled with textbooks.
Michael Cronin MRIA

Michael Cronin MRIA, Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation, Trinity College Dublin

Lockdown is one of the many unpleasant consequences of pandemics. It is a source of distress, discomfort and dismay. But is the experience all that unusual? Is there not a sense in which in many ways we have been in permanent lockdown since childhood? If many indigenous cosmologies are primarily focused on the world outdoors, the history of industrialised modernity is largely about staying inside. As the French writer, farmer and activist, Pierre Rabhi, has pointed out, confinement is the defining experience of modernity. Human beings, he argues, in developed countries, de la maternelle jusqu’à l’université, ils vivent un enfermement (‘from pre-school to university they are kept inside’). [1]

Later, they go to work in office blocks or government buildings. They leave these buildings to get into cars that prolong this isolation from the world beyond the (wind)screen. At night they look out at that world from behind another screen—television, laptop, tablet, mobile phone. As the essayist Chris Arthur has pointed out, the result is that ‘millions of us have become more defined by the time we spend indoors than outside. As a result, we’ve lost touch with the natural world. Those with the most pronounced indoor sensibilities can’t identify even the commonest species of birds, insects and plants in their locality.’ [2]

In my most recent work Irish and ecology/An Ghaeilge agus an éiceolaíocht (FÁS, 2019), I ask why ‘thinking outdoors’ is not a skill cultivated by our educational system. Although the primary school curriculum makes a principled effort to engage with the environment, the results are fitful at best, and by the time children are herded into the exam factory-farms of the post-primary sector, contact with the great outdoors is a distant memory of ‘nature walks’ in Senior Infants.

The need for outdoors thinking is crucial in the case of Irish. Where does most instruction in Irish take place? Indoors. What is most people’s memory of learning Irish? That of being indoors. A welcome parenthesis for many schoolchildren are the Gaeltacht summer colleges, where part of the pleasure is learning the language outside. But it remains just that, a brief parenthesis, bracketed by years of classroom confinement. We have the rich irony of students studying texts by poets and prose writers on a natural world these students never get to experience. In the understandable desire to be taken seriously as speakers of a modern language, fit for purpose in urban spaces, Irish-language speakers have been eager to shake off sentimentalised associations with the Wild Atlantic Ways of rural kitsch—setting suns, thatched roofs, beached currachs. There is a need now, however, to re-engage with the natural environment before it falls victim to the forms of indoor thinking that blind us to our vital connections with the living, organic reality of the island.

The need for outdoors thinking is crucial in the case of Irish. Where does most instruction in Irish take place? Indoors. What is most people’s memory of learning Irish? That of being indoors. A welcome parenthesis for many schoolchildren are the Gaeltacht summer colleges, where part of the pleasure is learning the language outside. But it remains just that, a brief parenthesis, bracketed by years of classroom confinement. We have the rich irony of students studying texts by poets and prose writers on a natural world these students never get to experience.

The Irish language has ample resources in terms of stories, terminology, academic studies and online materials to underpin this urgent enterprise of taking Irish thinking outdoors. A living language for a living planet is infinitely preferable to a dead language on a dead planet. Leaving Irish to languish indoors in the classroom robs it of its relevance to understanding the ecological realities, past and present, that will irrevocably shape Irish futures. The confinement of Irish speaks to a wider crisis in instruction. In The Expanding World: towards a politics of microspection (Zero Books, 2012) and Eco-translation: translation and ecology in the age of the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2017), I explore the ways in which a failure to name means a failure to care. If, in the words of the English nature writer Robert Macfarlane, our landscape becomes a ‘blandscape’ in which everything gets reduced to the generic poverty of ‘tree,’ ‘hill,’ ‘river’, then we will not even be able to identify what it is we have lost. We will literally be speechless in the face of climate change. What languages, literature and art allow us to do is not to look away but to look again.

Looking again, however, means going beyond the abstract view from nowhere, the detached gaze of the student peering out the window of the lecture theatre or more commonly, staring through the digital porthole of the computer monitor. These words are made for walking. Looking again rather than looking away means taking our educational system out of lockdown. Instead of doubling up on confinement with the relentless digitisation of education, we need take our students and our disciplines and indeed ourselves out of cyber quarantine. Instead of being screened off from the world on which they depend for their survival, they need to be brought outside—to the gardens, the parks, the ‘waste’grounds, the riversides, the hedgerows, the shorelines. Too much thinking indoors has arguably led to the destruction of too much that is outdoors. It is time we started a revolution in thinking outdoors while we still have an outdoors to think about.

