No bull: UCC academic a quiet man of literary taste

Des MacHale, UCC emeritus professor of mathematics, is not your usual fusty, serious academic.

His groundbreaking tome, The Life and Work of George Boole: A Prelude to the Digital Age, will later today see him receive an honorary doctorate, on the bicentenary date of Boole’s birth.

“The world has finally come to realise the genius of George Boole and the United Nations’ declaration this year was a major achievement,” he says.

“Everyone in the world now has heard about George Boole and his link with Cork: he produced some of his greatest work here.”

MacHale is dedicating his honour to the George Boole 200 team at UCC.

However, the man who has lectured generations of mathematics students in UCC for over 40 years has other very different literary strings to his bow — including The Book of Best Kerryman Jokes and The Book of Irish Bull: Better Than All Udders.

Next to mathematics, his other abiding passion in life is The Quiet Man film — a topic on which he’s written a number of books.

“Quite apart from its artistic merit, which is obviously considerable, The Quiet Man’s effect on Irish tourism has never been fully quantified,” he says. “It was the first time that the rich colours of Ireland were seen in glorious Technicolour on the silver screen, and it prompted a surge in American and European curiosity about our country that continues right to this day. As a two-hour advertisement for Ireland, it was priceless.”

Film extras made 30 shillings a day — three times the average weekly wage in the recessionary 1950s. While the film went on to win two Oscars, the scene where Wayne roughly drags O’Hara across the fields back to her brother’s house created a degree of controversy — particularly when an old woman hands him a stick “to beat the lovely lady with”.

Years later, O’Hara recalled that director John Ford and Wayne, as a prank, had piled as much sheep dung they could find directly in the path she was dragged through. “Duke had the time of his life dragging me through that muck, it was bloody awful,” she said.