Eire is happy with its celebrated writers, notably W.B. Yeats, the vaunted poet who grew up partly in Sligo, a rugged, rural West Coast county that treasures its enduring position as Yeats Nation.

You may cease in at WB’s Espresso Home on Stephen Avenue in Sligo city or the close by Yeats Society for a poetry studying. You may hike the Yeats Path and cease by the poet’s modest grave at Drumcliffe Church.

So it was notable one morning final month when The Irish Instances reported the most important drug raid in Irish historical past had been carried out by — who else? — William Butler Yeats.

Not the poet himself, after all, who died in 1939, however his namesake, a 300-foot-long warship.

It was a reminder that the Irish Navy, to the delight of some and the scorn of others, has been naming ships in its small fleet after Irish writers for almost a decade.

The renewed consideration got here on Sept. 26, when a cargo ship from South America carrying greater than two tons of cocaine appeared, because the poet as soon as wrote, on “the white breast of the dim sea.”

Warning pictures from the Yeats helped cease the cargo ship, permitting Military Rangers to board and pull off a dramatic seizure of medication price greater than $160 million.

Whereas the authorities hailed the raid as an indication of their coastal patrol prowess, some questioned whether or not a tiny navy with ships named after Irish poets and writers can adequately cease drug operating alongside the coast. (“Gonna Want Larger and Extra Boats,” The Irish Echo Stated in an editorial.)

It has not helped issues that the navy’s ranks have thinned to the purpose that it may well now assist patrols by solely two main vessels: the Yeats and the Samuel Beckett, named after the absurdist dramatist who penned “Ready for Godot.”

The James Joyce and the George Bernard Shaw have been lately taken out of motion amid personnel shortages which have left the ranks thinner than any level for the reason that Nineteen Seventies, stated Eugene Ryan, a former Irish Navy commander. “The drug sellers know this,” he stated.

When he retired in 2012, he stated, the navy had 1,200 personnel and eight operational ships. The navy, which patrols Irish waters with assist from the nation’s Air Corps and different enforcement companies, stories it now has 755 personnel and two operational ships at any given time, with plans to accumulate two extra.

Mr. Ryan, who helped lead two massive drug seizures off the Irish coast in 2007 and 2008, each with a number of naval vessels, stated it was dangerous to have the Yeats deal with the raid with out backup.

And as for the ship’s identify, he stated, “after they started naming vessels after literary folks like Yeats and Beckett, we didn’t prefer it in any respect.”

He stated the navy’s earlier apply of utilizing girls’s names from mythology and folklore was “a seamen’s custom that we have been happy with.”

Protection officers introduced the brand new method in 2014 to “facilitate higher recognition” for the navy. When the Irish chief Enda Kenny christened the Samuel Beckett in 2014, he famous the “scrumptious irony” in naming it for a person who famously abhorred public consideration.

The criticism was speedy. The Irish filmmaker and author Neil Jordan complained that it was inappropriate to affiliate artists — lots of them pacifists — with ships outfitted with cannons and heavy machine weapons.

The 4 ships named for writers now make up the majority of the navy’s massive vessels. They’re greatest identified for humanitarian deployments, together with the response to the European migrant disaster within the Mediterranean Sea and the coronavirus pandemic, when the Beckett was changed into a cell testing heart.

For a lot of, the names resonate, maybe as a result of so many Irish writers have been impressed by the ocean. Yeats had his “mackerel-crowded seas.” In “Ulysses,” Joyce took a unique tack, writing of the “snotgreen sea,” in distinction to the “wine-dark sea” of Homer’s “Odyssey.”

Eve Patten, a professor of Irish Literature at Trinity School Dublin, stated that Shaw, Beckett, Joyce and Yeats “have been all voyagers themselves and sailed away from Eire as quickly as they may.”

Beckett was an incredible sea swimmer whose father threw him into the frigid waters off the Dublin coast as a baby, she famous, and “Ulysses” is stuffed with references to sailors and ships.

“However what concerning the girls?” Professor Patten stated. “We’ve loads of real-life Irish girls writers to select from. The place is the Girl Augusta Gregory, the Edna O’Brien, or the Maeve Binchy? Or maybe the Sally Rooney?”

The Irish author Colm Tóibín stated he was struck by the picture of drug sellers being pursued by a vessel named for the poet who wrote “Crusing to Byzantium.”

“There’s one thing beautiful concerning the grandeur of Yeats’s identify on a ship,” Mr. Tóibín stated. “It’s the form of joke Joyce would have beloved, the concept of getting a bit of piece of tin named after him.”

He mused that if the navy vessels took on the personas of their writers or the traits of their works, then smugglers ought to most worry the one named for the quiet minimalist Samuel Beckett. “It will be silent,” he stated, “and could be upon you earlier than you knew it was there.”

As for George Bernard Shaw, who wrote performs that might exceed three hours, Mr. Tóibín stated, a drug runner would possibly resolve “something however a Shaw play” and easily give up.