IT is a great, posthumous, tribute to Kate O'Brien that the annual celebration in Limerick of her life and work now attracts speakers of the stature of the President, Mrs Robinson, and the English writer and critic, Marina Warner.
The Kate O'Brien literary weekend, now in its 13th year, is an attempt to make some restitution for the lack of support shown the novelist in her lifetime, when two of her books were banned in this State for obscenity, and to rescue her work from neglect.
That the censorship of her work seems so inexplicable and unjustifiable to us now is a measure of the profound changes which Irish society has undergone in a short period.
The importance of avoiding complacency about our newly acquired liberalism, and of remembering our recent past became one of the leitmotifs of the weekend's deliberations.
Competing versions of Irishness, and the importance of acknowledging the experiences and perspectives of people whose lives do not fit into a monolithic view of national identity were important themes. Mrs Robinson touched on these in her opening address, by referring to Kate, O'Brien's "awkward voice", which is questioning, challenging and testing".
The world O'Brien wrote of in her novels, the comfortable, relatively privileged Limerick of the Catholic middle class, with its "cramped choices" and stifling respectability, is, Mrs Robinson said, an important part of our past, which we should reclaim and attempt to understand.
A writer like O'Brien, who "both loves and reproaches a community", is not always welcome in Ireland, she said, but the way "we shelter and honour these awkward spirits is a measure of us" as a nation. The importance of memory, as well as its unreliability and selectiveness, was alluded to by a number of the speakers on Saturday, including the Irish Times journalist and novelist, Mary Morrissy, writer and TCD academic Ronit Lenttn, and the London based novelist, Aishling Foster.
Kate O'Brien's last published work, her memoir of her five haunts Presentation Parlour was a reference point for the weekend's theme Secret Histories, Hidden Lives, which was sufficiently broad to encompass an authoritative paper on the struggle of women survivors of the Holocaust to speak and to be heard (Ronit Lentin), and the history, form and function of lullabyes, as rich sources of language acquisition, which are imprinted with the conditions of women's lives (Marina Warner).
Aishling Foster's lively, provocative paper, "Missing From the Picture: Family memories and fictional history", had an autobiographical element that was echoed in the presentations given by the Limerick writers Jo Slade, Michael Curtin and Maeve Kelly later in the day.
Foster spoke of her experiences of growing up in a middle class Dublin suburb in the 1950s and 1960s, and the sense of disjunction she felt in relation to the prevailing images and symbols of Irishness. Her family, with its urban values, was "at odds with everything that was really Irish, as defined by de Valera's version".
While in the past decade, she said, Irish society has begun to look unflinchingly at unpleasant truths - about repressed sexuality, for example - there is a danger that "a new, equally unreal version of Ireland, with its Celtic theme parks, is being slipped in before the revised version is allowed to settle".
The suggestion that one of the reasons that the Catholic middle classes have so rarely been represented in literature, apart from Kate O'Brien's work, is that there is a sense of shame felt by this group at having survived and indirectly benefited from the Famine, was raised in the concluding general discussion on Saturday afternoon.
Links between survivors of the Irish Famine and of the Holocaust were suggested, but not entertained by Ronit Lentin, who strenuously rejected attempts to draw comparisons between the two catastrophes.
That such comparisons we're being made, however, is a reflection of the extremely diffuse nature of the discussions over the weekend, which diluted their effectiveness. After 13 years, it is arguable that the Kate O'Brien Weekend needs to clarify its direction to decide whether it is an opportunity for Kate O'Brien devotees to meet and discuss her books, or whether it aspires to be a broader literary and cultural forum, along the lines of a summer school.
At present, it falls somewhere between the two. While individual speakers were of great interest, the theme was so broad that there was insufficient focus to enable real debate.