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In 1960 Mary Hanley forced open the wedged shut door of the cottage at Thoor Ballylee. She walked into the large damp room. For 12 productive and happy summers, the cottage and its adjoining Norman tower had been the home of WB Yeats , his wife George Hyde Lees, and their two children Anne and Michael. Now, however, the floor was covered with manure. For years it had been used as a cow barn. Pulling aside stones that had blocked exits to keep the cattle enclosed, Mary walked into the dining room, with its magnificent enlarged window overlooking the Streamstown river as it races under the four-arched bridge.

A 40 per cent cut in funding for the arts has meant that a local committee in Galway is having to go it alone to restore WB Yeats’ former home of Thoor Ballylee. The Yeats Thoor Ballylee Development committee will hold a fundraising evening at the tower this Sunday, May 31.

In August 1896 WB Yeats and his friend Arthur Symons went on a tour of the west of Ireland. The poet was 31 years of age. They stayed with Edward Martyn at Tulira Castle, Ardrahan, visited the Aran Islands, and Yeats made his first visit to Lady Gregory at Coole Park.

WB YEATS The Wild Swans at Coole, published in 1917 and again, in an expanded edition in 1919, is one of his finest collections, containing such enduring works as the title poem, 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death', 'The Phases of the Moon', and 'Ego Dominus Tuus'.

THE INIMITABLE Des Keogh comes to the Town Hall next week with My Fair Ladies, a new play which he has written and performs about the many women in the extraordinary life of George Bernard Shaw.

GALWAY POETS and musicians will gather in Thoor Ballylee in south Galway, the one-time home of WB Yeats, for an evening of poetry, song, and story when The Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society presents At Home With Yeats, on Poetry Ireland Day this eveing at 8pm

You might think that those at the core of the Irish literary renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century, were one big happy family beavering away in their rooms at Lady Gregory's home at Coole, Co Galway. In those early days it was a house full of voices and sounds. Sometimes you heard WB Yeats humming the rhythm of a poem he was cobbling together; or the click-clacking of Lady Gregory's typewriter as she worked on another play for the Abbey. There was the sound of the Gregory grandchildren playing in the garden; the booming voice of George Bernard Shaw, as he complains that he is only allowed to have either butter or jam on his bread, but not both to comply with war rations (He cheated by the way. He put butter on one side of his bread, and when he thought no one was looking, piled jam on the other!); or the voices of the artist Jack Yeats and JM Synge returning from a day messing about on a boat calling out to a shy Sean O'Casey to come out of the library for God's sake and enjoy the summer afternoon.

As part of its contribution to Yeats2015, the year-long celebration of one of Ireland’s most beloved poets, Westmeath County Library is delighted to offer the public a chance to hear award-winning poet Noel Monahan give a talk on WB Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh.

The sinking of the Lusitania on May 7 1915, off the Cork coast, by a German submarine electrified Ireland, Britain and America. In Ireland, the fact that German submarines were lurking so close to the Irish shore, added fuel to the propaganda that Germany was planning to invade the country. It spurred recruitment into the armed forces. In Britain, the shameful practice of using passenger liners to carry munitions across the Atlantic without telling the passengers they were in effect travelling on a British war ship, was to come to an end.

THE LEGACY of Lady Augusta Gregory will be celebrated in the Lough Cutra Castle and estate, outside Gort in south Galway, next month.