A living city needs event posters

Sir, – Further to “Why have theatre posters vanished from the walls of Dublin city?” (Culture, July 26th), for close on 36 years I was the managing director of Irish Poster Advertising.

During that period, I tried time and again to get Dublin City Council support to integrate entertainment bill posting across all new development hoardings. The late Christopher Geoghegan, the environmental principal officer in 1985, was the only official who had the awareness to appreciate the value to the city of event posting. “Every living city needs event posters”, he would tell me, but they have to be coordinated and policed. In 1986, he gave me a one-year deal to manage the city’s out of control fly posting. That arrangement ran and ran until 2022.

The Dublin entertainment street posting system was the envy of many European cities, it was neat and tidy and everyone, small events, bands or big promoters got a fair share of the sites. Pre-Covid, sites became more difficult to acquire. Builders wanted big money, the council wanted rates, insurance companies bigger premiums. But what really killed entertainment street posting in Dublin was the lack of support from the council. Despite my continued insistence that the posters were of major cultural value and a showbusiness tradition dating back 140 years, no one at Wood Quay had the vision to appreciate their ongoing value to the entertainment life of Dublin city. – Yours, etc,

PAT EGAN,