VISITING Stockholm in 1923, WB Yeats remarked that the city’s Royal Palace – a magnificent structure and one of the largest of its kind anywhere – reminded him of the Ulster Bank in Sligo. Luckily, his poetic licence was fully up to date at the time (in fact, he was in Sweden to collect the Nobel Prize for literature) because, handsome as it is, the bank is a fairly modest structure by comparison.
Even so, Sligo took the hint. When the city (and it is a city, technically) marked the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death in 1989 by commissioning a statue, there could be only one place to put it. Since when, Rowan Gillespie’s Yeats has stood, covered in his own words, in front of the bank that – recalled from his boyhood 40 years before – reappeared to him in Stockholm.
Arguably at least as remarkable, in its own way, is another Sligo building that Yeats must also have remembered. It would be even less likely to be confused with Stockholm’s Royal Palace. But then again, Lyons’s department store may deserve a prize just for still existing. It first opened in 1835 and has occupied its present site, on the corner of Wine and Quay streets, since Yeats was in short trousers: in the process retaining its leaded lights and mosaic tiles, and a lovely wood-panelled cafe.
Lyons’s is not alone in its longevity, even among Sligo department stores. It must be something in the water here. Whatever it is, while almost every other Irish town has surrendered to the march of globalisation and while Dublin’s Grafton Street has come to resemble any pedestrianised shopping area in Europe, Sligo has somehow held on to three of its indigenous department stores. As well as Lyons’s, there is also Moffitt’s and Mullaney’s. That harbinger of globalisation, Tesco, has recently advanced to join them on the town’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street. So it’s all the more heartening to see the likes of Mullaney’s still trading nearby, with its Burmese teak and Italian marble shopfront a relic of a more graceful age.
YEATS IS NOT THE ONLYwriter to have been inspired by Sligo. Among others who may have picked up ideas from it was Bram Stoker. At any rate, his mother, Charlotte Blake Thornley is buried in the town's St John's Churchyard, along with many other members of what Sean O'Faolain later called "the best Protestant stock in all Ireland".
And although Stoker grew up a Dubliner, the Sligo tourism booklet goes so far as to suggest that he may have been inspired to write Dracula while observing the “walking dead” on visits to Sligo with his mother “during the cholera outbreak circa 1832”.
This would have been a doubly supernatural event, since – strictly speaking – Stoker wasn’t born until 1847. But in the context of his writings, that’s a minor detail. Maybe the walking dead of 1832 managed to haunt him later on – he would have been the first to admit such a possibility. Or maybe something was lost in translation.
These days, St John’s Church forms half of a rather odd couple, alongside its younger neighbour, the Catholic Cathedral, which was famously built the wrong way round. The story, as told to me by a very entertaining tour guide called Art McCarrick is that, when planning the new church in the late 19th century, the Catholic bishop set his eye on a site beside St John’s, but his Anglican counterpart wouldn’t countenance a rival religious establishment next door.
So instead the land was bought through an intermediary. And when the seller rumbled the plan too late, he nevertheless insisted that, unlike St John’s, the Catholic church would be built facing away from the town – onto Temple Street. Thus, a set of steps now leads up to the cathedral from the St John’s Street side, but arrives at an end wall, rather than the front door you might expect.
Nearby both churches is another statue redolent of Yeats, or at least of the Gaelic Revival in whose literary wing he served. Lady Erin was erected in 1898 as part of that year’s centenary commemorations by nationalists, who were again thinking about separatism. With broken fetters at her feet and right arm upraised, she expresses their aspiration in romantic form. But like the real liberated Ireland, she’s has had her ups and downs since.
The main problem is her arm, which emulates her fetters every so often by falling off. Situated at a busy street junction, the statue gets hit by traffic every so often. Or else some eejit climbs up on it late at night, transforming Lady Erin anew into an Irish version of the Venus de Milo.
Relocating her would be problematic, however: she’s the official centre of Sligo, demarcating the radial mile of the city corporation’s responsibilities. So the preferred option on such occasions is to fix her, as they did again recently. And whatever about her actual country’s prospects, at least Lady Erin is once more pointing upwards.
IN YEATS'Sother city, meanwhile, the National Library's Summer Wreath – an annual celebration of the great man – continues today, with a "reading and reflection" by actor Kate O'Toole and a lecture by Britain's former poet laureate, Andrew Motion. O'Toole is on at 1pm and admission is free. The Motion lecture, which is about Yeats's influence on Philip Larkin, is at 8pm and costs €10. Further details on both events are at nli.ie.