America: During her visit to the United States this week, President Mary McAleese was greeted by traditional Irish music almost everywhere she went, writes Denis Staunton.
On Long Island, she met a group of 12-year-old Gaelic footballers before witnessing a magnificent display of Irish dancing.
At Emory University in Atlanta, a group of students staged a reading of a Seamus Heaney poem and the President saw that college's extensive collection of manuscripts from contemporary Irish writers.
Irish studies is booming in the US, not only in established centres such as Notre Dame and Boston College or at Harvard and Berkeley, which have Celtic studies departments, but at many smaller institutions throughout the country.
Although the focus of many courses is on Ireland after 1800, courses in early Irish civilisation are hugely popular among students in the most unlikely corners of America. Joe Eska, president of the Celtic Studies Association of North America, is a professor of linguistics at Virginia Tech, the site of last month's shooting massacre that cost 33 lives. He also teaches courses in Celtic studies.
"Usually the people who do those things have been hired to do other things, to be historians, to be folklorists, to do comparative literature, to do other languages but, because they're interested in Celtic, they try to find a way to get it taught at their institutions," he says.
Despite the increase in demand for Celtic courses, few American universities have added new academic jobs in the field, and Eska says that Celtic studies as a discipline is just "hanging on".
This may explain the deep sense of shock his colleagues felt when they heard that University College Dublin was abolishing its single honours degree course in Early Irish and had decided not to fill the chair of Old and Middle Irish.
"We have to make a case to our institution or our department about why we should offer such courses and if administrators here see that even in Ireland administrators don't believe that it's worthwhile to offer such courses, it's going to make it that much more difficult for us in North America to try to keep the discipline alive," he says.
The President declined to be drawn into the dispute about UCD's decision, but she welcomed this week's announcement that Cambridge University is to offer a course in modern Irish.
"Isn't that the most extraordinary sign of the vibrancy of Irish culture? And the fact that it's not just offered, of course, to an Irish audience. This is for a scholarly audience drawn from all over the world, drawn from all sorts of perspectives," she said.
During the 19th century, German linguists led the study of Irish but Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, professor of Irish studies at Harvard, believes it would be "very peculiar, to put it at its mildest", if today's prosperous Ireland were once again to lag behind universities abroad in studying its own culture.
He says that his colleagues were aghast when they heard about UCD's decision.
"I think there was a feeling of betrayal and a feeling also of incomprehension. Why would the Irish university system and the biggest university in the country, at a time when Ireland is prosperous, abandon the study of Old Irish, the teaching of Old Irish? That's just something that people here find very hard to understand," he said.
UCD has not acknowledged or replied to letters from Ó Cathasaigh and his colleagues about the decision, but the university has argued that there are simply too few students who want to study Early Irish.
Ó Cathasaigh accepts that enrolment is an issue but suggests that Irish universities and taxpayers should consider carefully what impact student numbers should have on such decisions.
"The dean of arts and sciences here at Harvard recently was talking about the hypothetical situation where perhaps we mightn't have many students wanting to study, say, philosophy.
"But he said we would still have to get the best people in philosophy that we could because, as he put it, we're a university, not a factory," he says.