Dispute over sale of country house with Yeats, Irish nationalist connections

From the BBC:

A stately home frequented by Irish poet WB Yeats has gone on sale amid calls for the manor house not to fall into the hands of property developers. The 19th-century mansion Lissadell, which sits on 400 acres of land in County Sligo, went on sale on Thursday with an asking price of three million euro. . .

Yeats was a frequent visitor to the house because he was enamoured with the poet Eva Gore-Booth as well as her sister, the Irish nationalist Countess Constance Markievicz. The wife of a Polish count, Countess Markievicz was pardoned from execution following the 1916 Easter Rising and went on to be the only woman elected to parliament in the post-Independence Irish Free State. . .

Maura McTighe of the Yeats Society said the house needed to be preserved and protected. She said she would be devastated if the estate went to developers. "Too much of Ireland has gone into golf courses for Americans," she said.

Oh dear. Another gratuitous slap at the damn Yankees. Wonder how many of those obnoxious American golfers are in fact descendants of Irish emigrants?

Arthur Morgan, a Sinn Fein member of the Irish parliament, called on the Irish Government to preserve the house "as a monument to the heroine of the 1916 Rising".

"Sinn Fein believes that it is time for the state to examine the options for re-appropriating hereditary estates which are a legacy of our colonial past and have no place in a modern Ireland," he said.

Oh dear, again. In order to honor the house's previous owner, the good MP is advocating seizing it from her descendants. Maybe turning it into a golf resort would be for the best, after all.

Posted by David on May 27, 2003 10:06 AM