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ALUMNI | Interview


The Guinness Legacy

(Photo of Patrick Guinness)

As Guinness celebrates its 250th anniversary, David Molloy looks at the Guinness family’s ties with Trinity College Dublin.

Patrick Guinness B.A. (1980) is a law graduate from Trinity College Dublin. He is also an heir to the Guinness brewing dynasty, father to fashion model and designer Jasmine Guinness, and a historian who has penned the fi rst biography of his famous ancestor, Arthur. We caught up to talk about his family’s history with Trinity and his own time. To start with, what was it like to be a Guinness in Dublin?

“There were so many of us, that I don’t think that name had a particular resonance,” he says, noting that most people never made the connection. For someone with two family members as former Chancellors of the University, it’s quite remarkable that Patrick claims never to have been treated any differently from the average student. Rupert Guinness, the Second Lord Iveagh, was Chancellor of the University from 1927 to 1963, and donated extensively to the construction of the Berkeley Library, following on directly from his father, Edward Cecil Guinness, who was Chancellor 1908 -1927. The Moyne Institute, the current home of the Department of Microbiology, was funded entirely by Lady Normanby, Marchioness of Normanby, in memory of her father, Walter Edward Guinness, Lord Moyne. “In day-to-day practical terms, it didn’t really make a huge difference,” Patrick insists. Those kind of donations continued during his own time here, and not always on such a grand and visible scale.

“I can remember doing European Law with Mary Robinson. (Continued on page 57...)


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