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YET AGAIN, our National Theatre is the subject of speculation about its future location. Finding a new home for the Abbey has been like some comedy of errors that the author keeps rewriting but never comes up with a denouement.

The latest suggestion, though not entirely new, to relocate the theatre to the GPO site in O’Connell Street has more of an imaginative spark to it than all previous plans and proposals. It seems perfect for a multiplicity of reasons, not least the creation of a space in which the stories of 21st-century Ireland can be enacted on the spot where a vision of a society that cherishes “all the children of the nation equally” was first proclaimed by poets and writers. A century later it is the duty of contemporary drama to confront the failure to deliver fully on that aspiration and the work on the stage of the National Theatre should reflect and be part of that inquiry.