Will you help stop the fall of the house on Usher?

 

Dublin is one of the finest cities in the world. It has history going back more than 1,000 years. Sadly not all of that history has been preserved. To make matters worse, despite making people aware of the constant threat to Dublin, developers and other other Philistines keep attempting to rob the city of its history. 

In my lifetime we have had various rapes commited on the Irish capital with one of the worst being in the 1970s when Dublin Corporation attempted to build its new 20th century headquarters on top of a Viking settlement at Wood Quay.  They succeeded up to a point. Now very little is left of Viking Dublin.

Dublin suffers these outrages from time to time. A few months ago, developers bulldozed the Ballsbridge home of the only 1916 Rising leader to die in the rebellion, Michael Joseph O’Rahilly.  Known as The O’Rahilly he lived at 40 Herbert Park and despite a fierce battle to prevent his home being demolished, the heathens got their way and the building was razed earlier this month (October 2020).

Now comes the news that a Dublin house at 15 Usher’s Island on the banks of the Liffey is under threat from developers once again.  This is not just any house; it is the house in which great-aunts of James Joyce lived and in which Ireland’s greatest writer based his short story The Dead. 

In an act described as a “cultural vandalism” developers Fergus McCabe and Brian Stynes (a one-time Dublin All Ireland champion)  want to gut and rebuild the supposedly “protected structure” as a 56-room hostel with a four-storey extension at the back.

The house would lose all character and history.  Dublin would lose part of its history and will have nothing left the way the vandals have consistently robbed the city of its heritage over the years. 

Dublin has a rich literary history dating back to Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Flann O’Brien, W B Yeats, Samuel Beckett and of course James Joyce to name but a few from the past. And today, Dublin still boats more than its fair share of great writers: Anne Enright, Joseph O’Connor, Colm Tóibín, John Banville and Roddy Doyle again to name a few. 

The Irish capital punches above its weight when it comes to writers and artists. It must not be robbed of its heritage by the get-rich schemes of gombeen men, culchies and ignorant Dublin sporting stars.

It is still not too late raise our voices in protest. I signed this today https://www.change.org/p/an-bord-pleanála-save-james-joyce-s-house-of-the-dead-usher-s-island-from-becoming-a-tourist-hostel

Will you?

 

Photo: William Murphy ©williamm@informatique.org