Born: 3 December 1941, Ireland
Died: 11 May 2017
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Elinor Caroline Hussey
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Turlough O’Riordan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Hussey, (Elinor) Caroline (1941–2017), scientist, academic and educationalist, was born on 3 December 1941 at 16 Herbert Street, Dublin, to Frank Hussey and his wife Aileen (née Houlihan), who both originally hailed from Co. Cork. Hussey had two brothers, Paul and Roger; the latter qualified as an engineer and was director of the Institute of Chartered Accountants Ireland. Frank Hussey was housemaster of residential students (1925–71) at Albert College, Glasnevin, Dublin, which housed University College Dublin’s (UCD) faculty of agriculture, where he also occasionally lectured. The family lived at An Grianán on the college’s grounds (later the residence of the president of Dublin City University). Caroline undertook ten years of primary and secondary education at Holy Faith Convent, Glasnevin, sitting her leaving certificate examination in 1957 or 1958.
Research, trade unionism and university leadership
Hussey studied biological sciences at UCD, where she specialised in industrial microbiology and gained a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in 1962. At Trinity College Dublin (TCD), studying under Brian Spencer, she completed a doctorate (Ph.D.) in biology in 1966, becoming expert in the life cycle and ecologies of bacteria and fungi. During her doctoral studies Hussey was lead author on a research note, ‘Mechanism of choline sulphate utilization in fungi’, published in Nature (1965). Continuing to postdoctoral research in TCD’s department of biochemistry, in June 1967 Hussey was awarded a fellowship by Shell Petroleum to study the mechanisms governing the metabolism and life cycles of the fungi genus Aspergillus, examining the rate of synthesis and energy flows.
As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s biological laboratories (1971–3) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Hussey co-authored papers with the pre-eminent biologist Richard Losick, among others, which addressed the role of RNA polymerase (enzymes which contribute to the generation of polymers, such as RNA and DNA). She was lead author on two papers, addressing ribosomal RNA synthesis (Journal of Molecular Biology, 1971), and in vitro synthesis of ribosomal RNA (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1972). Having cut her teeth with leading biologists and geneticists and encountered a free-thinking political and social counterculture in Massachusetts, Hussey joined UCD’s department of industrial microbiology in 1973, published her research on bacterial genetics and was appointed senior lecturer in industrial microbiology specialising in microbial biochemistry and genetics. She was chair of the board of the school of biological sciences in UCD during the 1990s.
Hussey was active in the UCD branch of the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT), serving as national honorary secretary of the union (1977–9) and chair of the UCD branch during the 1980s. After two prestigious UCD professorial chairs in the humanities were awarded to politically industrious individuals rather than the best-qualified candidates in 1987, IFUT tasked Hussey, by then a member of both UCD’s governing body and the National University of Ireland’s (NUI) senate, with reviewing and suggesting improvements to the transparency of such decisions. She produced guidelines that recommended only minor changes to procedure, largely to enhance staff consultation in such appointments, and observed that in academic life ‘politics with a small “p” is not a dirty word’ (Magill, June 1987); she viewed political nous and networking abilities as positive attributes for senior academics. As IFUT president (1989–92), Hussey campaigned to remedy the increasing overcrowding in teaching and library facilities and to regularise the status of ‘college lecturers’ across the NUI’s constituent colleges (such lecturers were appointed by colleges directly, to circumvent the unwieldy senate approval process). She opposed replacement of the block grant system with a unit cost funding model for higher education, which she feared would diminish the quality of teaching and require universities to develop private funding streams.
Hussey was elected to UCD’s governing body (renamed governing authority under the Universities Act, 1997) in December 1978, one of the six representatives chosen by the university’s graduates. She remained a member until 2004. Responsible for financial and administrative decisions, the governing body/authority also made recommendations to the NUI senate on the appointment of academic staff and the structure and organisation of academic courses, degrees and exams. She served on the university’s finance committee for many years, gaining valuable experience. In October 1982, alongside Garret FitzGerald, Maurice Manning, John A. Murphy, Gus Martin and others, Hussey was elected to the NUI senate for a five-year term by the graduate (‘convocation’) panel. She remained a member of the NUI senate until 2007 (being elected by UCD governing authority in 2002).
