Jim D'Arcy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will start where Senator Naughton concluded in congratulating Senator O'Keeffe on the great work she is doing for Yeats 2015. I acknowledge the work of Senator Healy Eames and others on Thoor Ballylee where Yeats wrote one of his great poems, "Meditations in Time of Civil War", with the memorable lines:

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love;

I think we have moved on from that; I hope we have.

There is no doubt that Yeats is our outstanding poet even though he wrote what I regard as the most self-pitying line in poetic history. Forget about Shelley's:

I fall upon the thorns of life!

I bleed!

or even Gerard Manley Hopkins's:

No worse, there is none.

Pitched past pitch of grief,

in "No Second Troy" Yeats wrote:

Why should I blame her that she filled my days

With misery,

I am with you there, Willie.