Canada and the USA 

I graduated from university when jobs in Ireland were so limited that most young graduates emigrated. After applying unsuccessfully for many jobs, I eventually ‘bit the bullet’ and, in March 1955, I joined them and emigrated to Montreal, Canada. The night before leaving, I calculated that, at our Graduation Ceremony, 26 young civil engineers had paraded before UCG President ‘Pa’ Browne to receive our diplomas; 6 months later, when I got on the boat to Montreal, there were only five of those 26 left in Ireland! 

At that time, Canada was crying out for civil engineers. Within a week, I landed a job as a trainee Bridge Engineer with the Canadian Pacific Railway Company (CPR). Within two weeks, I (who abhors heights) was clutching narrow girders as I hunted for rusting structural plates beneath a very large railway bridge carrying very large trains across the very wide, swiftly moving, icy-cold St Lawrence River. 

I stayed with CPR for a year and then, as structural design had limited appeal to me, I found new work on the construction of an oil refinery in Hampton, Virginia, USA. Whilst in this job, I began to think seriously about ‘where, career-wise, do I go from here?’. The degree programme that I had completed at UCG in the 1950s took 3 years, whereas those in North America took 4 years – so I decided to improve my skills by seeking a job which would allow me to study a master’s degree course part time. To cut a long story short, I eventually landed a part-time job at Iowa State University, which allowed me to enrol in a master’s degree. I married the girl next door in Galway during this course, and with her support, I then decided to continue studying for a PhD. As the US Government was building a huge interstate highway network at that time, and it was clear that the motor age was here to stay. I focussed my PhD studies on highway and traffic engineering.  

United Kingdom 

I obtained my PhD in 1962 and then found a job as Lecturer in Highway Engineering at the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Leeds. For me, this was a case of being in the right job in the right place at the right time! There were only about 300 miles of motorway in the United Kingdom at that time, meaning there was great potential for huge government economic investments in roadworks and traffic operations – which, in turn, would bring about a big demand for the education of specialist highway engineers. Also, the literature indicated that, in a heavily populated small island such as Britain, the norm would be for modern road planning to be not just about physically locating a new facility but would also involve assessing its impacts on the surrounding physical and social environments.  

My then head of department was very supportive of my work proposals and, in 1964, I established a master’s programme in Transport Engineering. In cooperation with an economics lecturer colleague, we established a ‘no-cost’ inter-disciplinary Centre for Transport Studies at the University. In 1965, frustrated that there was no decent University textbook in the UK which dealt with modern-day highway planning and engineering, I wrote one! The initial edition was well-accepted and became a standard University textbook, which ran into four editions before being superseded.  

In 1966 I was promoted to the position of Professor of Transport Engineering. In 1971, in conjunction with two professorial colleagues (in economics and in geography), the Centre for Transport Studies won a grant of 200,000 pounds sterling from the British Science Research Council, which enabled the establishment of additional postgraduate courses and research activities. At that time, 200,000 pounds was viewed as a large grant, and the University Council supported our request for the Centre to be renamed the Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) and become a free-standing department of the University; my colleagues were then kind enough to nominate me as the inaugural Director of this new academic department. 

Today, some 50-plus years later, the ITS is a leading international centre for transport teaching and research.  

Australia: In Canberra 

In 1973 I received an invitation to spend 6 months as a Visiting Professor at the University of Melbourne. A major side-benefit of this appointment was that I was subsequently invited to give a series of lectures in various towns and cities. During one lecture, in the Australian Capital Territory (aka Canberra, albeit Canberra is but one suburb within the ACT), the answers I gave to a particular query somehow hit the mark and provided the solution to a highway-planning problem that had been bugging the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC). For context, the NCDC was the organisation charged by Parliament with responsibility for the planning, design and construction of the ACT as the national capital of Australia. 

The outcome of that lecture intervention was that I was invited to become the First Assistant Commissioner (Chief Engineer) at the NCDC, a position which had become vacant. I was flabbergasted by this opportunity, as I did not think that I had said anything particularly wise when replying to the lecture queries. However, the idea of being Chief Engineer of Australia’s national capital, with a (then) budget of ca45 million Australian dollars per annum, appealed to me hugely. So, after discussing it with my wife, I accepted the offer, and we moved to the ACT in early 1974.  

