The Ireland Institute will nurture writing which tackles the revisionist and anti-nationalist stance. The Ireland Institute was founded two years ago, initially with the aim of buying Pearse's birthplace on the street of the same name in Dublin. On Friday, the institute is being officially launched with an inaugural lecture given by Thomas Keneally.

Having secured the building, the institute hopes to refurbish the house and use it as a centre from which "various topics which inspired the founders of the modern nation might again be studied and debated in a wide-ranging and open fashion", according to their explanatory literature.

The founder members include: Damien Kiberd, Editor of the Sunday Business Post, who is also the Chairman; Declan Kiberd, Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at UCD; the artist, Robert Ballagh; lecturer Richard Roche and Poetry Ireland's Tommy Smith. Among their patrons are Thomas Keneally, Edna O'Brien and Seamus Deane. The three areas which the institute defines as those in which it has interest in debating are culture, journalism and history. It hopes to invite speakers from inside and outside Ireland to discuss issues such as cultural policy in post-colonial countries. Through the medium of newsletters and pamphlets, it aims to provide a forum in which to offer critiques of current practices in print and mass media, particularly what it sees as "pack journalism: the tendency of all journalists to ride together", particularly with reference to republicanism and nationalism. In time, it hopes to run courses on critical studies of the media. It wishes to extend the debate on Ireland's history by moving beyond the schools of nationalism and revisionism, to "seek a fuller confrontation with the past".