A NUMBER of wonderful publications on Ireland have come out as part of the festival. Irlandes Paralleles is a series of essays on Northern Ireland, with contributors including Robin Glendinning and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. L'Imaginaire l'est L'Irlande is a book of extracts from Irish writers, with glorious photographs of their inspirational landscapes: the sea view is a clear winner, but Anne Enright plumps for a Dublin row of semi-d's. Desirs D'Irlande, edited by Paul Brennan and Catherine de Saint Phalle, is a collection of fluently translated essays on imagining Ireland, with contributors including Bob Quinn, Fintan O'Toole, John Banville, Eavan Boland, Fintan Vallely, Angela Bourke and John Hume, who speaks of art's importance in the defeat of (literally translated) "the sirens of traditional ideologies".
To sell the book to the French, however, it was obviously judged necessary to put a red haired little girl on the cover. Tris Celte. And while Bob Quinn rails in his essay about false pancelticisme, stressing the fact that an island nation must have been formed by endless waves of diverse immigrants, his own film, The Bishop's Story, is showing in the Printemps Celte festival of art from "contemporary Celtic cultures".
