This article is from page 22 of the 2012-08-21 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 22 JPG
A NOTE of hope for the future of Ireland was heralded by Professor Kevin Whelan at the Merriman Summer School in Lisdoonvarna last week. Professor Whelan, who is the Director of the Keough Naughton University of Notre Dame Centre in Dublin, opened this year’s Summer School at the Pavillion in Lisdoonvarna.
According to Whelan, rural communities in Clare and all over Ireland remain beautiful but should be developed with reference to the local environment and the work of previous generations, rather than through other ideas imposed from outside.
“Despite our efforts to exploit it, to ravage it and to neglect it, we still live on a beautiful island. We can re- store Ireland to itself and bequeath it to Irish people not yet born. We can all still open our minds, our eyes and our hearts to it,” he said.
“Seamus Heaney does this as he experiences the Flaggy Shore in the Burren in autumn. He says, ‘When the wind and the light are working off each other’ and ‘big soft buffetings come at the car sideways and catch the heart off guard and blow it open’.”
The theme of the 2012 Summer School was ‘Thriving at the Crossroads: Rural Ireland in a Globalised World’ and this put the focus of many contributors on both the positive and negative changes which impacted on rural Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years.
“The rural countryside is the cumulative creation of countless gen- erations of people living in a specific place, the sedimentation of culture from the stream of time,” continued Professor Whelan. “It nourishes deep social and psychological wellsprings by providing a sense of continuity. It remains too, an enduring source of spiritual and artistic inspiration, stimulating creativity in our best artists. It provides an inexhaustible font of ideas on how we can best use our land, sympathetic with the wider search for ecological sustainability and socio-economic well-being.
“The countryside is the dynamic arena in which the drama of human history, the never-ending dialogue of nature and culture, has been constantly played. Cultural landscapes embody the natural history of humankind, of a long and evolving relationship with landscape.”