Ireland's Shotgun Wedding

Their campuses are less than a mile apart, but Dublin's two major universities have long been separated by a bitter heritage of hate and suspicion. Trinity College (enrollment: 3,500) is Protestant, England-oriented, aristocratic. University College (7,325) is Roman Catholic, nationalist, middle class. Relations between the two are so frosty that, when the Irish government recently offered them joint use of a veterinary school, the colleges balked at sharing the same faculty and instead created overlapping, independent staffs. Now, however, Ireland's Ministry of Education has taken a major step toward ending the rivalry. Under a plan of union revealed last month, the two schools will be merged to create a new entity, the University of Dublin, by the fall of 1969.

Papist Takeover. The shotgun wedding makes sound economic sense. Ireland is direly short of educational funds, and university enrollment during the next decade is expected to nearly double, from 15,911 to 27,000. The merger will end a costly duplicating of facilities. Ireland has no nuclear reactor, for example, because it could not in the past afford to build one at each university. Under the government's plan, both schools will keep their separate liberal arts faculties. Trinity is to be responsible for all work in biological sciences, law and medicine; University College will take over the physical sciences, engineering and business school programs. Students at both campuses will have access to Trinity's magnificent 1,000,000-volume library.

Both universities accept the need for merger, if only reluctantly. Founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1591, Trinity College has been one of the few centers of free, unfettered thought in Ireland. Its graduates include Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Beckett. Faculty traditionalists fear that the school will lose its elan and its independence in the merger. There is also some Protestant concern about a "Papist takeover." It has been noted that Dublin's Archbishop John C. McQuaid still sends out an annual pastoral letter warning Catholics that attendance at Trinity is a mortal sin. Dispensations, however, are freely given, and since many students simply ignore the ban, a full one-third of the enrollment is Catholic.

The plan is almost certain to be approved by the dail (assembly), largely because the government pays two-thirds of the budgets of both schools. "Once the universities begin to accept the idea as a fait accompli," says Education Minister Brian Lenihan, "they will begin to concentrate on how better to make it work." The fact that the merger could be proposed at all, without creating a religious civil war, is an impressive measure of how far Ireland has come in burying its angry past.

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