Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Professor Roy Foster is not my favourite historian, but his magnificent two-volume biography of William Butler Yeats, one and a half volumes of which I have managed to read, raised in my mind the point raised by Senator Norris. Perhaps the single greatest tribute to both William Butler Yeats and Senator Michael Yeats is that a man of such firmly rooted good sense survived extraordinary celebrity.

I did not appreciate that celebrity existed on the scale it did 100 years ago until I read Professor Foster's biography. William Butler Yeats was not just a poet, but a significant national and international celebrity, with all that carried with it. It is astonishing that Michael Yeats came from that with the breadth of vision he clearly had. I will not try to pay tribute to a man I never met, but he clearly had vision and it is clear he left a wonderful memory in Fianna Fáil. He is not just somebody about whom people are nostalgic or whom they remember in a ritual way. It is clear he had an impact on Fianna Fáil and that it had an impact on him and left him with huge loyalty to the party.

The richness of that sort of family commitment is something which culminated in extraordinary generosity in terms of the amount of the memorabilia of William Butler Yeats which has been donated to the Irish people. It will, courtesy of the National Library, be a source of wonder, entertainment and study for generations. That heritage could have been scattered to a dozen different enormously rich American universities, as has happened in other cases. It is not just a tribute to the poetry of William Butler Yeats, but to the extraordinary practical patriotism of the Yeats family. There is, of course, no doubt that former Senator Yeats was a man of considerable years, meaning that there is no sense of tragedy in his passing. However, there is a sense of history, since we are moving a generation further away from figures who formed our national consciousness. Professor Roy Foster's biography was the first time I fully appreciated, as an ignorant engineer, the degree to which a culturally separate identity was moulded at the turn of the 20th century along with the political one. There was a ferment of different ideas, people who argued with Yeats and with whom he argued, out of which emerged a very distinct sense of a separate identity for the people of this State as opposed to what was then the rest of the United Kingdom.

Michael Yeats was quite clearly a product of such a sense of different identity. It was not an exclusive one, since he was a committed European, and his father was also a man of international vision, with a great attachment to poets not only from different countries but from different parts of the world, Rabindranath Tagore being one of his great friends and heroes.

It is therefore a particularly apposite moment for Seanad Éireann to pay tribute to the late Michael Yeats. On behalf of the Labour Party, I sympathise with his family on the occasion of their considerable loss. However, I would also like to think we were celebrating the man and the family, who did so much to give this country a separate identity and then, having done so, contributed to its development and security.