Susan O'Keeffe (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. I hope the Cathaoirleach will give me a small-time indulgence, given that I have been allowed to escape from the banking inquiry committee room along with Senator Barrett. We make rare appearances in the Seanad now. However, I will try not to take the indulgence too far.

I particularly thank the Minister's Department and the former Minister, Deputy Deenihan, for their support since the launch of Yeats Day in 2012. It has been great to partner with the Western Development Commission to deliver a year-long celebration of Yeats throughout the country and across the world. I especially thank President Michael D. Higgins as the patron of Yeats2015 and, as Senator Barrett mentioned, the Yeats Society in Sligo which has flown the flag for Yeats for almost 60 years and which had the vision and foresight to say that it wanted to celebrate Yeats and that he ought to be celebrated. Its members have continued to do so over that period. Perhaps no other Irish writer has been feted simultaneously by the English poet laureate and the other national poets of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, London and Ireland as Yeats will be in Sligo on 13 June, his 150th birthday. It sums up his importance in Ireland and the world that this event is a high point among high points this week, this month and this year.

The man with silver hair who wore silver buckled shoes was a great poet, but also an unlikely champion of the Irish nation. Arguably, William Butler Yeats devoted a large part of his 79 years to the building and strengthening of the Irish identity. Indeed, the citation for his Nobel Prize from the Swedish Academy in 1923 said that his poetry gave expression to the spirit of the nation. In this Yeats2015 year of celebration we have a responsibility to salute one of the great writers and thinkers of the past two centuries and to reconnect with his inspiration and his work. This year of celebration opens a door to the world of Yeats, to encourage us to see beyond the leaving certificate curriculum and the dog-eared pages that many of us threw out when the leaving certificate ended. It extends an invitation to see beyond the caricature, to reconnect with his inspiration and language and to appreciate him in a new, multicultural 21st century Ireland. Very simply, it extends an opportunity to choose a new way of perceiving his work and his vision, not always perfect but rich and many layered.

At the turn of the 20th century the Irish spirit was troubled. Ireland was out of touch with its identity and desperate to establish its independence. At 35 years of age, Yeats was no classic revolutionary. He was not to be found manning barricades or polishing a gun. He went about it in a different way. He sought to give the troubled nation a powerful voice through its actors and writers. His keen understanding of the richness of Ireland's history and culture came from the time he had spent as a boy in his beloved Sligo. His mother was from Sligo and Yeats described the county as his spiritual home. In Sligo he experienced a type of wild freedom he would never again enjoy in his life. He listened to the storytellers and the sailors, he heard the myths and legends, he climbed the sacred mountains of Ben Bulben and Knocknarea and he fished in the rivers and streams. He loved the water and the wildness of the natural environment and these would be his bedfellows for the rest of his life.

Armed with this knowledge and his love of writing, Yeats sought to reveal to his new generation of the 20th century the wealth and complexity of our culture and history. Together with his muse and mentor, Lady Gregory from Coole Park, one of the most beautiful places with which he is associated, he worked to found the National Theatre, the Abbey Theatre, a place to articulate a voice for Ireland by speaking to its past and wrestling with its present to build a future that would instil in Ireland a sense of pride and identity. Yeats and the other writers who gathered around him created the Irish literary revival and thus were part of shaping the new 20th century nation which seized its moment at the GPO in 1916. By then the Abbey Theatre was already ten years old.

However, for his great contribution to the creation of our nation, Yeats has been almost reduced in this country to the leaving certificate perennial question of whether it will be a Yeats, Heaney or Dickinson question on paper two in the English examination. Other nations boast of their great writers. France has Proust, Germany has Thomas Mann, England has Shakespeare and America has Mark Twain. In Ireland we have let the larger part of Yeats's life and work languish and be misunderstood, at best, and, at worst, be forgotten. There is a school of thought that concentrated on his eccentricities, such as his interest in the spiritual and the occult and his Protestant upbringing. Even his name was a little posh. Somehow, he was not one of us, not even like us and certainly not of the Ireland that so famously danced at the crossroads and prayed in the church. It was relatively easy to sweep Yeats away, as something out of the ordinary rather than as someone quite extraordinary.

Despite this, we call on Yeats more often than we know. He lines and his thoughts are in our DNA. "A terrible beauty is born" is for many a formidable thought. Of course, it is part of his great work "Easter 1916", but many do not know that. Yeats had the capacity to crystallise a momentous thought in a single sentence, allowing us to cherry-pick his greatness and abandon the rest. Phrases such as "fumble in a greasy till", "add ... prayer to shivering prayer", "peace comes dropping slowly" and "Tread softly because you tread on my dreams" are among many of the quotes often used, but some have lost their original meaning or context.

Yeats was no dusty icon. He liked a glass of claret and he owned a dog. He loved the steamboats owned by his grandfather, whom he greatly admired. He loved to fish and row his boat. He chose to wear black clothes in his younger years, and the silver buckles of his later years were as deliberate. He first trained to be an artist but abandoned it in favour of writing. He was a canny businessman and his attention to detail was often an annoyance to those who worked alongside him.

As my time is limited, I will speak a little about this year. Senator Barrett has referred to the need for young people to engage. The educational project at the core of Yeats2015 has engaged with more than 100,000 national schoolchildren. Every national school in the country has taken part in this project. His sisters Lily and Lolly - Susan and Elizabeth - have their own festival this year, as they have had for the past two years. The work of his brother, Jack Yeats, is on exhibition once more in The Model in Sligo and the work of his father, John, will be exhibited in the National Gallery later in the year. There will be readings, exhibitions, poetry and song in Cork, Kerry, Kildare, Monaghan, Galway and Dublin. Yeats and James Joyce knew each other and both of their festivals, Yeats2015 and Bloomsday, will acknowledge their relationship. We have events taking place in Belfast, Chicago, Singapore, Slovakia, Vienna, Korea, Australia, Paris, London and Atlanta, to mention just some of them.

I thank the Leader of the House for allocating time to talk about Yeats, and I am sorry I have run out of time for my contribution. I acknowledge that this year is also the year of design, Irish Design 2015, and we are collaborating with the Crafts Council of Ireland this year. It is important for us to do that.Next Monday the Speaker of the House of Lords, Baroness D'Souza, will be hosting a special Yeats event. It is appropriate for us, therefore, to celebrate Yeats tonight. When Prince Charles visited Sligo recently, he acknowledged Yeats by visiting the famous grave at Drumcliff and received the world's first William Butler Yeats rose at NUI Galway. The Indian Government has gifted a bust of the Nobel Prize winning Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, which will be unveiled in Sligo in July.

We are celebrating Yeats around Ireland and the world. As Seamus Heaney said, Yeats had a marvellous gift for beating the scrap metal of day-to-day life into a ringing bell. In 2015 we have a chance not just to hear that bell ring but also to help it ring out across the world.