Sally Rooney’s moral imagination was forged by an arts education. It’s a sector we can’t afford to neglect

In her literary writing as well as her political advocacy, novelist Sally Rooney exemplifies what Richard Rorty has conceptualised as solidarity: the ability to see real and fictional others as “one of us” rather than “one of them”. For Rorty, this is the labour and the achievement of the moral imagination. It is one of the key ways that we “let the world in in order to let us disturb how we process it”, as the late Lauren Berlant so eloquently put it.
Rooney is a famously private figure but has nevertheless intervened into public discourse in recent times, speaking out about the housing crisis in Ireland as well as unfolding political violence in Gaza and Lebanon. Her novels – Conversations with Friends; Normal People; Beautiful World, Where Are You; and the most recently published Intermezzo – are keenly attuned to geopolitics, Marxist philosophy and the “poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live”, to quote Alice, Rooney’s literary proxy in Beautiful World.
We have argued in our research that this type of moral fibre and this form of political engagement are some of the many benefits enabled and mobilised by an education through the arts and humanities. In light of ongoing financial challenges to the Irish university sector, the pressing importance of such an education should surely give us pause. Over the past few months, several influential commentators have highlighted a deep-seated funding crisis ongoing in our colleges and universities. University presidents – among them Prof Orla Feely (University College Dublin), Prof Linda Doyle (Trinity College Dublin) and Prof Hugh Brady (Imperial College London) – have united in their calls for an urgent increase in core and supplementary funding. They have highlighted that the Government’s Funding the Future framework from May 2022 (which promised substantial exchequer investment in Irish universities) was effectively derailed by an unfortunate mixture of national pay award commitments and cost inflation. Considering this derailment, the multi-annual funding package announced as part of Budget 2025 has broadly been welcomed. Core funding is due to rise by €50 million next year, with an annual increase of €150 million due by 2029.
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The Irish Universities Association (IUA) has noted that this boost does not close the funding gap, however, and have called on the Government to address the shortfall in future budgets. Moreover, the recent move to dissolve the Irish Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland and merge both into “Taighde Éireann” (“Research Ireland”) continues to raise alarm bells among arts and humanities scholars, who see this dissolution as a premise for reallocating funding to Stem. The Research and Innovation Act enacting this merger makes frequent reference to “competitiveness of enterprise and employment”, and makes specific provision for the Minister for Enterprise to appoint one board member. The Irish Humanities Alliance has responded to this merger with a very welcome position paper urging “parity of esteem” between disciplines, but it remains to be seen whether this paper will be heeded.
Thankfully, it is not all doom and gloom. Irish universities can lay claim to a proud tradition of recognising the importance of all disciplines in meeting the global challenges of our age. As Mary Doyle, public policy fellow at Trinity Long Room Hub points out, “the arts and humanities have made a significant contribution to the most pressing social, political, cultural, technological and environmental issues of the 21st century”. Compared with our British neighbours and their apparent delight in labelling arts and humanities degrees as “low-value”, Ireland does value its creative industries. We saw this over the pandemic with the introduction of the Basic Income for the Arts pilot. And we see it now in the ongoing work of the Royal Irish Academy, the IUA and the Irish Humanities Alliance, all of whom continue to call for sustainable financial support of every university discipline. If funding for higher education has had a significant boost in the past few weeks, we must nonetheless join these representative groups in their ongoing advocacy.
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Defences of the arts and humanities tend to emphasise the value of the arts to the national economy. This is quite right. But we have invoked Rooney in our discussion to advance an entirely different and more intrinsic criterion. As Rooney’s writing so powerfully demonstrates, literature helps us to make sense of the world but it also asks something of us: it asks us to care, to suspend our disbelief and to imagine if things were different – if we were another person, if we lived in another world, if there could be another way of doing things. This is the unique gift of the artist and the artwork. As Rooney’s Alice captures it, “great novels engage my sympathies and make me desire things … I’m no longer disinterested.” In a world largely motivated by the profit incentive, it is so important to remember that, as Judith Butler states, “we are undone by each other”. Our lives gain their meaning through and by virtue of other people; and it is our appreciation of this fact that makes us moral beings.
Rooney embodies this morality through her remarkable literary achievements as well as her political courage. She is a thought leader for our times whose principled use of her global platform is evidence, if any were still needed, of the very particular power of the artistic imagination. While she reorientates her media spotlight on global violence and injustice, let us not inadvertently destroy our own creative infrastructures through complacency. Let us redouble our calls for a robustly funded arts and humanities sector in Ireland at a time when Sally Rooney’s moral intellect once again placed us on the global stage.
Dr Áine Mahon is associate professor in philosophy of education at University College Dublin; Dr Orlaith Darling is an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at UCD writing on contemporary literature, late capitalism, and social mobility