I’m boycotting the Magill Summer School this year. There, I’ve said it. Under no circumstances will I travel north to the picturesque haven of Glenties, in one of my favourite counties, Donegal, to take part in an event so dominated by those like me: male, pale, and wandering past the “best before” date.

Any summer school administrator struggling to find a theme for the coming season might consider the proposition that egg money did as much as anything else to help Irish emigrants colonise, in the most benign way, so much of the world.