Amazing Grace

From the halls of academia and the jungles of Borneo to saving the natterjack toads and surviving Ireland’s only shark attack, SHU-in-Dingle’s professor of biology and coastal & marine ecology has a few stories to tell.

Feature article from the Spring 2020 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

The best way to explain the Irish word craic to an American au­dience is to say that, though the word is technically a noun, it’s best thought of as a mindset. Essentially, it’s the quality of the fun, the good times, shared. It’s les bon temps in New Orleans or the bonhomie of a Parisian café. Except it’s neither of those, be­cause the craic is quintessentially, inexplicably Irish. Ask any Irish person to explain the craic in English and your definition will have as many variations as people you query; they all know what it means, but what it means is what it is, and to define it as something else—to translate it—is to diminish it in some way, to leave something out.

The same can be said of Grace Flannery.

There is an Irishness about Grace that befits every stereotype you might expect, and even more so the ones you don’t. She is of course devilishly charming (she’s Irish, after all). And there’s that genetic inclination for wanderlust and adventure. She’s unabashedly outspoken and unfailingly reliable. In short, she is exactly the sort of person you want sitting across from you in the pub, laughing, telling stories and generally raising the quality of the craic from good to great to, better still, deadly.

But if that’s all you know of Grace Flannery, then you’ve missed the point. Because there’s a paradox to the Irish that is per­haps their most defining char­acteristic: however vastly more complex they are than their “begosh ‘n’ begorrah” stereo­type, they will never be the ones to tell you so.

For example:

Not only does Grace Flan­nery teach biology and coastal and marine science at Sacred Heart’s campus on the Din­gle Peninsula on the southwest coast of Ireland, but she is also, in the words of Mark Beekey, co-director of the program and chair of the department of biolo­gy, the “primary reason” the courses even exist. Not only is she the program’s academic coordi­nator, but she’s Dingle born-and-bred and thus also serves as go-to ambassador for the students, introducing them to their new surroundings, helping them transition to life in this tiny, quaintly rugged outpost of a town.

The words “not only” and “also,” one quickly realizes, are essential tools when attempting to describe Grace Flannery.

Because not only is she Grace Flannery, lo­cal girl, daughter of a former fisheries officer who is since founder and current director of Dingle Oceanworld Aquarium; she is also Doctor Grace Flannery, with a Ph.D. from University College Cork, one of Ireland’s top academic institutions, revered worldwide.

And she’ll tell you almost none of it.

Ask an American professor to tell you his or her accomplishments and that’s exactly what you’ll get—a résumé of degrees, publications, responsibilities and interests. Ask Grace Flan­nery the same and she’ll pause uncomfortably, consider her options, disregard every­thing we’ve already covered above and instead tell you she’s the only person to have been attacked by a shark in Ireland. Because that, she knows, will be a story.

It begins with her father, Kevin Flannery, the fisheries-officer-turned-aquarium-founder-and-director. “We’d forever have townspeople knocking on our door, bringing us sick animals they’d found on the beach or telling us about some seal cubs that looked like they needed help,” she says. “Growing up, my bedroom was filled with aquarium tanks of sea turtles in various stages of rehabilita­tion. The whole reason he started the aquarium was because we’d run out of space in the house. “There’s countless pictures of me as a child, lying on the beach next to some dead animal so my father could document its size.”

The shark story was just such an occasion. A shark had washed up on shore and needed to be documented. Her father had it hoisted on a fork­lift with young Grace positioned next to it for reference when a stabilizing rope snapped and the beast swung free, clobbering the child. “Sent me flying across the floor,” she says, her eyebrows raised in resolution to this ... epic ... tale.

That’s an Irish shark attack: a fork­lift, a dead shark and a bit of bad teth­ering.

But also that’s the Irish for you. They are, it would seem, genetically predisposed to talk about essentially any other thing than their own accolades, to the extent that they are, in fact, often distrustful of any­one who seems too keen to self-promote. Thus when forced to do so (when cornered for, say, a university publication), there’s a cheeky iro­ny ever present, ready to undercut any sense of ostentation by completely ignoring the relevant whilst gleefully overselling the insignificant.

It’s also a perfect example of why just about everyone who meets Grace Flannery swoons at least a little bit. There’s no pretense with her. None at all. Grace seems genuinely to fail at re­alizing there’s anything remarkable about what she does or how she does it—which, of course, just makes it all the more remarkable. It’s like Indiana Jones discovering the Chachapoyan Fertility Idol, losing it to an unscrupulous ri­val, fleeing the Hovitos of the Peruvian Amazon and escaping in an open-cockpit seaplane with a boa constrictor in his lap, but deciding that story would be too braggadocious to tell and opting instead to inform you he’s named after the family dog.

Actually, it’s a lot like that. What do you think of when you think of vacation? Grace Flannery thinks of traveling deep into the jun­gles of Borneo and staying at a rainforest re­search center so that her room and board can directly fund the study and conservation of the natural habitat. They say it’s not work if it’s what you love, which might explain why the trip had no official tie to any grant or project she was on other than her own innate thirst for exploration: the natural product of a scientist’s curiosity borne in a wanderer’s heart.

For all her credentials, there’s nothing pre­cious about her. If there’s doing that needs to be done, Grace is the first to roll up her sleeves. She’s every bit as much at home taking students on a cycling tour of the Dingle Peninsula as she is taking creek bed samples to study and pro­tect the health of the native oyster population. An environmentalist, she’ll just as happily wade into an argument with environmental activists over the resources wasted and litter generat­ed pushing paper handouts into the hands of people who don’t want them (this happened) as she is to show her students how to harangue any pub landlord for single-use straws (this also happened).

And yet, however down to earth she may be, the credentials remain. The status of a Ph.D. in marine biology from University College Cork is hard to overstate. That she should bring that discipline to bear on such a wildly varied eco­system as the Dingle coast where, as Beekey ex­plains, “You can be in the mountains and then on the beach in minutes,” is a gift. Having such an individual on faculty for whom those differ­ent environments are not only a scientific curi­osity but also the local fabric of her upbringing is nothing short of a godsend.

Meanwhile, Grace—being Grace—down­plays the fanfare and instead defers to the allure of the Dingle coast. “I’m a bit of an Irish boo­merang,” she says. “I love to travel, sure, but hon­estly Dingle is still one of my favorite places in the world. I can’t even put it into words. There’s just something magical about it in the air.”

Now, teaching with SHU in Dingle, that in­nocent exuberance crosses over into her teach­ing. Working with students, she says, “You can either use a carrot or a stick. You can be­rate them for what they don’t already know or you can invite them to look at something with you, share with them what’s exciting about it.” She plainly takes the latter approach, having learned the art of teaching from her father. “He just loves showing people things. Even now, he’s like a little kid.”

Indeed, there is an infectious glee both Flannerys seem to have running through their veins—a delight in curiosity, inherent as a birth­right and cultivated through practice. “We’re messers,” she says, speaking of the Irish in gener­al, but her unapologetic grin seems to recognize a personally specific reference as well.

The result, whether by nature or nurture, is that Grace Flannery is a brilliant conundrum of a woman, a paradox born of logical conclusions, making her as engaging as she is (one last time now) quintessentially Irish: the disciplined sci­entist with a love of whimsy; the lifelong stu­dent as inspiring teacher; the wanderer so deeply rooted to home.

Photo caption: Grace Flannery, Ph.D., professor of biology and coastal marine science at SHU in Dingle.