Prof Cliona OâFarrelly is clear: she does not want this article to be about her path to the top. This much she makes apparent over the course of our conversation, during which we spend a great length of time discussing her path to the top.
OâFarrelly, a Trinity graduate, a professor in the Collegeâs School of Biochemistry and Immunology and the first-ever female chair of the Fellows, also says she wants to put a framework in place to establish some terms of reference in order to set the piece off in the right direction. Following this, she proceeds to take our conversation on a million different micro-trajectories, stopping herself only sporadically when she remembers why sheâs here and what she wants me to focus on.
If it sounds at this point as if OâFarrelly is a controlling interviewee, then itâs important to note that it doesnât feel at all like this. Rather, it feels like an attempt from OâFarrelly to impose some order on a life that has what she understatedly calls âseveral nichesâ, and to make sure this piece is used not to highlight her own achievements, but to show students that life is much broader, richer and more complicated than it seems at a young age.
But OâFarrelly canât stop herself from fully engaging with every question. At numerous points sheâs almost on the verge of hopping out of her seat with excitement, so taken is she by what weâre discussing, while at others sheâs uproarious at some story or reminiscence. She might want this piece to have some order, but our conversation certainly doesnât â and, it must be said, itâs all the more enjoyable for that.
This is the secret, it seems, behind OâFarrellyâs likeability: she is irrepressibly good company. Prof Diarmuid Rossa Phelan, OâFarrellyâs predecessor as chair of the Fellows, says in an email that âno-one is immune to her benign enthusiasmâ, and heâs not the only one to flag this part of her character. âEnthusiasmâ is one of the first words people reach for when asked to describe OâFarrelly.
But itâs chaos, rather than enthusiasm, that OâFarrelly identifies as the trait other people are likely to associate with her â she says that âsome people will probably say that I amâ chaotic. And she certainly seems it.
She’ll often get caught up in a conversation and then look at her watch and realise she’s 30 minutes late to her meeting. That happens
Jamie Sugrue, a PhD student supervised by OâFarrelly, says her worst attribute is âprobably her time-keeping. And that stems from her talking a lot. She’ll often get caught up in a conversation and then look at her watch and realise she’s 30 minutes late to her meeting. That happensâ.
OâFarrelly does talk a lot â about everything. She tells me during our conversation that she harboured dreams to sail around the world at the age of 14, and that she wanted to train a Grand National winner in horse-racing. Then she flits to another topic. And then another. All the while, she speaks with a similar level of passion as she does when she is talking about immunology, the discipline to which she has devoted her professional life.
The extent to which she is able to throw herself into so many things at once is almost bewildering, and itâs something that prompts respect and admiration from her colleagues. Prof Kingston Mills, who works alongside OâFarrelly in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology, has known her for nigh-on 40 years, and he says one of her abiding strengths is her ability to see things clearly where others donât: âWhen people say something can’t be done, she says: âDon’t be ridiculous â we’ll find a way to do this.â She is absolutely brilliant at motivating people.â
It seems OâFarrelly has always had this innate belief in the power of the collective to solve problems â and even she isnât quite sure where it came from.
âI don’t know why at the age of 18 I had such a strong image of what a university wasâ she says. âI loved the idea of a university being a collegiate collection of people together and all studying different things, but being exposed to different things. I had this notion that Trinity was the best example of this. It was only from books â Oxford and Cambridge â I knew Trinity was kind of like that.â
If thereâs no single interest that defines OâFarrelly (sheâs a voracious reader, as I find out to my cost when I fail to hold a conversation about literature, and sheâs the honorary secretary of Amnesty International), then the closest she comes to nailing her colours to any one mast is when she begins to talk about Trinity.
They had to invent a new grade in physics, because there were a few of us in the class who failed so badly in our Christmas exams
Trinity clearly runs through OâFarrellyâs veins. Itâs there in the happy childhood she doesnât want this piece to waste time on, itâs there in the spells she spent in Sussex and Harvard and itâs there in the present day. Trinity and its environment, to which she returned in 2007 after 14 âfabulousâ years working in University College Dublinâs St Vincentâs Hospital, are the things she comes back to time and time again â the first principles in a career that seems, on first reading, to have ignored them.
How did she end up in Trinity? Predictably, itâs a funny story. OâFarrelly, who had wanted to study architecture, was sitting in her bedroom in Adare, Co Limerick, flicking through the Collegeâs prospectus. âAnd I discover that Trinity doesn’t have a school of architecture! I need to be at the post â I’m going to be cycling down to the village. I knew I had to have it finished for a quarter to five because I was cycling down to the village to post it. So I had to decide â this was about half three â what was I going to do? So I went through all the different things: law, English, languages, history. So finally it was by default. I really didn’t want to do law. I knew I was quite good at science but I hadn’t done physics so I was worried about it â I had only done chemistry and biology. So anyway I signed up for science.â
This, then, is how one of Irelandâs most successful and well-known scientists began her career. But if it seems surprising, then you havenât been listening: so much of what OâFarrelly says circles back, eventually, to the idea of a diversity of interests. Sheâs a failure, she tells me cheerfully, in all sorts of things.
âIt looks like I’m really successful and if you were to see my CV, itâs packed full of achievements. But what’s never recorded in a CV are all the things that didn’t work. They had to invent a new grade in physics, because there were a few of us in the class who failed so badly in our Christmas exams.â
OâFarrelly has been all over the world with her research: Prof Luke OâNeill, himself widely acknowledged as a world-leading immunologist, tells me that she âstands out internationallyâ for the quality of her work. But academia doesnât even come close to capturing Cliona OâFarrelly. Itâs her desire to help, above all, that defines her: her sense of community and her belief in its power. She references Trinityâs four graduate attributes â acting responsibly, thinking independently, developing continuously and communicating effectively â as tangible evidence of what Trinityâs community can give to the students who attend. Itâs something she tries to impress on her students, she says.
Itâs the same impulse, it seems, that prompted OâFarrelly to run for chair of the Fellows after a stint as secretary. In a typically ramshackle fashion, she spends five minutes attempting to put her finger on exactly what it is about the role that attracted her. It wasnât the glory: she says that when she first started attending, âit was a group that did not seem to be really cohesive. The first Fellows meetings that I went to seemed to be dominated by conversations about pensions and parking. And I couldn’t understand that a body as potentially influential as the Fellows would be spending their time on such triviaâ.
Years later, sheâs now at the helm, and she says âthereâs a real sense of the body of Fellows really wanting to contribute to the universityâ at a time when things are not easy for higher education. You sense that OâFarrelly will want to contribute to Trinity in a multitude of ways for years yet.
Itâs Prof Lydia Lynch, another immunologist with ties from Trinity to Harvard and someone whose PhD was supervised by OâFarrelly, who sums her up best. âSheâs like my mamâ, she says simply. âWithout Cliona I don’t know what I would do ⊠because of her I have everything that I have, because of Cliona. She even helped my husband get back into reading, and he’s an electrician! She just helps.â