"I AM of Ireland… come dance with me in Ireland,” declared Erin’s greatest poet, WB Yeats. It is hard to overestimate the significance of Yeats to the development of modern Ireland. The Sligo poet was the artistic father of the Irish Literary Revival, and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, which put Irish creativity at the centre stage of the emergent cultural Nationalism in the late 19th century.

‘AN IRISHMAN'S heart is nothing but his imagination,’ observed George Bernard Shaw (GBS). In the history of literature, few writers have accumulated more honours than the extraordinary Dubliner.