A título personal agradezco a Irlanda su aporte a la cultura tras los escritores que ha ofrecido a la tradición literaria de Occidente: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Shaw, Beckett y Heaney . Luego del festejo de San Patricio ayer en Estados Unidos, Thomas Cahill publicó un artículo en el New York Times sobre el papel de Irlanda en la conservación de la cultura libresca en Europa a partir del siglo sexto de la era cristiana. It is hard to overstate the momentousness of that collapse. By the early sixth century, Western Europe had become largely illiterate, its teachers dead, its students on the run, its libraries turned into kindling. Ireland, however, had just settled down, thanks to a tough old bird named Patrick, a Roman citizen raised in the province of Britain who had been grabbed by Irish slavers when he was a teenager. It was after his escape that Patrick resolved to seek priestly ordination and return to Ireland to preach the Gospel. The glories of Christianity — particularly its books