Madam, - Recently, while looking south from the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park, I counted 22 tower cranes working in the general Kilmainham area on apartment blocks and suchlike. The Magazine Fort was built in 1735, on the site of the original Phoenix House on St Thomas's Hill and is mentioned by Sheridan le Fanu in The House by the Churchyard. This fort is designated as a List 1 building in the City Development Plan and media reports in 2005 suggested that it might serve as a sight for a New Abbey Theatre or an Opera House.
Alas, it is now a mass of crumbling buildings. Its exterior walls are ivy clad, its drawbridge is long gone and its dry ditch largely overgrown. Could we perhaps beg from the developers, who own the cranes, before they depart to fill their already overflowing coffers with profits from these new developments, for some left-over materials, to at least make a start on the restoration of this historic building so close to Dublin city? - Yours, etc,
FRANK FOLAN, Culmore Road, Dublin 20.