FROM THE ARCHIVES:Mary Robinson, then a Senator, opened the Yeats Summer School in Sligo in 1976 with this speech on the poet and the Seanad, as reported by Caroline Walsh. – JOE JOYCE
THE IRISH Senate at present was a more limited, less effective and less impressive body than the first Senate of the Irish Free State of which W. B. Yeats had been a member, said Senator Mary Robinson in Sligo.
She was opening the 17th Annual International Yeats Summer School in which more than 100 students, from 16 countries, have enrolled. The Senator, from Ballina, Co. Mayo, was a student at the first Summer School in 1960 and has been here on many other occasions.
The original Senate was very different from the present Body in that 30 of its members were elected by members of the Dail and the other 30 were nominated by W. T. Cosgrave, the then-president of the Executive Council. This made it a conservative body, “which represented differing political viewpoints, in particular, that of the Southern Unionists,” she said.
Yeats, who was a member of that Senate for the first six years of its existence, was appointed to advise the Government on education, literature and the arts, but though he took his duties seriously he was apparently a self-conscious public figure. His speech was mannered and rhetorical and he was aware of the permanence of the official record, said Mrs. Robinson.
Though he made contributions on liberal issues like divorce and censorship, his participation was hampered because of his own fundamental bias against democracy and his repugnance to the populist republicanism of De Valera.
Indeed he was out of touch with the mood of the post-revolutionary country and his increasing disillusionment with the new members being elected to either House sprang from his distrust of the democratic process. Even at his most enlightened he clearly saw the Upper House as a corrective for the populist tendencies of the Dail.
It was as chairman of the three main Senate committees relating to the arts that he made his main contribution. These were the Irish Manuscript Committee, the Coinage Committee, and the Committee for the Federation of the Arts.
These committees and the documents they produced informed and educated public opinion. “It could be argued that this is one clearly identifiable and useful role for a second chamber which does not duplicate but rather complements the different contribution of a popularly elected body,” said Senator Robinson.
Compared to this situation the present Senate had only limited powers and a still more limited sense of initiative.
Mr. John Keohane, president of the Yeats Society, said that the time had come to broaden the basis of the Summer School. While Yeats would always remain its centre, the school would be given a fresh impetus if it encompassed the rest of Anglo-Irish literature as well.
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