Ms Lucille Redmond:

The committee wanted us to state our reason for being here. My mother Barbara's father was Thomas McDonagh and her mother was Muriel Gifford. Muriel's sister, Grace Gifford, married Joseph Plunkett in Kilmainham Gaol chapel an hour before he was shot. Pádraig H. Pearse was my mother's godfather. My grandmother's sister Nellie was in the Royal College of Surgeons working with Madame Markievicz.

She also worked with Connolly. During 1916, my grandfather's brothers, Joe and Jack, fought in Jacob's factory. Joe was later the Deputy Minister for Labour to Madame Markievicz and he died on hunger strike on Christmas Day 1922. Earlier, Professor Kealy asked whether we wanted these buildings to be another museum and we must think about what we wish to commemorate and how we wish to do so. The liberal and open ideas of the people of 1916 are possibly not in tune with the Ireland of 2016, the central value of which may be seen as being profit and profitability. The question is whether we wish to forget these people, who ended a 700-year occupation and whose ideal of Ireland was liberal, European, egalitarian and co-operative. My grandfather was one of those people. He was a feminist and intellectual, whose Irish theatre presented works by new playwrights from across Europe. The Ireland he envisaged and of which he dreamed was European, intelligent, honest and liberal.

In response to Deputy Coffey, these buildings on Moore Street - this palimpsest as Professor Kealy said - these Georgian townhouses of small businesses really constitute the last terrace of such working-class Georgian houses in Dublin and perhaps in Ireland and they are the Alamo of Ireland's history. This terrace of houses and yards and the lanes down which the people of 1916 retreated, these houses in which the dying James Connolly and Michael O'Rahilly spent hours on the threshold of death and where Tom Clarke, Joe Plunkett, Sean McDermott and Pádraig Pearse prepared to lay down their lives, are the essence of Ireland's republic, that is, the republic they sought. We can choose to preserve these buildings as a symbol of that open, European and liberal Ireland for which these men died or one can follow the profit and salute the Celtic tiger and all it stood for by destroying this heritage. It is up to members.

If we wish to be the Ireland those men and women envisaged in 1916, then we should commemorate those people and ideals and should save these laneways of history and these houses and their curtilages but otherwise, no, go for the profit. My sister, Ms Muriel McAuley, has reminded me that the cobblestones across which they retreated are still in place on the streets.