Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank my colleagues for their valuable contributions to this discussion. I mentioned Lissadell House and I also wish to pay tribute to Edward Walsh and Constance Cassidy for the tremendous work they have done at this house. It is certainly a labour of love and an absolute credit to them. I have visited it and what I love about it is the fact that it is once again a family home. It is a house that is being lived in and is now full of energy and enthusiasm. I wish them well and I look forward to going there on Saturday.

I was very pleased to have been in a position to provide €500,000 in funding to the Yeats 2015 celebrations, particularly at this time of careful economic considerations. I assure the Senator that the State supports heritage buildings in many different ways and there is a range of funding opportunities, including Heritage Council grants and Buildings At Risk grants in my Department, along with others that were available over the past year. Somebody mentioned about my being unable to meet the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society committee. Unfortunately, I could not do so due to diary commitments. However, I commend the work of the voluntary committee. The Department funding of €500,000 was aimed at developing a programme of events to celebrate and commemorate the 150th anniversary of Yeats's birth.

Yeats is unique, not only as Ireland's first winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 but as a figure of the time in which he lived, which shaped this island as much as it shaped his writings. He lived through the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence and provided much of the cultural backdrop for that emerging State, co-founding the Abbey Theatre, which opened its doors in 1904, and driving the Irish literary revival, which was also known as the Celtic Twilight after Yeats's collection of 1893. He left his mark on the Irish political scene from membership of the IRB to becoming a Senator - speaking in the first Parliament and helping to design the Free State's first currency. He was a respected voice of debate in matters ranging from divorce to the impact of the First World War. Yeats was very much aware of the potency of Irish culture. Upon being awarded the Nobel Prize, he said "I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature".

His collection Responsibilitiescontained the phrase "in dreams begins responsibility". Yeats gave us many dreams of an Ireland rooted deep in its mystic past and set us on a path of literary and cultural richness. It is our responsibility to honour that legacy and celebrate this man. We have spread his legacy around the world and his works are honoured across the globe with his poetry appearing on the London Underground. I visited Emory University in Atlanta in the US last year. The esteem in which Yeats is held there is huge and they are so proud of their Yeats papers and first editions, which I was fortunate to view.

I thank the Members and the Leader for the opportunity to speak today on the celebration of Yeats Day and the wider events of Yeats 2015. I commend Senator O'Keeffe and her hard-working committee for their great work on Yeats 2015, which is being celebrated not just nationally but internationally. It would be appropriate to conclude with some poetry.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.