Seamus Heaney was among those who packed into the Ernest Walton Theatre in Trinity College, Dublin, this week to hear one of Latin America's most distinguished writers, Carlos Fuentes, speak about his native Mexico.
"We were born from disasters. We speak, the majority of us, the Spanish language and are raised in the culture of Catholicism . . . We are the extreme west and from the beginning we asked ourselves the questions of identity . . . We asked ourselves the questions of justice: to whom do those lands belong? Why have so many so little and so few so much?
"Can we live together in the global village without respecting the values in the local village?," Fuentes asked. "Can we live together in a world dominated by a single super power?"
Fuentes was welcomed to the university by Agustín Basave, the Mexican ambassador to Ireland and TCD's Provost, Dr John Hegarty, at a small reception before the lecture, which was entitled "Mexico in a nutshell".
This was the inauguration of a joint project between the Embassy of Mexico and Trinity College, which proposes each year "to invite a distinguished scholar to lecture for up to a week here," according to Dr Hegarty.
Among those who came to hear Fuentes speak were Patrick Murphy, chairman of the Arts Council and the French ambassador, Gabriel de Bellescize, who had both attended the launch of Dr Muriel McCarthy's book, Marsh's Library: All Graduates and Gentlemen, at the 300-year-old library, earlier in the day (See Sadbh, W12).
Mary Lawlor, director of Front Line, the international foundation for the protection of human rights defenders, was also present along with Dr Ciaran Cosgrove, head of TCD's Hispanic Studies Department and the novelist's wife, Silvia Fuentes.