JOHN HEGARTY (b. 1948)

Pioneering Trinity College Dean and Provost of the Research Era 

Student 1966-70

 

In 2001, at the age of fifty-three, John Hegarty was elected Provost of Trinity, the second Mayoman and the second person of Catholic background in succession to occupy the position - he succeeded Thomas Mitchell, a Belcarra-born classicist. They might just as easily have shared a Maynooth connection, since both were in the typical mould of those who presented themselves for selection as candidates for the priesthood in the Archdiocese of Tuam. But John Hegarty was the only one to choose that route, famously combining his undergraduate education as a seminarian with immediate post-graduate studies as a layman, all on the same campus.

John Hegarty was born on a small farm in Ballinasmalla near Claremorris, Co Mayo in 1948, the youngest of five children, three girls and two boys, in the family of Delia and Denis Hegarty. His father, who had been born in 1879, died when he was twelve. His mother, who was thirty years younger than her husband, brought up her family single-handed, and survived into the early years of the 21st. century. He was educated at local national schools and at St. Colman’s College, a diocesan college founded a few years before in the town a short time previously under the tutelage of Fr. John Colleran, a scientist who had graduated from Maynooth a decade earlier and who was joined (and eventually succeeded as President) by another Maynooth science graduate, Fr. Michael Lyons. The future Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte was a contemporary. 

In 1966 he entered Maynooth as an aspirant for the diocesan priesthood, continuing his attachment to science, in which he obtained a first class honours degree. In 1970, having embarked on his first year of theological studies,  he left the seminary but became the first genuine student of the new dual regime system in Maynooth, when he enrolled in the Higher Diploma in Education course then being conducted by Professor Séamus Ó Súilleabháin.

He then moved to University College, Galway, where he spent five years as a post-graduate student, securing his Ph.D in Physics in 1976. Here he also met Neasa Ní Cinnéide, a Kerry-born geographer, and following her acceptance of a study option for the degree of Ph.D at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, they moved to the United States, where he became becoming a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the same university. There he spent three years, then securing employment with Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he would lead a number of innovative research initiatives.

He returned to Ireland in 1980, at the age of thirty-two, on securing the newly-created position of Professor of Laser Physics at Trinity College Dublin. Over the next fifteen years, he would direct the cutting-edge funding-research-education interfaces in the areas of advanced technologies, setting up Optronics Ireland in 1989 as a campus enterprise within a network of operations in the other five major universities and the National  Microelectronics Research Centre in Cork. During that time he led a series of European Union-funded research projects into so-called resonant cavity LEDs (RCLEDs), a type of light emitter, collaborating with the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in a joint venture to commercialise the applications discovered by their research efforts. He served as department head in the Faculty of Science from 1992 to 1995, as adjunct professor at the University of Georgia between 1990 and 1995 and as visiting professor at the University of Tokyo and Sony Corporation in the latter year. From 1995 to 2001 he was Dean of Research at TCD, raising almost €70 million in funding for the expanding programmes in the university’s science and engineering divisions.

During those years, there were several interactions between the Maynooth and Trinity traditions in an unexpected way: two priest-professors at the national seminary who embraced the lay state became members of the faculty in the areas of Theology and Arts: Sean Freyne as Professor of and Cathail O hAinle as lecturer and (from ) Professor of Irish.