When the ants are swarming, the season of summer schools must be upon us, writes Kevin Myers.
The pioneer school was named after Merriman, whose wholesome interest in - and revelry in - sexual matters has not to my knowledge been celebrated in a single Merriman summer-school theme. But that's one of the defining features of summer schools: they never discuss the reality of the persons after whom they are named.
One thing the Humbert summer school never discusses is the brutalaity of General Humbert himself. We should fall on our knees in gratitude that he was defeated, for calamitous though the defeat of the French invasion force was for the poor Irish of the west, a French victory would have been infinitely worse. Humbert was a French revolutionary. He despised Catholics and he detested peasants; and his campaign against the Catholic peasantry in the Vendée was a pioneering exercise in genocide in Europe.
To be sure, Humbert was initially moderate in his conduct in Mayo, prompting some Catholic merchants to throw in their lot with him - but they were essentially useful dupes. The inspiration for the United men came from the middle-class Protestant revolutionaries in Dublin, who knew as much about the bog-peasants of Connemara as they did about the Hindu fakirs. A conflict between the revolutionary ardour of the French and the faith of the Irish was inevitable, for the Catholic peasants of Connemara were not going to abandon their faith or their reverence for the Virgin Mary to suit the French revolutionaries.
Humbert, of course, had met this kind of problem before, in the Vendée. He had dealt with it by the simple expedient of mass murder. But one of the problems with having to kill large numbers of people with the deplorably primitive technology of the day was that it simply wasn't easy. Cutting throats is slow and untidy. Shooting people with muskets, ditto. Beheading your victims is tiring, unless you're fit. Even then, you get stress-related injuries to the forearms and the shoulders: axeman's palsy. Even the guillotine takes an inordinate time per person : all that hauling the blade upwards, and getting the head neatly in line - plus of course, the spout of blood leaping 15 feet or so. Fierce messy.
So the revolutionaries hit on the idea of making a special boat with a removable bottom. A few hundred unwanted papist reactionary peasants would be packed into such a vessel, it would be towed out into the Seine estuary, the bottom would be opened, the wretched Catholics would fall into the sea to drown, and then the boat would be hauled back ashore, for more of the same. Perfectly splendid.
Another technique, for those lubbers regrettably inland, involved sealing off entire areas, forcibly requisitioning all foods and destroying all dwellings within. You can, you know, without shelter in the winter, die of hunger and exposure within a few days. Which is what thousands of poor people of the Vendée did.
General Humbert was the most important single military individual in the campaign against the Catholics of La Vendée. Indeed, it was the ruthless manner in which he reduced the area, breaking it body and soul at the cost of several hundred thousand lives, which caused him to be selected for duty in Ireland. If he could achieve such total victory against a numerically superior enemy, surely he would be the boy for Ireland.
Now why is this man honoured with a summer school in his name? If he had been an Englishman who had butchered thousands of Hindus for their religion, is it remotely possible that he would have a summer school named after him? Or a German who had slain as many Jews as Humbert killed French peasants? But Humbert was a chic killer. He butchered French Catholic peasants in the name of the revolutionary state, and therefore to modern Irish, bien-pensant thinking he must be acceptable. Had he butchered Irish Catholic peasants in the name of the crown, he would be regarded as an evil man. But his victims were merely French Catholic peasants and their priests, so that's all right. Or is it? Might it not be just a little sick?
Has the Patrick MacGill Summer School spent a single session contemplating what its authorial inspiration was most proud of - his service in the Great War with the London Irish?
He was a pioneer in the genre of the literate Tommy telling his tales of the trenches, and in those accounts you find none of the clichés and falsehoods of the pacifist left who have monopolised the role of myth-making about the Great War since the 1930s. Has the MacGill Summer School ever discussed the real Patrick MacGill, the warrior? Of course not, not in republican Donegal.
No matter. The year is long, with weekends aplenty for alternative summer schools. We might soon have the Charles J. Haughey Summer School, dedicated to the virtues of fidelity to the marital bed, to transparency in personal finances and the triumphs of John Redmond's constitutional nationalism. The Liam Lawlor Summer School is about market gardening in Co Dublin. The Patrick Pearse Summer School in Crossmaglen focuses on the viceregal lodge as a socially cohesive institution in Irish society.
The Ian Paisley Summer School in Ahoghill dwells upon the glories of the Tridentine Mass and the splendours of teenage girls confessing to elderly bachelor-priests. And the Bono Summer School's subject is public modesty, personal reticence and the duty of the very rich to pay their full share of taxes.