PETER COSTELLO,
Sir, - We still believe the memorial bench to John and James Joyce should be returned to its original site, facing Newman House, despite the letter from Ms Hendley of the OPW Press Office (who merely provides an explanation for what was done, but no excuse).
The placing of the bench vitiates not only the plan of the original sponsors in 1977, but also the intention of James Joyce himself that a memorial bench should be placed on a Dublin street for the convenience of older citizens like his late father.
Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus in January 1934 that "only Paris seems to understand that John Citizen wants to sit down at times without paying for his seat in the open street". The wider pavement would have provided even more room for it than before.
It would have been better for the OPW to have simply admitted that in the usual bureaucratic tidying up of our lives that goes on all the time, the authorities wanted the bench out of the way and expected that no one would notice or care what they did with it. - Yours, etc.,
PETER COSTELLO, Wellington Place, Dublin 4.
JOHN WYSE JACKSON, Blacklands Terrace, London SW3.