cobalt

Yesterday’s Sunday Times said that Colaiste Mhuire had been chosen.

Sunday Times – November 14, 2004
Abbey gets Parnell Sq school site
John Burns and Siobhan Maguire
A FORMER Christian Brothers college on Parnell Square in Dublin is set to be unveiled as the new home of the Abbey theatre.
Colaiste Mhuire, one of the city’s best-known Irish language schools, was abandoned last year because of its dilapidated state and has since been handed over to the government as part of the child abuse redress scheme.
The Office of Public Works is understood to be buying up an adjoining building to make the site big enough for a new national theatre. A major international architectural competition will be organised to decide who designs it.
John O’Donoghue, the arts minister, is aiming to secure cabinet agreement on a new site for the Abbey before the end of its centenary year, which expires on December 28. Its current premises is inadequate, and it is too expensive to rebuild the theatre on site.
Colaiste Mhuire has been chosen from a shortlist of three city-centre locations, which included Hawkins House, a hideous office block near Trinity College. All three sites were in public ownership.
One of the factors that swayed it for Parnell Square is the number of cultural institutions in the area. The National Wax Museum, the Hugh Lane Gallery and the Irish Writers’ Centre are all neighbours, while the Garden of Remembrance is across the road and the Gate and the Ambassador theatres are at the opposite corner of Parnell Square.
The facade of the five Georgian buildings is listed, and planners expect that the new grand entrance to the theatre will be on Granby Row, beside the wax museum. There is already a 1960s theatre on the site.
A planning official said: “There is no design as yet, so there is no entrance or configuration for the building. They have a site which they own, and it has the capacity to take the Abbey, so they are simply saying ‘Let’s have this as the preferred site’. That’s not to say they won’t run into planning or practical difficulties — it isn’t going to be easy.
“Dublin city council has serious ambitions to upgrade Parnell Square and clearly a building of the stature of the national theatre would contribute greatly to that ambition.”
The interiors of the five Georgian buildings are listed, so knocking down internal walls or removing ceilings will not be allowed, setting a huge challenge for the architects. The new national theatre will need two auditoriums, a rehearsal space, a restaurant/bar, an education facility and an archive.
“The floor space is there, and an auditorium; it fits,” said the official. “Putting a national theatre there is not impossible, it can be done.”
The saga of the Abbey theatre’s new home has been tortuous. The current building suffers from serious defects, such as having no link between the Abbey stage and the Peacock, the experimental theatre in the basement. There are also acoustic problems.
In 2002, the cabinet decided to redevelop the Abbey on its present site, and turned down the offer of a space in Dublin’s docklands. The Abbey’s board had favoured a move down-river, and out of Bertie Ahern’s constituency.
An expert group later concluded that the existing site was not big enough to solve the theatre’s accommodation problems. Adjacent properties needed to be bought in order to allow the theatre to stay there.
A study by the OPW concluded that persuading 20 neighbouring property owners to sell to the state would take too long and be too expensive. Rebuilding the Abbey theatre on its current site would have cost €50m, O’Donoghue said recently.
Earlier this year his officials selected the Carlton cinema site on O’Connell Street as the best new location. Dublin city council was compulsorily purchasing the site, and the department hoped a court challenge from the owners would be speedily resolved. But judgment is still pending, and O’Donoghue’s officials decided to look at other options.
A further attraction of the Colaiste Mhuire site is that it is in the electoral constituency of Bertie Ahern, the taoiseach, who has made it clear he wants the national theatre to remain in Dublin’s north inner city.
One of the oldest Irish language schools in the country, Colaiste Mhuire is the alma mater of Brian Farrell, the broadcaster, and Alan Dukes, the former Fine Gael leader. The buildings were taken over by the Christian Brothers in the 1930s.
The new Abbey theatre will probably be built as a public- private partnership (PPP), although O’Donoghue recently indicated a measure of frustration with such projects. He described PPPs as a demanding, complex and time-consuming procedure.