Sandra McLellan (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is almost impossible to talk about Dublin's rich literary tradition without simultaneously acknowledging the centrality of the battlefield site. Sean O’Casey’s work, particularly his dramatic trilogy, use both the events and the setting of Moore Street and the GPO in 1916 as a central prop. If one extracts the events and setting from O’Casey’s work it becomes meaningless. Does the Minister agree that the events, setting, streetscape and urban fabric of the site had a major influence on the social and cultural evolution of the people of Dublin? Does he accept that James Joyce extracts from the rich urban quilt the key personalities, eccentricities and stories without which he could not have written Ulysses? Does the Minister agree that the city, particularly the city centre and the Moore Street battlefield site as a setting, has made an extraordinary contribution to world literature and that the site in its totality, with its literary, architectural and urban fabric, needs to be recognised as having had a formative influence on the writers mentioned, on the works mentioned and on others writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Roddy Doyle and Brendan Behan? Will he acknowledge that the site has been a central element in works considered to be of great human creative genius?

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