Limerick's literary exiles

The manner in which exile affected the Irish writer surfaced as a key theme at last weekend's Kate O'Brien winter school, writes Kevin Barry. While O'Brien herself, Limerick's most noted novelist, produced much of her best work in Spain and England, it was the writing of a more recent exile, Frank McCourt, which triggered the weekend's most heated debate.

This was the 15th annual Kate O'Brien Weekend and each of its seven sessions drew close to capacity attendances, including many visitors from abroad. It may be a measure of the event's continuing success that O'Brien's critical star burns brighter now than it did at the time of her death in 1974.

The closing lecture was delivered at St Michael's Church, Pery Square, on Sunday by biographer and critic, Victoria Glendinning. She spoke of O'Brien's importance in mapping the emergence of the Irish middle classes, a group most frequently ignored by her contemporaries. The subtle feminism of the novelist's work was noted too, though Glendinning warned that the present day reader "can tend to view everything through an ultra-modern, liberalist lens", perhaps unearthing ironies where none were intended.

With the stated theme of the Weekend being time and place and their rendering in literature, it was inevitable that the spectre of McCourt's Angela's Ashes would loom large.At an open-floor discussion in the Hunt Museum on Saturday, the air thickened with rancour as many speakers denounced the book, suggesting that its reminiscence was unnecessarily grim and doom-laden. It's clear that there remains in Limerick an amount of bitterness about McCourt's work, a feeling that he has done the city down in the eyes of the world. There was the suggestion too that much of the book may be fictional. But, as Glendinning had said in the context of O'Brien's novels, fiction holds its own unassailable truths.