Professors and all manner of academics gathered in Boston College House on St Stephen's Green, Dublin, this week for publication of a new book on Ireland.
These are "reflections on Ireland in the new century by leading members of the Irish Studies community from both sides of the Atlantic", said Robert Savage, editor of Ireland in the New Century and professor of Irish history at Boston College.
A range of academics were "asked to talk about the future of Ireland from an Irish Studies point of view", he said. The essays were first presented at a conference at the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington DC in May 2000.
When Prof Kevin Whelan, of Notre Dame University, spoke in Washington, he was "trying to rescue republicanism from its modern manifestations".
Prof Alvin Jackson, of Queen's University, whose own book, Home Rule: An Irish History, has just been published in hardback by Weidenfeld and Nicholson, said he spoke "about the future of Unionism and the North" in his lecture.
Maurice Bric, director of the Centre for American Studies at UCD, and secretary of the Irish Research Council, was among those who attended the launch in Dublin this week. And Cormac O'Malley, the New York-based academic who is currently writing a book on the Irish Civil War (1922-1924), chatted to PhD student Owen McGee.
Angela Bourke, of the UCD Irish department and author of The Burning of Bridget Cleary, is currently working on a book about Maeve Brennan, a Dublin woman who became a bag lady in the US and wrote for the New Yorker before her death in 1993.
Many, such as book collector Aidan Heavey, who recently donated his collection of more than 12,000 books to the library in his native Athlone, went on to attend the Robert Emmet gathering in the National Library.
Others who contributed to the book's series of essays, which is published by Four Courts Press, include Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Seamus Deane and Declan McGonagle.