The "ulterior motive" behind an action to protect a 1916 Rising "battlefield site" around Dublin's Moore Street is to replace the State's plans for development of a 1916 Commemorative Centre with a "different project", lawyers for the Minister for Arts and Heritage have told the High Court.
It seems there may be concerns the Minister’s plans to commemorate Moore Street’s links to 1916 are confined to a terrace of buildings at Nos 14-17 and do not extend to a “battlefield” site extending from the GPO on to and around Moore Street, Michael McDowell SC said.
Counsel was beginning his arguments on behalf of the Minister opposing proceedings by Colm Moore, a nominee of the 1916 Relatives Association, aimed at protecting buildings and places on and around Moore Street with links to the Rising.
Mr McDowell said Mr Moore essentially wants a “different project” with a route marking the 1916 rebels’ retreat from the GPO into Moore Street “and all sorts of other things”.
The Minister was entitled to make a judgment as to what would be a “coherent” monument “evocative of pride and memory” and believed, if the national monument had to include other isolated buildings, such as No 10 Moore Street, that would result in something “visually confusing”.
John Nalty Connolly, a grandson of rebel leader James Connolly, has endorsed the Minister's decision to protect as a national monument the terrace extending from Nos 14-17 Moore Street, counsel said. The commemorative centre to be developed there will centre on No 16, where the Rising leaders met for the last time and decided to surrender.
‘Profound distress’
In an affidavit, Mr Connolly, a retired businessman of Killarney Road, Bray, Co Wicklow, said it was “a source of profound distress and dismay” to the majority of the Save No 16 Moore Street committee that this legal action had been brought. He understood the restoration of the national monument is delayed indefinitely pending the outcome of the case, he said.
He “very strongly” believes the Minister’s plans for the national monument are “splendid ones”, Mr Connolly said.
In submissions for the Minister, Mr McDowell argued that decisions on exactly which structures should be declared a national monument are primarily for the Minister, and not the courts to make.
The court’s task in judicial review is confined to analysing the process by which the Minister reached the decision and the court could not engage with the merits of the decision or examine its rationality, he said.
The Minister took the view the property most worth preserving is No 16 Moore Street and that Nos 14-17 form a coherent whole architecturally, should be protected together, rehabilitated and preserved as a national monument.
That was a “perfectly tenable and very attractive” view endorsed, among others, by some relatives of the 1916 leaders including Mr Connolly, counsel said.
The Minister also contended the planned works to develop the commemorative centre at Nos 14-17 will not impact on the alleged wider battlefield site extending from the GPO on to and around Moore Street.
That "begs the question why we're here", Mr McDowell said. The case resumes on Tuesday before Mr Justice Max Barrett.
