If the walls in the large foyer of the Highlands Hotel in Glenties Co Donegal could talk, they would have many stories to tell. For a summer week since 1981, the hotel has acted as the gathering place for the MacGill Summer School. Its founder, Joe Mulholland, has stated at the end of each programme for the past twenty years or more that he is unlikely to have the energy to organise another one. But soon after the turn of the year, like a homing pigeon, he re-enters the fray with a plan of sorts. Born in 1940, Mulholland is aware of the passing of time and assistant director Vincent Mc Carthy has increasing responsibilities in the planning.

The School is named in honour of Patrick MacGill, a native of the area who was born in 1889. Like many of his neighbours, as an eleven-year-old he got seasonal farm work in Co Tyrone through the hiring fair system. In his teens he worked on farms in Scotland. He became known as The Navvy Poet after the publication of his first book, “Gleanings from a Navvy’s Scrapbook”, in 1910. It was based on his first-hand experience of the tough lives of migrant labourers.

MacGill served a soldier of the London Irish Rifles in World War One and later made a living as a journalist and author. Awareness of those struggling to survive and an empathy with them were constant themes of his writings.

Joe Mulholland can relate to MacGill’s life. From Ballybofey, Co Donegal, his own father worked on building sites in Scotland to support his family while his mother took charge of the nest. Joe identified education as his own escape route from struggle. While studying at Nancy in eastern France, he met his future wife, Annie.  As a journalist and later senior executive in RTÉ, he was keenly interested in social issues and politics. Launching, shaping and driving the MacGill Summer School in his native county has provided the ideal vehicle for those instincts.

The late Seamus Heaney and his wife, Marie, frequently sat on the Highlands Hotel foyer couches, chatting, after the formal lectures and debates. Brian Friel, who died in 2015, and his wife, Anne, were also regular visitors. One of the most memorable nights in the School’s history was the occasion that an Abbey Theatre production of Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa was staged in a packed Glenties hall. Some members in the audience could recognise their neighbours as they featured in the drama. It was a perfect example of community in a community school. 

In the Highlands Hotel, there’s a bedroom known as the Meryl Streep room. The famous actress stayed there in 1988 when she came to Glenties with Friel to attend a local screening of the Lughnasa movie in which she starred.

Joe Mulholland has never shied away from debating international issues in Glenties. The John Hume lecture is a feature of the programme each year. It often has a well-known public figure, speaking on an international theme. 

This year, as well as including items such as a Michael McDowell interview conducted by journalist and author Stephen Collins, the programme had debates about China’s relationship with the world and the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.

The Highlands Hotel has changed hands in recent years. For decades, Christine Boyle, her husband, Johnny, and their children were the mainstays. The place had a deserved reputation for hospitality, delicious food and socialising that often runs into the small hours and beyond. Sinéad Boyle, a daughter of the original owners, continued to work there.

In sync with Joe Mulholland’s view that in our global village the wider world is no further than next door, several families from Ukraine are currently living in the hotel as part of a government-supported scheme.

Almost twenty years ago I chaired a session at MacGill when the main contributors were Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin and Jeffrey Donaldson, dispatched by Peter Robinson from Belfast to represent the DUP. At the time, the two major parties were some distance away from the deal that brought them as partners into a power-sharing administration in May 2007. The Glenties audience was the first to get a view of polar opposites, marking out territory and giving the first very subtle indications that the deal that most dismissed as impossible might someday happen.

After the UK’s Brexit decision, in July 2018 Peter Robinson was coaxed out of retirement to make a Glenties speech. It included the words “whatever happens over the next weeks and months, the stable connections that developed over the past two decades will unalterably change. We are on the cusp of a new era. An era in which the Republic of Ireland is firmly locked into a union as part of the EU while Northern Ireland is firmly locked into a distinct and separate union as part of the UK”. 

(That Robinson speech, so carefully crafted, is worth a visit via Dr Google.)

An offer I could not refuse

When Joe Mulholland asked for help with arranging a session on “Ireland – The future” for this year’s school, it was a request that couldn’t be refused.

Claire Hanna, the SDLP’s MP for South-Belfast, was the first to agree to be one of the four panellists. She has family links in Galway and she had featured at MacGill once before. As an able debater who is frustrated by the limited interest in Ireland matters, north or south, on the floor of Westminster, she was keen to come to Donegal. 

