FROM THE ARCHIVES:Political Correspondent Dick Walsh provided this rationale for summer schools in his politics column. – JOE JOYCE
It may be that our political leaders’ reticence is responsible for the proliferation of summer schools: Joyce, Yeats, Merriman, MacGill and Humbert; to which are now added an extravaganza for George Moore, a Daniel O’Connell commemoration, a weekend for Desmond Greaves, the biographer of Connolly and Mellowes; an international tribute to Gerard Manley Hopkins and, as far as I know, a dozen more local tributes to writers or events deserving commemoration.
What all of this seems to signify is that if our political leaders are unwilling in all but a few cases . . . to ask how we stand and what we would like to make of ourselves, there is a respectable body of citizens, with a fair smattering of visitors, who show no such reticence.
For, even where discussion appears to be limited to one writer’s inspiration or another’s background, there is the constant theme of man’s estate, the human condition. And if its pursuit is accompanied by an air of merriment, so much the better.
In a country where learning has too often been associated with discomfort or obligation or pain, and discussion of any serious kind has been discouraged or made the preserve of an elite – lest it get out of hand and people begin to think for themselves – this is a good thing.
There are other advantages to the summer school. For all the supposed intimacy of a country of our size, there are occasions when it seems that we are securely roped off from each other, divided by class or occupation, politics or religion, education or background, so that the decision-makers are insulated from the people whose lives they affect and the theorists from the consequences of their theories.
The odd trade unionist is invited to a conference of the Irish Management Institute; and the Minister for Education makes an appearance at the conferences of the teachers’ unions. But you won’t hear – well I haven’t heard – of a writer showing up at a gathering of businessmen; not to beg for sponsorship but to say: this is how the country generally – and you people in particular – look to me.
Isn’t it about time that such tough-minded realists as John McGahern or Tom Murphy or Frank McGuinness came face to face with those dreamers of dreams and inhabitants of ivory towers, Michael Smurfit, Tony Ryan or Paddy Moriarty?
This isn’t as fanciful as it may appear. When Mikhail Gorbachev set out on his Himalayan climb towards the transformation of his society, the people whom he invited to meet him were not in the first instance the political leaders . . . They were the Arthur Millers and JK Galbraiths, the intellectuals of the United States and Eastern Europe.
This is not to pretend that summer schools, or similar patches of neutral ground outside the limits of formal confrontation, will lead to a sudden sinking of differences.