POLITICIANS, like writers, are very sensitive to criticism, Munster MEP Brian Crowley told the opening of the Kerry International Summer School of Living Irish Authors in Tralee yesterday.
The reason, he explained, was that the blood, sweat and tears were never remembered. Art was a part of the soul and body - hence critics were hard to take. He recalled how Brendan Behan once said that critics were like eunuchs: they knew how it was done, they saw it being done every day, but they didn't know how to do it themselves.
The theme of this year's summer school, which takes KISS as its acronym, is "Rites and religions - visions and divisions in contemporary Ireland". Featuring many well known writers and poets from home and abroad, this year's highlight will be next Saturday's memorial day to the late Gus Martin, when Edna O'Brien and Brendan Kennelly (last year described as the "the sexiest man in Ireland") will read at the Siamsa Tire auditorium in Tralee, an event which the organisers say will attract up to 350 people.
The school's academic director, Peter van de Kamp, said KISS was unique in that it focused exclusively on living authors - "who had a dangerous capacity to talk back".
Mr Crowley, introduced yesterday as "the second most sexiest man in Ireland", said that when religion was mentioned, people tended to stand back and go into hiding. The situation in the North was an example of what could happen when religion was hijacked. Catholicism in Northern Ireland had become linked with republicanism, therefore people dissociated themselves from republicanism because of the fear of being associated with violence. A common feature of all religions, he went on, was the idea of a higher power, a greater God, and the vision of a life after death.
There were powerful images associated with religious human themes, Mr Crowley said, adding that he remembered in Strasbourg at the European Parliament, when the DUP's Dr Ian Paisley averred that Catholicism was not a religion but propaganda. People would have to move away from formal structures and realise the bottom line was that everyone was interdependent and would have to live on the island of Ireland, forgiving and forgetting in order to find new paths. Another powerful image, he continued, was on his first day as a member of the European Parliament in July 1994, when he saw Simone Weil, a survivor of Auschwitz, walking hand in hand with George Ratzenberger, whose father and uncles were "doctors" in the same concentration camp.
Mr Crowley said Ireland was now an integral part of the most powerful economic bloc in the world. The EU, with 15 member states, sharing 42 languages and 65 ethnic groups, still had divisions, but had learned to overcome them. The lesson for Ireland was that we should do so too.
At yesterday's opening, novelist and short story writer Maeve Kelly launched Clearing the Space - A Why of Writing, by Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, the painter, poet, playwright and actor. The book was originally given as a lecture at the 1995 KISS summer school, and is a personal meditation on writing and creativity. Ms Kelly said that the work had an important purpose - that of clearing the space for the imagination in which to work.
"But it also has another objective because it describes, as the reader embarks on it, travels in space of a different kind. The space which has limitless horizons because the imagination is limitless. When we reach out beyond the boundaries of normal experience and dare to change perceived reality by the vigour of our imagination, it is good to have a perceptive and stimulating guide, as we have here with Anne in this, her latest book," Ms Kelly said.
She said it was imperative that Irish booksellers should give as much acknowledgment to Irish writers, particularly contemporary ones, as others did.
