GAME ON Celebrating Trinity’s many sporting achievements

The Sesquicentenary Regatta at Islandbridge in April

Game On

With a new strategy providing a roadmap, Trinity Sport is on a de nite course for success.

Sonia O’Sullivan with members of the Women’s Senior 8 team who were awarded Pinks at the Sport Awards and Commons in April

Agame-changer – that’s probably the best way to describe 2015-16 from a sports perspective in Trinity. Following the official launch of the strategy in February 2016, there is now a concerted effort to put sport at the heart of the Trinity experience. Trinity Sport is raising its game when it comes to all things sporting and the strategy provides a roadmap for improving the performance of our athletes and for enhancing participation among students and the wider college community over the next few years and beyond.

One group that has already raised their game, it seems, are the college’s GAA players, who’ve had one of their best years in recent times. The men’s football freshers played a blinder all year, becoming the first freshers in Trinity history to win the Division 2 championship. Their future looks bright. The men’s senior hurlers had another great year, defending their Ryan Cup title and in the process elevating themselves to the Division 1 Fitzgibbon Cup competition.

The highlight for the Trinity ladies Gaelic football team was playing in the Division 1 O’Connor Cup – the first time in the club’s history to compete at such a high level. Since 2012 the ladies have progressed swiftly up through the divisions. They started the 2012-13 season in Division 3 and by 2015-16 had reached the top tier. The Camógs put in some very impressive performances resulting in a well-deserved win in February to claim the Fr Meachair Cup. The talents of camogie sports scholar Aisling Maher were also recognised when she was selected as the Dublin Camogie Young Player of the Year in November 2015, and also made the CCAO Third Level Camogie All-Stars selection.

It was a landmark year too for DUFC’s senior team, who were promoted to Division 1A in April under the stewardship of Tony Smeeth, who was awarded a Trinity Sport Award that same month for his special contribution to rugby. The team’s winning ways didn’t end there – they also triumphed in the intervarsity Dudley Cup, which Trinity won for the first time since 1994, beating a UCD team consisting of 14 professionally contracted players. Trinity played its Colours match this year in College Park beating rivals UCD by a margin of 28-15, its first triumph since 2012. They were also runners-up in the World University Cup held in Oxford in October. Well done too to James Bollard who earned his first international cap at the World Rugby U20 Championship in Manchester in June.

As women’s rugby continues to grow as a sport, so too does women’s rugby on campus. Not only did this year see an increase in the number of women participating in college rugby, the women’s team emerged

SPORTS INNUMBERS 21

Pinks awarded at this year’s annual Sports Awards and Commons

48

The number of student sports clubs

60

Sports scholarships awarded for academic year 2015-16

DUFC outgoing captain Nick McCarthy in action — Trinity were promoted to Division 1A this year The camogie team celebrate their Fr Meachair Cup win

victorious from the Student Sport Ireland (SSI) 7s competition in April.

One of the highlights of the rowing year was the Sesquicentenary Regatta held at Islandbridge in April. The event marked 150 years since the first regatta was held in 1866 and welcomed 259 crews from Ireland and beyond. For DUBC, the year really belonged to the Novice 8s, who won at the Irish Rowing Championships in Cork in July to crown a year in which they were unbeaten. In terms of results, it was an especially good year for DULBC’s Senior 8 and Novice 8. Highlights include Erne Head, where the Senior 8 retained their title as fastest women’s 8. They also beat hosts Queen’s at the University Boat Race in May. Meanwhile the Novice 8s recorded several big wins to be crowned Novice 8s champions at the National Rowing Championships in July.

Trinity’s hockey alumni were feted at an event in the Dining Hall in March. Among those present were Dorothea Findlater (106) along with her granddaughter Zanya Bowers, both of whom not only played for Trinity but also for Ireland. In fact, Dorothea earned her first international cap 80 years ago in Philadelphia. Notable hockey successes this year include performances by sports scholars Anna May Whelan, who gained her first international cap in June against Spain, and Rachel O’Brien who vicecaptained the Leinster U21 team.

