What makes us commemorate one literary figure and neglect another? Is it fashion, fad or fortune? With anniversaries coming up for the largely neglected George Moore, Thomas Moore and Lady Gregory (right), how could we do more to remember those who helped to shape our culture?, asks Robert O'Byrne

Thanks to a remarkable synchronicity, a number of important anniversaries fall within a few weeks of one another this spring. But thanks to an unremarkable combination of public and private indifference, they will pass largely unnoticed.

February 24th marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the novelist George Moore, while the following day marks that of the death of the poet and musician Thomas Moore. Less than three weeks later, and within two days of each other, fall the birth dates of Lady Gregory and Canon Sheehan, also 150 years ago.

If ever there was an opportune moment to celebrate the extravagant diversity of our literature, it would be during this period. Nothing will happen, however, primarily because the four writers, while once widely admired and read, are now little more than names in the Irish literary canon.

Last October, Irish Times journalist Fintan O'Toole, remarked upon the complete silence at the time of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. As O'Toole commented, not only was Sheridan one of the finest playwrights produced by this country, he was also a parliamentarian who for some 30 years passionately argued on behalf of Ireland's rights, for Catholic emancipation and for the extension of civil liberties. Yet there is no statue to his memory, no so-called summer school marking his achievements, not even a plaque on the nearderelict site of his birth, in Dublin.

Perhaps this neglect matters not at all. Literature is as vulnerable to fashion as any other cultural form, and nobody can say for certain whose memory will be cherished and whose forgotten. But it remains extraordinary that while some Irish writers posthumously receive adulatory attention in their native country, very many others are ignored.

Last month, in Seán Ó Mórdha's documentary Portrait Of The Irish Artist, the writer and critic Seamus Deane commented on the commodification of culture in Ireland, referring to the manner in which a handful of dead authors, most notably W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, had been conveniently recruited to help sell the country as a tourist destination. The near-deification of a few has been to the detriment of the majority, the latter overlooked, the former overscrutinised.

The imminent spate of literary anniversaries will once more confirm that while Ireland has always been rich in writers, its record in remembering them remains poor. There are, for example, no plans to commemorate the death of Thomas Moore, the country's most famous poet in the 19th century but recalled today, if at all, for a handful of sentimental verses about the scenery of Co Wicklow.

However, Moore was also a friend of Robert Emmet, about whom he wrote in Oh Breathe Not His Name, five years after the latter's death. He was the biographer of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, an opponent of the 1800 Act of Union and, like Sheridan, a supporter of Catholic emancipation, having been born into that faith.

Although buried in England, his native city of Dublin voted a substantial sum of money to give him a national funeral at Glasnevin cemetery. Five years later, a statue by Christopher Moore - no relation - was raised to the poet on College Green, of which Leopold Bloom remarks in Ulysses: "They did right putting him up over a urinal; meeting of the waters."

And at the time of the bicentenary of Thomas Moore's birth, in May 1979, there were a number of events to acknowledge his importance. The anniversary of his death, however, seems set to pass unobserved.

So too will the birth of George Moore. Last spring in the Dublin Review, the novelist's biographer, Adrian Frazier, wrote an open letter to Bord Fáilte in which he contrasted the adulation of Brendan Behan with the neglect of George Moore. Arguing that the latter wrote better books than the former "by a long shot", Frazier sought to discover, if only for his own satisfaction, why one author should be promoted by the tourist board and another overlooked.

In Behan's case, the character of the man is clearly important, as his anarchic, often alcohol-fuelled behaviour conformed in many respects to what overseas audiences expected of the Irish. And while Behan may sometimes have been intolerable company while alive, posthumously his life can be synopsised as a sequence of amusing anecdotes.

George Moore, on the other hand, is more problematic, not least because, as Frazier points out, he managed to wreak social and literary havoc while never drinking to excess; a sober anarchist is so much less marketable than a drunk one. If Moore had an addiction, it was to telling the truth as he perceived it; even in his lifetime, the trait tended to win him at least as many enemies as it did allies. While much of his behaviour, as Frazier's biography shows, remains highly entertaining, the amusement is of a more cerebral nature than that of someone such as Behan.

Not that Moore is without his admirers; it is just that they are few in number and inclined to become preoccupied with unhelpful forms of commemorating their hero. Frazier notes that the George Moore Society wants to restore the novelist's Mayo home, Moore Hall, which was burned out by the IRA towards the end of the Civil War. But Moore had little or no interest in the place. He seldom stayed in or visited it, and in his memoirs he described the hall as representing "feudalism" and said he wished "that I could summon sufficient courage to pull it down and sell it; it would make excellent rubble to build labourer's cottages." The campaign to reconstruct Moore Hall shows that some acts of remembrance are less appropriate than others to the person supposedly being honoured.

Frazier proposes one further reason for the want of appreciation for George Moore in his native country: that he was a member of the landlord class. This may also help to explain the comparative neglect of both Lady Gregory and her neighbour Edward Martyn, despite the importance of their respective roles in the Irish literary movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At least local enthusiasts in Co Galway have ensured that Lady Gregory's memory is celebrated each autumn at Coole Park, and they intend to mark the anniversary of her birth in March.

But, remarkably, at the time of writing the Abbey Theatre had made no plans to celebrate this imminent and eminent occasion, even though Lady Gregory was one of the institution's founders. In a long essay in the New York Review Of Books last August, novelist Colm Toibín, who is shortly to publish a study of Lady Gregory, demonstrated that Cathleen Ni Houlihan - a play first performed 100 years ago next April - was almost entirely written by Lady Gregory rather than by Yeats, to whom its authorship was credited. So where are the plans to restage the work, which inspired Yeats to ask after the 1916 Rising: "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot"?

Despite deserving far greater appreciation than she has received here since her death, in 1932, Lady Gregory probably suffers from two drawbacks: she was a representative of the old order - her title will always stand against her - and she was a woman.

Ireland's cultural idols are far more likely to be male than female; otherwise, there would be greater attention paid to the likes of Lady Morgan, another fine writer and champion of this country who is now scarcely remembered beyond the academic environment. In 1863, four years after her death, an admirer wrote that her name "is not one that can or will be readily forgotten . . . Her name will hold no contemptible position in the political and literary history of her times."

This prediction proved hopelessly false for the author of The Wild Irish Girl and a succession of other novels that made Lady Morgan one of the most successful writers of early 19th-century Europe. The 150th anniversary of her death does not fall until 2009, so there is still plenty of time to ensure that this remarkable Irishwoman is remembered and her contribution to our cultural development celebrated.

In the meantime, while it is too late to organise anything substantial for the series of anniversaries falling in February and March, they might at least serve to recall both the transitory nature of much fame and also the unfair neglect into which so many of our former heroes are prone to fall.

The 150th anniversary of Canon Sheehan's birth is to be marked in mid-March in Doneraile, Co Cork, the town where he lived for the last 18 years of his life and wrote his books