Treading softly in Sligo

The Yeats festival is much more than an attempt to cash in on the artistic brothers’ association with the area, writes Alan O’Riordan.

IRELAND tends to celebrate its literary heritage in a parish-pump-priming way. The starting point is not words, but locality. There is a certain logic to this, to Bloomsday wandering around Dublin, or Kavanagh pilgrimages to Inniskeen.

Even Samuel Beckett, who, unlike those other two greats of Irish literary modernism — Joyce and Yeats — is not readily amenable to tourist-board oversimplification involving period dress, now has a festival in his honour in Enniskillen, where he attended the Portora Royal School.