MacHale, Joseph Patrick (1922–2005), university administrator and sportsman, was born 8 January 1922 in Dublin, sixth child and younger son of J. P. MacHale, a senior official with the Hibernian Insurance Company, and his wife Grace. Educated at CBS Dún Laoghaire (1930–32) and Blackrock College (1932–9), he attended UCD where he graduated BA in 1942, with first-class honours and first place in German and Latin, B.Comm. in 1943, again with first-class honours and first place, and M.Comm. in 1947. Qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1945, with first place and the award of the Institute of Chartered Accountants' gold medal, he worked at the Dublin accountancy firm Stokes Kennedy Crowley before joining the Irish airports authority, Aer Rianta, in 1946, first as assistant secretary and later as accountant. In 1948 he was appointed assistant secretary at UCD, where he took on other duties, including lecturing on economics for UCD's newly established extension courses (which were intended primarily for members of trade unions).
In June 1954 MacHale was appointed secretary and bursar at UCD, which he remained until his retirement in 1987. While the secretary of the college was ex officio secretary of the governing body, from 1959 MacHale was continuously a member of the governing body. He was also a member of the NUI senate (1962–72). As secretary and bursar he was head of administration in a university college that was at the time, in terms of student numbers, as big as all other university institutions in the state put together. Serving under four presidents (Michael Tierney (qv), Jeremiah Hogan (qv), Thomas Murphy (qv) and Patrick Masterson) he made his mark on all aspects of college life and organisation. He introduced standardised salary scales and grades for both academic and administrative staff, bringing order to what had hitherto been dealt with on an ad hoc basis. He was responsible for an efficient and cost-effective administrative system. As bursar his guiding principle was to balance the accounts, often difficult at times of recession when state funding was under severe pressure, and to maximise the resources applied to academic departments and student services.
The range of his responsibilities in UCD was phenomenal, as was his personal commitment to duties that others might have delegated to subordinates. As supervisor of examinations for the NUI in UCD (1956–82), he personally attended the twice-daily briefings in Earlsfort Terrace when examination invigilators were given their assignments. Up to 1971, when UCD appointed a buildings and development officer, MacHale himself undertook the detailed work of managing UCD's buildings and properties, a formidable responsibility at a time when UCD was relocating on a phased basis from Earlsfort Terrace to the Belfield campus in south Dublin. He had served on the buildings committee planning for the move to Belfield since 1952. Over the years he played a leading role in the acquisition of land adjacent to the Belfield site and in negotiating funding and contracts for the construction of new buildings and facilities. His final contribution to the purchase of property adjacent to Belfield was the acquisition of Roebuck Castle in 1986, though he greatly regretted not being permitted by the Higher Education Authority to procure the entire Roebuck site, whose topography and mature trees had considerable potential for the expansion and landscaping of the campus.
If the move to Belfield was the single most significant development during MacHale's time as secretary and bursar, in the 1960s and 1970s a number of major events occurred on his watch, in most of which MacHale played a major if not decisive role. These included the challenge in 1959–60 of the lawyer John Kenny (qv) to the UCD governing body's approach to non-statutory academic appointments (MacHale gave evidence to the board of visitors investigation); an ICTU all-out strike picket in 1974 which put back the start of the academic year to November; and most memorably the plan of Donogh O'Malley (qv), minister for education, in April 1967 to merge UCD and TCD into one university while retaining two separate colleges. Ostensibly writing in a personal capacity in an article in Studies (vol. lvi, no. 222 (summer 1967)), MacHale set out the UCD position which was to support merger but on the basis of a complete corporate unification of UCD and TCD, a proposal unacceptable in TCD and perhaps not entirely meant by the UCD authorities.
When worldwide student radicalism reached UCD in autumn 1968, in what would later be dubbed the 'gentle revolution', it was hardly surprising that MacHale should be regarded as the epitome of establishment conservatism. A motion was passed by the Literary and Historical Society calling on the governing body to remove him from his position as secretary of the college. Over the succeeding months he frequently acted as spokesman for the beleaguered college authorities in face of demands from the Students for Democratic Action, who occupied the administration offices in February 1969, and the more moderate demands of the Students' Representative Council. The latter had made a particular issue of a student role in determining the move to Belfield and the question of library facilities, to which MacHale responded with a detailed factual statement of what the UCD authorities had sought from the government.
Having defended the traditional system of admitting students to university (on the basis of passing leaving certificate or matriculation examinations and then using first year as a trial year), describing it in 1964 as 'the best system available' (Studies, liii, no. 212 (winter, 1964), 397), he became a keen advocate of a points system for admission to UCD courses as student numbers increased in the later 1960s. When the Central Applications Office (CAO) was established in January 1976 as a limited company with responsibility for admissions to all universities in the state, MacHale was a founding director of the company. A founding member of the Irish Conference of University Administrators, he monitored closely the university funding model in Britain in the 1960s and the extent to which it might or might not be adopted in Ireland, publishing his views in Studies (vol. liv, nos. 214–15 (summer/autumn, 1965), 187–96): 'A university grants committee for Ireland: for and against'. Whenever he could, he attended the annual conference of British university finance officers.
MacHale was an enthusiastic sportsman of considerable ability. Tennis was his main interest, having played it since he was aged eight. In 1938 he joined Fitzwilliam LTC and was a member of the club team that defeated the All-England Club (Wimbledon) in 1948. He played for Ireland's Davis Cup team (1947–50), and in 1948 won the South of England championship at Bournemouth. On twenty-four occasions between 1948 and 1957 he represented Ireland at squash, and was Irish squash champion in 1951 and 1952. He was also a highly proficient contract bridge player, representing Ireland internationally over almost three decades from 1953.
Logical, focused and unusually well informed, MacHale was 'direct and supremely honest, with an unequivocal approach to people and problems which did not always reveal his sympathetic nature' (UCD: report, 191). In June 1999 he was conferred with an honorary LLD by UCD.
He married Carmel Quinlan on 7 September 1954; they had three children: Conor, Aoife and Bairbre. He died 5 July 2005 in St Vincent's University Hospital, Dublin.