This resignation and move to Belfast on Whyte's part in 1966 almost certainly was the unintended result of an extraordinary piece of clerical interference and bullying that rebounded upon McQuaid and on UCD.
Whyte was in the midst of writing his standard history of the Catholic Church in independent Ireland, later published in 1969; at McQuaid's apparent instigation, his professor and head of Department attempted to forbid him from continuing with this work.
The irony was that the resultant scholarly book, finished in Belfast rather than Dublin, deeply underestimated clerical power in the Irish state and gave the Catholic Church a rather easy ride.
In a very real sense, McQuaid was the patriarchal and eccentric governor of Dublin Archdiocese, where one-third of the stat's population lived; he attempted to run an urban society of a million people as though it were a large feudal community.
He also worked as research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies during the late 1970s and was elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1977, serving as Vice-President from 1989 to 1990.
[2] In 1984 he returned to University College Dublin, then faced with stringent fiscal cuts and wider problems in Irish third-level education.