This year Ireland should have been celebrating the 225th anniversary of St Patrick’s College in Maynooth, once the largest seminary in the world. Covid-19 put paid to celebratory events in this mad year, which also saw the loss of one of the college’s most illustrious alumni, John Hume (whose obituary appeared in last month’s Catholic Herald). Not that Maynooth is a stranger to mad years. In the 19th century, the 1845 “Maynooth question” was described by the Whig social theorist Harriet Martineau as “the great political controversy of the year, the subject on which society seemed to be going mad”. The seminary, in the town of Maynooth, a little outside Dublin, was founded in 1795 by an Act of Parliament signed by King George III. The king said it grieved him more to establish “a Popish colony in Ireland than it did to lose the American colonies”. An ode recited by the lord lieutenant of Ireland at the laying of the first foundation stone was evocative: