Planning go-ahead for land at last home of Yeats

Planning permission has been granted for the construction of 28 apartments in the grounds of W. B. Yeats' last home in Ireland.

Riversdale House, an 18th-century farmhouse in Rathfarnham, Dublin, was saved from demolition at a meeting of South Dublin County Council in February following an intervention by the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Ms de Valera. The house, on which Yeats took a 13-year lease in 1932, was made a listed building on the recommendation of Ms de Valera.

The protective status, however, was not afforded to the 3 1/2 acres of ground around the house.

A spokeswoman for South Dublin County Council confirmed yesterday that permission had been granted on April 19th for 28 two-bed apartments in four blocks of two storeys and attic.

She said the applicant developer, Begley Clarke, had been advised to submit revised plans given that the original application sought to demolish the house. It would have to submit these before development could begin, she said.

Now that permission for the apartments has been granted the council cannot accept objections.

"If someone wants to object to it they'd have to appeal the decision to An Bord Pleanala," she said. "They'd have a month to do that, from the date permission was granted."

No appeals had been received by the board by yesterday evening.

Mr Terence Brown, TCD professor of Anglo-Irish literature, was among 18 leading academics who wrote to The Irish Times in January as part of campaign to save Riversdale from demolition. Yesterday he called the council's decision to grant permission for 28 apartments on the grounds "enormously upsetting".

"The fact that the house was saved is something, but I very much regret the minimalist nature of the decision. The grounds are absolutely an integral part of the home that Yeats experienced and was inspired by," he said.

The poet lived at Riversdale with his wife, George, and their two children, Anne and Michael. It was the setting for his last meeting with Maud Gonne in the summer of 1938 and also the place where he completed the New Poems and worked on the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Two poems in New Poems, published in 1938, are about Riversdale and its grounds, An Acre Of Grass and What Then?

In the latter he wrote: All his happier dreams come true

A small old house, wife, daughter, son,

Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,

Poets and wits about him drew;

What then? sang Plato's ghost,

What then?