91��Ƭ��

Read Professor Nestor's Inaugral Address.

Watch the Inaugural Video Address.

Watch the Inaugural Address Student Musical Performance.

Thank you, Niamh - thank you Mayor Moran, thank you Minister O’Donovan. Thank you to our musicians. I think I now have what any young boy would always want - a theme tune! I am delighted to welcome you all to 91��Ƭ�� this afternoon. Thank you to everyone who is here, and I extend a particular welcome to those who have travelled from overseas to be with us this evening.

It has been 369 days since I walked off an Airbus A380 at Dublin Airport to take up the role as the 11th President of 91��Ƭ��. November 7, I landed, a Thursday. It was cloudy, it was cold, and I felt alone. 369 days. I am calling it a year… Other Presidents have made bolder calls.

One year - long enough to lose an Irish version of an Australian suntan, yet not long enough to acquire an Australian version of an Irish accent. Long enough to miss loved ones who could not travel with me, yet not long enough to overcome the loss of the family and friends who have long since left us. Long enough to regard 91��Ƭ��, and the remarkable dedication of colleagues across every corner of this institution, with the privileged vantage point of fresh eyes. Yet not so long that I've forgotten what it means to be new, to be uncertain, and to be a learner.

As I gathered my thoughts to draft this inaugural address, the contents of a letter, written in 1914, loomed large. In that dispatch, the Modernist poet Ezra Pound advised his correspondent that it took him ten years to learn his art and a further five to unlearn it. While philosophers have often had cause to reflect on what Pound meant by the verb “to learn”, for a dynamic, distinctive, and deeply engaged College, the more potent and provocative term is that which relates to “unlearning”.

Unlearning is the second act of education; one we resist far more than we realise. Having spent years, perhaps decades, perfecting the first act - the accumulation of knowledge, the forging of expertise, the confirmation of credentials - we become skilled at addition, but unskilled at subtraction - of letting go of that which no longer serves. Where learning cultivates mastery, unlearning encourages reflexivity. Where learning builds confidence in what we know, unlearning acknowledges the provisional nature of all knowledge.

Pound’s comments serve, not as a metaphor, but as a method. Because this address is not about that first education, it’s not about prophesying excellence - though everyone wishes that. It’s not about promising world-leading research - though everyone pledges that. It’s not about unveiling pillars or priorities - though everyone structures around those. It's not about better strategic planning tools, refined implementation processes, or optimised metrics. It's about that hard education. It's about asking questions that help us discover what we should become, not refine what we already are. It’s about doing better things rather than merely doing things better. In fact, it's about a very particular kind of courage. Courage that is found in a very particular kind of person - Catherine McAuley.

When she founded the Sisters of Mercy in 1831, just shy of 194 years ago, Catherine McAuley had already made what appeared to be her most courageous decision - using her inheritance to purchase property at the corner of Lower Baggot Street in Dublin, and constructing there a House of Mercy. That building housed a school for young girls mired in poverty, a shelter for homeless women, and various workshops that provided vocational training in needlework and domestic skills; competencies and capabilities that might prepare young women for employment rather than the perpetuation of dependence.

Such charitable generosity however neither captures nor fully defines Catherine McAuley’s courage. That lay in her stubborn refusal to accept that merely ‘helping the unfortunate’ was enough. It lay in her categorical rejection of what others took for granted - that 'better' was 'good enough'. It is here that her courage manifests itself. Not in asking "how do we help better?" but in questioning "why is it that help is needed at all?" This is the kind of question that refuses to accept current structures as inevitable; the kind of question that generates possibility; the kind of question that opens space for imagination rather than foreclosing it.

Where others would witness destitution and ask, "What can we give?", McAuley would ask, "What have we taken?" Where others consoled themselves with handouts to the ‘deserving poor’, she created pathways to economic independence and systems that could transform social relations.

Her instrument was education. Not education as the transmission of knowledge. Not education as kindness extended to the unfortunate. Education as recognition of human potential and the demand for justice. Education as the building of relationships that can overcome marginalisation, that can dissolve barriers, and that can create the conditions for human flourishing. Education as the instrument through which people can come to know themselves and their world differently.

This is why her Sisters became known as 'walking nuns' - they refused the cloister, and refuted the model of holiness as withdrawal from the world. They moved out, and into Limerick's most disadvantaged communities, into grinding poverty, and systematic exclusion. This wasn't relocation - it was an attempt at transformation. It was also an acceptance of responsibility – it is not enough simply to observe the world, one must help to form it, to reimagine it; through action, through encounter, and through relationship. Relationship, the most fragile, yet the most powerful of social instruments. Relationship - an affirmation that 'all real living is meeting'.

Those relationships would create recognition where there was invisibility, solidarity where there was isolation, and mutual dignity where there was hierarchy. Those relationships would generate intellectual growth, emotional resilience, and social transformation, and they would do these things simultaneously.

Catherine McAuley's courage then is moral courage, but it is also epistemic courage. The courage to challenge unjust beliefs. The determination to correct the mistake of not believing what we should. The strength to act on those beliefs even when it served her discomfort rather than her convenience.
So, the question that Catherine McAuley gives rise to is this - what does courage mean for a modern university-level College, an institution whose very existence is predicated on ‘the provision of education’?

It means recovering what McAuley understood instinctively - that universities exist to move toward margins, not away from them. Social margins, certainly - those excluded by poverty, by circumstance, by systemic barriers to access. But intellectual margins too - the questions we haven't asked, the frameworks we haven't interrogated, the ways of knowing we haven't acknowledged. The margin is where transformation begins, not where it ends.
McAuley's work set something in motion. Not a fixed model to be replicated, but a momentum to be sustained. I want to offer some precision on that word momentum. Pillars are static, structural, load-bearing and necessary, but ultimately they are fixed. Momentum is dynamic, directional, gathering energy from the past to propel us forward. Momentum is what makes questioning, transformation, and movement toward margins possible.
This momentum has animated 91��Ƭ�� since its establishment in 1898. The founding purpose was clear - to prepare teachers who would serve communities systematically excluded from quality education. The mission was always distinct - education must prepare not just workers but citizens; it must focus not on the future of work, but on a working future. Education must produce not technicians, but critical thinkers capable of building a more just society. This is the momentum we've sustained. The evidence surrounds us.

We have grown not only in size but in purpose - expanding our mission to include initial teacher education at both primary and post-primary levels, and broadening our academic offerings to encompass early childhood education, psychology and vibrant liberal arts programmes, featuring disciplines such as media studies, drama, history, modern languages, and philosophy. Since 1991, our student body has grown from less than 300 to over 5,000 - growth that reflects demand, but also the necessity of response. Our physical presence extends across three sites in two counties. We've built collaborations that matter; locally through initiatives like City Connects, TED, and EDNIP; regionally with various Education and Training Boards; nationally through policy engagement; and internationally through staff and student mobility with some of the most prestigious universities in the world.

We've transformed from a teaching-only institution to one where research achievement is recognised and rewarded at the highest levels, and contributes to policy development. We awarded our first PhD in 2002, our 100th in 2015 and this year alone, we celebrated the achievements of 31 doctoral graduates!
None of this is mine to claim, but for all of us to celebrate. I acknowledge with deep appreciation the vision and efforts of my predecessors - Sister Angela Bugler, the late Professor Peadar Cremin, the late Professor Michael Hayes, Professor Eugene Wall, and colleagues across every area of this institution, whose dedication has built what we inherit.
Their achievements – the infrastructure, the programs, the reputation – they are hard won. But growth itself isn't a strategy. And the structures that enabled past success may not be those that enable the type of transformation now necessary.
In a sector still reeling from the effects of the pandemic, and where uncertainty is the new norm, in a world marked by polarisation and a growing aversion to difference, where and how does our courage manifest itself?
Are we willing and able to ask uncomfortable questions, questions that genuinely challenge our assumptions? Do we narrow our intellectual horizons, or lean into the work of dialogue? Do we protect and proclaim what we know, or remain open to transformation? Do we serve ourselves, or the flourishing of others? Can we shift from asking "Why are things the way they are?" to "How might things be?"
Courage at this time means embodying McAuley's disposition, not replicating her solutions. This is the work ahead. This is the work of an institution serious about remaining true to its founding commitments, and serious about the futures that are worthy of them.

