roanoke.com Real Politics / Preston Bryant

Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

When we think of Ireland, we think mostly of conflict. After all, that's what seems to have consumed the Irish people ever since Henry VIII told the largely Catholic population that it's the Protestant church that should rule their lives.

But when Ireland's president, Mary McAleese, showed up in Charlottesville last week, it is not her republic's ongoing conflict with Northern Ireland that she wanted to discuss so much as how the once sleepy island has awakened, progressed, and is now a model for other European nations to follow.

McAleese was in town to kickoff a four-day conference on "Re-Imagining Ireland," where about a hundred Irish scholars, artists, journalists, politicians, and business folk gathered with hundreds more interested Americans of the same ilk to discuss all that Ireland has been, what it now is, and what it can be. The conference was sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

On hand to greet McAleese for the conference's opening dinner -- where some 700 people packed the Omni Hotel ballroom -- were Gov. Mark Warner and a respectable bipartisan contingent from the General Assembly. Warner recounted how on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, with the day's terrorists attacks on our nation so shockingly on our minds, McAleese phoned up the American ambassador and invited him over to her home for some quiet time.

The Republican and Democratic legislators were on hand to show support for Warner, a Democrat, who earlier in the day had discussed with McAleese how Virginia and Ireland might strengthen the already strong economic and cultural ties that bind our state with her nation. Partisanship, you know, stops at the water's edge.

In many respects, Virginia and Ireland have been -- and still are -- on something of a parallel path of progress. Our state has been transformed over the past half-century from a largely agrarian economy to one that's led by sophisticated manufacturing, cutting-edge R&D, and financial services. Ireland has grown over the past 30 years, according to McAleese, from one of Europe's more troubled economies to one of its most stable. The president -- Ireland's second female president (her predecessor also was a woman) -- proudly proclaimed her nation as arguably Europe's most progressive and her people now among its richest. Ireland, she said, is the world's top exporter of computer software -- no, not the U.S. and not India -- and today is America's ninth largest trading partner.

All of this was music to Warner's ears. The governor, a venture capitalist-turned-politician, noted that in his former life he backed an IT company that's now thriving in Ireland's western coastal city of Galway. As the governor is now planning a trade mission to Germany and Switzerland, perhaps a swing to Ireland might be in order, too.

The VFH's Irish conference is one of its more ambitious undertakings in many years. Recognizing Ireland's remarkable climb to enviable heights in today's high-tech, high-finance, high-brow world -- whether via its software industry or by producing Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists like Frank McCourt ("Angela's Ashes") -- really shouldn't be all that surprising when you think of its people's 1,500 years of successes in industry and culture. They shone in their medieval use of gold and bronze and excelled in early shipbuilding. And it was Ireland's monastic scribes who preserved early western literature as the continent's barbarians sacked all that was good (and bad) about the Roman Empire and ushered in a couple hundred dark-aged years.

All of that was remembered over the conference's four days as so many of Ireland's leading pols, academics, and artists contemplated how to harness that history and genius and re-imagine it for today's economic, cultural, and political good -- a good that certainly could be integral to helping forge the peace that has so long eluded McAleese's Protestant and Catholic islanders.

So interesting it is that in a state whose history is as English as boxwoods there should be such a distinguished gathering and conference that - who knows? - could in some small way lead to a modern, progressive Ireland made even greater by a long-lasting peace.

It also won't be surprising that should a re-imagined Ireland really spring from this conference, it will have been the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities that helped produce it. The VFH for many years has been sowing seeds of hope for a brighter Virginia by employing the humanities and public policy to build bridges between its past and future.

What's been good for Virginia just might also be good for Ireland. We'll see.

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