Audio Clip from interview 1 with Dr. Leo Colgan

Audio clip from interview with Dr. Leo Colgan, Founding Regstrar, University of Limerick. Interview 1 conducted on 22nd January 2009 by Dr. Catherine O'Connor.

"...and my first task was to employ a dance band for the opening, the grand opening in a marquee in September!. So I duly went about and did that and I think I employed, it was either Mick Delahunty or Maurice Mulcahy, I can’t remember, but then we set about designing and developing the curriculum, developing systems and procedures and so on. A twenty- five year development plan was already in place. The NIHE was duly opened by An Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, in September in ’72, and we decided we’d have an inter-denominational service at the start which comprised the Chief Rabbi, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Limerick, I think, the Church of Ireland and the Methodist Moderator. And Jack Lynch opened it and shortly after that a letter appeared in the Irish Times from Dr. Jeremiah Newman, who was President of Maynooth at the time. He wrote about our inter-denominational service and said it was ‘theologically unsound and sociologically unrepresentative’! which caused great amusement locally. Anyway, we opened the Institute, the twenty five-year development plan which was an amazingly prescient document, postulated a campus population of 8,000 in twenty-five years, of which 1,000 would be living on campus. This was utterly unheard of because the population of Trinity and UCD at the time would have been about maybe three and a half, four and a half, maybe five thousand, and here was this fledgling Institution in Limerick proposing 8,000!. What on earth would we do with these and in areas hitherto unheard of, like electronic engineering, material science, European Studies?"
-Interview excerpt