What a relief: so the State isn't going to be burdened with the responsibility of financing the Gore-Booths' pension plan, as desired by the Shinners and others, writes Kevin Myers.
Certainly, Lissadell in itself is not such a fine house; what really distinguishes it is that a murderer once lived there.
That would be an interesting precedent.
For it would be something of a shame if the State now had to buy any house simply because someone who had murdered a policeman in cold blood had once resided there. That would involve the purchase of perhaps thousands of houses - and thereafter, the erection of thousands of plaques. For example: Here Lived Countess Markievicz, who shot an unarmed policeman dead in cold blood in St Stephen's Green, in grateful memory of which the State has bought this house.
Logic and fairness would have to insist that the State also bought the houses of her two-fellow murderers of Constable Michael Lahiff in St Stephen's Green in April 1916. They all three shot him, Markievicz first. Alas, history doesn't seem to record who these gallant individuals among the Irish Citizens Army actually were.
Ah, if that were only it. Murdering policemen became a hobby at the time: Thomas Ashe ambushed a party of RIC men outside Ashbourne, butchering eight and wounding 15. There is a memorial there - not to the innocent Irishmen who were killed or maimed, of course, but to their killers.
However, it would be a bit thick now if the State had to go round the homes of all those who took part in the ambush on an unsuspecting party of peelers, buying the lot up. Guided tours every Sunday: here is the kitchen, well, kitchen sink really. And here is the parlour - well, it's the dining room as well. Upstairs is the bedroom. Jacks outside. Careful on your way out. . .My, it's all go - isn't it? - in this rebels' homes business.
Not to speak of the hundreds of policemen who were murdered from 1917 on.
And since the Mayor of Sligo, the Shinner Sean McManus, loudly urged the State to buy Lissadell, logic demands that we also buy the homes of the killers of hundreds of RUC men and women as well. Happy news, this would be, for all those IRA men who were never jailed for these murders - 80 per cent of killings of RUC officers went unsolved - and who might never otherwise have qualified for whatever pensions the British and the Irish governments probably have in mind for IRA veterans as part of the peace process appeasement plan.
However, this might have had mixed results: Sean O'Callaghan has probably been wondering what would become of him financially if he ever fell out with MI5, as the passionate relationship between British intelligence and Sinn Féin-IRA becomes consummated into marital bliss. He could have insisted that the government buy his family home because he too, like Constance Markievicz, had done his bit for Ireland, and bumped off a harmless policeman.
However, it's possible that the reason the State thought about buying Lissadell and helping the heirs to the Gore-Booth estate become even richer, courtesy of the Irish taxpayer, was that it was A Big House. But there are hundreds of big houses left in Ireland - not as many as once there were, thanks to the strenuous incendiary efforts of the IRA - but a good few, nonetheless. Are we going to buy them all up as well? Or was there another reason why the State considered buying Lissadell?
Was it because Constance Gore-Booth was mentioned in a Yeats poem? Well, reach for the cheque book, Charlie, because there's hardly a single thing that Yeats didn't mention in the course of his writing. Hello, Ben Bulben; welcome, The Cheshire Cheese. Ah, what about you, Irish Airman Foreseeing His Death?
In reality, maybe the proposal to buy Lissadell was inspired by them all. A touch of snobbery, of Big House deference, of literary allusion, and of republican murder. The ideal Irish heroine.
The ideal Irish heroine, indeed. Constance Gore-Booth was a madwoman, a patrician fantasist who lived out her absurd day-dreams on the canvas of other people's lives - mostly poor people's lives. She threw herself into the Dublin lock-out in 1913 without having the least understanding of the people she was either "helping" or "opposing". Later she was to kit herself out in the comic-opera "Irish Citizens' Army" uniform (worn by officers only, of course) bought from the scout department in Arnotts.
After she'd fired her Mauser into poor Constable Michael Lahiff, aged 28, she jumped up and down with joy, crying, "I shot him, I shot him". This is diseased stuff. She was old enough to have been the mother of the young man she'd just murdered.
So, when people with grisly sanctimony describe her as a "patriot", do they ask why they are using that word? And down the years which followed Michael Lahiff's murder, how did his family feel about the elevation of his murderer to the pantheon of Irish heroes and heroines?
There is a bust to Constance Gore-Booth, who being a bogus socialist went by the bogus title of Countess, in St Stephen's Green, not far from where she ended a young man's life. There is, of course, nothing whatever to commemorate death of an unarmed, working-class man shot down in cold blood in the name of Ireland.
Thank God for poverty that we did not ennoble this foul dead by sanctifying its dotty author further.