Lissadell House Sligo
Lissadell House on the shores of Sligo Bay in County Sligo is a Greek Revival country house of the 1830s whose significance in Irish cultural history far exceeds its architectural quality, the house having been the childhood home of the revolutionary sisters Constance Markievicz and Eva Gore-Booth, two of the most remarkable women in the cultural and political history of modern Ireland, and the subject of one of W B Yeats's most celebrated late poems. The combination of the Gore-Booth family history, the Markievicz connection and the Yeats association makes Lissadell one of the most charged heritage sites in Connacht.
Constance Gore-Booth, who married the Polish Count Markievicz and became one of the most significant figures in the Irish revolutionary movement, was sentenced to death for her role in the 1916 Easter Rising, the sentence commuted on account of her sex in one of the most dramatic episodes of the Rising's aftermath. She subsequently became the first woman elected to the British Parliament, though she did not take her seat, and the first woman to serve as a government minister when appointed Minister for Labour in the first Dáil in 1919.
Yeats visited Lissadell on several occasions and his memories of the two sisters in their youth, The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows open to the south, forms one of the most direct and most moving of his late poems, giving the house a permanent place in the Irish literary imagination.