In March my wife and I went to see the Book of Kells, in the library of Trinity College, Dublin.  It was a cool spring morning, there were long groups of tourists, moving slowly but deliberately towards the ticket office of Ireland’s premier attraction.  After we paid our fee, we zigzagged through the display panels and stood with a pair of Germans, face to face with one of the world’s oldest books.  There was a hushed moment before a party of French schoolchildren was herded in: and then the Book of Kells was lost in a crowd of mildly interested teenagers. 

A month later I was sitting in the Town Hall Theatre, listening to one of the sixty writers from seventeen countries, over whom stretched an enormous EU flag: twelve yellow stars on a blue background.  The flag’s history dates back to 1955, when it was chosen by the Council of Europe: twelve representing perfection, the circle unity.  Sometime during the week I realised that the stars also represented the points on a clock face.  Facing an enormous clock for a week is bound to bring up thoughts of mortality and life and the passing of time.  By the end of the week the flag had taken on a Zen quality: throughout each session, on the EU flag, a second hand kept ticking. 

Thankfully Time is just as diligent in measuring cruelty or stupidity or the lives of dictatorships, as it is the lives of saints or the forgotten or the long-winded speaker.  It is incredible  how Europe has changed in the fifteen years since the fall of Communism. 

Looking back at the week of Cuirt, two moments have refused to let me sit in peace.  The first was on the opening night with Brian McCabe’s salvo against the war in Iraq, and on the last night the talk given by James Kelman, and reading from his new book You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free.  It is a great thing to proclaim our beliefs, to stand up and do so in front of an audience is both challenging and liberating.  On the other side, it is also great to find people we admire share our opinions.  I picked up one of Kelman’s books afterwards and went to get a late dinner in a Chinese restaurant, and read one of his essays explaining that the conventions of written English stifled the voice of the accented writer.  It might seem an odd point upon which to essay, but language is not just the medium of communication, it is the theatre within which writers stage their plays. 

Writers from the former-communist countries obviously lived under censorship, but in the ‘free’ world, there are many other forms of censorship, less obvious, and so more difficult to battle against: self-censorship; the censorship of the copy-editors, publishers; and ultimately the censorship of the public - who may choose not to buy books because they do not approve of what it says about them or their world.  It is this need to bring hidden issues to the fore that drive many artists.  Literature has always been at the forefront of social reform.  It is not the radical views of Dickens or George Elliot or Swift that now strike us as peculiar – but the then accepted views, that it is right to lock poor in poor houses, or let the free market go unfettered, or to house rural workers in squalid conditions. 

In western Ireland the question of language, and more precisely the spread of English, is a current issue.  Unlike many others, I welcome the spread of the English language.  One reason for this is purely selfish: I have been able to travel to the remote parts of the world and teach my native tongue.  But it is my experience there that makes me a firm proponent of a lingua franca: which just happens to be English.  For an Eritrean or a Chinese or a Pakistani person, English is the gateway to an international realm of ideas; and most importantly it is their only way of keeping apace with the latest engineering, medical or digital innovations.  Which brings me back to the Book of Kells - pride of Irish culture, even though it which was written in Latin.  But then Latin was the English of the whole mediaeval period, and allowed the writings of men like Erasmus or to be easily disseminated throughout Europe.  In the same way English is no longer the native tongue of Canada or Australia or England or the USA – it is an international language.  The language in which Chinese and  Japanese, Russian and German, greet each other and communicate. 

I discovered something very interesting that day in Trinity College.  The Book of Kells is not Irish and should not be in Dublin at all.  It was written by Scots in Scotland, so its real home should be the library of Old College, in Edinburgh.  It should be the premier attraction of the Scottish Tourist Board. But then the name ‘Scotland’ comes from the name of a people who came from northern Ireland.  The book was written by monks who followed the Irish monk St. Columba, so that makes it Irish.  Or does it?  How important is the nationality of saints?  The patron saint of Ireland, Patrick, was not Irish, but English.  If the workers decide the nationality of an object then why is the Bayeaux Tapestry, which was stitched by English maidens, in France and not Canterbury?   

These might seem trite points, but it is on such tenuous facts and factoids and myths that most nationalities depend on for their patriotism.  Of course Time makes a mockery of many issues, and nationality is no exception.  The idea of Nation states was an invention of the 19^th century, and – like a freeze frame photo – modern European identities have been built on the back of this particular moment in time.  If nation states had been invented in say, 1168, then many of the nationalities we get so excited about would disappear.  England and north-west France would be a country called Normandy; Italy would be Venice and Florence; North-west Scotland and many of the smaller British islands would be ruled from Norway; and Ireland would be four countries called Munster, Leinster, Connaught and Ulster – which, of course, would give the Irish much enhanced voting powers in the Eurovision Song Contest. 

Despite the cultural and genetic confusion across Europe, people and governments have tried to draw lines where none exist.  Issues of race and nationality have plagued Europe for hundreds of years: and the wars in the former Republic of Yugoslavia are examples of the hatreds that still exist.  This matter of nationality and citizenship has particular relevance to me at this moment.  My wife gave birth to a son three days before Cuirt began.  He is eligible to Irish Citizenship, but I am English, my wife is an US citizen with Scottish parents and a grandfather who came from Co Mayo.  So what does that make our son, if not confused?

This brings this essay back to the theme of Cuirt: the enlargement of the EU and celebrating writers from the new member states.  The EU’s roots come from the 1955 European Coal and Steel Community,  a trading agreement designed to prevent war between France and Germany.  And, uniquely, it is that pursuit of peace and prosperity that have remained central to the principals of the EU.  With the new member counties the EU now contains 25 countries and nearly half a billion people.  It stretches from Finland in the Arctic Circle to Cyprus, a mere 20 miles from the coast of Lebanon.  It is a political recognition of the cultural inheritance we all share, and, whether we like it or not, has given us and all our children, another nationality: European.