The DUP offered Emma Little-Pengelly. She too had spoken at the MacGill School once previously. She once worked as an advisor to Peter Robinson. She held the South Belfast Westminster seat from 2017 to 2019 until she was ousted by Claire Hanna. She was co-opted to the Lagan Valley Assembly seat, won by Jeffrey Donaldson in the 2022 Stormont elections, allowing him to remain as an MP in London. If the DUP comes back to power-sharing, Little-Pengelly may be the deputy first minister it nominates to serve alongside Sinn Féin’s First Minister, Michelle O’Neill.

The government came through with Charlie McConalogue, the Minster for Agriculture, as its representative. Some of the reasons behind the choice were obvious. He is currently Fianna Fáil’s only representative in the 5-seat Donegal constituency. Fine Gael’s Joe McHugh has made it clear he won’t be running again.  With Independent Thomas Pringle holding a third seat and Sinn Féin the dominant force with two TDs – Pearse Doherty and Pádraig Mac Lochlainn – and the party keen to secure a third one, giving Charlie McConalogue an outing on the home patch made sense.

The last party to sign up for engagement – and it happened close to the actual event – was Sinn Féin. It is sometimes suggested that the Shinners have a well-staffed backroom team plotting day and night and that every decision to act or not act passes through an elaborate vetting mechanism. My experience is that is not always the case. Sinn Féin, like others, has a last-minute gear.

With party leader Mary Lou McDonald easing her way back to full health, she was never going to make it to Glenties. Michelle O’Neill is growing in confidence and authority as a public speaker – she seemed a solid possibility. So too did Pearse Doherty – on home territory where he is popular. But a week before the scheduled event, Sinn Féin confirmed it would send Rose Conway-Walsh.

Her profile in the party is increasing. She is now Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on Public Expenditure and Reform. She was born in England but her family moved back to Mayo and settled in Belmullet. She is one of the five TDs in the Mayo constituency. No polling, public or private, has suggested that she might be under threat in the next general election.

The venue was packed with an audience of 200 plus and they stayed engaged for more than two hours. The format worked because, after brief opening remarks by each of the four speakers, debate about some of the current issues followed and over a dozen members of the audience then took the opportunity to put questions to the panel.

It says something about the worth of an event like the MacGill School when people like Martin MacGill and John Joe Duffy are drawn to it.

The liveliest issues included the chat about who might form the next coalition and the predictions about whether there will be a border poll in the next ten years. A poll in that time frame is ‘unlikely’, according to Charlie McConalogue of Fiánna Fáil; ‘likely and hopefully’, according to Sinn Féin’s Rose Conway-Walsh; ‘unlikely and hopefully not as it would be destabilising’ in the view of the DUP’s Emma Little-Pengelly and ‘50/50’ according to the SDLP’s Claire Hanna, who is all in favour of debate about the issue.

Some of the questions from the audience – it was mainly a female audience – had edge. One person asked, ‘why do Sinn Féin representatives never say Northern Ireland?’  (I told how, in my previous role as RTÉ’s Northern Editor, I tried to use the handle that features in the Good Friday Agreement, ‘Northern Ireland.’) Rose Conway-Walsh indicated that ‘the North’ and the ‘North of Ireland’ are the terms that come naturally to her. 

As a public performer, she has a calm, studied delivery that is an asset to her and her party. She doesn’t seem to upset staunch Sinn Féin opponents.

A different question, following up on remarks by Emma Little-Pengelly, was about how to facilitate the healing of those affected by The Troubles. The audience member who raised it was sitting about ten rows from the panellists and wearing casual gear. His voice was very familiar. In April 2019 it was heard in Belfast’s Saint Anne’s Cathedral, when at the funeral mass of Lyra McKee, Fr Martin McGill asked the assembled political leaders, British Prime Minister and Taoiseach included, “why in God’s name does it take the death of a 29-year-old woman with her whole life in front of her to get us to this point?”  Applause, starting from the back, filled the church like a wave that day. The Irish Examiner described the footage as “the most powerful 80 seconds you’ll ever watch.”

Another priest had also come with a colleague to observe the Glenties discussion.  Fr John Joe Duffy was wearing clerical garb. Last October his pastoral qualities provided vital empathy in Creeslough after an accidental explosion killed ten of his parishioners. 

It says something about the worth of an event like the MacGill School when people like Martin MacGill and John Joe Duffy are drawn to it.

“Kid, you need a guardian angel to look out for you.” 

The previous week, in a telephone conversation with Rose Conway-Walsh, I mentioned how I would be heading the other end of the country, to speak at Béal na Bláth, after the Glenties event. She then told how she had recently been back to London, where she was born, for an event in Islington. The local Council had facilitated the unveiling of a plaque on the street where Michael Collins was initiated into the IRB in 1909. Three years before, as a teenager, Collins had emigrated from Co Cork and found work as a post office clerk in England.

