The triumph of this year’s Cúirt despite the disruptive Icelandic Volcanic Ash is not just a tribute to the energy and dedication of its directors but also an indication of the increasing importance of the festival in Galway’s calendar year, a fact that is further underlined by the subtle change in the traditional local greeting of “You won’t feel the Christmas” and “You won’t feel the Races” to “You won’t feel The Arts Festival” and “You won’t feel Cúirt”. The positive and immediate reaction of writers all over the country who stepped in enthusiastically to substitute for the writers abroad whose flights were cancelled signals just how culturally important Cúirt is deemed to be nationwide and augurs well for its future.

For obvious historic and geographic reasons, Ireland has had more than her fair share of Emigrants. There are few, if any, Irish families who do not have relatives living abroad, and the theme of emigration is at the very core of. our cultural expression ever since Colmcille’s self-imposed exile to Iona. Over the last generation, each generation seems to have at least one classic emigrant narrative. Pádraic Ó Conaire’s “Deroaíocht”, Michéal Mac Gahbhann’s “Rothaí Mor an tSaoil”, Donal Mac Amhlaigh’s “Dialann Deoraí”, Patrick MacGill’s “Children of the Dead End”, John Healy’s “Nineteen Acres” and Brian Friel’s ”Philadelphia Here I come” spring easily to mind.

It was at a meeting at 11.00 am on what seems like an age ago in Chris Williams’s restaurant The Brasserie in William Street that the idea of Cúirt, Fred Johnston’s brainchild was first floated. Present at that meeting were Fred Johnston, Dick Donaghue, Ronnie O’Gorman and myself.  Johnston had just come to work for a six-month stint in the Galway Arts Centre with a vague literary brief.  Dick Donaghue, the then director, asked him on his first day what he was going to do. Johnston replied that it was a dream of his to organise a Literary Festival in Ireland that was dedicated solely to Poetry. This meeting was held to explore the possibilities of such a festival. The reaction to the idea around the table that morning was positive but there was a long way to go.

Inside the cover of a 2006 paperback edition of the book the blurb reads: “Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, a village that is still her home. She attended local schools and the University of Alabama. Before she started writing she lived in New York where she worked in the reservations department of an international airline. She has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, two honorary degrees and various other literary and library awards. Her chief interests apart from writing are nineteenth-century literature and eighteenth-century music, watching politicians and cats, travelling and being alone”. With this somewhat terse statement, Harper Lee, as behoves the true storyteller, disappears completely and the narrator, eight years old Miss Jean Louise Finch alias “Scout”,