Irish Examiner view: Protest uses the power of polite dissent

Actor Olwen Fouéré, filmmaker Margo Harkin, and American historian Kerby Miller have each refused the University of Galway's offer of an honorary doctorate

University of Galway's campus. Whether the university will finally sever ties with Technion is unclear. File picture: Ray Ryan

There is a particular sting in the act of protest that doesn’t shout, doesn’t blockade, or disrupt. The kind that simply says “no”. 

In recent days, the University of Galway has felt that sting three times over, as actor Olwen Fouéré, filmmaker Margo Harkin, and now American historian Kerby Miller have each refused the institution’s offer of an honorary doctorate. One act of dissent can be dismissed as an anomaly, two, a trend, but three is a reckoning.

Their shared objection is clear: The university’s ongoing partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, which is long associated with Israel’s defence industries. For these honourees, accepting a ceremonial degree from an institution still tied to such a partner would amount to complicity by association — a softening of the moral spine at the exact moment it should remain rigid.

What makes their refusals so potent is their tone. None arrived in fury or flourish. Fouéré’s letter was measured. Harkin’s was reflective. Miller’s, too, was rooted in principle rather than performance. And yet together they form a quiet chorus of critique far harder for the university to sidestep than a thousand placards at its gates.

This is the unique force of what might be called ‘polite dissent’, the ability to embarrass an institution not through confrontation, but through withdrawal.

Universities, after all, trade heavily in prestige — especially prestige they can borrow. Honorary degrees are less about honouring the recipient than amplifying the institution; the hope is that some of the recipient’s sheen rubs off on the crest embossed on the parchment. But when three respected figures decline that parchment, the gesture reverses direction: The sheen becomes tarnish, the prestige becomes a question mark. This discomfort is sharpened by the university’s own unfulfilled assurances. Earlier this year, its leadership publicly pledged to cease new research agreements with Israeli institutions — a promise presented as
evidence of responsiveness, responsibility, even moral alignment. Yet the existing, multimillion-euro partnership with Technion remains untouched. In September, the university said it cannot exit from the project because of legal advice.

To the public eye — and evidently to the three honourees — that incomplete follow-through looks less like principle and more like PR. And here lies the point: Polite dissent exposes the gap between what an institution says and what it actually does. It does not roar; it reveals.

When prominent figures walk away, they force the university to confront the contradiction it hoped would go unnoticed — in a moment demanding clarity, it has opted instead for caution. With Miller now joining Fouéré and Harkin, the university’s moral ledger looks more imbalanced by the day.

Whether the University of Galway will finally sever ties with Technion is unclear. But the message delivered by these honourees is not. Sometimes the refusal to accept an honour becomes the most honourable act of all.

Misogyny culture

The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence begins each year with the same stubborn hope, that shining a brighter light might finally shrink the darkness.

Yet we mark this year’s opening in the shadow of an axe attack on a woman in her own home in Kildare — a brutal reminder that this week’s spotlight is far from symbolic.

Because in Ireland the statistics alone indict us. According to Women’s Aid, one in three women will suffer physical, sexual, or psychological abuse by a partner — a lifetime risk that is far more than a marginal social problem. And in 2024, gardaí logged more than 61,000 contacts related to domestic abuse, a 9% increase on the previous year.

Meanwhile, the CSO reports that one in four women has endured sexual violence by a partner during their adult lives.

It is no longer credible to treat violence against women as a private tragedy. This is systemic, endemic, structural. We make grand political declarations, convene task forces, draft strategies — and still the headlines come.

The problem is not one of policy; it is one of culture. A culture in which control masquerades as love, silence shields cruelty, and male violence becomes the predictable endpoint of tolerated attitudes. If the 16 Days are to matter, they must do more than raise awareness — they must raise standards. For men. For communities. For institutions, which so often hide behind platitudes while women’s lives unravel.

Until we stop treating violence against women as inevitable, nothing will change. And until something changes, another woman will be attacked in her own home — and we will once again find ourselves lighting candles in the dark, asking why the dawn never comes.

Back to the future

In the Irish Embassy in Berlin, an unexpected window has opened onto a country many of us barely recognise anymore. Diether Endlicher’s black-and-white photographs, taken in the early 1960s, capture an Ireland on the cusp of disappearance: Small-town streets where nothing hurried, faces lined with weather and work, children loitering in doorways as if time were an endless resource. 

It is a landscape of quiet gestures and slow certainties — a world before motorways, before AI and smartphones, before the economic whiplash that flung the country from austerity to abundance and back.

Looking at these images now, from the vantage point of a nation wrestling with housing crises, economic booms, and immigration anxieties, one feels a tug of something deeper than nostalgia. Not a longing to return to that Ireland — which was poorer, narrower, and more constrained — but a desire to salvage what was good in its rhythms: Neighbourliness without calculation, a sense of belonging not measured in GDP. As we push ahead in an age defined by speed and volatility, such exhibitions remind us that progress doesn’t have to mean severing our roots. Sometimes the past isn’t a place to go back to, but a compass to help us move forward.

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