The talks process due to start in the North in midSeptember has "a fair chance of succeeding", former Taoiseach Dr Garret FitzGerald said yesterday. Delivering the opening keynote address at the John Hewitt International Summer School in the Glens of Antrim, Dr FitzGerald said success did not mean that everyone would have to agree the outcome.

"If parties representing a majority can agree a scheme, or even perhaps without formally endorsing every element of it, can accept that it be put to the people in Northern Ireland and the Republic, then the longing for peace . . . could secure its adoption," he said.

Dr FitzGerald said that if Sinn Fein rejected such a settlement, its endorsement by the people of Ireland as a whole could secure that; in accordance with obligations the party would have entered into in signing up to the Mitchell Principles, any opposition would be non-violent.

He said that this in turn would ensure the ending of the loyalist violence "and the DUP and the UK Unionists if they opposed the scheme would then join Sinn Fein in opposition". He said that this was the positive scenario and that he "need not dwell on the negative one".

The theme of this year's school is: "Beyond the Planter and the Gael". In opening his address, Dr FitzGerald said the dichotomy between the Gael and the Planter is more of a myth than a genetic reality. He said it seemed unlikely that a majority of the population in the north-east corner of the island was descended from the 17th-century settlers, despite today's Protestant majority. He believed a fair proportion of Protestant genes today must be either Celtic or more probably pre-Celtic.

Dr Fitzgerald said, however, that this did not take away from the power of the concept. "In truth myths are often, perhaps even usually, more powerful than any reality in determining how people feel, and how they act."

This is the 10th year of the school which opened at lunchtime yesterday with its now traditional procession around the impressive grounds of St MacNissi's College, Garron Tower, Co Antrim.

Dr FitzGerald joined up to 100 students of the school and friends and associates of the Belfast poet who died in 1987, in walking behind the summer school banner as the music of The Sash and the Green Glens Of Antrim was played.

The programme co-ordinator, Hazel Armstrong, said the aim of the school was "to keep a focus on the ideas of Hewitt" who was, she said, "a dissenter and a republican in the spirit of 1798".

During his lifetime, Hewitt's leftwing views led to him being rejected by the unionist controlled Belfast City Council for the post of director of the Ulster Museum. The councillors decided he had too many Catholic and "communist" friends.

Students this year have come from as far away as Japan, Denmark and Italy.

Setsuko Miyamoto, a teacher at Leeds University, said she attends the Hewitt school because of the insight it provides into the culture, politics and literature of Northern Ireland. "It's not just academics talking about arty stuff."

One of the highlights will be the premiere tonight of The Green Shoot, a one-man show on the life and work of Hewitt with Ian McElhinney.

This afternoon Prof Richard Kearney of UCD will give a lecture on post-nationalism and post-unionism. Speakers later in the week include Seamus O Cathain on the life and work of Michael J. Murphy and Terence McCaughey, a Presbyterian minister, on "The Dissenting Voice: An Unbroken Tradition".

Other events will be a guided tour of the Glens of Antrim and next Saturday a debate on: "Is The Union Re-negotiable".