A couple of weeks ago in his address, Bill offered us an etymology of the word Religion, which is that it follows from the Latin religare, meaning to bind together – presumably, people (also presumably spiritually rather than physically). Anyway, the timing, as it happened, was very interesting, because it came at a point when I had felt more bound up with Ireland as a community than at any time since I arrived here two-and-a-half years ago. The reason for this is that I had been (and continue to be) actively involved in the resisting what I regard as a very imminent and serious threat to the future of free expression and social well-being in Ireland, and in doing so, I had been feeling (and continue to feel) more connected to the greater community than previously (I have met lots of wonderful people in the process, as well!).
What am I talking about?
At the risk of being labelled as an alarmist, let me relate to you some experiences I had while living in Australia. When I arrived there in 1990, I found a country that felt very free, with a newly awakening arts culture, a newly awakening sense of multiculturalism (at last), a sense of social awareness – in short, full of hope. What I witnessed over the years following was a move towards repression, racism, greed, and division, to an extent which (by accounts) exceeded anything seen there since the 1950’s. How could this have happened so rapidly, you might ask? That I cannot fully answer, but I do think I have an idea how it began. Like nearly all countries which are overtaken by totalitarianism: the tanks move in first to the Universities. While tanks weren’t required in Australia, sackings and censures of academics (tenured and non-tenured) critical of government policy became commonplace, working conditions for academics were savaged (real pay cuts of 50% or more being the norm). ‘Non-Market’ departments, such as History were eliminated from every University in the country virtually overnight (hence, for example, no outcry when the ‘detention centres’ in the middle of the desert were set up for hapless asylum-seekers – nobody was around to note their similarity to concentration camps). The catalyst for all this was the dissolution of the buffer mechanisms which had protected the Universities from direct tampering by the government, the abrupt change, in my opinion, happening at the behest of the Multinational corporations from whom the politicians had increasingly begun taking dictation.
And so you can see why, now that the process of emasculation of the Universities has begun in earnest here in Ireland (under the guise of ‘restructuring’), I have become an activist again. I am certain the same will happen here if unchecked.
And what has all this got to do with religion? If you believe as I do that our common humanity is what binds us, and there is a real threat of divisiveness (i.e., the antithesis of religare) and you feel it needs to be resisted, then activism becomes a religion.

David Edelman
UCD

PS I just found out that the President of UCD has brought in corporate executives from IBM to implement the restructuring: it appears that UCD is to be fashioned after IBM's flavour of US corporate structure.