A man wearing a red hat and shorts stands in the foreground, on a coastal rocky landscape
Frédéric Dias MRIA

Frédéric Dias MRIA, Applied Mathematician, School of Mathematics and Statistics and MaREI SFI Research Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine, University College Dublin

Ocean waves can be converted into electricity by wave-energy converters, but ocean waves in the form of storm surges or tsunamis can also cause a lot of damage or even kill. My daily research aims at better understanding the power of ocean waves, through analytical, numerical and experimental work, and by field observation.

I completed a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1986 and started my academic career in the US before returning to France in 1990 to work at CNRS, the French state research organisation. In 2000 I joined the École normale supérieure Paris–Saclay as professor of Applied Mathematics. I moved to University College Dublin in 2009, on leave, to work on wave-energy converters, and I now lead the wave group at UCD.

The coastal boulder deposits (CBDs) that we can see on the west coast of Ireland are an example of the variety of methods that we use in our research. CBDs are large rocks deposited on land by storm or tsunami waves. Because CBDs are very durable, they can provide long-term records of coastal inundation, but quantifying the strength and source of inundation remains controversial. In collaboration with colleagues in the US, we have analysed the numerous records of CBDs found worldwide and combined the data from these records with wave climatology research to determine the range possible for storm waves to transport CBDs. In comparing present results to findings using older methodologies, we found that the older methods may have underestimated the potential for storm waves to create CBDs, and some previously identified ‘tsunami’ CBDs may actually have been transported and deposited by storm waves.

In terms of numerical work, my group is involved in efforts to solve the so-called Navier-Stokes equations of fluid mechanics. These equations are notoriously difficult to solve, especially in regard to the fluid mechanics of a free surface, such as the surface of the ocean. This is why we rely heavily on the computing resources of ICHEC, the Irish Centre for High-End Computing.

The coastal boulder deposits (CBDs) that we can see on the west coast of Ireland are an example of the variety of methods that we use in our research. CBDs are large rocks deposited on land by storm or tsunami waves. Because CBDs are very durable, they can provide long-term records of coastal inundation, but quantifying the strength and source of inundation remains controversial.

My current project HIGHWAVE (2019–24) is devoted to research on wave breaking. Why do waves break? How do they dissipate energy and why is this important? Wave breaking is not just a fascinating scientific topic, it is also an interdisciplinary topic of considerable relevance in terms of transfers between the atmosphere and oceans, and one of substantial economic importance. Several national agencies have to deal with the impact of waves in various aspects of their work: the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, Met Éireann, the Marine Institute, the Office of Public Works, the Geological Survey of Ireland, the Commissioners of Irish Lights and the Irish Naval Service. It is wonderful to be able to collaborate with all these agencies.

A large part of our research on the HIGHWAVE project involves fieldwork and relies fundamentally on the support of the communities on the Aran Islands and in Connemara for its success. Before the official start of the project, the residents of Inis Mór, Inis Meáin, and Inis Oír had a chance to see the plans and voice their opinions at public meetings, one on each of the three islands. Following these meetings, the project’s measurement campaign started on Inis Meáin, where the community was very receptive. We are already thinking about the future, once the HIGHWAVE project is completed: to build an international research station on Inis Meáin!

In 2012 I received an advanced grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to work together with John Dudley on extreme wave events, and in 2014 I received an ERC proof-of-concept grant to work on extreme wave measurement. I received a second advanced grant from the ERC in 2019, to work on wave breaking. As well as being a member of the Royal Irish Academy, I have been a member of the Academy of Europe since 2017 and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Letters and Science since 2019. I was awarded the Emilia Valori prize for applications of science by the French Academy of Sciences in 2014. I am co-chief editor of the European Journal of Mechanics–B/Fluids. From 2008 to 2016 I was secretary-general of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.

Nuala Johnson MRIA, Honorary Professor of Geography, School of Built and Natural Environment, Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), and former director of research, Society, Space and Culture Research Cluster, QUB

I am a human geographer by training, having completed my degrees at University College Dublin (Geography and Politics) and Syracuse University, New York, before taking up lecturing posts at Loughborough University, University College London and latterly Queen’s University Belfast.

My early research drew conceptually on Antonio Gramsci’s thesis on the political role of organic intellectuals. I have used his ideas to explore how the state connects with popular understandings of the past. This work resulted in the publication of articles and book chapters, as well as an internationally focused collection of essays, A companion to cultural geography (Wiley, 2004), edited with James Duncan and Richard Schein.

There are three distinct but related areas of scholarship on which my research is focused: (i) place and nationalism; (ii) the relationships between identity politics, memory, and representation; and (iii) the spaces of scientific knowledge, gender and empire.

