Sarah Harte: The GPO deserves more than offices and retail — it needs cultural investment

Turning the GPO into shops and offices isn’t progress — it’s a sign of cultural insecurity. We owe our history better than that

A child waves a flag outside the GPO as she awaits the 1916 Easter Rising commemorations in Dublin. Picture: PA

Against the backdrop of increased ‘Ireland for the Irish’ protests, the story of who we are feels more pertinent than ever, which is why developing the GPO to include offices and retail spaces is a crummy idea.

It demonstrates a depressing lack of cultural confidence, which isn’t a surprise because the British were so adept at separating us from a sense of pride and culture that we ended up a nation of property developers.

Nothing wrong with property developers. As someone who is pro-business, I have the utmost respect for visionary businesspeople who take risks and make things happen, but in their lane.

If the French had a GPO with a comparable history, would they have partially developed it as shops and offices? They would deem the idea ‘sauvage’. Is it too much to ask that the New Ireland be more confident?

Last Saturday, Sinn Féin organised a hands-off our rebel history protest against the development of the GPO into office and retail space. Just over nine years ago, around 500,000 people lined the streets of Dublin on Easter Sunday to commemorate the Easter Rising and what some view as the genesis of the modern independent republic.

On both days, people who turned up will inevitably have different perspectives on the Easter Rising. This was also true at the time of the rising, with a plethora of different reactions to the five-day event, which subsequently grew either more hostile or more sympathetic from those who had initially viewed it as a “putsch without popular support.” 

When WB Yeats wrote his famous political poem 'Easter 1916', Maude Gonne wrote him a tetchy letter from Passy in Paris telling him how much she disliked it, telling him that “above all it isn’t worthy of the subject.” She sternly told him that MacDonagh, Pearse, and Connolly were “men of genius, with large, comprehensive, speculative and active brains.” 

Certainly, our history has never been straightforward and cannot be explained by simplified narratives. Yet, the revisionist line that the signatories to the proclamation were a bunch of bloodthirsty psychopathic terrorists without an electoral mandate who set themselves up as a provisional government and should not have been commemorated at all in 2016 is one that is at best reductive, with an inherent, tedious bias that is markedly telling.

A view from the kind of people who get excited at the sniff of the word Royal and see us as a kind of empire affiliate, people who would now happily rejoin the Commonwealth (in a poll last year, 40% were persuadable) and think an honours system here would be great. A South Dublin medic once told me that Chelsea was the epicentre of the cultural world. I greatly enjoyed the laugh that this gave me (head thrown back territory actually), but I suppose one man’s feast is another woman’s famine.

We are all prisoners of our past. Myths are how we explain ourselves to ourselves on the level of family, community and country. The past is shaped by who’s telling the story, and that story can never be scientific in its accuracy; it shifts like grains of sand and is always personal and ideological

As Richard Cohen, author of Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past, wrote: “Every man of genius who writes history infuses into it, perhaps unconsciously, the character of his own spirit. His characters ... seem to have only one manner of thinking and feeling, and that is the manner of the author.” 

A consideration moving forward is not only how we choose to view and celebrate the past, but also how we honour who we are now. These questions are closely connected. An engagement with the past should dictate an investment in the future, but what do we mean when we say ‘invest’?

Cultural, intellectual, religious and political influences are increasingly more diverse here. This inevitably means an expanding definition of what it means to be Irish. This necessitates guarding against polemical utterances on who is Irish, because we have new mythmakers who peddle hate and sow dissension, who appropriate the Tricolour for their hollow strains of ethno-nationalism.

The shattered remains of the General Post Office after the Easter Rising. Picture: Getty Images

As it happens, there is already an interpretive centre in the GPO which narrates our past. We could add to this curation and preservation of our history a place of artistic excellence, intellectual exchange and education that would honour the idealism and bravery of previous revolutionaries.

And I don’t just mean the signatories to the Proclamation. I mean all the men and women who fought for Ireland in 1916, in the War of Independence, in the Civil War, regardless of what side they were on, who made sacrifices, were sometimes forced into brutal acts, but who had a dream of which we are the beneficiaries. 

A dream that went beyond shops, offices and high-end apartments for pension funds. They are turning in their graves

In other words, in a bullet-riddled historic building, we make new history with a range of voices for a new, confident Ireland, in a broadened culture. We support theatre, dance, art, music, poetry, photography, and literature through artist residencies in dedicated spaces because, in a new Ireland, the cultural ideals on which a claim of nationality rests need to develop.

Una Mullally in The Irish Times has written repeatedly and persuasively about the opportunity inherent in developing the GPO and O’Connell Street “that can inspire and facilitate generations to come”. She’s on the nose, although the founder of the Little Museum of Dublin, Trevor White, considers the cultural development of the GPO to be a performative virtue-signalling soporific one.

His solution involves converting part of the GPO into owner-occupied apartments, with the proceeds then used to develop social and affordable housing in affluent suburbs. On paper, this might sound plausible, except experience tells us that development for a niche market rarely leads to affordable social housing. Ultimately, this is a well-intentioned pipe dream. To paraphrase him, it's gentrification on steroids.

It’s beyond the word count of this column to analyse the outcomes of the Part V rules, which compel developers to hold back 10% of a development for social housing. They have been in force since 2000, and saying they haven’t been a success is an understatement. I don’t disagree with White that people should live on O’Connell Street and in the city centre, but which people?

Regardless of your perspective on what 1916 signifies, or even if you miss the days when Ireland was run from Dublin Castle and you continue to tug what you view as your metropolitan forelock to Blighty, our colonisation is undeniable as the defining event of who we are. This feels more germane than ever as we witness imperialist adventures in Ukraine and Gaza, which, as historian Professor Jane Ohlmeyer of Trinity College Dublin points out, are “legacies of empire”.

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As the Irish Examiner editorial wrote on Monday, “We can learn well or badly from history ... we have a duty of care, not only to our own descendants but the wider world we’d like to see.” 

The marked idealism that characterised the run-up to and aftermath of 1916 is in woefully short supply. That “wider world” or vibrant civic culture will never be achieved by building more shops and offices, or, for that matter, high-end apartments. Spare us.