Sir, - I have just returned from abroad and was intrigued to read the letter from my old friends and Joycean colleagues, Peter Costello and John Wyse Jackson, about Joyce's bench on the Green. I was unaware that the bench had been recently moved and I support their contention that it should be replaced in its original location.
I am sure your readers will understand that I feel strongly about this point as I was the instigator of the project in 1977. I was the chairman of the organising committee of the International James Joyce Symposium which took place in Dublin in that year and it had come to my notice, as your correspondents point out, that Joyce wished to commemorate his father by the erection of just such a seat in Dublin.
His original choice was on the Whitworth Road just at the corner of the Claude Road in Drumcondra. This project was effectively sunk by some of the local representatives who maintained "that it was bad enough having people like that walking up and down this street" without encouraging them by facilitating them with a seat.
I got the support of my fellow committee members here in Dublin and of the International James Joyce Foundation to proceed with the matter.
Subsequently we secured the co-operation of the city authorities and the Office of Public Works. We, in fact, paid full cost of the bench itself and of the necessary works to accommodate it. We specifically chose the site on St. Stephens Green to recognise Joyce's repeated references to "St. Stephen's - that is my Green" as he called it in his early prose works and the fact that occupants of the seat would look straight across at Newman's University to the very windows from which the young Joyce gazed at the Green as a student.
The seat was dedicated on Bloomsday, 1977, and I invited the Irish playwright, Denis Johnston, and James Joyce's old friend from the Paris days, the late Maria Jolas, to speak on the occasion. I still have in my possession a photograph of Denis Johnson and Maria Jolas elegantly, but soberly attired, accompanied by myself in a blazer, a cravat and a straw hat and Gerry Davis impersonating Bloom in a well-filled black suit and bowler hat.
I recall, particularly, Maria Jolas's remembrance of Joyce, shortly after the death of his father, coming to her, putting a large sum of money in French Franc notes into her hand, and asking her to give it to some down-and-out in memory of his father.
She scoured Paris for a suitable target and eventually found a elderly homeless man asleep on one of the gratings of the Paris Metro. She woke him up and gave him the money at which his eyes widened in astonishment. He shook himself awake, listened once more to the story, said "Sans Blague" - "No Foolin' "- before grabbing the cash and disappearing. Apparently this was an outcome that gave Joyce particular satisfaction.
In the circumstances I am surprised that neither I nor any other member of the original committee responsible for the erection of the seat were consulted by those who chose to move it, and I would appeal to them to reinstate it in its original location which, as I have indicated, was arrived at after a good deal of thought. - Yours, etc.,
Sen DAVID NORRIS, Seanad Éireann