Looks like a developer got hold of the property (as developers do, and will–even wherever you are buried will one day be purchased, excavated, and built on if things are allowed to keep going as they are (hint hint: pitchforks and torches, people)) and Dubliners are saying the “soul” of Dublin is at stake (come now).
Joyce himself framed it best: “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.” The line, uttered by his alter ego Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, alluded to the parochialism and spiritual impoverishment that prompted Joyce’s self-exile to continental Europe in 1904. More than a century later, Ireland is culturally unrecognisable – tolerant, open, ethnically diverse. But artists – and artistic legacy – now face a threat from hotels, hostels and offices that are popping up like toast across Dublin.
