Summer schools focused on history have long been a part of our cultural hinterland. They often ask the speakers and audience to consider the lessons to be learned from various eras and personalities. That can result in dispiriting reminders that it seems not to be in human nature to learn the lessons of experience, but these gatherings can nonetheless stimulate productive discussion, provide necessary long-term perspectives and make us appreciate how the lines between past and present are tangled.

This week at the 15th Thomas D’Arcy McGee summer school in Carlingford, Co Louth, there were particularly charged reminders of that. McGee was born in Carlingford in 1825 and emigrated to the United States in 1842 where he demonstrated considerable literary flair, prompting his return to Ireland in 1845 to write for the Freeman’s Journal newspaper. He subsequently joined The Nation, the weekly paper of the Young Ireland group, and became secretary of the Irish Confederation, a group of Young Irelanders who had split from Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association.

Arrested for sedition in 1848, he escaped to America after the Young Ireland rebellion that year, where he started newspapers, clashed with Catholic Church authorities over their critical attitude to the Young Irelanders, involved himself in emigrant welfare and wrote a history of Irish settlers in........

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