On Friday, October 16th, it was announced that Dublin City Council had granted private developers permission to turn 15 Usher’s Island into a 56-bed tourist hostel. Known colloquially as “The House of The Dead”, this building was once home to Joyce’s great aunts, who ran a music school there, and was the setting for his internationally acclaimed story “The Dead”, and John Huston’s final film by the same name.
Only four days later, final-year student Cáit Murphy jumped into action and set up an online petition to “Save James Joyce’s ‘House of the Dead’ (Usher’s Island) from becoming a tourist hostel”. Spurred on by John McCourt’s article in the Irish Times and her mother’s advice “to stop ranting about it and actually do something”, Murphy got to work. Speaking to The University Times, Murphy said that she only expected to attract the attention of “friends, other students in Trinity and maybe UCD and some lecturers who might be interested”. Now, with nearly 3,000 signatures and counting, the petition has surpassed all expectations and transcended international boundaries. “It’s just insane,” Murphy said. “I’m overwhelmed by it.”
However, the uphill struggle to reverse development plans for the site has been journeyed before. In Autumn of 2019, John McCourt, a professor of English literature at Università di Macerata, and Irish literary giant Colm Ó’Tóibín drafted a petition to preserve the building. The petition was signed by almost 100 international masters of the craft, including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Edna O’Brien. “There wasn’t one person who said, ‘No, turn it into a hostel’”, McCourt recalls. “They all said this place really is a shrine which should be preserved.”
“Dublin is a UNESCO city of Literature. I don’t understand how the buildings and spaces that helped bring that honour upon the city aren’t being protected.”
Despite their best efforts and securing the support of the Department of Culture and Heritage, An Taisce, the National Trust for Ireland, the Irish Georgian Society and the Heritage Council, among others, the devastating news that permission had been granted to private developers to begin gutting the building came, crushingly, on the Friday before Irish Book Week 2020.
This wasn’t even the first opportunity that the government or public bodies had to intervene. Neither the government nor Dublin City Council made a bid for the property when it changed hands in 2017. Murphy reinforces that, “Dublin is a UNESCO city of Literature. I don’t understand how the buildings and spaces that helped bring that honour upon the city aren’t being protected.”
In McCourt’s eyes, we are “about to desecrate probably the most important address in Irish literature, and one of the most important addresses in world literature, because ‘The Dead’ is a story that everybody reads by Joyce – it’s not Finnegan’s Wake or Ulysses, which require a certain kind of reader”.
“It’s kind of a universal story”, he added. Cáit Murphy exemplifies this: “The Dead”, she told me, was her first introduction to Joyce and, as a student of English and film, Huston’s 1987 portrayal of the story stands strong among her favourites.
Both as a young man who had “been driven by it a million times without ever really noticing it”, and an engaged participant in walking tours who was aware of “the very special spirit and atmosphere” of the literary space, McCourt understands the human tendency “to take these things for granted as long as they’re there”.
“We have so much going on that it’s actually hard to make this part of the news – and that’s the perfect time for a property developer to just ‘oops!’ knock the building down.”
If succumbed to, however, McCourt fears that we could find ourselves bereft of Joycean locations “of primary importance”, referencing the demolition of 7 Eccles Street – the home of Molly and Leopold Bloom, in the 1960s. He also believes that the conversion of 15 Usher’s Island into a cultural space, would be “great for that part of the city” and serve as a “lovely halfway house” for tourists visiting the Guinness Storehouse.
Conversely, he questions the capability of the fragile Georgian structure to handle a daily influx of 56 people. “Does the city need another hostel or another hotel? It certainly needs proper housing to be built”, he continues. “But the tourist numbers we saw in the last decade, we’re not going to see them for a long time. So, I even wonder are the developers that keen themselves on following through with this plan?”
Murphy, who grew up in Drogheda, resents the fact that the planned hostel is targeted at tourists and students: “I think it’s a bit condescending to say students wouldn’t be interested in literature when […] places like MOLI [Museum of Literature Ireland] demonstrate the success of places that are dedicated to literature”.
Murphy is also reckoning with the obstructions a national lockdown poses to student activism. “Being away from the action is difficult”, she admits. McCourt, who’s fighting the cause from abroad could relate to this, adding: “Our timing couldn’t be worse […] We have so much going on that it’s actually hard to make this part of the news – and that’s the perfect time for a property developer to just ‘oops!’ knock the building down in a storm the way they did with the O’Rahilly house.”
Despite this, McCourt holds out great hope for Murphy’s petition. “We’ve got 2,000 signatures in 2–3 days”, he observes. The root of his jubilation however, stems from the baton being “passed into another generation”. “You kind of take it for granted that an auld fella like me is gonna want to save the Joyce house – it would be weird if I didn’t”, he laughs, saying it’s “very encouraging” to see the love of Joyce live on. In Cáit Murphy, it certainly has: “I care about the house so much, it doesn’t matter if I’ve to sacrifice some element of anonymity to bring such an important thing to the fore.”
The petition remains live at change.org. The window for lodging new objections to the Dublin City Council will close on November 5th.