As a geographer I have been committed to exploring the significance of space and place in shaping nationalist discourse. The first strand of my research—on the role of place in the articulation of nationalist identities and politics—has been rooted empirically in analyses of education policy and language, in particular the role of the Irish language in cultivating a sense of nationhood in the early years of Irish state. I have also examined the ways in which the heritage sector has represented Ireland’s past at key sites and has confronted the crises of representation that specific episodes in history can evoke. The evocation of life at the ‘Big house’, in the case of Strokestown Park House and its attendant famine museum in Co. Roscommon, has been the focus of one such line of thinking. In addition, I have investigated how contested senses of national space have been rooted and represented in literary texts, for instance in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection man, which is set in the sectarian geographies of Belfast at the height of the Troubles.

As a geographer I have been committed to exploring the significance of space and place in shaping nationalist discourse. The first strand of my research—on the role of place in the articulation of nationalist identities and politics—has been rooted empirically in analyses of education policy and language, in particular the role of the Irish language in cultivating a sense of nationhood in the early years of Irish state. I have also examined the ways in which the heritage sector has represented Ireland’s past at key sites and has confronted the crises of representation that specific episodes in history can evoke.

The second major strand of my research has been concerned with the conceptual and empirical dimensions of the performance of social memory with respect to public monuments and museums. My interest in public statuary and collective memory has arisen from a desire to understand how national identity is forged in the landscape, and how nationalism as an ideology and practice finds expression in the built environment and in rituals of commemoration. Initially my work focused on the centenary commemorations of the 1798 rebellion, and the debates that attended the erection of public statues marking that centenary in counties Wexford and Wicklow in particular. The iconography of these monuments, their siting in public space, and popular reactions to them were the focus of this analysis. My research interest then shifted to the commemoration of the First World War, which was the focus of my first monograph: Ireland, the Great War and the geography of remembrance (CUP, 2003; reprinted 2007). In this book, I sought to challenge the conventional historiography that Ireland had completely erased the memory of its role in the First World War from public space, and I sought to reveal the quite complex debates that surrounded commemorative activity in the two decades after the war. In particular, I documented how the routes of parades, the location of public statues and their iconography were all inflected by broader discussions about the constitution and performance of public memory.

The other main strand of my research has centred around examining the relationships between place and scientific enquiry, especially the development of natural history. Geographers and historians have suggested that local circumstances and conditions may affect the ways in which natural history was practiced and represented in particular spaces. This body of work builds on and extends current research on the borderlines between geography and science studies. My second monograph Nature displaced, nature displayed: order and beauty in botanical gardens (I.B. Tauris, 2011; reprinted 2020), is a comparative study of the botanical gardens in Cambridge, Belfast and Dublin. The scientific principles for organising botanical knowledge were, I argue, regularly mediated by the desire to produce spaces that would be aesthetically pleasing both to the botanist and the broader public, thus blurring the boundaries between art and science.

Building on this work, I am currently examining the relationship between gender, empire and natural history in the context of early twentieth-century Burma. Focusing on Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe—botanical illustrator, naturalist and plant-hunter—who spent 24 years with her husband in colonial Burma, this work seeks to unravel the hidden historical geographies of a female naturalist working in the colonies at the height of empire. This work is due for publication next year, as Empire, gender and bio-geography: Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe and colonial Burma (Routledge, 2022).

A man (Alan Smeaton MRIA) smiles and poses for a photograph with his RIA Gold Medal cupped in both hands. He has grey hair and is wearing a blue shirt, blue tie and dark coloured suit jacket. He is photographed from the arms up. There are large banners in the background of the photograph one reads HEA and the other reads Royal Irish Academy in large letters.
Alan F. Smeaton MRIA, 2015 RIA Gold Medallist in the Engineering Sciences.

Alan Smeaton MRIA, School of Computing and Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Dublin City University.

I am a computer scientist by training, having completed my degrees at UCD. In my earlier years there the class was so small that we were all accommodated for lectures, and for our workspace, in our own dedicated Portacabins behind what is now the main library on the Belfield campus. The winters were cold but the camaraderie was great, and when you’re an undergraduate student with your own keys to your own cabin, that generates a spirit of independence and adventure.

My research started in the area of information retrieval; basically, matching a user’s text query against a collection of documents to find the most relevant matches, and using statistical modelling techniques for the process. Then a thing called the World Wide Web happened, and suddenly information retrieval was one of the hottest applications of computer science. Systems like Alta Vista, InfoSeek, Lycos, Excite, Inktomi, and another called Google, all launched within a few years of each other to help people find things on the web. Very quickly we saw a divide in the information retrieval research community: there were those inside some tent, working for companies like those listed above and with access to their computing resources and their data, and there were those of us who were publicly funded researchers and outside the tents, with only a small fraction of their data and computing resources. We struggled to make progress.

