Tom Dunne, who died on 15 April after a short illness, was an original and interrogative historian and a much-loved teacher, supervisor and friend.
He was born in 1942 to a family of farmers and shopkeepers in New Ross, Co Wexford, a world he evoked vividly in his beautifully crafted memoirs. His mother was a descendant of Ignatius Rice, and aged 14 Tom joined the Christian Brothers, becoming a proficient and charismatic teacher in various postings.
He left in 1964 after disagreements over corporal punishment and other issues. Notably, he went on to be the only former member of the order to give evidence to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, reproduced in the Ryan Report (2009). His seven years with the Christian Brothers marked him with a deep-founded dislike of authoritarianism and a hard-won independence of mind; his funeral on 23 April last was resolutely humanist.
Tom’s academic brilliance was clearly evident during his undergraduate degree at UCD. After a spell of teaching at secondary school level he migrated to postgraduate studies at Cambridge, and in 1977 to a lectureship in the Irish History department at UCC, which became the background to the rest of his working life.
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His intellectual interests moved from Home Rule politics to a markedly original fusion of literature and history. The landmark 1985 conference he organised in Cork on “The Writer as Witness” and the ensuing book, highlighted his pioneering work on the early nineteenth-century Irish novel, while his celebrated major article on Irish Romantic writing, ‘Haunted by History’, became a much-cited classic. Above all, through his work on Maria Edgeworth and other writers and a subversive pamphlet on Wolfe Tone, he pioneered an influential emphasis on the psychology of colonialism as applied to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Irish mentalities.
Later he would turn to art history, particularly 18thcentury landscape painting, and the work and life of James Barry, to whom his attention returned very recently.
Tom became a unique cultural historian, with a superb writing style, honed by omnivorous and cosmopolitan reading. His intellectual development is tracked in his 2004 book Rebellions: memoir, memory and 1798, a remarkable and courageous weaving together of his own autobiography, local Wexford history, and a forensic reconstruction of violent episodes of the 1798 Rising. It won the Ewart-Biggs Prize for a work extending understanding between Britain and Ireland, and made a considerable impact. His work on 1798 had already aroused some controversy, to which he was not a stranger. Along with the charisma, enthusiasm and generosity of spirit which endeared him to so many, he possessed a steely adherence to principle and a firm commitment to the academic and ethical standards he believed in. This was evident in his sterling service to the NUI Senate as well as the History Department at UCC and Cork University Press – this last a passionate commitment, whose centenary exhibition he launched a few weeks ago, on what was to be his last visit to Cork.
Tom’s family was the bedrock of his happy and fulfilled life. He had four children – two daughters, Fiona and Deirdre, by his first marriage to Mary O’Callaghan, and two sons, Oisín and Fergus, with his beloved second wife the historian Clare O’Halloran – a soulmate in every way. Along with Kevin Barry, Richard Kearney and Edna Longley, Tom was a founding editor of the Irish Review, a distinguished journal of literature and ideas, which ran from 1986 to 2020, with Clare replacing Tom as co-editor in 2004.
After their retirement from UCC, he and Clare moved from Montenotte to Greystones, where he wrote The Good Boy, a reflective and moving autobiographical study of old age, partly inspired by the essays of Michel de Montaigne.
Published last year, it was a fitting envoi to a life well and courageously lived, and an intellectual achievement which leaves an enduring inheritance. It also enshrines the memory of an unforgettable and captivating personality, treasured by those lucky enough to have known and loved him.
Roy Foster
