MacGill Summer School ridiculously out of tune with the times

“I speak with a proud tongue of the people who were And the people who are...”

– Patrick MacGill, 1922

Let me speak with a proud tongue of such people. In particular, of the women of Ireland. We have just achieved something momentous. We have just democratically transformed this country and won a huge victory for equality and justice.

It was a hard struggle and it has been going on for 35 years. People came back from all over the world to vote. We are still reeling. Patrick MacGill’s fictional character Moleskin Joe has a saying: “There’s a good time coming, although we may never live to see it.”

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Our good time has come. We are alive to see it. Our tongues are proud and we can’t stop smiling. It is particularly sweet that we have done this in the year that marks 100 years of women’s suffrage. Thousands of women and men celebrated both in a joyful parade through Belfast a few weeks ago.

In a year when we have heard from so many brave, brilliant women, we are presented with an array of men

So you would have a right to expect that a school dedicated to a writer who championed the oppressed and the dispossessed, and in particular the emigrant, a school that imagines itself to be at the cutting edge in terms of “issues of our time”, might have looked to this amazing movement for inspiration for this year’s programme.

The outcome of the referendum on the Eighth Amendment was not known when plans were being laid, but the fact that an extraordinary battle was to take place has long been signalled. In any case, tumultuous events require that a summer school about current affairs has to be versatile.

Men, men, men

Director Joe Mulholland must have been living in another country. For there was no mention of the suffragette centenary or of the Eighth Amendment referendum in the programme for the 2018 MacGill Summer School. Nor was there anything about ongoing Irish debates and events in relation to the politics of #MeToo.

[Last night Mulholland moved to rectify the Eighth Amendment omission, saying the programme would include two extra ssessions, one on the recent referendum, and the other on how to achieve gender balancing.]

The line-up of speakers is unbelievable.

In a year when we have heard from so many brave, brilliant women, we are presented with an array of men, most of them wearing the jackets and ties that signal masculinity and respectability, many of them sporting grey hair.

These, clearly, are the people Mulholland sees when he looks for people with something interesting to say. Men like him. Men, men, men. Bertie Ahern is the keynote speaker! There are just 15 women, and several have now pulled out.

Such insulting arrogance can hardly be taken seriously and politically minded women are feeling far too high to be wounded by it

The content of the week-long event is for the most part ridiculously out of tune with the times. There is a panel on relationships between the two jurisdictions in Ireland which does not mention the fact that recent social changes in the Republic on same-sex marriage and abortion have highlighted the human rights deficit in the North. There is a panel on the Catholic Church in Ireland which refers vaguely to “recent events” indicating changes in social attitudes, and goes on to pay tribute to the still “respected presence” and “caring” role of the church.

There is nothing about the anti-women statements made by the hierarchy in recent months. David Quinn from the defeated side in the referendum is on the panel. There is no reference to the marvellously punky stance by former president Mary McAleese. Her declaration the church had long been “a primary global carrier of the virus of misogyny” is evidently deemed unremarkable.

Challenged, the former managing director of television at RTÉ, got defensive and made things worse. That’s not fair, he bleated. Certain difficulties had to be taken into account. The committee had a policy of seeking women, it was just hard to find ones with “the right aptitude”. (He apologised for this remark last night).

Such insulting arrogance can hardly be taken seriously and politically minded women are feeling far too high to be wounded by it. But Mulholland, by virtue of his powerful past role in the Irish media, still succeeds in getting extensive coverage for his Pale Stale Male Fest.

By contrast, events about feminism are tacitly boycotted by the boys. I could give him a list of 100 great women speakers within minutes – I wonder how many of them were asked?

Disrupting old assumption

Back in 1985 when Field Day made the monumental mistake of producing an anthology which amounted to what Ailbhe Smyth called “a male separatist version of the story of Irish writing”, Eavan Boland declared herself sorry to have been included given the absence of so many other notable female writers. “Women are disrupting an old assumption of Ireland,” she said. Nuala O’Faolain wrote in this paper that the anthology showed that the Irish patriarchy was “smug as ever”. Rita Ann Higgins presciently noted in a fine poem from 2011, “Ireland is changing mother/Tell yourself, tell your sons.”

Tell Joe Mulholland. Tell him our aptitudes are just fine, but that he might want to refresh his own.