THE PLAN to move the Abbey to the GPO will cost about half what moving to the docklands would have done, and will help rejuvenate O’Connell Street, the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism has said.
Martin Cullen said he planned to take a decision on whether to move the Abbey to O’Connell Street soon and estimates that relocating it in time for 2016 would cost €80 to €90 million, much less than the expected cost at George’s Dock (€150 million to €170 million), which had progressed almost to architectural competition before problems arose.
On the GPO’s future, he said: “I don’t want another museum there, open nine to five, then the whole bloody thing is dead. Think of the wider context of O’Connell Street and try to rejuvenate it,” he said.
Mr Cullen said an architect had drawn up plans and made a model of how the Abbey might be relocated to the GPO before the suggestion ever came into the public domain.
He had received an approach out of the blue about a year ago from an unnamed “very good international architect” who has worked with theatres. He had taken the theatre’s specifications, did “a huge amount of research”, and made a model. “So I know it works,” said Mr Cullen. “I saw it all and it’s fantastic.”
Asked whose idea moving the Abbey to the GPO was, Mr Cullen said: “It kind of came mutually . . . We were talking about it and kicking it around . . . He said ‘That’s a fascinating idea’. He had it in the back of his own mind as well, but I said, ‘Will the thing work?’ and he said, ‘Leave it with me’.”
He came back with ambitious plans that the Minister is extremely enthusiastic about. “It was a labour of love. I said, ‘If we go down this road, obviously the OPW takes over and there will be an international tendering competition and all that’.”
Mr Cullen said the conference of business people in Farmleigh earlier this year was “a turning point” in making the case for arts funding. “A lot of people who were expected at the economics session turned up at the cultural forum, and the place was packed out. And that made everyone sit up and start to think differently about the arts.”
The whole arts sector is “worth €10-11 billion in broadest terms to the Irish economy,” he said, and research shows half of visitors “come specifically for cultural tourism, and 18 per cent of people come to Ireland because of something they saw in a film”.
Mr Cullen said the controversial proposal to merge three galleries – the National Gallery, Irish Museum of Modern Art and Crawford – will not happen, but that Crawford in Cork would become “part of the National Gallery set-up”, while Imma remains as a single institution.
He intends that a new national opera company will be established next year, definitely in Dublin, not Wexford, with decisions about how it is to be structured made within three months so that plans can be included in next year’s Estimates.