Because I was on a big learning curve most of the time, my five years in the ACT were tremendously exciting. As well as doing the routine things done by city engineers, I oversaw the design and construction of a number of major projects: e.g. the Googong Dam (a rock-faced earth dam which provides Canberra’s water supply); the Lower Molonglo Water Quality Control Centre (the then largest inland wastewater works in Australia); and large sections of the Tuggeranong Parkway (including the Molonglo Parkway – now renamed Parkes Way), which enabled the completion of the ACT’s planned highway system. I also learned a little about national and local politics when I introduced parking meters into the ACT. 

Toward the end of the 1970s I foresaw that the end of the era of big spending by the NCDC was nigh and that, sooner rather than later, local government would (as it should) become operative in the ACT – so I decided to return to academia, this time as the Director of a small tertiary-level college in Tasmania. My reasons for accepting this post were twofold: firstly, it was available and provided me with an immediate entry into the world of academic administration and, secondly, both my wife and I thought it would be good to live in a ‘down under’ Irish-style environment (which was how we then viewed Tasmania). 

Australia: In Tasmania 

Tasmania is the smallest (550,000 population) Australian state. In the 1980s roughly half of its people resided in the South of the state, clustered in and about the city of Hobart. This state capital was also the home of the University of Tasmania (UTas), Australia’s fourth oldest University. The remaining Tasmanians lived mostly in the Northern half of the state, and their focus tended to be on Launceston, where I was Director of the small Tasmanian State Institute of Technology (TSIT).  

UTas was slow in adapting its modus operandi to meet the expanding tertiary education demands of the 1980s, e.g. most student enrolees were southern-based and potential students living elsewhere had to travel to Hobart to pursue their tertiary studies – and this was the cause of much resentment elsewhere in Tasmania. Whilst the TSIT was not titled a university, the brief I received when I took up my post was to challenge UTas, especially in northern Tasmania. The historical discrimination exercised by the University against residents of the North was recognised by both the State and Federal Governments, so extra resources were made available to provide for the changes that had to be made to do this. 

The policies the TSIT adopted to raise the quality of the existing institution, and the quantity of students, were based on common sense: viz. 1.  become a multi-disciplinary and (in specialised areas) multi-level institution; 2. provide teaching schedules and mechanisms which met potential student needs; and 3. employ well-qualified and enthusiastic academics to devise and teach niche courses for which there would be a continuous workforce demand. Not all these policies worked well in practice; however, those which did work well related to Architecture, Aquaculture, Business Studies, Computing, and Nursing. The end effect was that the TSIT grew rapidly and, in 1990, some 57% of the enrolments in Launceston were in 3rd level programmes which were not available at the old University in Hobart (which only had minor growth). 

In late 1987 the UTas Council proposed a merger between UTas and the TSIT and, at about the same time, the Australian Minister for Education produced a Green Paper which proposed that an Australian university typically needed about 8,000 equivalent fulltime students (deemed Equivalent Full Time Student Unit, or EFTSU) to support a wide range of postgraduate and research programmes. I publicly supported both proposals; I reasoned that by combining the UTas (>5,000) and the TSIT (ca3,000) EFTSU count, the Federal Government’s criteria would be met, whereas not merging would mean that both institutions would remain small, with neither able to provide the educational leadership that Tasmania badly needed in rapidly changing times. A positive decision to merge was eventually taken by the Councils of both UTas and TSIT and, on 1 January 1990, the ‘new’ University of Tasmania finally became a state-wide institution, and Launceston finally became a university city (like Galway).  

In 1989, prior to the merger, the decision was taken that the interests of the new University of Tasmania would best be served if a new Vice Chancellor was appointed from ‘outside’ the merging institutions. My opposite number at the ‘old’ UTas retired whilst I stayed on as Deputy Vice Chancellor until I retired on my 60th birthday in 1993. I then wrote another book and got involved in local community work. After I retired, the University of Tasmania bestowed the honorary degree of Doctor of Law (LLD) on me and, some years later, I was made a Member of the Order of Australia – the AM is the Australian equivalent of the British OBE – by the Governor General of Australia.