In later years my father told me he always thought it a quirk of Irishness that TCD, as a bastion of Queen Elizabeth I’s pioneering 16th-century vessel of English Protestantism, set sail within a Catholic Irish sea and was, to some extent, represented by symbols more in keeping with ancient Celtic traditions. He found it strange to see the assimilation of another’s cultural symbolism, considered inferior or anathema to the conquering colonial power at one point, but subsequently being passed off as representative of one’s own. He felt this intellectual sleight of hand was inherently dishonest and arrogant, wondering why no one else seemed to notice these social incongruities or even cared.
Also, when I was myself an undergrad at TCD in the 1970s, I came to understand that the establishment of libraries, including my very own seat of learning, sometimes concealed a philosophy that wasn’t always benign, especially where it concerned a dominant colonial power ruling the roost in Ireland for the best part of eight centuries.