Membership of the NUI senate and UCD’s governing authority aided Hussey’s adept navigation of the university’s political networks, where a nexus of largely Fine Gael-orientated senior academics historically dominated university posts. In October 1994 she was elected registrar by the governing authority (by a 16–15 vote), and thus deputy president and vice-president of academic affairs. She was the first woman elected to such a post in an Irish university (though Lucy Gwynn had been appointed ‘lady registrar’ for women students of TCD in 1904). Alongside UCD president Art Cosgrove (appointed in 1993 and with whom she worked closely and effectively), Hussey prioritised the maintenance of academic standards after previous regimes had focused on expanding facilities and student numbers. Her election had relied on the vote of the president of the UCD students’ union, and that body understandably expected a sympathetic ear. Hussey was nonetheless integral to the gradual, staggered adoption of semesterisation by each faculty of the university in the coming years, widely opposed by students. In 1998 Hussey became embroiled in UCD’s controversial 1997–8 promotions round, in which only one woman was promoted to associate professor, compared to nineteen men (five per cent of applicants at a time when just under twenty-four per cent of UCD’s academic staff were women). Hussey publicly defended the evaluation procedures as having been followed ‘meticulously and transparently’ (Irish Times, 27 June 1998).
Hussey was a vocal champion of the leaving certificate applied, a vocational curriculum first introduced in 1995, and served as chair of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment from 1996 to 2000. As student fees increased in the early 1990s, Hussey urged the government to meaningfully tackle the structural inequalities delimiting access to higher education for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. She welcomed the subsequent abolition of fees in 1995 and was appointed to the commission on the points system, established in October 1997 by the minister for education and science, Micheál Martin, which reviewed entry mechanisms to further and higher education in Ireland. As registrar, Hussey supported efforts to widen access opportunities beyond UCD’s traditional demographic. The university’s New ERA (Equal Rights to Access) programme commenced in 1997, with Hussey’s early and enthusiastic advocacy essential to its success. A research-driven response to low university participation rates amongst those from disadvantaged communities, the programme provided students with financial aid, academic supports and personal mentoring, which notably increased the admission and retention of students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Hussey engendered support from (sometimes reluctant) academic staff, funding from the Higher Education Authority (HEA) and the approval of governing authority and academic council. She also took an interest in addressing the deep-seated structural nature of educational inequality (evident in the predominance of students who repeated the leaving certificate on prestigious undergraduate courses such as law, medicine, architecture and engineering) and in 2002 commissioned a HEA-funded study on the reasons why students left UCD before completing their degrees. Hussey retired from UCD in 2004, at the end of her ten-year term as registrar.
Politics and public service
Hussey had been politically active while still a postgraduate at TCD, canvassing in the Dublin South-Central constituency for Frank Cluskey during the 1965 general election campaign. After her return to Ireland, she became an active member of the Labour Party branch in Sandymount, Dublin, and later sat on the party’s national policy development committees on education, landlord and tenant law, and the environment. Hussey served as director of elections for Ruairi Quinn in the 1974 local and the 1977 general elections. After he lost his seat in the June 1981 general election, she reinvigorated his constituency clinics, contributing to his return to the dáil in February 1982. A masterful constituency tactician, Hussey remained Quinn’s director of elections for the next decade or so; her statistical acumen underpinned her impressive tally-master role at election counts, where transfers under the proportional representation-single transferable vote electoral system were essential to Quinn’s successes.
Hussey’s own electoral ambitions surfaced in March 1982, when she unsuccessfully stood for election to the seanad from the university panel as an NUI graduate. Though a long-standing Labour Party activist, Hussey campaigned as an independent; influenced by Mary Robinson and John A. Murphy, she argued that the six senators elected by graduates of the NUI and TCD should remain aloof from party politics. Critics suggested she sought to gain from Gemma Hussey’s election to the dáil from the seanad in February 1982 (having initially been elected to the seanad from the NUI graduates panel) and from their shared surname, though they were not related.
