The Taoiseach is to officially open an exhibition honouring Countess Constance Markievicz this week at her ancestral home more than three years after the Government refused to buy it for the nation.
Bertie Ahern has slotted the engagement into a whirlwind tour of Co Sligo on Friday.
He will open the Countess Markievicz exhibition housed in a restored coach house at Lissadell House.
Owners Eddie Walsh and his wife Constance Cassidy said yesterday they were delighted Mr Ahern had agreed to do the honours.
"It's an exhibition that is of importance to Sligo because it honours Countess Markievicz in all her different guises," Mr Walsh said.
"It marks her life both as a young girl growing up here in Lissadell, as a horsewoman riding across the countryside of Sligo immortalised by Yeats, and then as she moved on into London and Dublin society.
"It also commemorates her life from 1908 when she became one of the major players in the Irish nationalist movement, leading to the foundation of the State."
The couple bought Lissadell House and much of its furnishings for €4.55 million in 2003 after experts advised the Government to resist pressure to buy it for the people of Ireland.
Ministers were told it would take another €30 million to restore and maintain the dilapidated property.
However Mr Walsh and Ms Cassidy reckoned when they bought it that €5 million would restore the house and surrounding gardens to their former glory over five years.
Mr Walsh said yesterday: "What we're simply trying to do is get Lissadell up to the way it was 100 years ago when it was a centrepiece for horticulture in Ireland. At the time it employed 200 people.
"With modern machinery we'll never get back to those numbers, but we are trying to do our bit. We have up to 20 people employed. It's shaping up."