This is a task that begins with honest acknowledgement - the traditional academic enterprise is profoundly solitary. From the independent scholar narrowing their field to pursue original research, to the single academic designing and delivering their own modules, the introverted nature of academic work is everywhere evident. And while this has generated disciplinary excellence, it has also entrenched a culture that values expertise within silos but which struggles to sustain debate across them, or to articulate common purpose beyond them.
Strategic planning has become a ritual - a cyclical performance where we articulate visions, establish metrics, and adjust when reality refuses to comply. We've mistaken the map for the territory, the plan for the practice.

We've inherited binaries that constrain how we think - research versus teaching, theory versus practice, individual achievement versus collective flourishing. These aren't natural categories - they're historical constructions, and they are increasingly at odds with the questions and complexities our communities face.
The same applies elsewhere. When we separate 'academic' work from 'community engagement', we render it supplementary, not integral. When we distinguish 'theory' from 'practice', both suffer - theory without practice becomes abstraction; practice without theory becomes repetition.
We track publications, citations, graduation rates, and satisfaction scores. But metrics quickly replace what they measure, and that measurement changes the behaviour - disguising and undermining what we intended to assess or advance.
And there is knowledge itself. Disciplines have produced remarkable advances, but also profound fragmentation. Problems don't arrive pre-disciplined. A child struggling in school doesn't have a 'psychology problem' or a 'sociology problem' - they have a life. Our structures resist integration precisely when we need it most.

But what if knowledge is fundamentally relational rather than individual - emerging through encounter and the friction of different perspectives? What if knowledge and education are allowed to emerge within and nurture relationships? What if research were made accessible across the university community; students, staff, and partners? What if we recast research from the limited and extraordinary to the ubiquitous and accessible, from nineteenth-century transmission models toward collaborative projects of sense-making?
What if teaching were understood, not as delivery, but as co-creation? Not content transfer but shared discovery, where both teacher and student are transformed?
And what if engagement were foundational rather than supplementary – what if it were conceived as partnership, where the boundary between university and community is permeable, and where the wisdom beyond our walls shapes the knowledge within them? These aren't idle questions. They are directional ones - they point toward a different kind of institution - one ready to embrace these challenges; one ready to realise these possibilities. But what enables the shift from vision to action?

The catalyst for this kind of effort is neither policy nor procedure, but agency - it involves recapturing the original motivations that drew us to academic life. This is where courage is found; this is where courage is required. Not just the courage to act differently, but the courage to ask why we're doing what we're doing. Why do we structure programs this way? Why reward these activities and not others? "Why" is the question with the most potential. “Why” furnishes the greatest opportunity to examine and to energise.

But we need other questions too; Who are we as educators, scholars, practitioners? Who are we in this work together? What do we value about our scholarship? Why do learners come to us, and what are the questions they grapple with? What do we understand about the complex environments in which they live and work?
It is questions of this type that enable new patterns of thinking, of learning, and of being. Questions that create space; space for dialogue before commitments that demand alignment; space for discovery before commitments that foreclose it; space for curiosity before the commitments that declare certainty.

But questions alone aren't enough. We need response-ability - an ethical recognition that we are always and already implicated in what we study, with whom we teach, and the communities we serve. There's no view from nowhere, no neutral expertise standing outside the situations we seek to understand. Our methods shape what we see. Our questions determine what counts as answers. This isn't relativism; it's reflexivity - intellectual honesty about the situated nature of knowledge production. It's courageous to acknowledge our position, our assumptions, and our stake in the knowledge we create.

