This weekend as Galway travel to Croke Park the flag of the Tribesmen flies over Thoor Ballylee.

Yeats’s poor eyesight made hurling an unlikely sport for him, although he did try fencing with Ezra Pound (‘the Irish like contradiction’, said Pound). On the other hand his friendship with Douglas Hyde, founding president of the Gaelic League, gave him an intimate familiarity with the wider aims of the GAA. Yeats’s connections to Dublin and Sligo are well known: his long association with Galway and Thoor Ballylee in particular make this small gesture at the Hiberno-Norman tower, now open 10-1 weekdays and 12-4 weekends for the month of September, all the more fitting.