Remembering the many talents of broadcaster, activist and historian Máire de Paor
Archaeologist, historian, arts administrator, broadcaster and activist Máire de Paor, who was born 100 years ago this month, was a multifaceted person who was also noted for her humanity and warmth. Her achievements are all the more commendable as she lived through a time when attitudes to the role of women in Irish society were decidedly narrow.
She was born in Buncrana, Co Donegal, the second of four children of Eamonn McDermott, a grocer, and Delia McVeigh, a teacher, both veterans of the independence struggle who had left Derry after partition. Following schooling at the Convent of Mercy, Buncrana, she attended UCD, where she became active in the Cumann Gaelach and interested in the writings of Wolfe Tone and James Connolly. She graduated with an MA in 1946, having done a thesis on the Meath first World War poet Francis Ledwidge.
In 1948-1958 she was an assistant lecturer in UCD's department of archaeology, where she completed her PhD on early Irish Christian archaeology and metalwork, took part in important archaeological digs at Lough Gur and published a book on 10th-century Irish metalwork. Her most well-known book, Early Christian Ireland (1958), was co-written with her husband, historian Liam de Paor, whom she met in UCD in 1944 and married in 1955. They would go on to have four sons and a daughter. 'This book, which became a bestseller, was indicative of Máire's approach to scholarly matters: serious but not solemn and above all accessible,' according to
Diarmaid Ferriter
, who wrote the entry on her in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
He ascribed her leaving
UCD
in 1958 partly to the demands of raising a young family but perhaps also to 'her restless and creative spirit, which seemed more suited to a freelance career'. It was also the case that married women were then debarred from permanent contracts in Irish universities; the bar was lifted in UCD in 1966.
READ MORE
Whatever the reason, she travelled to teach in the US, Canada, Scandinavia, France and the UK and spent a year in Nepal with her husband on a Unesco project, becoming active on a committee helping Tibetan refugees there. Ferriter described her as a committed republican, socialist and feminist. She joined the Labour Party and in 1965 contested the senate elections on the National University of Ireland panel on its behalf but was not elected.
The significance of her research on early Christian Ireland was acknowledged in 1960 with her election to the Royal Irish Academy and she served on its council for five terms. She was a founding member in 1967 of Cumann Merriman, which organised the summer school in memory of the 18th century Gaelic poet. This gave her 'the opportunity to indulge in all her favourite disciplines, including history, art, culture, language and archaeology, and particularly their use as methods of exploring nationality', according to Ferriter.
RTÉ recruited her as a researcher and broadcaster in the late 1960s and she researched extensively for radio and television programmes. Among her television credits are These Stones Remain (1971) and Ireland: A Television History (1980). In 1973, she was appointed to the Arts Council, serving on it for the next 20 years. When there were difficulties between the Arts Council chairman, Colm Ó Briain, and the Government in 1982, she championed the council's independence and its need to resist political interference. In her Arts Council role, she particularly supported the visual and performing arts, and was a skilled administrator and gifted social networker on their behalf.
'Notwithstanding her passionate belief in political equality, she accepted that she was an elitist as far as the arts were concerned, maintaining that original artistic ability was the preserve of a relatively select number of practitioners, whom she worked ceaselessly to discover and publicise,' Ferriter has written.
She had been appointed to the cultural relations committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs and to the interim board of the National Museum of Ireland and she remained active in many roles until shortly before her death at the age of 69 on December 6th, 1994.
On her death, Pat Wallace, afterwards a long-time director of the National Museum, wrote that she was 'a Donegal woman whose parish eventually encompassed all of Ireland'. Indeed, her love of archaeology and the arts 'brought her into contact with people and cultures all over the world', the historian Angela Byrne wrote.
To commemorate and honour her, UCD created the Máire de Paor Award for the best PhD thesis each year.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
On the ground with Ireland's only cadaver dogs
Sarda IN is a voluntary group in Northern Ireland that provides dogs for search and rescue, as well as for cadaver searches across Ireland. Video: Alan Betson
Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
The Gaelic philosopher who wrote ‘one of the most influential books of our time'
There are formative cultural experiences in all our lives. I'll never forget hearing The Smiths for the first time, watching The Breakfast Club, and reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. Alasdair who, I hear you say? For fans of the Scottish philosopher, who died last month aged 96, his barnstorming book on the future of western thought felt like an intellectual coming-of-age. 'We have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality,' he wrote. READ MORE It is not just that we are trapped in seemingly irreconcilable arguments about what's right and wrong. It's that we have lost touch with a shared language that can make reconciliation possible. So MacIntyre proclaimed in his book, first published in 1981, although that short precis of After Virtue doesn't nearly do it justice. The British writer Kenan Malik describes After Virtue as a 'brilliant, bleak, frustrating and above all provocative' work, while Irish philosopher Joseph Dunne calls it 'a coruscating critique of the ills of modernity'. MacIntyre was born in Glasgow to parents of Irish descent – 'who ensured that he learned Irish', Dunne points out. An 'active Trotskyite' for many years and a member of the Community Party in the UK, MacIntyre progressively moved away from Marx towards Aristotle and, in later life, converted to Catholicism. One constant throughout was a pride in his Gaelic roots. Dunne, who taught philosophy at St Patrick's College, Dublin City University and closely engaged with MacIntyre's work, told The Irish Times that, 'in an earlier atheist phase', MacIntyre 'had identified himself as a 'Catholic atheist' on the grounds that 'only Catholics worshipped a God worth denying'.' But what made After Virtue so special? The book begins with an arresting image. Picture the world of science experiencing a 'catastrophe' whereby 'laboratories are burnt down' and no one can provide a convincing proof that two plus two does not equal five. Something similar has happened