Poet resisted IRA order to shut the Abbey

Yeats Summer School: William Butler Yeats and Eamon de Valera met for the first time early in 1933 when yet another crisis threatened the Abbey Theatre.

The chat lasted for an hour and afterwards Yeats admitted in a letter to a friend that he had been pleasantly surprised. "I had never met him before and I was impressed by his simplicity and honesty though we differed throughout," Yeats wrote.

"It was a curious experience, each recognised the other's point of view so completely. I had gone there full of suspicion but my suspicion vanished at once."

As Prof John Kelly of Oxford University told students at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo yesterday, Republicans had threatened to blow up the Abbey in 1923.

When every other theatre in Dublin had obeyed the IRA's order to shut down, Yeats insisted that the Abbey stand firm.

When the Fianna Fáil party was returned with a majority in 1932, Yeats again resisted all attempts by the new government to censor or control the national theatre, indicating that he would prefer to close it than to sacrifice freedom of expression.

After the meeting de Valera assured him that there would be no interference.

Yeats had fought many battles on behalf of the theatre during a colourful history which famously included riots and condemnation in the press during controversial productions by Synge and O'Casey.

When a reference to a woman's "shift" in The Playboy of the Western World provoked outrage Synge was keen to close the play down, "but Yeats said 'absolutely not'", said Prof Kelly.

Indeed Yeats was so gung-ho that he threatened to prosecute the demonstrators and suggested that sandwich boards be sent around Dublin advertising the play.

Prof Kelly pointed out that the Abbey was lucky to survive the 1916 Rising not least because the buildings on the other side of the street were shelled. "The Abbey was a great and noble enterprise but without Yeats it would not only have failed but would hardly even have begun."

He paid a warm tribute yesterday to the late Mary Lappin, a stalwart of the Yeats Summer School from its early days in the 1960s, who he said had done so much to establish it as an institution for admirers of Yeats and lovers of poetry.

Among those lining up after yesterday's lecture to thank Prof Kelly were Seamus Heaney and Yeat's son, Michael, who attends every summer.

Mr Yeats, a former senator and vice-president of the European Parliament, said that at 83 he was "well used" to people's interest in his father. He was just 17 when W. B. Yeats died.

Seamus Heaney came early to catch yesterday's lectures by Harvard academic and former colleague Prof Helen Vendler, and Prof Kelly. "They were excellent. It's what makes this summer school what it is," he said.