The Merriman Summer School is probably the most influential platform in Munster for the annual gathering of the best and brightest in Irish arts, literature, politics and academia. Cerebral though it may be, all is not profound navel-gazing at the school which got under way at the weekend in Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare.
There is room too for some good old-fashioned fun when the lectures are over. Impromptu singing, storytelling and the raising of a glass or two are still permissible under the rules, chief of which is that the school should always seek to be thoughtful and thought-provoking.
Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, will deliver the keynote lecture tomorrow, dealing with "Degrees of Separation; the Irish Poet and Britain".
This year, the theme is "Five Territories: `These Islands' at the turn of the Millennium". It is a broad canvas and has brought together scholars from Ireland, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, to discuss where we have journeyed together, and where we are now. Heaney, whose voice reaches across all borders, is an ideal choice to reflect on the question from the perspective of one whose work has not only dealt with, but transcends national issues.
Some years ago, Heaney gave a lecture at the school on the west Clare poet Brian Merriman, whose Cuirt an Mhean Oiche inspired the summer gathering which has been going strong since 1967. He spoke then of Merriman as a world poet, while tomorrow he will discuss the new world profile which Irish poetry, North and South, enjoys.
His lecture on Merriman was subsequently given at Oxford and later appeared in Redress of Poetry in 1985, a collection of 10 essays. For the purposes of this lecture, Heaney says he will hark back to the early Field Day pamphlet "An Open Letter" (1983) in which he famously reminded the editors of the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry that he was the holder of an Irish passport - "you'll understand I draw the line/At being robbed of what is mine."
"If Edna O'Brien or John Banville appear in an anthology of British fiction it may not matter much to them, but for Northern nationalists the issue may be somewhat more sensitive," he adds.
The lecture will look at the tensions inherent in the work of the Munster poet, Eoghan Rua O Suilleabhain, regarded as the greatest poet of the Sliabh Luachra school, who served in the British navy, and of Francis Ledwidge, the Co Kildare poet who died fighting at Ypres in 1917, as well as the Belfast poet, John Hewitt, whose poetry in the 1940s was influenced by the concept of Ulster regionalism.
The lecture will also look at the milieu in which poets now find themselves working - devolution, all-Ireland institutions, etc. Events have changed our view of ourselves and how we relate to one another in this part of the world, says Heaney.