On 30th January 1997, Seamus Deane chaired a symposium on 'Secrets and Lies: 25 Years On', during the Derry Commemoration of "Bloody Sunday", the tragic event of 30th Jan. 1972 when British paratroopers shot 13 participants dead in an unarmed demonstration in that city.
Seamus Heaney marked the day by sending to the Derry Journal stanzas of a ballad he had written on that terrible occasion. Introducing them in the Derry Journal (1 Feb.1997), He recorded that the news of the atrocity reached him while driving from Belfast to Derry, adding 'Ahyah, I think it is in order to reprint this abbreviated version' - as follows: 'On a Wednesday morning early I took the road to Derry/Along Glenshane and Foreglen and the cold woods of Hillhead;/A wet wind in the hedges and a dark cloud on the mountain/And flags like black frost mourning that the thirteen men were dead.//The Roe wept at Dungiven and the Foyle cried out to heaven,/Burntollet's old wound opened and again the Bogside bled;/By Shipquay Gate I shivered and by Lone Moor I enquired/Where I might find the coffins where the thirteen men lay dead.//My heart besieged by anger, my mind a gap of danger,/I walked among their old haunts, the home ground where they bled;/And in the dirt lay justice like an acorn in the winter/Till its oak would sprout in Derry where the thirteen men lay dead.' (The gap of danger' is an Irish martial idiom also employed in 'The Soldier's Song'.) Heaney's ballad belatedly joins Thomas Kinsella's well-known response to the shootings in the broadside A Butcher's Dozen.
The Irish novelist Kate O'Brien was commemorated at a literary symposium in mid-February 1997, opened at St.Michael's Chruch, Pery Sq., Limerick, by Her Excellency Mrs. Robinson, President of Ireland at that date. Those speaking included Ronit Lentin, Mary Morrissey, and Aisling Foster - the last named on the theme of 'Secret Lives'. The event was reported by Eileen Battersby in The Irish Times under the title 'What Kate wrote: Dissecting the Bourgeois Mind' (15 Feb. 1997).
The 1st Limerick Conference in Irish-German Studies was held on the Plassey campus during 4th-6th September 1997 under the direction of Joachim Fischer and Gisela Holfter of the Dept. of Languages and Cultural Studies, and was marked by the official launch of the Centre for Irish-German Studies, where Professor Eda Sagarra, Secretary of the Royal Irish Academy, did the honours. The presence of Konrad Adenauer, representing the German Ireland Fund (Cologne), conveys an impression of the high-powered character of the conference. Heinz Kosok, the acknowledged authority on the subject, spoke of 'Irish Literature and Irish Studies in Germany'-while the reverse state of affairs was addressed by Hugh Ridley of UCD. Under the rubrics, 'History', 'Literature and Music', 'Heinrich Böll and Ireland', 'Translation', 'Cultural Exchange and the Media', and 'Business and Politics', some twenty-five speakers delivered half-hour papers delving into matters of considerable interest and complexity. Gabriel Rosenstock and Hans-Chrisian Oeser read from their poetry, and Helen Houlihan (soprano) and Gareth Cox (piano) performed Sean Ó Riada's 'Song Cycle', together with settings to poems by Hölderin, Heaney, and John Montague.
A major international conference on Irish emigration was hosted Ionad na hImirce/Irish Centre for Migration Studies at University College Cork, 24th-28th September, 1997 under the title of 'The Global Irish Diaspora'. Topics covered included 'Representations of Emigration', 'Irishwomen and Irishmen in the Americas'; 'The Irish and the British Empire', 'Irish Migration in a European Context', and 'New Global and Local Identities'. The conference was opened by Her Excellency, Mary Robinson, President of Ireland and addressed by Rabbi Julia Neuberger (Chancellor of the University of Ulster), Donald H. Akenson (author The Irish Diaspora and biographer of Conor Cruise O'Brien), Tim Pat Coogan (late of Irish Press but timely in every other sense), and Lena Deevey (Director of the Irish Immigration Centre in Boston), as well as David Fitzpatrick, Ruth Ann Harris, Mary Hickman, Richard Kearney, Declan Kiberd, J .J. Lee, Jim MacLaughlin, Kerby Miller and other well-known scholars, critics, thinkers. The Convenor was Piaras Mac Einrí, of the UCC Department of Geography,Cork, and Director of the hosting Centre. A striking departure of the Conference was the live electronic reportage on events transmitted on the Web at <http://www.ucc.ie/ioms> - a 'first' for Irish conferences.
A number of Irish sessions were conducted at the Central New York Conference on Language and Literature held at SUNY, Cortland, New York 13045, during October 5th-7th, 1997. These included 'Modern Irish Fiction' (chaired by Michael Molino), Modern Irish Drama (chaired by Jaimie Carswell), Modern Irish Poetry (chaired by Daniel Tobin), Contemporary Irish Literature (chaired by Kathryn L. Kleypas), Irish Women Writers (chaired by Beth Wightman), James Joyce (chaired by Frank Moliterno), and all co-ordinated by the tireless Alexander G. Gonzalez, Professor of English and Conference Director.
'I Sought A Theme And Sought For It In Vain' was the title of a conference mounted at the University of San Diego, from October 17th-19th, 1997. Further information indicated the theme was 'the search for themes in Irish Literature, history and culture'. Stephen Arkin of the Department of English at San Francisco State University was the co-ordinator.
David F. Fanning of the English Department at Ohio State University organised a panel on Flann O'Brien for the 39th Annual Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association (M/MLA), held on November 6th-8th, 1997.
The University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina, hosted the 1998 Southern Regional ACIS Conference entitled 'Irish Identities' on February 19th-21st, 1998. Keynote speakers were Frank McCourt of Angela's Ashes fame and historian Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White. Topics spanned the areas of politics, poetics, ethnicity, culture, with themes addressing exile, immigration, emigration; costs and strategies of assimilation, Irish-American relations, identity, memory, nostalgia, and sentimentality; romanticisation and commodification, and the material conditions of Irish identity. The Conference was organised by Ed Madden of the Department of English, University of South Carolina.
Proposals on 'Irish Studies/Lesbian & Gay Studies' for a collection of critical essays at the intersections of Irish cultural and historical studies, queer theory, and gay/lesbian studies were elicited from the same campus by Marie Honan with a closure date set at 1 Nov. 1997. Let's see, now - Oscar Wilde, Mícheál Mac Liammóir, Kate O’Brien, John Broderick, Des Hogan, Emma Donoghue ... [ Not forgetting Hamlet and Lear, according to Yeats. - Ed.] The contact address given included the email <mph2299@is3.nyu.edu>.