RBAICRHRAERTDT FROM TRINITY TO CHINA Bridget Hourican, journalist, in conversation with Richard Barrett As a student, I had rooms in the top floor in the Rubrics. The second night I arrived, there was this gigantic noise and I could see the stars: the gable wall had fallen out! It had stood there for 273 years and then I appeared… I had to be evacuated to Botany Bay and that was great - tennis courts right outside my window and the Buttery at the end. Richard Barrett – entrepreneur, property developer, ex-Treasury Holdings and founder of Bartra Group - is recalling his days as a law and economics student in Trinity in the early 1970s. We’re speaking by Zoom, of course, and especially in these pandemic times with the campus on lockdown, his college days seem like a whole other world, an enviable swirl of teeming lectures, sparky tutorials, clubs and societies (chess, swimming and bridge for him), endless parties and stirring debates. This was during the early years of the Northern Irish Troubles: The debates weren’t just confined to the Hist and the Phil - someone would jump up on an orange box in Front Square and start talking and someone else would join and soon you’d have a crowd.” He recalls his individual lecturers warmly: Louden Ryan was Professor of Economics - shortly afterwards, he was appointed Governor of the Bank of Ireland. Basil Chubb took us for politics and would give uncannily accurate predictions of who was going to win the election. In law, we had Mary McAleese, who was only about four years older than we were; she specialised in posing questions in a different way to make you think. Then there was R. F. V Heuston, who was the editor of the seminal book on English Law for Torts, and William Duncan, who took us for private international law and jurisprudence, and was later appointed Deputy Secretary General of the Hague Convention. So that’s the calibre of lecturers we had.” He had decided on Trinity at a very young age: I’m from Ballina in Mayo but my mother was from Dublin and when I was eight or nine, she brought me on a tour of the principal buildings of the capital, and that included Trinity and I liked the look of the place. I opted for economics because my father was a businessman, an exporter of agricultural produce, which involved a lot of travel, especially to eastern Europe, which was then behind the Iron Curtain. He would tell stories, like how he would bring nylons and cigarettes to Hungary
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