Hussey was chair of the joint labour committee on contract cleaning in the mid-1980s and served on the Irish Congress of Trade Unions’ women’s advisory committee. Such union roles engendered her interest in the emerging field of health and safety at work and in April 1986 Quinn, as minister for labour, appointed Hussey to chair the interim board of occupational safety and health. With a membership drawn from employers, trade unions and government departments, the board made a significant contribution to the drafting of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act, 1989. Following on from that work, in 1989 Hussey co-developed a diploma in safety, health and welfare at work, alongside Tom Walsh (director-general of the recently created Health and Safety Authority (HSA)) and UCD chemist Peter Start (co-founder of the Young Scientists’ Exhibition, at which Hussey had acted as a judge from 1977). Hussey and Start subsequently established the UCD Centre for Safety and Health at Work in 1991, a collaboration between the medical, science and engineering faculties of the university. From 1992, the centre deployed distance learning technology to deliver a certificate in safety and health at work to students based at the regional technical colleges. Lectures were delivered by two-way satellite link (facilitated by RTÉ and the European Broadcasting Union) from the mid-1990s until 2014, when the course went online. Hussey was a pioneer of interdisciplinary approaches to research and education, in both pure and applied contexts, long before such thinking became a mainstay of Irish academic life. (She supported the UCD faculty of agriculture’s rollout of a diploma in rural development, delivered by distance learning, in the late 1990s.)
She was the Irish representative to the European Federation of Biotechnology’s working party on safe biotechnology and chaired the HSA’s dangerous substances advisory committee until 2004. In March 1993, Brendan Howlin, minister for health, appointed Hussey to an expert group convened to examine the circumstances in which pregnant women were administered contaminated anti-D immunoglobulin by the Blood Transfusion Service Board. The group, chaired by Miriam Hederman O’Brien, reported to the minister in July 1995. As UCD registrar Hussey was an ex officio director of the Central Applications Office, and the university’s representative on the boards of management of St Vincent’s Hospital and the Mater Misericordiae Hospital, both in Dublin. In 1993 she was appointed, by Ruairi Quinn, to the board of Irish Fertilizer Industries Ltd. After her retirement she served as deputy chair of the National Qualifications Authority of Ireland (2008–12) and sat on the board of the State Examinations Commission.
Despite receding from active participation in constituency and party affairs from 1994, following Quinn’s election as Labour Party leader in 1997 Hussey was regarded as a member of his kitchen cabinet. In March 2011 she was appointed by Quinn, then minister for education, to a three-person independent advisory group (alongside John Coolahan and Fiona Kilfeather) to guide the forum on patronage and pluralism in primary schools, which examined ways to address the stark over-preponderance of catholic schools (ninety-six per cent of which were under religious management in 2011, ninety per cent directly by the catholic church) catering to an increasingly secular Irish population, with religious observance rapidly declining. The few non-religious primary schools in operation, comprising less than two per cent of schools, were oversubscribed and clustered in Dublin and other large urban centres. Hussey argued for an independent body, managed by local government and operating independently of any religious or patron body, to blindly assign local school places. The forum’s report, delivered in April 2012, urged substantial adaptation of patronage to better reflect increasing demand for non-religious schools, as well as primary education through the Irish language. It recommended an initial phase of divesting 258 schools in eighteen catholic dioceses, as well as removal of the requirement for religious instruction to infuse all facets of the primary curriculum.
Death and assessment
An engaged catholic, Hussey worshipped frequently at churches in Sandymount and on Haddington Road, close to her home on Shelbourne Road, Dublin. Highly sociable, she enjoyed sailing and swimming and was a long-time active supporter, and vice-president, of UCD soccer club. A fan of detective fiction, Hussey wrote Publish or perish (1991), a murder mystery set in the genetics department of a modern suburban Dublin university resembling UCD. Murder by the book followed in 1992; both were published under the nom de plume H. J. Forrest. Hussey endured a short illness before her death on 11 May 2017 at St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin. After her funeral mass at the Church of St Mary, Haddington Road, Dublin, she was buried in St Fintan’s cemetery, Sutton, Co. Dublin. The UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science established the Hussey Award for microbiology (which she had endowed), conferred on the leading B.Sc. graduate annually, in her memory.
Hussey consistently sought to improve educational outcomes for all. By identifying and mapping structural educational disadvantage, she implemented novel pathways and supports to improve the educational outcomes of children and adults across the entire gamut of Irish education. This, alongside her significant contribution to the realm of health and safety, marks Hussey as a classic twentieth-century European social democrat.
Hussey deposited a collection of her personal papers in the archives of the Irish Labour History Society in 1994.