The International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL)

I was in York recently for what I believe was the 39th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), an annual event bringing together a global community of scholars with an interest in our literatures (in the Irish and English languages). The five-day conference attracted about 160 participants from a range of countries, including Ireland, Britain, Korea, Egypt, Poland, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Australia, Portugal, Japan and the United States.

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Conference, where I drew on my own experience of the value of Irish literature in promoting Ireland internationally. In this field, I am an enthusiast rather than a scholar. A graduate of UCC, my MA thesis focused on the politics of the literary revival, with Yeats and George Russell (AE) as my main sources. I have retained an interest in Irish literary history. My only book, A New Day Dawning: a portrait of Ireland in 1900 (Cork 1999) drew heavily on literary sources. I have spoken about Irish literature in all of the countries where I have lived and worked - India, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Scotland, Malaysia, Germany, and here in Britain at present.

My experience has taught me a number of things. First, Irish literature is an asset for a small country like ours. Our major 20th century writers, Yeats, Joyce, O'Casey, Beckett, Heaney among others, packed a really big punch and Irish writers continue to make a mark in this century. This means that Ireland is better known around the world than it would have been had our writers' pens remained dry.

Wherever I have been, our writers have enjoyed a strong local following. Some years ago when I was Ambassador in Berlin, I took part in a full reading of the German translation of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. It took place in Hamburg and attracted a full house, almost all of whom stayed to the very end! I have organised Bloomsday events in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kuala Lumpur, Berlin and London. This year, I have spoken about W.B. Yeats at locations all over Britain. I hesitate to draw comparisons, but I doubt if many European countries possess a national literature with such an extensive international following.

My second point is that Irish literature is an aid to explaining Ireland. It doesn't tell the full story, of course, for no one source could do so. I have found our literature to be a powerful resource for introducing Ireland to people who would not be willing to delve into our history or study the details of our social and economic situation. I recall that whenever we had an open day at our Embassy in Berlin, many of our visitors were drawn to a poster we had on display with images of our leading writers.

Irish literature is especially valuable at this particular time as we run through a series of important centenaries, as it offers a window into Ireland’s past. Irish writing will have a special relevance next year as we remember the Easter Rising of 1916. It cannot be pure coincidence that the most eventful decade in Irish history was also the decade that saw the publication of three great Yeats collections, Responsibilities, The Wild Swans at Coole and Michael Robartes and the Dancer, James Joyce’s Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, and if we stretch things a little, Synge's Playboy of the Western World and O'Casey's three Dublin plays. I take the view that, when we remember our past, we ought to include such literary landmarks as well as the major historical milestones on the road to independence.

To coincide with this year’s IASIL Conference, I posted a quote from Yeats's Autobiographies on my Twitter account @DanMulhall. In this passage, Yeats dreams of bringing Ireland together through 'a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed from provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.'

When Yeats wrote of ‘provincialism’, I suppose he was referring to narrower ways of looking at the world. As he made clear in that manifesto poem, ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, he was determined to sing 'to sweeten Ireland's wrong' without in anyway compromising the quality and integrity of his writing about 'things discovered in the deep/Where only body's laid asleep.'

Yeats encountered frustration and disenchantment in his quest to create a national literature that would match his artistic ambitions, but the global gathering of scholars at IASIL is proof that Irish literature is today being subjected to an exacting criticism, and that it exhibits not just a European pose, but a global one.

It is a very positive thing for Ireland that our literature has attracted such an international audience and that it is being interrogated by such a talented global community of scholars. They will meet in July next year for the 40th IASIL at my own favourite place of learning, University College Cork.

Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador in London