This is why the strategic plan I'm about to discuss is not built on pillars, but momentum. It presents interdependent themes that only make sense together - themes emerging from questions, themes that invite co-construction rather than compliance.

So let me offer three orientations that have emerged from many conversations - three ways of attending that shape how we teach, how we research, how we relate:

Living Care, Common Home

The first orientation recognises that care is fundamentally interconnected. We cannot care for one another without caring for our communities. We cannot care for communities without caring for the planet we share. These aren't separate responsibilities - they're inseparable dimensions of what it means to be human, to be in relation.
When Pope Francis named Earth as our Common Home, he was articulating what should already be evident - we're embedded in systems we don't control, systems that sustain us, systems we're degrading.
Living care will mean examining how our practices, from procurement to pedagogy, research to facilities, employment to governance, sustain those relationships, not diminish them. It will require us to interrogate the language we inherit - 'care' must prioritise interdependence, not dominion. Sustainability - environmental, financial, social - must challenge inequality, not reproduce it.
This shapes how we understand our place - locally and globally. We're not external benefactors but participants in shared life. Musicians from diverse traditions, historians confronting contested pasts, Irish language students revitalising cultural practices, educators fostering inclusive learning - these are necessary acts of co-creation. Cultural vitality, educational transformation, and collective memory all require encounter across difference. Spiritual traditions, intercultural wisdom, diverse modes of knowing; these aren't obstacles to overcome but essential sources of wisdom.
Living care extends to how we understand ourselves as an institution. As an employer, we must create working conditions that honour people, not exhaust them. Staff wellbeing isn't peripheral - it's foundational. Our physical spaces – classrooms, studios, libraries, and campuses- must enable creation, invite encounter, and impart joy. How we allocate resources, whom we employ, what we build - these are enactments of care, not refusals of it.
Living care recognises connection without dissolving distinction. Research retains its rigour, teaching its discipline, and administration its necessity. What changes is the recognition that no activity stands alone. Each derives meaning from its own integrity and from its participation in relationships - with one another, with communities, with those voices that imagine what can come next.

Children's Voices, Future Worlds

The second orientation recognises children and young people as present-day knowledge creators, not recipients of our wisdom - citizens with rights now, not adults-in-waiting. This requires wrestling with different questions. What might children reveal about equity, belonging, and possibility that conventional frameworks miss? How do the worlds we're creating now expand rather than foreclose what they imagine for themselves?

Voice alone is insufficient. Children need space to form views and express them, audiences who listen, and influence over decisions that affect them. This means participatory research across education, psychology, history, languages, and theology. Methodologies that begin with young people, not about them. It means staff resourced as agents who notice, who interpret, who listen, and who can act. This orientation extends authentic partnerships already underway while inviting disciplinary expansion; What emerges when we attend to how young people interpret heritage, express identity, frame their own mental health, and create meaning through art?
Giving every child the best start means addressing the structural conditions - housing, income, health - that shape what becomes possible. Because we hold ourselves accountable to intergenerational ethics, we must ask, will our choices expand worlds that children inherit, or reproduce the inequalities they already perceive? The question isn't whether children direct every decision, but whether we're willing to be transformed by what genuine listening reveals.

Human Potential, Humane Technology

The third orientation addresses how we foster human flourishing in an age of rapid technological transformation. Generative technologies don't merely automate tasks - they alter what human capabilities matter and why. Human potential isn't about competing with machines. It's about strengthening distinctively human capacities; ethical discernment, aesthetic sensibility, relational wisdom, and the ability to formulate questions worth pursuing. These aren't supplementary to technical competence. They determine whether technical knowledge serves human dignity or undermines it.
Humane technology means designing tools for human flourishing, examining the values embedded in systems. When information proliferates instantly but truth becomes contested, we must cultivate judgment; Which sources merit trust?; What constitutes evidence?; How do algorithms shape what we see? We name these technologies without being captured by them - we wrestle with them, interrogate them, question what they demand. This shapes how we approach digital literacy, information integrity, media creation, along with the spaces, physical and virtual, where learning happens. Our research, our pedagogical choices, all must invite human encounter, not extract attention. This is not simply a humanistic principle; it's an economic necessity. Regions thrive through adaptive creativity and ethical innovation, not technical execution alone.