Despite a number of years when publicly funded researchers in information retrieval were at a severe disadvantage, however, the issue of access to data and to computational resources has now improved a lot. While there is still a divide between the research that those in large internet companies as opposed to those of us using public resources can do, most of the real innovations and progress in my research area now comes from publicly funded research rather than from within industry.

In my work these days I cover many topics and application areas because my interests are wide, but two recurring themes are the use of machine learning and the development of applications that help people to find things. I use machine learning in applications as broad as measuring the health of new-born calves by means of neck-worn accelerometers; diagnosing knee injuries from MRIs; generating video summaries of online lectures; and synthetic media generation and the detection of ‘deepfakes’—computer-manipulated images in which one person’s likeness has been used to replace that of someone else. The list goes on.

When I saw the emergence of the divide between private and public resources in text-based information retrieval, I switched my interest to applying analysis, indexing, search, summarisation and other processes to images, and then to videos. Within the last decade we have seen what could be called extreme levels of progress in these fields. We are at the point now where we can take images or videos in many genres and, using computer vision techniques, we can perform analysis and decision tasks on them that compare with, or in some cases exceed, the levels of analysis that humans can achieve. From medical diagnostics to autonomous driving, from emotion- and attention-recognition in faces to counting crowd numbers in public spaces—these are tasks for which researchers, including myself, have developed systems that can beat human levels of performance.

Three main factors have contributed to facilitating the perfect storm that has made this progress possible. One is the increase in computational power and its availability and affordable cost, and for this we have hardware engineering and software development to thank. Another is improved data availability, whereby the aforementioned improvements in data resources available in open access format, and the emergence of data challenges and benchmark activities, have been catalysts in our progress. The third and final factor has been developments in machine learning. We have moved from simple, linear regressions to complex, bio-inspired neural networks in less than a couple of decades, and developments in these areas have not just been theoretical; we have seen field testing and evaluation, and also deployments and practical implementations. Anyone and everyone with moderate computer programming skills can now easily avail of all of these advances. This means that the skillset needed to get up and running quickly using machine-learning implementation is not that high, which is why we see more and more use of artificial intelligence-based systems today.

In my work these days I cover many topics and application areas because my interests are wide, but two recurring themes are the use of machine learning and the development of applications that help people to find things. I use machine learning in applications as broad as measuring the health of new-born calves by means of neck-worn accelerometers; diagnosing knee injuries from MRIs; generating video summaries of online lectures; and synthetic media generation and the detection of ‘deepfakes’—computer-manipulated images in which one person’s likeness has been used to replace that of someone else.

One downside of the improvements in machine learning, in terms of the performance of techniques and their ease of use, is that many systems in widespread use today are branded as using artificial intelligence (AI), whereas when you peel away and examine what they actually do there is no real intelligence at play at all. A case in point is the system used to target personalised Facebook advertising in the 2016 US presidential election, for which Cambridge Analytica became infamous. This was branded as being ‘AI-based’, but in fact it used a simple form of linear regression, implemented in Microsoft Excel. There are many examples of such over-reaching in terms of AI branding; in the long term this mis-use of the term ‘AI’ may come back to haunt us, as we expect intelligence but in fact get simple processing.

With regard to helping people to find things, I believe that technology in all its forms should ultimately be used to assist people to do things better, whether this involves activities of daily living, work-related tasks, leisure pursuits, interaction with others, or self-improvement. Often the search process is polluted by the presence of disinformation or misinformation, and sometimes we have trouble even formalising what kind of information we want to find. The basic ground rule that technology should always make people’s lives better has led me to ask why people actually need to search for information online in the first place. Sometimes it is genuinely to find information that we do not know, but sometimes it is to re-find information that we knew once but have now forgotten. How do we get to such positions? There is a really strong connection between our information seeking and our memory, and I find this intriguing.

I will always have an interest in the wide range of applications of machine learning—which is the fastest moving area in computing—but it is in the study of human memory, why it fails and how it fails, and how we can develop technology that can help plug that gap, that I will continue my work. My recent progress in that area is in automating the ways we can compute media memorability, such as image and video, using, yes, you’ve guessed it, machine-learning techniques. For that task we have best-in-class performances, which encourages me to continue to explore the relationship between human memory and information finding.

