Good morning, and welcome to our daily summary from the summer schools. First to Lahinch, where the Maudlin Gonne & Lost Forever Summer School is rather daringly entitled "Irishness; what it is to be Irish".
Roger Doogood, the eminent Marxist social historian from Grimsby Polytechnic for Fisheries and Social Realism yesterday posited the challenging theory that the Irish national character was shaped by 35,000 years of British genocide, state-induced famine, enforced illiteracy and technological confiscations.
"The Irish invented the combine harvester in the seventh century, and it is illustrated in the Book of Kells. The same margins show early Irish helicopters, and on the pages dedicated to the Gospels of St Matthew you can clearly see a Spitfire and a Lancaster. That's not all. The first three-masted sailing vessel recorded in world history is in the Book of Durrow, and it is believed that St Kevin was the first man to split the atom at his laboratories in Glendalough. Needless to say, all these achievements were stolen by the British.
"Ladies and gentlemen, let me here apologise for my Englishness." And without more ado, he shot himself, followed by set dancing, and a great deal of jolliment which nowadays goes by that pretentious and tiresome pseudo-Gaelic neologism, craic .
In the Sean MacBride Summer School, they are tackling the more innovative topic of "Irishness: its inner meaning". All speakers are required to speak in a bogus French accent. Professor Immaculata Quimlivid yesterday declared that up until the middle ages Ireland was the most advanced civilisation in the universe. "Visitors came from outer space to learn our ways. At first, we gave them the printing press; and later, plans for electron microscopes and radio telescopes. Moreover, there's strong evidence that extra-terrestrial architecture was greatly influenced by the work of our scientists at Bowth, Dowth, Howth, Knowth and Growth. And then came Henry II."
The Tom Kettle Summer School in Crossmaglen is taking a different tack, and is dealing with what it is to be Irish. It was told by Seamus Much Anguisch that Kettle was a fervent pacifist who passionately believed in Irish neutrality. "In that sense he was in the tradition of Emmet, Lord Edward FitzGerald, Wolfe Tone, Patrick Sarsfield, and St Kevin, who, incidentally, invented the steam engine. Unfortunately, one of his students was an Englishman named Watt who stole the plans in the middle of the night. The rest is history."
The Maria Edgeworth Summer School in Ballymurphy is taking a more oblique topic: the true sense of Irishness. The Peruvian scholar Pedro Lightfinger told the delegates that Ireland had been an inspiration to his people from the time that the first Irish vessel had sailed into the Andean harbour at Lima.
"Your national symphony orchestra was gathered in the bows of the vessel, playing extracts from Beethoven's Ninth and other Irish symphonies. Nuns were doing a hornpipe in the rigging. Christian Brothers were dancing 'The Walls of Limerick' and a naked Eamon de Valera was giving swimming lessons to nude Indian teenagers alongside the ship. You taught us freedom. We owe you so much."
The Owen Roe O'Neill Summer School has set up its stall with the highly challenging - not to say controversial - subject of "Whither and Whence Irishness: Paradoxes and Enigmas". The feminist writer Fallopia Whynge told the conference yesterday that pre-Christian Ireland was purely female.
During this golden age, Irish women had invented the dynamo, the lawn-mower, chocolate biscuits, petrol, face-cream, and Stilton cheese. Then came a double blow. Monks arrived, introducing phallocentric phallocracy, thus enslaving women. And then had come Henry II, ushering in an age of darkness into which the great technological advances of Irish womanhood were lost for several hundreds of years.
A radically different theme was being followed in the Humbert Humbert Summer School which alternates between the twinned towns of Nobber-Cobh. Here delegates have been considering the thorny issue of Irishness, and its implications.
"Irishness, to me," declared Rupert Codswallop of the University of Oppression and Woe, Easter Island, "is synonymous with oppression and woe. The matrices of misery and suffering intersect here; the ley-lines meet; the co-ordinates of colonialism collide, the meridians of tyranny mesh.
"Yet," he said, pausing to raise a quivering digit, "I feel real love here too, and forgiveness, for you have pardoned me for what my four fathers did to your forefathers. Yes," he sobbed, "I have four fathers. A picnic. Too much champagne." He then sang Ten Green Bottles, followed by Four Green Fields, and fell over.
Addressing the Constant Phone-Booth Summer School, Dr Dayglo Kybosh said that in the many contradictory paradigms of Irishness, the tropes of discrete contiguity were bound by a profound sense of eschatological phenomenology. For this reason, both ethnically existential and quintessentially ethical, he backed Celtic.
Unusually, however, at the William Shakespeare Summer School at the playwright's home town of Stratford-on-Slaney, the topic being discussed was Irish identity. An Irishman in the service of the crown, a Captain McMorris, declared: "Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave and a rascal. What is my nation? Who talks of my nation?"
However, the Irishman's Diary Totally Unattended Summer School has ruled that, along with piracy on the high seas and high treason, any reference to the meaning of "Irishness" will henceforth be met with summary capital punishment without trial or mercy, and with no possible recourse to a higher court. You have been warned.