Madam, - I would like to disagree strongly with the academics who wrote in recently to plead that Lissadell House be preserved by the State as some kind of memorial to the Gore-Booth sisters, Constance and Eva.
Constance died in the public ward of a Dublin hospital, her health worn out by her tireless struggle for a workers' republic. Eva, with her long-time companion, Esther Roper, campaigned relentlessly for the rights of low-paid workers, male and female. These women were not big house eccentrics, Irish Mitfords, who slotted into a readily available alternative social scene with crowds of eager hangers-on. Neither of them ever really "fitted in" anywhere again, and they were often mocked and ridiculed, by other women as well as by men. They were magnificent, and it traduces them horribly to associate them forever in people's minds with Yeats's image of them as young, beautiful and well-dressed. What revolutionary woman would want to be immortalised as a gazelle!
I am sure that both Constance and Eva would be delighted if Lissadell were turned into a resource centre for the low-paid and unemployed, for asylum- seekers and Travellers, but it is a bit far out from the town of Sligo for that to be practical. So why not let it revert to being a country club for the rich and famous? That is what big houses always were. - Yours, etc.,
CAITRIÓNA CLEAR, Department of History, National University of Ireland, Galway.