Sir, - In his report on the University of Notre Dame's plans to invest in a new study centre in Newman House (The Irish Times, October 21st), your education correspondent, Andy Pollak, states that No. 86, one of the two 18thcentury buildings that make up Newman House, "is little used by UCD apart from some offices and for an occasional Irish studies course".
I don't know where he got this information, but I sincerely hope it was not from anyone in authority in UCD. Newman House is the city-centre campus of University College Dublin. It is frequently used by members of the college's academic community as a venue for international meetings and conferences. Indeed, I can personally testify that No. 86 has become the venue of choice for one international group of itinerant legal scholars.
The intelligence that part of the complex will henceforth be occupied by a university justly famed for its football team (and, if the report is to be believed, its facilities shared with a third institution that does not even have a football team) will no doubt come as a surprise to many graduates who, like myself, regard Newman House as the jewel in University College Dublin's crown. No less surprising will be the realisation that plans to alienate one of the stones in that crown, apparently in perpetuity, seem to have reached the point of no return without any discussion with members of the rank and file of the college's academic community.
Nor will these sentiments be mollified by the knowledge that the new occupants are to busy themselves with the cultivation of that already most ubiquitous of plants, Irish studies. - Yours, etc.,
(Dr) Finbarr McAuley,
Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen.