Patrick MacGill would turn in his grave at this moribund mausoleum of middle-aged male elitism

‘School’ is an irrelevant talking shop for Old Boys

THERE is this much to be said for Patrick MacGill, the illeducated navvy turned celebrated writer from Glenties, Co. Donegal: he had plenty of edge. MacGill was a radical, a socialist, a dedicated chronicler of exploitation, and hence an unorthodox voice in early 20thcentury London, where his career was made.

‘I always revolted against injustice, and hated all manner of oppression,’ he wrote in Children Of The Dead End: The Autobiography Of An Irish Navvy, published in 1914.

In short, MacGill was as much an enemy of the Establishment as it was possible for him to be. It might be a mercy, then, that he can’t see what has become of the annual think-in named in his honour, in which the Establishment talks to itself and about itself for a week in summer and those of us in the cheaper seats are expected to clap.

I’ve never been invited to attend a summer school, being insufficiently distinguished and also leaning rather to the Groucho Marx philosophy of club membership: I would not want to attend any summer school that would have the likes of me at it.

I do, though, claim the privilege of having some very distinguished friends, some of whom have addressed the MacGill Summer School in the past.

One woman friend chaired several all-male panels there on successive years, and said that she accepted the invitation to do so only in an effort to redress the chronic gender imbalance that was so blatantly obvious year after year.

WOMEN will often take steps like this, forcefully but unobtrusively trying to make the world look a bit more equal, even where it’s not. Most of the time it’s important to do this; occasionally, though, it isn’t important at all.

Really, this week’s controversy about the female deficit at MacGill should have been neither as surprising nor as disappointing as it seems to have been, for two reasons.

One is that, realistically, the gender balance at MacGill probably reflects reasonably fairly the gender balance at high levels of public life generally. When the speakers for this year’s event were announced, there were only 15 women among them compared to 45 men – in other words it was about 25% women.

Matters weren’t helped by the fact that speakers were listed in alphabetical order on the MacGill website and the first of the women had a name starting with G, so the home page consisted solely of mugshots of men. Amid all the fuss that ensued, the organisers managed to get hold of a woman whose name begins with A. But it was too late by then.

Yet the representation of women at MacGill has always hovered at around that level, since long before it was fashionable to point it out. You can consult a public list of all the previous speakers from when the school was established in 1981 to last year, and you’ll find over 800 names on it, of whom 220 are women – about 25%, in other words, historically.

But this is about right when it comes to female access to the upper echelons of society. We know, for instance, that just 22% of TDs are women, and just over 27% of judges. We know that women make up 63% of the civil service but that only a fifth (21%) of secretaries-general are women. We know that only 19% of company chief executives are women.

The difference is that those things matter. It really matters that parliament acts for society as a whole, and not just a privileged male sample of it. It really matters that the judiciary as far as possible is drawn from the whole population, not just half of it. It really matters that women become top-level civil servants and captains of industry, so women have an equal say in the management of public and private enterprise.

Will I tell you what really doesn’t matter? The MacGill Summer School, in which a succession of the same faces turn up again and again, year after year, to have tediously predictable conversations with each other. That’s the second reason why all this sound and fury about MacGill signifies so little. You might as well get annoyed about not being invited to join the Rotary Club, or the Knights of Columbanus. By way of illustration, have a look at this year’s programme, in which the theme is The Future of Ireland in a New Europe: The Challenges Ahead?

RIGHT there on the home page, his mugshot appearing immediately before that of Token Home-Page Woman’s mugshot, is Bertie Ahern. He’s giving the annual John Hume lecture in which he will doubtless yet again claim sole credit for the peace process. I can’t think of a soul who would go to the trouble of travelling to Glenties to hear Ahern speak. I can think of countless souls who would decamp permanently to Glenties in the morning if it meant they never had to hear him speak again.

Then there’s Phil Hogan, the former environment minister we thought we’d got rid of for once and for all when he took off for Europe in 2014. He’s giving a talk on Ireland in Europe post-Brexit, because no one has been talking about that.

There’s David Quinn on the crisis facing the Catholic Church. Are you getting a strong ‘dog bites man’ feeling about this whole affair?

Who else? Noel Whelan and Frank Flannery on whether a putative election will give us the sort of stern governance we apparently need, and enough of this feminine shilly-shallying about partnership. Whelan and Flannery go everywhere, but they especially go to MacGill. hey make an annual point of it.

Then there’s the usual murmuration of TDs and the usual embarrassment of journalists from the ‘right’ sort of media to ensure maximum silly-season coverage among the sock puppets of the Establishment.

So yes, it’s mostly men, it’s mostly middle-aged men (at the youngest), and it’s mostly wellheeled men. Moreover, it’s mostly men who are already amply supplied with soapboxes. Do we need to go to Donegal to hear Flannery or Whelan speak? Can we not just turn on a Sunday morning radio show? Do we need media coverage of what Fintan O’Toole says in Glenties? Does he not already have a very serviceable media platform on which to ventilate his opinions?

Do we need to hear David Quinn’s thoughts on the Church in person or can we just draw on our copious existing knowledge to deduce what he’s going to say before he says it?

What the MacGill Summer School represents faithfully is Joe Mulholland’s contacts book. It represents one man’s perception of who are the elite. It’s not representative and we know it.

There are battles to be fought for female participation, but not here. Instead of talking about it – and hence publicising it – can’t we just ignore it?