Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing this timely, welcome and debate-worthy motion to the Chamber. The motion asks us to do something that successive governments have failed to do, namely, treat the GPO and Moore Street as if they matter. I am not just referring to this Government but the previous one and the one before that. Going back to the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, the GPO played very little part in the celebrations, and Moore Street none at all. I understand there have been plans and court cases but I walk past the GPO and through Moore Street on most days and the impact of those plans is to be seen right in front of me as I tread the streets. The GPO is not just a landmark; it is a physical foundation of the Republic itself. It was ground zero for a vision of Ireland that still dares to speak of equality, self-determination and cherishing all the children of the nation equally.

I support the motion but I will also go further. What is being offered by the Government is not just inadequate to the history, meaning and symbolism of the structure and its place in our history; it is nauseating in its limitations. A so-called cultural space wrapped in offices and retail outlets. That is not a legacy project or a tribute and it will not be functional. It is a failure of imagination. It is the kind of gesture a person makes when they do not believe in anything real, when the best a person can hope for is compromise and the worst is a cheap deal, dressed up in heritage language. What makes it worse is where it is happening, at the GPO, on Moore Street, on the very spot where the Republic was declared, not only in theory but in action.

What we speak of tonight is not just nostalgia; we are seeking clarity. When we talk about Moore Street and the GPO, we are talking about two places that are soaked in meaning. We are talking about a week in 1916 when a group of women and men, many of them poets, trade unionists, teachers and dreamers, stood in defiance of empire and declared a Republic on that spot. We are talking about the homes, laneways and tenements that surround them, where ordinary Dubliners paid the price. Too often we forget that more civilians than soldiers or rebels died during Easter week. We forget that women fetching water, children sitting by windows and elderly men trying to get to safety were all shot in the streets surrounding the GPO on that fateful day. On Moore Street, in the final hours of the Rising, when the GPO was burning and the rebel leaders were seeking to escape, local families were the ones caught in the crossfire. John O'Duffy, a pensioner in his 70s was killed crossing the street. Brigid McKane, 15 years old, was accidentally shot in the head by a volunteer who burst into her home in Henry Place. An infant, not yet two years old, was shot in her mother's arms.

When we talk about Moore Street and the GPO, we are talking not just about a battlefield site but about the community heritage and about the people who lived and died in the shadow of the Proclamation. We are talking about the unfinished business of that Proclamation. The Republic that was declared and the one that promised equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens has very clearly not yet been realised. We see this every single week with the protests that happen outside Dáil Éireann and the people who come into the Public Gallery for the vindication of a basic right, such as a wheelchair or a school place. This does not scream of a Republic fulfilled. We see this in housing, poverty, immigration and in how we have treated children, women and minority groups in the State. We see it in the fact that the most sacred civic space in our country is being treated like a planning headache, instead of a national opportunity.

The GPO should not be reduced to an architectural backdrop for a few retail units and a modest gesture towards history. It should be a national civic space, a living, breathing museum of the Irish Republic. It should not just be a museum of the 1916 Easter Rising, although that of course should be central, but something far more ambitious. It should be a place that tells the story of this Republic and its origins, promise, betrayals, heroes, silences, possibilities and complications, all housed within the space. It should be a museum that includes hunger strikers and the women who fought for their suffrage, the revolutionaries and resisters, the trade unionists and the campaigners for civil rights, repeal and marriage equality. It should be for the language movement, the immigrants, the Travellers, the queer community, the migrants and for all of those who call it home. We should also have a space where we can discuss the most difficult parts of our history, be that the Civil War or the Republic that was fought for and then relinquished to the church and other more conservative entities.

There is no cultural quarter in Dublin without Moore Street. There is no museum worth building that does not start with the people who are already there.

A statue of Cú Chulainn also stands inside the GPO. A warrior lashed to stone so he could die standing, it is a symbol that has taken on meaning within the Ulster cycle. The statue was placed there with the attached symbolism of sacrifice, but it is also crucial to be aware that it is a place that has now developed meaning in the Ulster tradition, which gives us one more layer of tradition and meaning at the location. This was later adapted by the Unionists too, with the myth that he died defending Ulster from the rest of Ireland. Whether we believe in that myth or not, or hold it as part of our identity or values, that is okay, but even in our most sacred national building, we have this moment of shared symbolism, complexity and contradiction. That is what a republic should be able to handle. It is also what this museum, a museum of our Republic, past, present and undelivered, should be able to cater for. A civic quarter could represent something far more than just the building, not a sanitised version of Irishness, nor a tourist-friendly package of 1916 memorabilia, but a brave, honest ambitious telling of who we are, who we have tried to be and who we can become.

If we look around Europe, in Amsterdam, the Dutch Resistance Museum does not just tell heroic stories, it asks visitors to reckon with fear, complicity and courage. In Riga, the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia tells the truth about Soviet and Nazi atrocities and does so in the city centre, not tucked away from sight. I refer to both of those museums for a specific reason. We talk about the fact that the GPO is a fairly massive site of nearly 25,000 sq. m, but both of those museums, in cities of similar size, scale and population, are bigger. Those countries understand that difficult history belongs in the public, that honesty is patriotism and that memory is not something to outsource to developers, so why can we not do it? Why, in Ireland, is our instinct always a compromise to commercialise and to put offices where civic ambition should be? The answer, of course, is political, cultural and ideological because at some level this Government, in particular Fine Gael-----

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