My first job was as an Administrative Officer in the Irish Civil Service. I was assigned to the Department of Finance, Establishments Division. Our duty was to decide on the staffing arrangements in various government departments and their outlying services. The work was not trivial. How many air traffic controllers should be employed at Shannon Airport? That was a question for the Department of Industry and Commerce, in the first instance, and for the Department of Finance – in principle, the Minister of Finance – in the end. I found nothing wrong with the work, except that I had no particular flair for it, as my superiors Seán Ó Buachalla, Gerard McInerney, and Louis Fitzgerald had. It was a happy release, then, when Professor Jeremiah J. Hogan offered me an Assistant Lectureship in the Department of English, University College, Dublin. Hogan was the sole professor: he was in full charge of the Department, in accordance with the ordinance of Departments by the Irish Universities Act of 1908. Informally, he entrusted the teaching of Old and Middle English to T. P. Dunning, a scholar of Langland. He handed over Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, as it was called, to Roger McHugh, a colleague he did not like: he wanted to keep him at a distance. English literature, from approximately the year 1500 to the later years of the nineteenth century – say, from Skelton to Newman and Hopkins – was Hogan's particular concern. American literature was not taught.