Sir, – While worthies galore scramble aboard Dublin’s latest literary bandwagon, I hope our President will next week find time to express belated appreciation of London’s role in Irish literature.
So many of the writers who are celebrated here in Ireland sought refuge over there. From Oliver Goldsmith and Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw, Oliver St John Gogarty, George Moore, Sean O’Casey, Ernie Gebler and, latterly, John McGahern.
Jonathan Swift, Liam O’Flaherty, Elizabeth Bowen, Maeve Binchy, Austin Clarke and JP Donleavy also served time there. Dion Boucicault and Brendan Behan first achieved fame in London. James Joyce, WB Yeats and Sean O’Casey married in the city, and it also provides the final resting place of the 18th-century dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Samuel Lover, Bram Stoker, James Stephens, Lady Morgan and Lady Wilde.
It would be very appropriate if the President (who is of course a poet himself) were to lay a wreath on Oliver Goldsmith’s grave in remembrance of these writers. Goldsmith is buried in the Temple, where compatriots Edward Martyn and fellow-poet Tom Moore also sojourned.
Should London, rather than Dublin, perhaps be celebrated as Ireland’s literary capital? Yours, etc,
BRENDAN LYNCH,
Mid Mountjoy Street,
Dublin 7