Sligo celebrates Yeats Day with a host of events

“IT was a very good year despite the poor weather and we saw an increase again in the number of people who travelled from abroad to Sligo especially for the day.”

The words of Yeats Society Director Susan O’Keefe who was thrilled with the turn out for the celebrations to mark the birthday of the Nobel Prize Winning poet, WB Yeats.

“Our biggest market is still America, but we had people from all over, the UK and even China. The Chinese are now doing Yeats in school and we catered for a big group on the Thursday giving them a tour,” Susan adds.

She says that next year the society even plans to have some of their material translated to accommodate this growing market.

The five day celebrations which kicked off on June 13th had something for all ages.

“We had visitors as young as two,” explains Susan, “From the Anne Cartron creche.” Lots of local children from Eily Kilgannon’s School of Speech and Drama also got to perform whilst a vintage day variety show took place at the Glasshouse.

The Yeats Day Festival closed with a sailing to the lake Isle of Inisfree, where passengers were entertained by Harpist Michael Rooney and the Yeats Poet in Residence Alice Lyons who recited some of his most famous lines on the isle with which he will forever be associated.