Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and thank Senator Susan O'Keeffe for raising this matter in the House. The Minister is in office at an interesting time for the arts, given that Yeats2015 was launched last week and that we are on the cusp of a new year.

In many ways, the arts and culture equate to people's identity. Self-actualisation begins when one can express oneself through and experience the arts. Many needs must be taken care of before one can enjoy oneself at this level. I will focus on Yeats2015 and Thoor Ballylee. I am chairperson of the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society which was founded recently. It started its work in July or August 2013 and its goal is to reopen Yeats's ancestral home of Thoor Ballylee in south Galway in time for what would have been his 150th birthday on 13 June 2015. This is an ambitious project as Thoor Ballylee was closed in 2009 owing to severe flooding that saw the bottom floor of that impressive building flooded above the height of the Tá and Níl signs in the Chamber.

We have now accepted we cannot necessarily prevent the flooding of Thoor Ballylee but our goal is to reopen it and move the artefacts, etc. to the second floor. I do not know if the Minister has been to Thoor Ballylee but it is well worth going. It is quite a big building. It is a tower and was Yeats's living quarters. One can see how inspirational it was. The vantage point over south Galway is impressive and links to Lady Gregory's Coole Park and the nearby Kiltartan Gregory Museum.
I have written to the Department seeking a meeting with the Minister and my one request is to have it soon. For us to achieve our goal of restoring, reopening and running cultural and educational programmes in Thoor Ballylee we are looking at €1 million. We need €150,000 by next June to reopen it and it is our intent to have it. We have just hired a fund raiser and she is putting together a vision statement and a master plan. I am working closely with her, as are other members of the committee like Ronnie O'Gorman, and Sr. de Lourdes Fahy, who published and launched Galway Poems of WB Yeatslast Friday in Gort, which includes 20 of his best known poems, including The Winding Stairand At Galway Races. It is a lovely pocket sized version containing 20 of his poems. Yeats said he felt he wrote much of his best poetry in Thoor Ballylee.
We are closely linked to Sligo and the story of Yeats in 2015. Senator O'Keeffe visited us at one of our committee meetings in Gort. It is very impressive to see the energy in the group. The council, Fáilte Ireland, Galway Rural Development, the local community, and Ronnie O'Gorman and I are all involved. We have written to President Higgins to ask him to launch the project in June. We are focused on making this happen at a date suitable to the President because I am sure he will be busy with dates for Yeats in June. We will leave that up to him.
We are also looking at launching a local, national and international fund raising programme to raise the money. My request to the Minister is to arrange a meeting with a delegation from the group as soon as possible. The father or grandfather of Sr. de Lourdes Fahy used to drive Yeats, others knew him and there are long family links to him in this area of south Galway. I am hoping for people to have an open mind about having Thoor Ballylee as an important place in the Yeats story. I express some surprise that it was not built into some projects that have been funded and were announced last week, given that it is such a seminal building in the story of Yeats's life. I look forward to hearing from the Minister with regard to date for the meeting. January would be good.