I was introduced to Political Geography in the final year of my B.A. degree in Trinity College, Dublin. Political Geography did not normally form part of the TCD curriculum, but a couple of the permanent lecturing staff were on leave in my final year, so we had a couple of visiting lecturers. One of them, Dick Muir (who subsequently wrote Modern Political Geography - one of the more influential texts in the 1970s), taught a course in Political Geography which had a strong focus on nations, states and territorial disputes, with a special emphasis on Eastern Europe. Until then I had associated politics with arid debates on television between elderly gentlemen about the state of the economy, so the fact that politics might actually be interesting came as a total revelation. I loved the course. Apart from generating an interest in Political Geography and Geopolitics, it also initiated a fascination with Eastern Europe and its complex ethnic problems, long before those problems resulted in the terrible genocidal events of the early 1990s.
The TCD courses exerted a strong influence upon my own Political Geography courses when I got a chance to teach Political Geography several years later. I have always had an interest in nations, nationalism, states and territorial disputes, but over the course of time I developed an interest in other aspects of Political Geography, including administrative geography and electoral geography. My Political Geography research interests tend to be focused on Ireland, but I retain a broader interest in events elsewhere for teaching purposes.
My interests in Political Geography have resulted in various other activities.