In one of her last official functions the President, Mrs Robinson, officially opened this year's Merriman Summer School at Ennistymon, Co Clare, last night. In her honour the Cork poet Michael Davitt read in Irish to the President an original poem, After- glow in English, to recognise her contribution to Irish affairs during her years in Aras an Uachtarain:
Your Excellency, you lit the light proclaiming an end to famine of spirit
On your leaving, let more than afterglow remain
Let the blood of your vision live on.
Let it not become a straw vision
Keeping the raven at bay while the potatoes rot.
This year the theme of the school is "Seventy-Five Years of Independence, the Reckoning", and an impressive array of speakers has been arranged between now and August 29th.
They include: Ms Mary Kotsonouris, from the legal profession; Ms Nuala O'Faolain of The Irish Times; Ms Ivana Bacik, Reid Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology at Trinity College Dublin; Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, formerly head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, and BBC governor for Northern Ireland; Mr Bob Collins, the Director-General of RTE; the broadcaster Prof Brian Farrell, who is the director of the school; the journalist and broadcaster Mr David Hanly; and Prof Declan Kiberd, head of the Anglo-Irish Literature Department at University College Dublin.
In the opening address to the school last night Prof Kiberd said the mystery of the Irish renaissance at the outset of this century was that it was conducted on a shoestring. Despite this, a central element in the thinking of people as different as Michael Collins and James Joyce was the notion of economic prosperity and individual self-belief.
Only in the past few years, he went on, had that vision begun to be realised. Although the period of cultural revival between 1890 and 1922 had been characterised by a range of self-help movements, from the Gaelic League to Horace Plunkett's Co-Operative Movement for farmers, there had been no economic lift-off after Independence. Instead, Prof Kiberd declared, professional men had continued to put in a short working day in order to show that they still had the vestiges of gentility about them while the education system had for decades put a premium on classical learning to the detriment of commerce and craftwork.
Prof Kiberd said that all had changed. Irish people had revealed a talent for enterprise, creating more than 150,000 jobs in the past three or four years. The ratio of those dependent on wealth-creators was dropping sharply, and groups such as the Irish National Organisation for the Unemployed were encouraging members to set up their own businesses.
Ordinary people had discovered in themselves the sort of self-belief which people like Douglas Hyde and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington had dreamed of instilling. There had been a huge change in attitudes to work, Prof Kiberd continued, which was no longer seen as a necessary chore to avoid starvation, rather a means of securing wealth and comfort. At the same time, the transformation in everyday life in the Republic had been paralleled by the Nobel and Olympic achievements of Seamus Heaney and Michelle Smith.