A man with short grey hair and a beard, wearing a black coat stands against a background of a redbrick building
Richard English MRIA

Richard English MRIA, Professor of Politics, Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) and Distinguished Professorial Fellow, Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, QUB

The time for policy-makers and politicians to think most effectively about terrorism is when the problem is comparatively non-headline-grabbing. It is very hard, for obvious reasons, to act most calmly when emotions flow immediately after an atrocity, or amid a seeming crisis of high-level threat.

What can academic research suggest in terms of how policy-makers, politicians and indeed wider society should think about terrorism and how to respond to it? I would argue that there are four major points to consider.

First, terrorism represents a largely ineffective way of achieving strategic goals. In that sense, the sound of the bomb does not bring with it the likely defeat of our society, or likely victory for the bomber. My book Does terrorism work? A history, published with Oxford University Press, considers this question in relation to the experience of many groups throughout history, most of them coming nowhere near achieving their main goals. This should make citizens calmer about the extent of the threat that is embodied in a terrorist attack or even a wave of such assaults. It should also allow governments to avoid the disastrous over-reaction that—from 1970s Northern Ireland to the post-9/11 ‘War on terror’ and beyond—has done so much to worsen the terrorist threat that was supposed to be defeated.

Second, popular and even individual action can make a difference. There are many historical instances of individuals doing tactical damage to terrorist movements (through some people’s sharp-eyed interventions when danger was posed, to others’ magnanimous responses to terrorism in ways that undermined the organisations that had carried out the atrocity in the first place). But popular action can also have more significant effects even than this. Central here is the determination to proceed with normal life amid the seeming threat from terrorist attack. The statistical unlikelihood of being a victim of terrorism is, of course, no comfort to those who have suffered from its merciless violence. Nevertheless, the reality remains that, in the vast majority of settings, terrorism represents a statistically trivial threat to most of us, and our continued normalisation of daily life will help to make it an even less effective and attractive tactic for those pursuing political change.

Third, the organised media have a vital role to play in relation to how societies experience and deal with terrorism. They have a duty to present it in proper perspective rather than sensationalising or exaggerating its threat. Some, like the distinguished British journalist Simon Jenkins, have been exemplary here; more have fallen for the ersatz glamour of terrorist stories and have exaggerated terrorist events’ significance. Journalists have a responsibility to explain why an attack has actually happened (and to challenge some of the more crass, yet frequently repeated, arguments about terrorism being purely criminal or psychopathic or non-political). They also have a duty to remember what is truly significant in past events. Those who flew from Europe to join ISIS made many noisy headlines; the experience of those who subsequently returned from Syria or Iraq, utterly disillusioned after their experience, represents a far more important story, but it remains one less often given high profile.

Fourth, we need to think about long pasts and futures when we face the next contemporary explosion. The early-twenty-first-century ISIS crisis should always have been reported and discussed in terms of the mutually shaping relationship between terrorism and counter-terrorism after 9/11, a relationship that created the context for the rise of that blood-stained movement. More commonly, ISIS was presented without honest attention to the ill-judged Western actions that, in part, had helped bring it into being. This is not to blame the West for anti-Western terrorism. Rather, it is to point out that we cannot respond to a threat unless we honestly understand its origins.

The time for policy-makers and politicians to think most effectively about terrorism is when the problem is comparatively non-headline-grabbing. It is very hard, for obvious reasons, to act most calmly when emotions flow immediately after an atrocity, or amid a seeming crisis of high-level threat… What can academic research suggest in terms of how policy-makers, politicians and indeed wider society should think about terrorism and how to respond to it?

Likewise, current actions will carry complex legacies into the future. This includes foreign policy (the approach of Western states, for example, towards various Middle Eastern regimes and to the power relationships in that region). There are no easy answers here, of course. But how the USA, UK and European Union states engage with (say) Saudi Arabia, as opposed to Qatar, will have consequences in terms of terrorism. We still have not paid the full costs, in terms of blowback, from the post-9/11 ‘War on terror’ and its aftermath. Let’s be honest and anticipatory as we engage with foreign policy, in terms of the relationship cycles that are likely to be generated.

These points do not offer easy answers to the terrorist problem. Books like my own Terrorism: how to respond, also with OUP, are written with a recognition that academic reflection occurs in easier contexts than that of the political decision-making response. Responses informed by these research-based points, however, would help to make terrorism less of a threat. Terrorists will almost certainly not achieve their central goals through violence, and we should therefore not over-react. What individuals and citizens do and decide can affect levels of terrorist violence. Despite the dispersal of media into new forms, organised media do still have a major effect on terrorist outcomes and on the attractiveness of terrorist organisations and their actions. The current bomb owes much to complex pasts, just as our current politics and policies and economic relationships lay the foundations for various futures, benign and/or malign.