History Man
For Martin Maguire, finding research topics is not the problem - it's finding time to do them all.
With the Christmas holidays beckoning, many of us will be looking forward to the time off. Not so Dr Martin Maguire, who sees the break as an opportunity to forge ahead with some research projects he's working on. The lecturer in humanities has developed a broad range of research interests in the past number of years and rather than get engrossed in one area prefers to keep "a lot of pots on the boil". His research interests include: contemporary Irish history with a particular emphasis on the State and State-building; the Irish protestant experience; labour history; post-war Europe; the history of anarchist, socialist and communist thought; cultural history and the history of everyday life.
Martin Maguire lectures with the Department of Business and Humanities at DKIT and is a member of An Foras Feasa.
Maguire works on his own a lot of the time but he sees himself as less and less the "monk scratching away in the corner" and increasingly being involved with large-scale research projects with other academics. One of these, funded by An Foras Feasa - the Institute for Research in Irish Historical & Cultural Traditions - involves compiling a database of the senior civil servants of the Irish state between 1922 and 1972.
"Civil servants cultivate anonymity; they really do stay in the shadows. But there is a sense that they are very powerful figures and have a very strong influence on policy. The project is to identify them and find out about them and then to study their influence on policy and to see what extent they gave good advice or bad advice to their political masters," he explains.
He plans to put his research findings up on the web so that it can be accessed by other academics and researchers who are interested in the pivotal role that the civil servant-politician relationship has played in the evolution of the State. "One of the advantages of digital is that the contents can be constantly revised," he says, adding that he plans to start putting his findings up on the web within 12 months.
Maguire has published widely. Last year, he authored a well received book, published by Manchester University Press, 'The Senior Civil Service and the Revolution in Ireland, 1912-1938: Shaking the Blood-stained Hand of Mr Collins' and recently penned an article about the protestants involved in the 1916 Uprising, which is due to be published in the upcoming issue of the scholarly journal Studia Hibernica. He is also contributing a chapter on Gladstone and the Irish civil service in a book about the former British PM due for publication next year.
Other related projects include a history of the UPTCS, the trade union of the professional civil service of the state, and participation in the 'Mapping the State' project at the Geary Institute at UCD led by Dr Niamh Hardiman.
On the teaching front, Maguire is currently supervising an MA on the rural electrification scheme in the Cooley area and is co-supervisor along with Professor Vincent Comerford of NUI Maynooth on a PhD whose subject is Co louth between the Civil War and the early 1930s.
Taken from The Link, newsletter of the DKIT Regional Development Centre and Research Office, Issue 5, Winter 2009.
