Did you know that the world's first surgically and hormonally reassigned female-to-male transsexual, Michael Dillon, studied medicine in Trinity College, Dublin where he won rowing blue with Dublin University Boat Club, having previously won a rowing blue with St Anne's College, Oxford as a woman – probably the only person to do so as both a woman and a man? Of course you didn't. Unless you're David McCullagh, that is. The Six-One anchor joined Oliver Callan – sitting in for Ryan Tubridy – to talk about the Dictionary of Irish Biography, which has been made available in its entirety online for the first time. The dictionary, which is managed by the Royal Irish Academy, was first published in book format in 2009.
"When the first volumes came out, you know, you had your politicians, you had your civil servants, you had your well-known artists and actors and all the rest of it. But there's lots of other lives out there and one of the things I know that struck them at the time was only about 10%, initially, of the lives in it were women."
Work has been ongoing to rectify this, David assured us. The dictionary, though, is all about the stories of Irish (and Irish-adjacent) lives. And it's added to all the time. You won't find David or Oliver in it, though:
"In order to get into the Dictionary of Irish Biography, you have to be dead for about 5 years because they feel that gives a length of time to give somebody a fair appraisal."
Who, Oliver wondered, is the dictionary aimed at? At the launch of the online edition, the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, suggested it would be useful for everyone from Junior Cert students to college professors. David cited an example of how he's got interesting information from it for his own work (he's written several biographies of Irish politicians), including the fact that Éamon De Valera was a decent rugby player when he was in school and that a man with a lifelong grudge waited over 50 years to heckle Dev. These are the sort of titbits you won't find on Google or Wikipedia.
A big part of the dictionary's success and a crucial part of its importance is its reliability. David explained to Oliver how the dictionary's editors curate the almost 11,000 entries that make up the dictionary:
"It's a very rigorous checking process. So, when they're writing an entry for this, they go back to the sources. Part of the problem when you're researching anything, you know, things get repeated which aren't necessarily accurate, or they get, you know, Chinese whispers, they get changed in the way. Something might be written in a book which isn't quite right and then it gets printed in another book and another book and another book and then it becomes the accepted wisdom. So you kind of need to go back to the source to try to establish the actual facts."
So, you can disagree with interpretations or with the conclusions in a particular entry, but the facts are accurate, according to Dr McCullagh. It is, Oliver declared, like a reliable Google. Sounds like a winning formula.
For more from Oliver and David's conversation – including the full story of Michael Dillon and the latest updates on Bruce Springsteen's brush with the law – you can listen to the full interview here.
The Dictionary of Irish Biography is published by the Royal Irish Academy, "for scholars of Irish history, society and culture" and can be found here.
Niall Ó Sioradáin