Sir, – Minister for Arts, Jimmy Deenihan is to be commended for his efforts to secure for the State the restoration of the Irish Houses of Parliament in College Green. As your readers will know, the complex was shamefully sold off to the Bank of Ireland when the Irish parliament was abolished under the Act of Union (1800). This was the world’s first purpose-built two-chamber parliament building, the parliament of Henry Grattan, to secure the restoration of which Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell devoted their lives. Although the acquiescent founding fathers of the Free State failed to recover it in 1921, surely now, in the aftermath of the banking crash, a chastened and contrite Bank of Ireland will have the decency to cease to fumble in a greasy till in College Green.
It cannot be a matter of whether this happens, but of when. And a most appropriate “when” is fast approaching.
The year 2014 marks the 750th anniversary of the establishment of the Irish parliament – which met, so far as we know for the first time, in the unlikely setting of Castledermot, Co Kildare, in June 1264 – making ours one of the oldest parliamentary systems in the world.
The writer and others are planning what we hope will be a major conference to mark the occasion (and we would appeal for modest Government support for the venture), but there is a much more emblematic way to commemorate it: thanks largely to the Irish people, the Bank of Ireland may not now be financially bankrupt but it will be morally bankrupt if it spurns Mr Deenihan’s request and fails to return their Houses of Parliament to the nation, beginning in 2014, the 750th anniversary of the introduction of parliament to Ireland. – Yours, etc,