These three orientations, these three thematic frames, provide a grammar for institutional life, not a blueprint. They enable coherent institutional action without predetermining all outcomes. They invite ongoing dialogue about what it means to be an educator, a researcher, a member of this learning community - at this particular moment, and beyond.
They articulate a framework for collective sense-making that will help us navigate uncertainty together. This means co-construction becomes central to how we work. It means we'll discover our values through practice rather than declaring them in advance ... because where our values can be found matters far more than what we say they are.

There is one significant and concrete symbol of this momentum that I want to mention – the new library building. Libraries have always been more than repositories of books. They're spaces where knowledge, community, and possibility converge. Our new library will embody and inspire the very principles I've described today - spaces designed for collaboration and individual study, for digital and traditional scholarship, for learning that crosses boundaries rather than reinforcing them. It will be a building that invites questions about who learning environments are for, what they can be, and what they can achieve.

With this new strategic plan, we are entering a second education together. We're learning to ask different questions, to attend to voices at different margins, to refuse false choices, to unlearn what limits us. It is momentum that opens up new possibilities for sustained transformation. Change shaped not by predetermined answers but emergent questions – change guided not by a fixed map, but by moral purpose.

This is uncomfortable work. It requires intellectual humility - the recognition that expertise doesn't immunise us from bias, that leadership doesn't mean having all the answers. It requires patience with processes that feel messy. It requires courage to risk the security of what we know for the possibility of what we might discover.
But we do that because we believe that better is possible. It is that spirit – a willingness to unlearn in service of deeper learning – which remains our most vital inheritance, our most urgent responsibility, our most necessary future.

This is a task that requires a specific ethic and a matching ethos. Ones that ensure the way ahead remains one of optimism and of opportunity. As 11th President, I am organisationally positioned at the head of such a task. However, I can be neither its patriarch nor its prophet.
I can be its standard bearer. In the role, I would always show the way, but the path ahead will be determined by those who respond to the invitations, who engage with the questions, who risk the discomfort of unlearning. I'll show up consistently, listen more than I speak, ask difficult questions, and even admit when I'm wrong. I will create space - not for monument parks, and ballrooms - but for the kind of questioning that institutional life too often closes down.

This is a challenge I relish, an opportunity I am honoured to embrace, and a task that I firmly believe in - because it is work worth doing… it is work that brings joy.

Thank you.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.

The occasion featured a unique musical performance, composed exclusively to commemorate the moment. Amidst the demands of his school placement, fourth-year Bachelor of Education student and accomplished pianist, Conor Fallon arranged a remarkable piece titled Ceol na Dtonn (Music of the Waves).

Conor was joined on stage by three recipients of the Ashling Murphy Memorial Scholarship, an award presented in Ashling’s memory to students who demonstrate exceptional talent and achievement in the field of traditional music - Catherine Joyce, a third-year Bachelor of Education ( B Ed) student who performed on flute and harp; Róisín Ní Chonchúir, a third-year B Ed in Education and Psychology student, who played fiddle and flute; and Rachel Mahony, a second-year Bachelor of Education student, who performed on concertina. They were accompanied by first-year Bachelor of Education student and talented uilleann piper, Muireann Meade. Guided by Gwen Moore, Professor of Music Education at 91��Ƭ��, the students artfully blended elements of Irish traditional, classical, and popular music in a creative tribute to the College’s rich heritage and enduring traditions.