Sir, – I wish to register in the strongest possible terms my disquiet at the decision by Dublin City Council to authorise – and to expend scarce resources – on what amounts to the desecration of Merrion Square.
This public square has provided a wooded place of quiet; a place of play and the possibility of community recreational gathering for all who work in this area, and all who stroll through it.
This is a disconcerting action and an abuse of elected power, particularly the crude felling of so many trees, rather than selective pruning if the growth of specific trees was affected by overcrowding.
The dismantling of this place – where a little privacy for reflection was available in the middle of the administrative centre of the capital and where the interludes in the working day could be spent under trees and across lawns – defies, certainly, the understanding of this citizen.
This imposing of change, I suggest, represents a misplaced nostalgia for a formal square, not as it has presented for so many years – a slightly wild place where squirrels and foxes could share a city space with the many citizens of Dublin whose environment it has graced since it was opened to the public – but as it was: aping an earlier incarnation as a private place for privilege and the imposing of a quite inauthentic mimicry of that which has passed. – Yours, etc, MARY JONES Arkhive Productions, Lwr Mount St, Dublin 2.