A unique rooftop auction at Thoor Ballylee at the weekend raised €10,000 towards Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society’s plans to restore and reopen Yeats’s venerable tower in county Galway.

A total of €10,000 was raised at the auction, which was held on the rooftop of Thoor Ballylee by local auctioneer Colm Farrell – dressed as Yeats.

A signed first edition of Maud Gonne MacBride’s autobiography fetched €5,200 at a fundraiser for poet WB Yeats’s former summer home at Thoor Ballylee in south Galway.

The signed copy of MacBride’s A Servant of The Queen, published in 1938, was donated by Enid McAleenan to an auction run last Sunday evening by the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society, along with a letter written by MacBride to her late aunt Eileen.

Gonne’s letter refers to the importance of living a full, adventurous life and standing up for a “free Ireland”.

Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society chairwoman Senator Fidelma Healy Eames paid tribute to the “power and generosity of the local community”. “All funds raised will be used to open the tower to the public during the summer season in the stark absence of State funding,” she said.

Read more in this Irish Times article here.