A chara, - How right is Ursula Hough-Gormley (March 19th) to say that the Carlton is the right building in the right place for our National Theatre. O'Connell Street has been a national disgrace for too many years. - Is mise,
GERALD MORGAN, FTCD,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2.
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Sir, - After a business meeting in the Gresham Hotel last week, two colleagues and I stood on the steps of the hotel looking across O'Connell Street at the empty shell of the Carlton, whose magnificent Art Deco frontage cries out for a clean-up. All three of us agreed this would be a wonderful site for a new Irish National Theatre in this new millennium. How proud O'Casey would be to know that The Shadow of a Gunman could be about a hundred yards down the very street where this nation state was declared.
Perhaps that is the problem: the historic denial of the importance of O'Connell Street to this Celtic Tiger. Or could it be that Síle de Valera didn't think of the idea in the first place and that any idea that does not emanate from a member of the Government is not a good one?
Ursula Hough-Gormley gets my full support in her call for the Government to see sense on this issue. She should be supported. - Yours, etc.,
BRENDAN QUINN,
South Enniscrone,
Co Sligo.