Higgins to open conference on Douglas Hyde and State

Labour TD Mr Michael D. Higgins will have an ideal opportunity next weekend to reveal whether he intends to contest the November presidential election when he opens a conference in honour of Ireland's first president, Douglas Hyde, in Co Roscommon.

The theme of the 17th Douglas Hyde conference is the link between Hyde and the State.

The Labour Party will decide in the coming weeks whether to nominate a candidate to run against the President, Mrs McAleese, who is widely expected to seek a second term.

The Douglas Hyde festival is being held at a number of venues in Co Roscommon where the founder of Conradh na Gaeilge was born, the son of a Church of Ireland rector.

The unlikely link between Ireland's first president and Maeve Brennan, the Dublin-born writer who was one of the first women to work for the prestigious New Yorker magazine, will be explored at the conference.

Connections between politics and the arts will also be explored by several contributors.

Festival director Ms Mary O'Malley, the Connemara-born poet, will interview returned emigrants about their experiences.

Ms Angela Bourke, a lecturer in Irish at University College Dublin, where Hyde was professor of modern Irish, will examine the connections between Ireland's first president and the subject of her recently published biography, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker. The conference runs from July 16th to 18th.