The nugget of information was an unexpected gift. My first boss and mentor, the late John Healy, often told me “Kid, you need a guardian angel to look out for you.”  Life regularly delivers surprises for me, giving material that works its way into shape through keystrokes.

After the Glenties discussion, I was sitting having a cup of coffee in the Highlands Hotel bar with Donal De Buitleár, when Josephine Feehily joined the company. It was our first meeting, even though I have known and admired her work for years.  She impressed many, me included, in the media interviews she gave during her period as a member of the Revenue Commissioners and its executive Chairman (2008-2015) – the first woman to hold the position. She later chaired the first Policing Authority. Her current activities include chairing the governing body of TUS, the technological university of the Shannon and serving as a board member of Connacht Rugby. 

Paschal Donohoe is a fellow Spurs supporter and that should be a solid basis for conversation.

Before leaving the company, the guardian angel delivered another nugget. After telling Josephine about my pending business in Cork, she mentioned the letter Michael Collins wrote to WT Cosgrove in August 1922, the day before he was shot dead. In it, Collins raised his concerns about pressures on the finances of the new state and recommended appointing “three first-class men” who would independently oversee the collection of revenues. 

The letter shows how, in his final days, Collins saw a competent, independent Revenue authority as an essential building block of the fledgling state. Josephine undertook to track down a copy of the Collins correspondence. 

It arrived in my email the following day as I polished shoes in preparation for the long journey south.

Speaking at Béal na Bláth

The invitation to give the oration at the annual Michael Collins commemoration in Béal na Bláth came earlier this year. My first thought was this is a wind-up or a case of mistaken identity. The person on the end of the phone was Garret Kelleher, a Fine Gael member of Cork City Council and a member of the organising committee. He said my time spent as RTÉ Northern Editor and Europe Editor was what interested his colleagues.  

I was conscious of the huge honour involved and the responsibilities. Last year I had watched the live coverage of Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar, going to Beál na Bláth together, in the centenary year of the Civil War ambush that cost Collins his life. In 2010 the then Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, became the first Fianna Fáil politician to deliver the oration at what he called “one of Irish history’s sacred places”. 

Ten months later, the cancer he had fought with dignity, took him.

The late Bill O’Herlihy spoke there in 2013. Seven years before it happened in 2020, he urged Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to put Civil War politics behind them and form a coalition to address unprecedented economic challenge. 

Bill was a journalist, an accomplished television anchor and PR executive but he was also attached to the Fine Gael tribe. I made it clear to Garret Kelleher that I was not affiliated to any party, and he understood. He didn’t even make the most basic inquiries as to what I might say and sought no advance notice of the script. That was the basis of our arrangement.

Like change that happens as one sleeps, the instinct to write for The Currency went missing from the beginning of July. The time, including silence, was taken up trying to script something for Cork. 

My son, Joe, drove me down. The Google navigation aid played tricks with us, directing us along a web of narrow roads that gave a real sense of ambush terrain. Seven miles from our destination, we pulled in at the entrance to a large hayshed and in the warm breeze, we changed into our formal clothes. It’s the kind of father and son moment that will stay lodged in the memory.

The appointed podium time came like clockwork.  Immediately before it, Canon Humphrey O’Mahony recited a decade of the Rosary. His 90-year-old brother was in a chair among the crowds, praying with him. One hundred and one years before, their late mother passed the site of the ambush, hours after it happened. Many times afterwards she would recall to her sons how she saw the hat of Michael Collins, lying on the road.

Among the points I sought to make in my address is that I respect politicians. I’ve spent more than 40 years observing them. I would never be drawn to their demanding life but I’m thankful for the role it plays in our democracy.

Three of them I know were there among the gathering. Paschal Donohoe, the Minister for Public Expenditure, broke from a week with his family to travel to Cork. He is holidaying in Kerry and, in the way that he routinely gathers details and fits them into a bigger jig-saw, he discovered how the French President, Charles De Gaulle had visited Kerry in 1969, before travelling to Connemara and later to Áras an Uachtaráin. 

Paschal Donohoe is a fellow Spurs supporter and that should be a solid basis for conversation. But there is a very private side to him and it’s hard to get beyond the barriers. Earlier this year he was scourged during a sham controversy over the erection of election posters. He never talks about publicly about the personal stuff, including the impact of protests that are sometimes mounted in the vicinity of his family home. Even political opponents acknowledge Donohoe’s competence. It would be the state’s loss if he made a surprise decision to move to a life beyond politics.    

