Joseph O’Connor opens Yeats Summer School in Sligo

Ben Bulben seemed to disappear yesterday just as students from around the world gathering for the opening of the international Yeats Summer School in Co Sligo sought out the famous mountain.

It was shrouded in mist as writer Joseph O’Connor welcomed students at the Hawk’s Well Theatre with “a poem by Yeats about friendship” which had always meant a lot to him.

The Municipal Gallery Revisited name-checks many of Yeats's famous contemporaries. O'Connor said he had been thinking of the poem's theme in recent months as the country started "dreaming again about a future for Ireland and imagining what kind of society we can be and what kind of friendships and relationships we can have with the rest of the world".

Global impact

Yeats’s impact on the rest of the world was outlined by Labour Senator Susan O’Keeffe who is spearheading the year-long 150th-birthday celebration for the poet.

She pointed out that countless people were reading Yeats’s poems on the London underground, while his work was being enjoyed everywhere from Tokyo to Moscow – and also in Hargadon’s pub in Sligo where a poem is being read every day this year.

“It’s a global salute for a global poet,” she said.

US ambassador Kevin O’Malley did the honours in the traditional pub at the weekend. Other dignitaries at the opening of the 56th summer school included the poet’s granddaughter Caitriona, and Marie and Catherine Heaney, wife and daughter of the late Seamus Heaney.

Mr O’Malley praised the academic collaboration between Ireland the US, pointing out that more than 8,000 US students visit Ireland annually.

Irish emigrants to the US had always “brought with them a way with words”.

The Yeats Society launched an international poetry competition this year in honour of Seamus Heaney but did not have to go far to find a winner.

Sligo woman Una Mannion who received her award from Marie Heaney was inspired by the story of a child who died thousands of years ago.

“In 1981, when I was 15, they found the remains of a child in my father’s field, known as ‘the sandy field’ in Culleenamore near Strandhill,” she explained. “It had been there since the Iron Age .”