Campaigning was under way this weekend to force the Government to acquire one of the State's most historically well-connected stately homes.
Lissadell House, in County Sligo, which has strong links with the 1916 Easter Rising, is up for sale - at a likely asking price of more than €3 million.
The name has been copied by home-owners throughout the length and breadth of the country, but the original Lissadell featured in a poem by W B Yeats, and is currently home to a family centrally caught up in the fight for independence in the early years of the last century.
The Gore-Booths have lived in the house since it was built about 170 years ago and it is now going on the market for the first time - in a move that has sparked attempts to save the building for the nation.
It was the childhood home of Constance Gore-Booth, who in later years, as Countess Markiewicz, was closely connected with the leaders of the struggle for independence and became the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons.
She lived at Lissadell with her sister Eva and their beauty, as well as the elegance of the building itself, was believed to have inspired Yeats to write the line: "The light of evening, Lissadell, great windows open to the south."
The countess fought alongside the Irish insurgents during the Rising in Dublin and was condemned to death by the British authorities.
Her sentence was later quashed and she was imprisoned instead.
After refusing to take her seat as the first woman MP at Westminster, she later sat as a member of the first Dáil. After that, she fought in the Civil War and aided the poor of Dublin until her death in 1927.
Her brother Josslyn was the grandfather of the present Lissadell owner, who has the same name. The grey limestone mansion is set in 400 acres of parkland on the northern shore of Sligo Bay.
The opening shots in a bid to save Lissadell for the nation were fired today by Sinn Féin.
Mr Arthur Morgan, TD for Louth, called on the Government to preserve the house "as a monument to the heroine of the 1916 Rising".
He also said: "Sinn Féin believes that it is time for the state to examine the options for re-appropriating hereditary estates which are a legacy of our colonial past and have no place in a modern Ireland."
PA