The National Concert Hall is not having a good year on a number of fronts writes Michael Dervan. Its project for a recital hall on the site of the former tennis court on Earlsfort Terrace is being held up by a planning appeal from Ted Neville of the Irish Real Tennis Association. And reliable sources report that the proposal for an Irish Academy for the Performing Arts on the Earlsfort Terrace site, warmly supported by the NCH board, has not won Government approval. It's not the Academy which has got the thumbsdown, apparently, but the location.

John O'Conor, director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, who has been pushing the project heavily in public as well as in the corridors of power, clearly has a hankering after the convenience of a city-centre location, and sounds decidedly unenthusiastic about DCU, the major alternative.

He even claims to have investigated the Belfield campus as a possibility - O'Reilly Hall is part of the attraction there - and turned it down as too difficult to get to. Perhaps his next step should be to ask some of Dublin's thousands of young martyrs for learning how they manage to make it to lectures there - or to DCU - every day.