Finally, in June we got to welcome alumni Ronan Gormley (BESS 200105), Conor Harte (2013-14) and Stephen Barry (2001-04), as well as the rest of the Rio-bound Irish men’s hockey team, to Santry for a match against Canada. It was great to showcase our new international-standard pitch, which was upgraded as part of the first phase of redevelopment of the 34-acre Santry site.

3

The number of Trinity alumni in the Irish Men’s Hockey squad who competed in Rio – the first time an Irish hockey team has qualified for the Olympics in over 100 years

Dorothea Findlater and Ronan Gormley at the alumni event in the Dining Hall

1854

The year DUFC was founded, making it the oldest rugby club in the world in continuous existence

43,000

Visits to the swimming pool

Did you know?

ere are substantial discounts for alumni at the Trinity Sports Centre.

Waxing Lyrical

BY TOMMY GAVIN

Winner of the 2016 Hennessy Emerging Poetry Prize, Jane Clarke, lls us in on her creative approach to writing poetry and shares her thoughts on how the art form is valued in Ireland.

For Isobel

Your father’s alive in our house; his books talk to ours on the shelves.

His photograph above the piano, violin tucked under his chin.

You play the pieces he arranged, quote his sayings and stories,

read his fountain-penned notebook of favourite poems, Yeats,

Frost and Verlaine, for what they tell about him.

You would run to keep up as he walked Three Rock Mountain,

insisting you listen to the latest from Sartre and Teilhard de Chardin.

Read to me from the Russians, he’d say, those months when he lay in the Mater.

You cycled from your summer job, grateful for each day and even

for his request through a medicated blur, speak clearly and enunciate your words.

In a room full of strangers you sit by her side; she plays with your fingers, fidgets with rosary beads.

She whispers meanderings of mama and dada back home in Rockcorry and frets about the cows

that broke into the meadow, the stove to be blackened, feeding corn to the goose, walking her brothers to school.

One day she shouts, you let her slap your hand. The next she holds onto you. She cries when you leave.

She’s forgotten your name, sees her sister in your face. She’s floating away from you, a leaf in a slow stream. Jane Clarke’s poetry is both subtle and enduring. Often appealing to images of wildlife, her work is rooted in a rural sensibility that recognises the indifferent violence of nature, but also its beauty, giving expression to the depths of human experience. She believes that poetry is primarily aural, closer to sculpture or painting than literature, in the creation of almost-intangible art objects through language. Winner of the 2016 Hennessy Emerging Poetry Prize, Clarke’s first collection, The River, was published in 2015 by Bloodaxe Books. She is currently working on a second collection.

HOW DO YOU APPROACH YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS?

My work is lyrical, so I’m working with sound, with emotions and with ideas. It’s highly intuitive, and intuition is honed by reading, reading, reading. When I'm in-between poems, I have the fear that there won't be another one, so I try to make sure that if I am not writing, I’m reading. As long as the poems are coming, I'm very grateful.

COULD MORE BE DONE TO SUPPORT IRISH POETRY?

On the one hand poetry is thriving with poetry readings in pubs and at festivals all over Ireland every night of the week, with The Poetry Programme and Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ, with poetry featured in The Irish Times and The Irish Examiner. It hasn’t translated into sales of books and I think that’s a pity. Unfortunately the Irish Book Awards don’t even include poetry as a category. And yet Irish people love poetry and at key moments in life, it's poetry they turn to. I think it’s also a pity that poets can’t make more of a livelihood from something they work so hard at. I don’t necessarily want to give up my other work, but there should be a better living from poetry. The arts just aren’t valued adequately in terms of the role they play in life.

WHAT WAS YOUR TIME IN TRINITY LIKE?

I did a B.A. in English and Philosophy. Brendan Kennelly was my tutor, the poet Peggy O’Brien and the critic Terence Browne were both there, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was teaching Old English. So it was a vibrant Department. I remember Brendan meeting me in Front Square and introducing me to Michael Longley and Derek Mahon because they were his pals. That’s a whole other world, you don’t get that in many places.