Sir, - I found Anthony Clare's review of Donal McCartney's book on the History of UCD (Books, December 18th) interesting in one significant respect. The reviewer characterises the whole enterprise as an instance of some lost historical opportunity. The lost opportunity is understood to be the failure to amalgamate Trinity with UCD and so to create a "truly great university in Dublin".
In so far as he describes the current situation at Belfield as a "leviathan", perhaps the failure to proceed with such an amalgamation was not altogether the disaster he imagines it to have been.
Might I suggest that the real disaster in the history of UCD was the other failure alluded to. That is the failure by those two "hate-figures" McQuaid and Tierney to establish a truly Catholic University on the site. I understand that such a proposal was always and would remain anathema to the liberal-left establishment that now rules over cultural and educational affairs in Ireland today.
However, I remain convinced that with such a failure we lost a unique opportunity to remove Ireland intellectually and spiritually from the stifling grip of Anglo-American cultural imperialism. Had such a genuinely Catholic university been created at that time we might have forged nourishing links with the rich cultural and intellectual tradition of Catholic Europe.
And so, in this way, Belfield might not now be churning out such spiritually anaemic clones of the politically correct cultural establishment as is now unhappily the case. - Yours, etc., Thomas P. Walsh,
Fassaugh Road, Cabra, Dublin 7.