Do you remember Froggy?

I am now 50 years out of Coláiste Mhuire this year. At a commemorative lunch the other day, one of my classmates asked "Do you remember Froggy?"

Do I remember Froggy? Of course I do. He was my first French teacher, and a very good one. Not exactly a compliment to a militant Fleming, but there you are. You can't have it all.

I did a post on this blog in his defence this month 6 years ago. I was incensed at the time at how Cathal O'Shannon (now RIP, but a journalist whom I once admired) and Senan Moloney (who had an agreement with Froggy in 1987, which he presumably considered expired on Froggy's death, heedless of the man's reputation, or the feelings or economic fortunes of his widow) both went for the man in an RTÉ series on Hidden Nazis.

Fortunately, his widow, who was made of stern stuff, took the matter to court and secured limited implementation of the 1987 agreement. Meanwhile, RTÉ cut from the transmitted programme a reconstruction of a Nazi interrogation in which Folens was portrayed in the part of interpreter.

If you are curious you can read my original post, but for now I just want to recall him as a teacher.

He taught French by the direct method (mainly). This may have been because he was in an Irish language school and didn't have much, if any, Irish. I suspect he would have used this method even in an English speaking school.

He operated an incentive system. Laxity or indiscipline in class earned you an X. Three Xs and you were sent down to the Head. An exceptionally good performance in class earned you a circle. This allowed you to skip homework on a night of your choice.

There was a period of weeks when less than half the class turned up in school. I think there was some flu epidemic or suchlike sweeping the land at the time. Folens put the curriculum on pause and regaled us with stories, tonguetwisters and songs, all in French. I thought this very enlightened at the time. Those who were absent through no fault of their own did not miss out on the course and those of us who were lucky enough to turn up got a bonus. Il était un petit navire. Le riz tenta le rat, le rat tenté tâta le riz tentant.

As I mentioned in the earlier post, his "cog notes" could be seen as first class, depending on your view of the objectives of the education system. I certainly found them great. They were Roneod and were the germ that subsequently grew into a first class publishing company. They were followed by modest volumes on the newer subjects, like civics, for which no textbooks were available, and, eventually, by the full range of high quality textbooks.

Anyway, I thought he deserved a mention, more than 50 years on.

Marianne

I had occasion recently to do a clearout of old papers in the course of which I came across a very interesting monograph written in 1985 on the crisis in Northern Ireland. You might like to read it? But first a bit of background on the author.

Marianne was born in France of Irish-French parents, and French was the language of the home.

When it came to career time, she decided she wanted to be an interpreter and went to the interpretation school in Geneva, just across the border from where she lived in France.

Sensibly, one of the course requirements was to spend some time in a country of the language she was hoping to interpret, and, while there, complete a monograph on some aspect of that country's linguistic, social or political life.

Marianne was taking English and Spanish, and, as she had Irish relations, she decided to come to Ireland and do her English language monograph here. Given the intensity of the Northern Ireland problem at that time (1985) she decided to do the monograph on the North.

She read widely around the subject before she put pen to paper and when she got around to formulating her outline she had a well thought out analysis of the situation from a political science viewpoint.

One aspect of her approach was to distinguish between what was going on at the political level on the one hand and the underlying interplay of violence (physical force) on the other. In doing this, she naturally assigned the IRA, UDA, RUC, Crown Forces etc. into the latter category. At the end of the day, these entities were all engaged in trying to force a military solution (or underpin a political one with force).

I thought this a perfectly valid academic approach to analysing the problem. Imagine my surprise then when her supervisor in Geneva threw a freaker. No way were the Forces of the Crown going to appear in the same bucket as the IRA. She was told that these two groups were in no way morally equivalent and could not therefore be lumped into the same section of the analysis.

What a load of cobblers that was. But what provoked this irrational, unscientific and unacademic outburst? The explanation soon emerged. Her supervisor was British.

As she needed her qualification, she had to compromise, which she did, barely.

You can read her paper here. I think that anyone with a modicum of understanding of the Northern Ireland situation, as it evolved up to 1985, and, indeed, since, will see that the paper was well thought out, and even prescient.

I leave it to you to judge.