Simon Coveney was there with the youngest of his three daughters. As a teenager he may well have accompanied his late father to the commemoration event. Our paths crossed most frequently when he and his predecessor, Charlie Flanagan, had the Foreign Affairs brief and Stormont was closed. The pair were an easy target, classed as ‘interlopers’ and shunned by some unionists. Their trips north risked the opposite of a ‘brownie points’ effect with their own constituents. But they stayed the course. Coveney saw power-sharing restored in the deal he and Northern Secretary, Julian Smith MP, brokered, only for it to collapse again as the result of a DUP boycott.

A third familiar face, Nora Owen, was sitting alongside family members in the crowds. She is a former Minister for Justice and a former Fine Gael Deputy leader.  She is also a grandniece of Michael Collins. I remember first meeting her in Brussels, soon after she became a government minister. We were preparing for a short television interview. She began exercising her jaw muscles and asked for a drink of water. She had learned the techniques as a first-year secondary school student from a Dominican nun. Her sister, Mary Banotti, served as a member of the European Parliament for 18 years. I saw first-hand the pioneering work she did at European level on behalf of vulnerable children.

Our challenge, at a time of unprecedented resources and change, is to create a more inclusive, fairer Ireland.

It’s 21 years since Nora Owen learned on live public television that she had lost her Dáil seat. Her Dublin North constituency was one of three places where an electronic voting system was being trialled. The surprise and humiliation factors were so severe that she began crying. The incident was a perfect example of the attritional nature of politics. It’s a precarious existence, with the danger of an abrupt end never far away.  

Nora Owen is 78 since June. She is long retired from public life but her public service instincts remain. At 74-year-old Pat Rabbitte has a version of that gene, working rigorously as the chairperson of Tusla. Pat Carey showed it in the unflappable way that he pursued unfairness. Brid Smith displays it in the dignified way she is making space for a successor.

One of the points I sought to make in Béal na Bláth was about the importance of our joining the European Community 50 years ago. In that setting, our relationship with the UK changed. Britain’s Brexit decision illustrated our contrasting history as EU members and our different priorities. The practical problems and identity issues facing Northern Ireland are a difficult part of that Brexit legacy.

Challenges and opportunities

The key matter I tried to articulate was around the opportunities and challenges that face us on the island. For the first time since the Famine, seven million people live here – 1.9 million in Northern Ireland, and in excess of 5.1 million in the South.  During the period since the 1840s, the populations of most Western European countries trebled or quadrupled. The world’s population increased six-fold.  We are one million shy of where we were.

In that factual context, it is absurd to suggest that Ireland is full. It is an entirely different matter to ask if we have the planning and the mindset to prepare for the population growth and change ahead.

Housing is an obvious example of our struggle to come to terms with our new circumstances. During a twenty-year period that included the Celtic Tiger phase, 100,000 sub-standard apartments were built and thousands of homes with inferior materials were constructed in Donegal and other counties. The bill for the repairs will top €6 billion.  Ultimately, the state will pick up the tab.

It would be wrong to suggest politicians or a state’s supervisory role are solely responsible for that €6 billion episode of squander and the impact it has on housing supply and shortage. Elected representatives didn’t run the construction companies or install facilities that created safety risks. Nor were they parties to cash economy practices that left no appropriate trail of accountability or responsibility.

In our actions, within a democracy, we can have a say in shaping the society around us. Michael Davitt explored the power of boycott in the late 19^th century. Price gouging and greed can be identified and called out as negative forces. 

The current stance of the DUP to continue refusing to facilitate the formation of power-sharing at Stormont may serve the party’s preoccupation to avoid internal splits. But, in the longer term, dysfunction risks the danger of the DUP making itself irrelevant.  It can be given that message at the ballot box.

As for those keen to change the constitutional position, if they are to convince the sceptics and the waverers, it may be a case of “show, don’t tell.” 

Our challenge, at a time of unprecedented resources and change, is to create a more inclusive, fairer Ireland.

In Christy Moore’s song, North and South of the River, there is a killer line:

“There is no feeling so alone

 As when the one you are hurting is your own.”

It was true in the time of Patrick MacGill. It was true in the circumstances that led to Michael Collins death one hundred and one years ago. And it is certainly true and relevant as we face our responsibilities as builders.

Noting what is happening in Russia, in China, in the United States with its tainted political and judicial structures, we are fortunate to be facing our challenges as Europeans.

Tommie Gorman’s full Beal na Bláth address can be accessed here.