Aidan O’Hara’s report from the 9 th McGlinchey Summer School in Clonmany, Inishowen, Co. Donegal, 23-25 June 2006.

They came from all over Ireland and ‘foreign parts’ to attend the McGlinchey Summer School this year in Clonmany. There was a woman there from South Africa, Inishowen folk from Boston, including Connie McEleney who sang a song or two, and there were more from England, Scotland, and Canada. But most of the people attending were from Inishowen and Derry, all there for the excellent talk and the craic. It was a most enjoyable occasion, blessed with fine sunny weather, and all served up with a generous helping of music, song and dance, a crafts display and an art exhibition.

The theme for the 2006 school was, “Inishowen at Work Then and Now – Trades, Skills & Traditional Crafts,” and it traced the ways people made a living from the mid-1800s right up to the present. The school is named after weaver and storyteller, Charles McGlinchey (1861-1954), from Meentiagh Glen near Clonmany, whose memoirs were chronicled by local schoolmaster Patrick Kavanagh. These manuscripts were later edited by playwright, Brian Friel, and published in book form as “The Last of the Name”.

After the opening night, word soon spread that - among other matters - they were speaking about strong drink and squeaky knickers at the summer school in the Community Centre. The aforesaid undergarment was mentioned by the man who opened the school this year, William McCarter, former Chief Executive of Fruit of the Loom and former Chairman of the International Fund for Ireland. In an unscripted and amusing talk that Willie said he hoped was in the spirit of the sort of lateral thinking summer schools were noted for, he told us how his father overcame all odds to set up a clothing factory in Inishowen in the 1930s. Times were hard and his father visited Jim Lynch’s small factory in Muff where there were yards and yards of cloth that Jim had little use for; and hardly surprising, because it was a brown-coloured material for making shrouds! But Mr McCarter got it at a bargain price and they were soon turned out as women’s knickers, one of the earliest products of his factory. They served their purpose well, their only peculiar feature being that the knickers squeaked when the women walked. Willie went on to trace the McCarter story up to the present, and it included his own involvement in the production of Irish whiskey at the Cooley Distillery in Co. Louth. He spoke of two of the distillery’s brands in particular: Tyrconnel, a single malt whiskey, and Inishowen, a unique blend whiskey that is very lightly peated. Willie talked lovingly about how it contains a number of different types of whiskey which include peated malt whiskey, malt whiskey and grain whiskey . There wasn’t a dry mouth in the house.

Then it was the turn of Professor Nollaig Mac Congail to give this year’s keynote talk, The Patrick Kavanagh Memorial Address. He wondered that Willie didn’t ask if we had ‘a mouth on us’ such was our thirst for a drop o’ the cratur so fondly described. Professor Mac Congail’s talk was entitled, “Working and Living in McGlinchey’s Time”, and in it, he pointed out that McGlinchey dealt almost exclusively with the ordinary everyday happenings of life in rural Ireland, hardly ever referring to major figures and events: Davitt and the Land War, Parnell, the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, and two World Wars. Dr. Mac Congail also said that we owe a huge debt to Patrick Kavanagh, the schoolmaster who wrote it all down, to Brian Friel for his editing, and to Seamus Heaney who wrote the blurb for the book’s cover. “But for them there would have been no book at all,” he said. McGlinchey overlooked major world events “in a manner that is almost Olympian” says Friel. The old man whose time was running out was anxious to pass on his account of what Friel refers to as “a rural community in the process of shedding the last vestiges of a Gaelic past and of an old Christianity that still cohabited with an older paganism, and of that community coming to uneasy accommodation with the world of today, ‘the buses, the cars, the silk stockings’.”

Nollaig listed several events from the lives of the people in Ireland in McGlinchey’s time that illustrated the stark lived reality of their experience. In one example, he quoted a report from The Derry Journal of 1924 about the discovery of the body of a dead infant in rural Donegal, and how the coroner’s report stated it had been strangled. It was grim stuff. Then he added that there had been other such deaths that same year. But he also talked about how the people enjoyed themselves, mentioning McGlinchey’s references to music, song and dance; later that same evening and every evening of that weekend, you had your choice of any or all of the latter in the Clonmany pubs. Singers and performers included members of the James Eoghan McGonigle family – Kevin, his aunts and uncles – Jimmy McBride, Grace Toland, Brian Doyle, and Patricia Flynn. And to top it all off, there was a Gala Concert that featured youthful members of the local branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, Sean Cannon and his son, James. On Sunday night, it was all rounded off by The Big Night which included songs by the Loose Canons (not a group of dissipated clergymen, but six women singers from Inishowen), poetry reading by Michael Coady, readings from McGlinchey’s “The Last of the Name”, and music from Bill Coady and Friends.

Among the other speakers on the weekend were Pádraig Ó Baoill who outlined the work of the Congested Districts Board (1891-1923), Liam Ó Cuinneagáin spoke on cultural tourism, Trutz Haase dealt with the current state of Inishowen’s economy, Denis Bradley’s topic was “Inishowen – Derry’s Backyard”, and Dolores O’Reilly spoke on the textile and fashion industries of the Northwest. Other excellent features of the summer school included an art exhibition, a crafts and trades exhibition, and field trips conducted by the school’s energetic chairman, Marius Ó hEarcáin.

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