John A. Murphy

John Augustine Murphy (17 January 1927 – 28 February 2022) was an Irish historian and senator. He was professor of history at University College Cork (UCC).

Biography Murphy was born in Macroom, County Cork, and has said he was very bookish as a boy. He won a Cork County Council scholarship in 1945 to study history at UCC, and graduated in 1948 with a first-class honours degree and first place in both History and Latin. He was a founding member of UCC History Society (UCC Historical Society, as it was then) in his final year of university. He took an MA in Cork before taking up a teaching post at the diocesan seminary at Farranferris in Cork city.

After eleven years in Farranferris (1949–1960), he became an assistant lecturer at UCC. He was appointed Professor of Irish History in 1971, holding that chair until his retirement in 1990. His 1975 book Ireland in the Twentieth Century was one of the first surveys of contemporary Irish history.

From 1977 to 1982, and between 1987 and 1993, Murphy represented the National University constituency as an independent member of Seanad Éireann. As a senator, he was noted for his advocacy of political and cultural pluralism. Earlier he had been a supporter of Noël Browne's Mother and Child Scheme. was also noted as a sharp critic of Sinn Féin and the Provisional Irish Republican Army, to the point that Murphy was often cited as an "Anti-Republican". Originally advocating for Irish reunification in the 1960s, and protesting the introduction of internment of Republican prisoners in 1971 as well as the Emergency Powers Act of 1976, by the 1980s Murphy's position had switched to the view that "the national question" around Northern Ireland was little more than a border dispute. Murphy dismissed the Provisional IRA as nothing more than "armed Hibernianism" as well as "unworthy" of the term "Republicans", and aroused fury amongst the provisional movement when he publicly criticised the 1981 Irish hunger strike. In 1982, Murphy delivered a speech at Béal na mBláth to mark the 60th anniversary of Michael Collins’ death, and declared Irish reunification "was not worth the shedding of a single drop of blood". In the 1990s Murphy condemned John Hume for being willing to make overtures to Gerry Adams in seeking to end the Troubles peacefully. His father Thade was a Gaelic footballer, who represented the Cork county team.

Works

Murphy, John A.; O'Carroll, J. P. (eds), De Valera and his times, Cork University Press, 1983.