The Minister for Tourism, Dr McDaid, says he supports a proposal to make Dublin the international capital of romantic love. Mr Michael Kennedy, the Fianna Fail candidate in the Dublin North by-election, with an eye to the imminence of St Valentine's Day, issued a statement yesterday calling on Bord Failte to promote Dublin as "the destination for romantic couples at St Valentine's weekend."
He pointed out that "Dublin's Whitefriars Street Church is the resting place of the remains of St Valentine, who wrote the first billet doux as he was about to be martyred - signed "from your Valentine." Dr McDaid commented: "There is no reason why Dublin should yield to Venice, Paris or anywhere else in the area of romantic appeal.
"Some of mythology's great love stories are based in Dublin: Tristan and Isolde, from whom Chapelizod takes its name, and Diarmuid and Grainne, who had links with Howth."
Mr Kennedy said a Bord Failte campaign "for lovestruck couples to celebrate St Valentine's Day in Dublin would start the traditional holiday season even earlier than St Patrick's Day."
He said St Valentine had secretly married Roman troops who were forbidden to wed because the Emperor Claudius II believed single men made better soldiers. From jail, he miraculously restored the sight of the daughter of the Roman judge who had condemned him to death, and the judge and his family converted to Christianity.
Before he was beheaded in 269 St Valentine wrote to the judge's daughter and signed the note "from your Valentine."
In 1836 St Valentine's relics were donated to the Carmelites in Aungier Street by Pope Gregory XVI in recognition of their work with the poor, and are still kept in a casket in one of the church's altars.