to moral philosophy, MacIntyre argued. As religious certainties faded away, and as we abandoned traditional belief systems, we have been left with purely emotional judgments on morality. In short, we cry 'hurrah' and 'boo' at one another without any common ground. For MacIntyre the rot set in with the Enlightenment, and its promise of creating a moral framework divorced from history and community. The Enlightenment gave us two new ways of assessing ethical matters: human rights theory and utilitarianism. The former has strengthened recognition of individual freedom but it runs into trouble when competing rights clash. Utilitarianism advocates doing whatever maximises benefit and minimises harm. Reimagined as 'effective altruism', it is the favourite ethic of tech bros who claim to be making the world a better place while acting like jerks. MacIntyre called for a return to an earlier way of thinking known as virtue theory. This emphasises the need to cultivate characteristics like honesty, humility and compassion. In a unique and exhilarating twist, After Virtue wrapped this argument up in a wider critique of capitalism, the creeping managerialism of society and the coarsening of political language. Central to Alasdair MacIntyre's thinking is to resurrect the ancient Greek notion of telos or 'purpose' For someone who is hardly a household name, MacIntyre had an outsize influence on a generation of political scientists. In Malik's book The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, there are more references to MacIntyre than to George Berkeley, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Voltaire put together. But he has his critics too. Liberal commentator and author Mark Lilla says After Virtue 'turned out to be one of the most influential books of our time' – but not in a good way. 'By blurring the lines between intellectual history and philosophical argument, MacIntyre ... developed a compelling just-so story about how our dark world came to be,' Lilla writes in The Shipwrecked Mind. For liberals like Lilla, we should double down on Enlightenment values, not back away from them. When faced with monsters trampling over international human rights law, we need a stronger response than appealing to virtues. We need a system for managing conflict, along with clear rules and punishments. MacIntyre opens After Virtue with an epitaph to deceased ancestors: 'gus am bris an la', Scots Gaelic for 'until the day breaks'. The book also 'ends with a kind of prayer', Lilla observes. But prayer won't stop Vladimir Putin or Binyamin Netanyahu raining missiles down on civilians. Ultimately, MacIntyre left room for debate over how we should rehabilitate our moral thinking. After Virtue does not close off the possibility of restoring virtue theory to its rightful place in our collective reasoning, while taking the best of what both human rights theory and utilitarianism have to offer. Central to MacIntyre's thinking, however, is to resurrect the ancient Greek notion of telos or 'purpose'. The Enlightenment sidelined inquiry into purpose; searching for 'the meaning of life' itself became a figure of fun. But MacIntyre believed it was essential for humans to have a meaningful story about where they came from and where they're going. He insisted, as Dunne puts it, on 'the narrative structure of a human life'. 'I can only answer the question, 'What am I to do?',' MacIntyre wrote, 'if I can answer the prior question, 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'.' We have become accustomed to self-help books spoon-feeding us 'lessons for life'. But a proper work of philosophy inspires us to ask better questions.
Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
Appreciation: Dr Denis Sampson
Dr Denis Sampson, the noted biographer, critic and essayist who died earlier this month, was born in Whitegate, Co Clare, but made his home for the last 30 years in Montreal, Canada. Born in 1948, he received his secondary education at Mount Saint Joseph's College, Roscrea, and went on to take a BA in English at University College Dublin. A period working in the Department of Finance followed, during which time Denis also studied for an MA in English from UCD. In 1969, he took up further study in English at McGill University, Montreal, where he earned his PhD. It was then that he began his 30-year teaching career at Vanier College, Montreal, then began and where Denis and his family made their home. READ MORE Although he wrote in many forms, Denis's most notable accomplishments are in the field of literary criticism and scholarship. His deft and thoughtful combination of these two related areas of inquiry was already fully formed in his first book, Outstaring Nature's Eye: The Fiction of John McGahern (1993), a work which is not only a model of criticism but which also effectively pioneered serious research into the mind and art of its subject. Another first followed, a biography of Brian Moore – The Chameleon Novelist (1998). Subsequently, Denis began to sound other strings of his literary bow, most notably in personal essays, many of which appeared in such eminent venues as The Dublin Review and the leading Canadian journal, Brick . These essays may be seen as both a consolidation of the homecoming implicit in Denis's McGahern work and an embrace of the wider world of international experience signposted by Moore. This latter sphere also led to Denis's numerous residences at Canada's internationally renowned Banff Centre, while he also maintained a regular presence as a valued speaker at Irish studies conferences. And in time, Denis's Irish origins and interests found a means of speaking to his Canadian life and work in the memoir A Migrant Heart (Montreal, 2014), a noteworthy contribution to the literature of the Irish diaspora (though, strangely, it still lacks an Irish edition). McGahern's continuing output claimed a good deal of Denis's critical energy, with substantial accounts of late-style McGahern appearing in leading Irish studies outlets. Additionally, the study Young John McGahern: Becoming a Novelist (2012) proved a fitting capstone to Denis's many years of thought and research about a writer whose canonical status Denis helped establish. The theme of becomings and beginnings also prompted Denis's most international book, The Found Voice: Writers' Beginnings (2016). Denis's many friends within and beyond academia found him a genial, open-minded, generous man who had as one of his finest traits a great gift for friendship. An excellent host, first-rate conversationalist, venturesome traveller, and devoted family man, Denis will also be fondly remembered for his genuine interest in his students, his scrupulous attention to their education, and to the helping hand he unfailingly extended to younger scholars. Denis Sampson died on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025, after a long illness at his home in Montreal. He was 77. His wife, Gabrielle, and their children Conor, Robert and Anna survive him, as do three grandchildren.
