Josepha Madigan (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to inform the Deputy that the cultural and heritage centre at Bank of Ireland on College Green will be launched on Wednesday, 4 July 2018. I will open the new centre alongside Ms Francesca McDonagh, the chief executive of Bank of Ireland. The first exhibition to be housed at the centre is entitled "Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again". It will celebrate the life and work of our great Nobel Prize winning poet and will be launched by President Michael D. Higgins on the same day. The centre and new exhibition will open to the public on 6 July. The exhibition will draw on the extensive literary archive donated to the National Library in 2011. I take this opportunity to thank the Heaney family for their remarkable philanthropy and for strongly supporting this initiative. The exhibition will be an exciting partnership between the State and the private sector and will run for four years.

The Heaney exhibition will be the first at this dynamic new cultural and heritage centre at the Bank of Ireland's premises on College Green in Dublin which is the home of Ireland’s first Parliament. Part of this iconic building has now been transformed to welcome the public in partnership with the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. The exhibition will be accessed by the public through the Gandon designed entrance to the College Green building on Westmoreland Street, which has not been used for many years. It will be a superb addition to the cultural landscape of Dublin.

The recent opening of the Luas line across Dublin city centre will facilitate visitors and tourists in coming to an area that has been little more than a pedestrian and traffic throughway for too long. The new culture and heritage centre at the Bank of Ireland premises is held under licence between the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the bank for ten years from 27 November 2017. The National Library of Ireland, through a memorandum of understanding, is responsible for the first exhibition to be hosted at this unique venue. It is envisaged that further exhibitions involving other national cultural institutions will be hosted at the venue in the future.

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