Trinity College Dublin
By Dr John Hegarty, TCD Provost
At the heart of Dublin City is one of the most
prestigious universities in the world, Trinity College
Dublin. As you enter the cobble-stoned campus
you cannot help sensing the impact of its four
centuries of existence. Nor, can you help feeling
that Trinity’s students and academics of today are
taking the university to a new level of intellectual
energy, innovative initiative and connectivity. The
statistics speak for themselves – Trinity is in the top
1% of universities internationally in fifteen fields
of research, it is in the top 100 overall by a number
of rankings, graduates are highly sought after by
employers and 10 companies were spun-off in
2009 alone. In 2001 when I became Provost of the
University, my plan was to take Trinity into the top
50 universities internationally. In 2009 we achieved
that goal. But since rankings are quite crude
measures, it is worth probing a little further to find
out what makes Trinity so distinctive.
First is its history. Founded by Queen Elizabeth I
of England in 1592, for over 400 years Trinity has
produced some of the world’s great minds across the
sciences and the humanities, including two Nobel
Laureates, Samuel Beckett in literature and Ernest
Walton in science. Literary greats such as Jonathan
Swift, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and Samuel
Beckett are joined by the creative genius of more
recent graduates, such as writers, Michael Longley,
Derek Mahon, Anne Enright and Sebastian Barry.
Philosophers such as George Berkeley and Edmund
Burke are joined by more contemporary alumni
such as former UN Human Rights Commissioner,
Mary Robinson. Trinity graduates and scholars
keep Ireland firmly at the forefront of science. Past
discoveries still relevant today include Sir William
Rowan Hamilton’s mathematics, Ernest Walton’s
splitting of the atom, Denis Parsons Burkitt’s