There must now be more than 60 summer schools in Ireland. If you could attend them all, you would be educated indeed, but you might need a year-long sabbatical from free thought, writes Declan Kiberd
A few years ago, a leading writer confided in me that when he died, he would have himself cremated and his ashes scattered over Dublin Bay. "In this way," he chortled, "it will be impossible for any of you chaps to name a summer school after me in my burial place." "I wouldn't be so sure of that," I riposted. "They have such things as floating universities of the sea, so why not a floating summer school?"
In Gaelic Ireland, summer was the one season when there were no schools. The bards sent their students home to help with saving the hay and the crops; and many a sad lyric was written on the last night before the annual break-up of the school.
The modern Irish summer school seems unique - a cross between adult education course and big house weekend. Its roots may lie in the socialist weekends organised by Fabian societies and by the Gaelic League early in the last century.
These schools were joyful affairs, often denounced by puritanical priests for the freedom with which the sexes mingled. Lectures were given every morning by leading thinkers such as Bertrand Russell or Douglas Hyde to shop assistants and desk clerks who were bursting with brains but who, in their class-ridden society, lacked the means to go to university.
The Yeats school is probably the daddy of the more recent versions. Its roots lie in An Tóstal, a festival held in the 1950s to welcome returning emigrants home. In Sligo, that celebration included a pageant celebrating the poetry and landscape of WB Yeats. It was a brave attempt to show that, despite economic downturns, the country was still culturally vibrant and that the emigrants were felt to be an integral part of the community. Only in 1960 and after did it become the academic powerhouse it now is.
At Sligo, lecturers are sometimes reminded of WH Auden's definition of a professor ("a man who talks in someone else's sleep") and warned not to attempt this. Their audience will range from absolute experts who have written books on the poet, to absolute beginners who were helped by a poem of Yeats through an illness or a boring train ride and have come simply to learn more. Somehow, the talk must have topspin for the experts and yet be utterly accessible to the newcomer.
And so it usually is. For those of us who lecture in colleges, it is an education to watch so many colleagues in action every morning, with so many different styles and techniques. Such snooping on fellow-scholars isn't easy or even polite in the normal university set-up, but in Sligo it is part of the essential experience.
Over the decades, the Yeats school has attracted its share of characters, from the German botanist who asked to be taken to "Thoor Ballyhoo" to the Texan widow who, on reaching that wonderfully phallic edifice, recited a personal ode to the poet which ended in the line: "Hang on there, Willie, I'm coming up."
The school is a sort of utopian space, a place of spiritual challenge in which people of diverse backgrounds rub shoulders on a basis of absolute equality.
Likewise, the Merriman. It usually meets later in August. Known by participants as "the lark in the Clare air", it was in its early days heavily supported by journalists, many of whom hadn't the chance to go to college (and by some who made it to college, but not to very many lectures, and felt a need to make up the backlog).
This may explain its reputation for carousing. "In Sligo they drink between lectures," boasted one Merriman stalwart, "but in Clare we lecture between drinks." That was long ago - at last year's affair, most were abed by midnight in preparation for the lessons in set-dancing and Irish next day.
For many years, these schools held the field, but have now been joined by Listowel writers' week, Synge in Rathdrum, Magill in Donegal, Hewitt in Antrim, Carleton in Tyrone, and an autumn Wilde weekend in Bray. Even my own native parish of Clontarf offers an annual welcome to a wonderful blend of heavy-metal satanists and retired parish priests who come to pay tribute to the creator of Dracula.
The emergence of so many schools is surely linked with the development in the 1980s and 1990s of local radio and local publishing, two forces that fed the already deep interest in local history and culture. Many of the speakers come up with fresh ideas about social problems and cultural opportunities.
In today's Ireland, the numbers making it to third-level colleges have rocketed. You might deduce from this that one of the main reasons for having such schools has been taken away. It may well be that there are too many to be viable. But somehow, the charm of a strictly temporary holiday community devoted to high living and plain thinking remains.