David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Cathaoirleach. I feel I am being advanced to an unusual degree because this is, after all, not just Yeats's evening but Senator O'Keeffe's evening. I thank the Government for providing this opportunity for us to speak of one of the great Members of this House as well as a poet. W.B. Yeats was someone who took up the cause of divorce when it was extremely unpopular, who spoke of the Anglo-Irish minority as no little people and was a remarkable figure here. He also produced the first and most beautiful coinage this State has ever seen, so he was a remarkably practical man for a poet.

He is remembered in this House also because of the wonderful portrait of Constance Markievicz that hangs on the Seanad staircase. When I see that I always think of those beautiful lines of Yeats that I am sure Senator O'Keeffe was going to, and may well, quote:

The light of evening, Lissadell,

Great windows open to the south,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazelle.

In the manner of many families of what I call the Gaelic descendancy, my great aunt, after she left Alexandria, was governess to the Gore-Booth girls in Lissadell and although she had an impeccable Gaelic ancestry, she was a complete Union Jack waving, God save the Queen British imperialist. I think that browned off those two girls so much that they went off and got pistols and became revolutionaries so I claim a certain level of a family interest in this but, unlike that other female scion of the revolution, Maude Gonne, they did at least have some Irish blood. Maude Gonne did not have a titter of Irish blood. She first saw Ireland from the inside of the Curragh Camp where her father was a colonel in the British army. She did not have a word of Irish, and she started an organisation called Inghinidhe na hÉireann. Irish history is full of this kind of drivel and rubbish, much of it racist, from these English people like Padraig Pearse, but I will not go into that; I will talk about Yeats.

I was fascinated from a young child with the marvellous musicality of Yeats's verse. There was a swing and a melody to it, despite the fact that Yeats was notorious for having a tin ear. He could not tell the difference between the original Dixieland one step and the national anthem, but he had a wonderful sense of poetry which remained with him throughout his life.

Yeats was one of the great figures of world literature. One of the things I love about him was when somebody telephoned him - I think in 1922 - to tell him he had won the Nobel prize, his immediate response was, "How much is it?". He was immensely practical. He could make world-class poetry out of utter dross. The nonsense of the Theosophical Society, Madame Blavatsky, bangs that go bump in the night and all that kind of stuff provided him with a vocabulary about the perne in a gyre and all that wonderful, spine-tingling imagery. He was like Rembrandt, who had old buckets and scuttles and bits of oars around the studio, but he could make great art out of them, and Yeats was the same.

Yeats also came from a wonderful family. His father, Jack Yeats, was a most brilliant portrait artist and his brother, who I do not believe has been properly assessed in terms of art, is one of the great modern artists.

Yeats founded the Abbey Theatre, another thing for which we have to be grateful to him, but there is always a little bit of humour underneath it. I remember speaking at a planning conference in Sligo at which one of the planners told me that he had applied, in triplicate, as Béarla agus as Gaeilge, for permission to construct a small dwelling house of mud and wattles made, with provision for nine bean rows, on the "Lake Isle of Innisfree". It was turned down with a bang by Sligo County Council, who said it would constitute a gross insult to the visual amenity of County Sligo. So much for attempting to realise a poet's dream.

When I think of Lissadell I also think, very sadly, of the way his family were treated by this State. We do not have a good record in rewarding the figures of the literary renaissance, possibly because, and this came into my mind listening to the Minister, they were all Protestant. O'Casey was a Dublin working class Protestant, Synge - ascendancy, Shaw; Yeats, Lady Gregory, and what a tragedy that is. There were walking tours round the gardens of Coole, and that is because the house is not there any longer. It was deliberately pulled down by the State.

I remember the two old girls in Lissadell, Gabrielle and Aideen, who were wonderfully innocent, lovely creatures, and the way they were harassed by the trustees of the estate. Timber was taken out of Lissadell. I remember the way they were imprisoned in the house. I am sorry the Sinn Féin representative is not here because I remember hearing some squalid little Shinner from Sligo saying on the wireless that it was a pity about the Gore-Booths that they left the people there during the Famine with the green grass running down their lips. The Gore-Booths, like my Gaelic Irish family, bankrupted themselves feeding and looking after the people-----