Archive
Ireland’s Largest Single Literary Event
So said Margaret Hayes, Dublin City Librarian at the opening of the DublinSwell event in the city’s gleaming, green-lit, Convention Centre last week. This, she said, was Ireland’s largest literary event ever.
It was a celebration of Dublin’s listing as a UNESCO City of Literature – one of only four cities in the world to receive this designation. A happy audience of some 2,000, led by President Mary McAleese, gathered to listen to Dublin poets, musicians, writers and actors.
I had a few quibbles, like the half-hour delay in getting the programme underway, our seats being double-booked and the blaze of gore in the visuals of Iran that accompanied Mike Scott’s rendering of Yeats poems.
The poets were my stars of the night. Seamus Heaney read ‘Postscript’, one of my favourite Heaney poems: ‘As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways / And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.’ We had Paul Durcan’s tragic-comic verses, Dermot Bolger’s tribute to his late wife, Paula Meehan’s earthy Dublin lines, Biddy Jenkinson’s poems as Gaeilge and verse-drama excerpts from Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus.
The President spoke of ‘Brilliant’ – Roddy Doyle’s short story that was the inspiration for Dublin’s Saint Patrick’s Festival 2011 parade. The word could be applied to DublinSwell. Great to be there.
See details of full DublinSwell programme and review here.
Blogging / Writing is good for your health
I like this post – from a Techie – about the therapeutic effects of blogging and expressive writing.
It seems to be about the process you go through in coming up with and arranging the words. The post has a link to some scientific evidence on the benefits of blogging /writing. And our words create a legacy – leave a trace behind.
Read more here.
Hope at a Moment of Social and Psychological Chaos
I was one of those who was deeply moved by the words of Bill Clinton to a New York audience over the St Patrick’s weekend. It was not just the words he spoke, but the tone of his remarks. It seems to me that he has a deep understanding of the psychic trauma we are going through in Ireland.
He asked the question that people are asking all over the country. How to respond at ‘this moment of economic calamity and social and psychological chaos’?
We need, he said, to keep our heads straight while recovering from this ‘impacted sense of shame’ and not forget what we are at the core. ‘Scrape away the barnacles that have clouded the vision of the place we love.’
I, for one, was uplifted by Bill Clinton’s words.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day
Be a Dublin (Literary) Ambassador
I like this idea from City of a Thousand Welcomes initiative. A simple notion asking volunteers to meet up with a visitor to Dublin and share – over a cuppa or a pint – their enthusiasm for the city.
You fill in a simple form and nominate one thing every visitor to Dublin should see. For me it is the National Library of Ireland. Not just packed with archives and exhibitions and literary ghosts, but a great place to stand on the steps and watch the comings and goings to Government Builidngs and the Dail next door.
Only problem for me is that I don’t qualify as a Dubliner!
Patricia Byrne 
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