A day for whom?

THE Day of Irish Life on September 27th will introduce Irish culture to dozens of cities and towns throughout Germany in 1,100 events featuring such disciplines as fashion and cookery as well as music, drama and literature. Almost 300 Irish people living in Germany will perform in the one day festival, which organiser Christian Springer hopes will put Germany's Irish diaspora on the map.

"There will be an awareness that an Irish diaspora, exists here as well as in Britain and America and that there is a considerable number of Irish people living in Germany. They've only known about each other at a local level up to now, but a nationwide network is being built up already during the planning for the Day of Irish Life," he said.

Many of the events have been organised by adult education centres in conjunction with local Irish people, but some organisations that have promoted Irish culture in the past complain that they have been ignored by the organisers of Ireland's presence at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Terry McDonagh, an Irish poet who has been living in Hamburg for the past 15 years, has helped to organise a number of readings in the city next week, but he doubts that the Frankfurt spotlight on Ireland will have much lasting effect on people like him.

"It's a fly by night thing that will go on until the end of the year and then be forgotten. A lot of people I know are very sceptical about it," he says.

Mr McDonagh believes that the Dublin based organisers of Ireland and its Diaspora have been more interested in attracting sponsorship from Irish businesses in Germany than in involving Irish writers living there.

"It's a platform for a bunch of people from Dublin who'll come over to Frankfurt and then go back and write about loneliness and exile and loss. Well, good luck to them! But it's very lopsided and there are a lot of Irish people here who have been doing a lot of work who have been ignored," he said.