Dispute With The Church and Move To Belfast
In his book, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for So Long?, Whyte's successor as Professor of Politics at UCD Tom Garvin gives an account as to the clerical politics prevalent at the time in UCD which caused Whyte's untimely departure:
| “ | A little later, in 1966, McQuiad provoked, possibly unintentionally, the resignation of John Whyte, a distinguished Catholic political scientist, from University College Dublin's Department of Ethics and Politics. This resignation and move to Belfast on Whyte's part in 1966 almost certainly was the unintended result of an extraordinary piece of clerical interference and bullying that rebounded upon McQuaid and on UCD. Whyte was in the midst of writing his standard history of the Catholic Church in independent Ireland, later published in 1969; at McQuaid's apparent instigation, his professor and head of Department attempted to forbid him from continuing with this work. The irony was that the resultant scholarly book, finished in Belfast rather than Dublin, deeply underestimated clerical power in the Irish state and gave the Catholic Church a rather easy ride. Another irony was that Whyte, as a Roman Catholic historian and political scientist, was apparently rather favoured by McQuaid. However in 1966 bishops didn't know they needed friends. Whyte was to come back to UCD and was professor of Ethics and Politics between 1984 and 1990. In a very real sense, McQuaid was the patriarchal and eccentric governor of Dublin Archdiocese, where one-third of the stat's population lived; he attempted to run an urban society of a million people as though it were a large feudal community. | ” |
At Queen's Whyte was to spend seventeen years as lecturer and reader, and from 1982 Professor of Irish Politics during which he sought to bring together political scientists from across the Island and develop an All-Ireland political science fellowship. From 1973 to 1974 he worked at as a research fellow at Harvard's Centre for International Affairs, and in 1975 he helped lead a team of researchers investigating the Northern Ireland conflict, then at its height. He also worked as research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies during the late 1970s and was elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1977, serving as Vice President from 1989 to 1990.
Read more about this topic: John Henry Whyte
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