It's that sort of place. It's a Gaeltacht area and even a gay area. It's because I put the gay into Gaelic that it's become a rather pinkish place in recent times. It's a mecca of artists."
At the launch in Dublin this week of the inaugural Samhain, 2003 International Poetry Festival, which will take place over the Halloween weekend, Ó Searcaigh praised the people of his native Gort a' Choirce (or Gortahorka, in its anglicised form) on the north-west coast of Donegal for asserting their separate identity and deciding to celebrate poetry.
"We are in a golden age of poetry in Ireland," he said. Later, he greeted fellow poet Gabriel Rosenstock, who recently won joint-second prize in the international Haiku Mainichi competition.
The Samhain festival, which was launched by Mary Coughlan, the Minister for Social and Family Affairs, will feature the new Smurfit International Poetry Competition with a total prize fund of €5,000, donated by Ann Smurfit, who attended.
Among the friends and neighbours who came to lend their support were Milo and Edna de Buitléir, who run Amharclann Uí Shearcaigh, the village's 85-seat theatre, and their neighbour, Anne Giblen; fiddle-player Theresa Kavanagh; Brian Ó Domhnaill, newly-named regional chair of Údarás na Gaeltachta, Denis Doyle, of the North West Tourism Authority, Anne Learmont, scriptwriter with Ros na Rún, and John Cannon, chairman of the festival's organising committee and manager of Ostán Loch Altain.
For more information on the Samhain festival e-mail
• info@samhainpoetry.com or see www.samhainpoetry.com