FOR weeks before the Frankfurt Book Fair, publishers affect bored resignation. "Are you going over?" "Oh, I suppose so", is the languorous response, while the advantages to the publishing house of a week spent talking figures in huddled corners, chasing rumours and running up hotel, bills are debated inconclusively. In recent years this annual ritual has been given a welcome inoculation, with the introduction of a focal theme, highlighting the publishing industry of a particular participating country.

At the 48th Frankfurt Book Fair in October, Ireland comes under the spotlight and the opportunity has been seized by the publishing industry and the Arts Council to stage a major festival of Irish arts, called "Ireland and Its Diaspora". "It is a once in a life time opportunity, offering a huge publicity umbrella," says Lar Cassidy, the Arts Council's Literature Officer and the festival's director. "Nine thousand publishers attend Frankfurt, with 300,000 visitors and 9,500 authorised journalists covering it. It's comparable in scale to the Edinburgh Festival or the Rio Carnival."

Previous years' "focal theme countries" such as the Netherlands and Austria have experienced increased book sales in Germany, and this, of course, is one of the aims of the festival. The organisers also hope to achieve higher recognition in Germany for Irish writers, with more exchanges, readings, residencies and translations of Irish work into German - commissioned through Dublin rather than London.

Although the festival is intended to promote Irish writers published anywhere, Irish publishers will attend in force, represented by Cle, the Irish Book Publishers Association, and will make their presence felt with a national portmanteau stand as well as about 20 stands showing the wares of individual Irish publishing houses. With a turnover of £31 million in 1994, which represents an increase of 92 per cent in 10 years, the industry is flourishing in its areas of strength, the children's book sector and Irish interest non fiction.

The festival's core event, "Writers Live", will consist of readings, discussions and lectures by over 30 leading Irish writers (most of them published in Britain), which will be chaired in German in two venues: the theatre in the Irish Pavilion on the central Plaza of the book fair complex, and the city's Literaturhaus. The writers, including Seamus Heaney, John Banville, Derek Mahon, Edna Longley, Roddy Doyle, Edna O'Brien, Hugo Hamilton, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Paula Meehan and Glenn Patterson, will address the expansive theme of the Irish diaspora.

"Yes, it is broad," Lar Cassidy says, "but it will break down in the discussions into its different dimensions, as happens at the International Writers Conference we have held in Dublin." An introductory essay in the festival's bi lingual programme guide by academic, critic and author of In venting Ireland The Literature of the Modern Nation, Dr Declan Kiberd will help establish subthemes and issues for debate.

DECLAN Kiberd is also literary consultant for the showpiece of the festival, an exhibition in the circular, glass Irish Pavilion, designed last year for the Austrian publishers by the Viennese architect, Adolf Krischanitz. The Literature of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora is intended to convey the centrality of the word, both written and verbal, to Irish culture, a feature that has co existed with a history of exile and displacement, emigration and migration.

Luke Dodd, director of the award winning Famine Museum in Strokestown House, Co Roscommon, is the curator of the exhibition, which will present Irish writing in an international context, selecting a diversity of texts, from the illuminated manuscripts laboured over and exported by Irish monks, to Joyce's Portrait at an Artist in which Stephen Daedalus is determined to elude the nets of "nationality, language and religion" and adopt a defence of "silence, exile and cunning".

Using a combination of visual and audio elements, designed by Orna Hanly, as well as panels of information, the exhibition will be required to be both comprehensive, covering 1,400 years of Irish writing, but also relatively minimalist, to accommodate the projected 72,000 people who will pass through it over six days.

While the festival's emphasis is on literature, there will also be two major art retrospectives: the touring exhibition of 20 years' work by the Irish American abstract painter, Sean Scully, which opens at IMMA today, and will be shown at the Schim Kuntshalle, Frankfurt, from September 21st to December 1st, and a rare opportunity to see the work of designer and architect Eileen Gray, at the Deutsches Architektur Museum from September 24th to November 24th. Gray, who was born in Enniscorthy in 1878, spent most of her life in Paris, where she built up a reputation for her late art nouveau style lacquer work, carpet and furniture design, before designing buildings in the international modernist idiom.

AMOUNTING to the largest Irish arts festival in Germany ever, the Frankfurt programme also includes: Mick O'Kelly's series of photographs of male and female figures with bar codes, seen by anyone who has pounded the miles of corridor in Heathrow's Terminal One; four seasons of Irish film at the Deutsches Film museum between June and October; a gala concert at Frankfurt Opera House with De Dannan, Martin Hayes and Louis Stewart; an exhibition of historic photographs from the collection of the Ulster Folk and Transport museum; a selection of documents, books, prints, manuscripts and newspapers from the National Library; a showcase of the work of Irish illustrators, curated by Ed Miliano; a concert series by traditional musicians touring 22 cities in Germany and Switzerland, and a nationwide "Day of Irish Life in Germany" on September 27th, with theatre performances and readings.

So, the question hovering over it all is: who's paying for this? "It is the product of a series of extraordinary partnerships," says Lar Cassidy, "with great generosity coming from funders, partners and sponsors in Germany, where there is a very special warmth for Ireland." The total expenditure exceeds £1.2 million, with £500,00 from Germany and £700,000 originating in Ireland, from a range of sources, including Bord Failte, An Bord Trachtala, the Arts Council, the Departments of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, and Foreign Affairs.

Financing the festival has been a protracted struggle; the board is still in negotiation with Macnas about its possible participation, but this, Lar Cassidy says, is now the only area of uncertainty. Everything else that had been originally planned will be taking place. And if you're wondering where the pub is, rest assured that a new one is being specially designed beside the Irish Pavilion, to accommodate daily music events, readings, and, oh yes, the quaffing of an occasional glass of stout.