TLRH | 2024 Annual Edmund Burke Lecture | Fintan O'Toole

Recorded November 26th, 2024. The Trinity Long Room Hub is
delighted to welcome author and columnist Fintan O'Toole to present
the 2024 Edmund Burke Lecture, 'Terror and Self-Pity: The
Reactionary Sublime', which is supported by a generous endowment in
honour of Padraic Fallon by his family. Fintan O'Toole is an author
and columnist. His books include We Don't Know Ourselves: A
Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, Heroic Failure: Brexit and
the Politics of Pain, and Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and
Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. A member of the Royal Irish
Academy, he is a winner of the European Press Prize and the Orwell
Prize for political writing. He is also Professor of Irish Letters
at Princeton University. About the Annual Edmund Burke Lectures
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) graduated from Trinity College Dublin in
1748. As a student he founded what would later become the College
Historical Society, the oldest student society in the world. Burke
entered Parliament in 1765 and quickly became a champion for
political emancipation. After 1789, he directed his attention to
the French Revolution and its immediate ramifications for political
stability in England. To mark the university’s deep and lasting
connection, and to express the inspiration his life and work as a
public intellectual offer to us, the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and
Humanities Research Institute has instituted a prestigious annual
Edmund Burke lecture, delivered by a leading public intellectual of
our time on a topic that engages with the challenges facing us
today. One of Burke’s central and life-long concerns was what moral
codes should underpin the social order, constrain the use of power
and inform our behaviour as responsible citizens. This is as
important today as it was in Burke’s time, and the Edmund Burke
lectures will keep his manifold legacies alive by providing a
prominent forum for contributing in his spirit to the wider
discourse about what society we want to live in and what
traditions, perspectives and values we need to draw on in the
shaping of our future. Learn more at www/tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub