BOTH speakers at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo yesterday examined the poet's preoccupation with Celtic themes, in the context of the reality of political and economic life in Ireland in the 19th century, Dr Luke Gibbons of Dublin City University and Dr Sean Ryder of University College Galway both stressed the acuteness of the social and political conflicts that existed at the time, which Yeats sought to escape or elide by evoking a long gone, heroic Celtic past.

Luke Gibbons began by comparing the nostalgia of Scottish cultural nationalism in the 19th century with the Irish literary revival. "Both cultures were suffused with romantic sentiments, with the trappings of Celticism, and with longings for a shattered past but while the past in a crucial sense was over and done with in Scotland, in Ireland it was still unresolved, and could not yet be viewed through the rear window of nostalgia," he said.

This meant that Sir Walter Scott, for example, could develop the genre of the historical novel, "which was in a position to recast history in a coherent narrative form precisely because it was overtaken and contained by the present".

However, reclamation of the Celtic past in Ireland was more problematic. "Not alone did it open up the unwelcome prospect (from an Ascendancy perspective) of an independent Irish civilisation, free from all traces of English rule, but recent history kept intruding on the view, particularly in the aftermath of the calamitous rebellion of 1798."

The difference between the two cultures was evident not just in the contrasting history of rebellion, but also in their economic fortunes. Fifty years after the Act of Union in 1707, the Scottish growth rate greatly exceeded that of England and leaders of the Scottish enlightenment could discern real progress. In Ireland, the Act of Union brought economic deterioration and retarded development, in the midst of modernisation.

Indeed, the market made such inroads on the Irish countryside precisely because of the systematic destruction of Gaelic culture.

For Yeats, the custom and ceremony, the lineaments of tradition which he valued, were themselves riven with violence and conflict, due to the colonial pedigree of the Ascendancy. "The brutal imposition of colonial rule cannot be safely interred in a remote past, or located in a once off primordial act of violence, but has to be renewed in every generation, thus converting continuity itself into discord and strife," he said.

DR Sean Ryder looked at Yeats's relationship with 19th century nationalism through his claimed continuity with the poets of the 19th century and, specifically, the Young Ireland movement.

Like Samuel Ferguson, he was keen to establish his credentials on both political and artistic levels. Both identified with the Protestant, English speaking class which controlled the majority of economic and political resources in Ireland. "A prehistoric past of aristocratic Celtic warriors, pagan rituals and noble deeds appealed to a class whose own identity was inescapably rooted in the all too historic business of colonisation, religious bigotry and political oppression."

It could be argued, Dr Ryder said, that this was an attempt to retain privilege while appearing to advocate a common Irish culture based on a transcendence of historical conflicts. "The problem was that admiration for Cuchulain and Deirdre was not enough to redress the political and economic grievances of the majority population, and few of them were buying it."

Thomas Davis and the Young Ireland movement had been preoccupied by the relationship between literature and nationality 50 years before Yeats. From the start Davis argued for an inclusive sense of nationality, and specifically for reconciliation between Orange and Green. Celtic myth played no part in this construction of nationality.

Learning history was an important part of their project of national education. Dr Ryder pointed out that Davis's suggested reading for this purpose included Henry VIII's state papers and Cromwell's letters, suggesting that, for Davis, "it is important to know Irish history as seen through the eyes of those who made it, however repugnant their role may have been".

When Yeats provides a reading list in Irish history, however, it is far less comprehensive "history as passionate story telling".

They also differed widely in their attitudes towards landscape. That of Davis could be described as "a 1840s version of a Holidays Ireland campaign", exhorting upper class Irish tourists to holiday in Ireland. Historical ruins need to be preserved as "texts" which help teach us our nationality. "Few ballads from The Nation celebrate the landscape as pure nature or as a rustic paradise certainly none supernaturalise it."

Yeats relentlessly de-historicised the landscape. "Mythologising the landscape just at the moment that it is undergoing unprecedented political and economic transformation seems a wilful act of denial and rejection," said Dr Ryder. "It seems important for Yeats, for instance, that he find fairies and Celts rather than agrarian insurgents hidden in the glens and mountains."

Davis represents secular modernity, with which Yeats was uncomfortable. His attempt to use Davis, Ferguson and Mangan to construct a canon of which he would be a part was, ultimately, "artificial and ideologically fraught".