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15 Usher’s Island, the Dublin house James Joyce used as the setting for his short story The Dead.
15 Usher’s Island, the Dublin house James Joyce used as the setting for his short story The Dead. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The Guardian
15 Usher’s Island, the Dublin house James Joyce used as the setting for his short story The Dead. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The Guardian

Joyce fans mourn loss of Dublin’s soul as developers buy House of the Dead

This article is more than 4 years old

The writer observed a century ago Ireland’s inclination to trash its heritage. Now some fear the setting of his greatest short story will fall victim to cultural vandalism

Dubliners know the Georgian townhouse on the Liffey quays by a macabre-sounding nickname: the House of the Dead.

In fact it is – or was thought to be – immortal, left forever as the setting of James Joyce’s The Dead, a masterpiece considered one of the greatest short stories in the English language.

In the 1890s the writer’s maternal great-aunts ran a music school at the four-storey house, 15 Usher’s Island, and hosted Christmas parties that Joyce used as the scene for the story, a meditation on love, loss and identity.

Evergreen themes, it turns out, because last week city authorities announced a plan to turn the House of the Dead into a 54-room hostel, prompting an outcry that property deals were trashing culture and zombifying Ireland’s capital to make way for foreign tourists, students and tech workers.

“It’s a great travesty,” said PJ Murphy, who runs Sweny’s, a former pharmacy that features in another Joyce masterwork, Ulysses, and is now a museum trust lined with Joyce tomes. “It should remain a place to visit by people who have read Joyce. To turn it into a hostel is a great tragedy.”

Artists, academics and others echoed the sentiment. “Dublin can build all the hotel/hostel rooms it likes, but if it continues to disregard and demolish its unique cultural heritage it will obliterate what remains of the heart of the city and there will be little left for visitors or indeed for Dubliners themselves to appreciate,” John McCourt, a professor of English literature, wrote in the Irish Times.

“These endless hostels and hotels are symptoms of a whiskey and leprechaun version of Ireland … which ignores climate change and the need to appeal to locals as well as those arriving, shamrock-eyed, via long-haul flights,” tweeted novelist Paula McGrath.

Anjelica Huston and Donal McCann in The Dead, based on the final short story of Joyce’s Dubliners. Photograph: Zenith/Sportsphoto

The row is the latest twist in a venerable debate about the nurturing – and crushing – of art.

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.

Each month seems to augur fresh expansions by Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other tech giants that have their European headquarters here. More than 80 new hotel projects with names like Aloft, Central, Hyatt, Grafton, Hard Rock, Iveagh Garden, Marlin, Mayson, Radisson and Wetherspoon are at various stages of development.

The influx has brought jobs and money but also increased the cost of living. This has worsened a homelessness crisis – 3,873 children are in emergency accommodation in Ireland, it emerged last week, the state’s highest ever level – and forced musicians, writers and other creatives to leave. Others, like Stephen James Smith, Dublin’s unofficial poet laureate, survive by couch-surfing.

Map: Dublin, Ireland

Bohemian musical venues are shutting, unable to pay rents, a trend replicated in San Francisco. The County Wicklow musician Hozier was among the many who mourned the closure of the Bernard Shaw pub.

Dublin city councillors recently voted to cap new hotels to halt the “increasing erosion of cultural life and space”. The vote has questionable legal and political force.

The council and the Office of Public Work, after all, had ample opportunity to buy the protected property that Joyce called the “dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island” when it came on the market two years ago. They didn’t. Instead two private investors, Fergus McCabe and Brian Stynes, snapped it up for €650,000 (£560,000).

According to an official notice posted outside the gate last week they now seek planning permission to turn it into a 54-room hostel with a cafe.

Not everyone is horrified. Eugene Lewan, a tourist from Washington state, reckoned the business could respect the legacy. “If the hostel was themed around Joyce that might be OK.”

PJ Murphy, who runs Sweny’s pharmacy as a Joycean museum trust. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The Guardian

All the cries of cultural vandalism, of defilement of literature’s great temple, cloud a melancholy fact: the building is already vandalised, already defiled, victim of a century of neglect.

Built in about 1775 on the south bank of the Liffey for a grain merchant, Joshua Pim, the structure is largely unchanged from the time Joyce’s great-aunts occupied it.

Publication of The Dead in 1914 – included in the short story collection Dubliners – made the house famous. But it fell into disuse and decay, its roof broken, its interiors ravaged by squatters, the whole building almost destroyed by fire in the mid-1990s.

A Joyce-loving barrister, Brendan Kilty, bought and tried to rescue it. He refurbished the ground floor, restored period decor, hosted literary events and reenacted the Christmas dinner scene, only to end up filing for bankruptcy and selling the property in 2017.

When the Observer visited last week there was nothing to indicate the building’s significance, not even a plaque. It looked abandoned: there was litter outside, weeds clogging the basement steps, the windows grubby, the facade chipped and peeling – a sad version of the elegant home featured in the 1987 film version of The Dead directed by John Huston.

Neighbouring buildings have fared little better. This is a rundown part of Dublin you don’t see on postcards. Last week two Italian tourists were mugged at gunpoint up the road.

“The amount of Americans that come here looking for the Joyce house – I tell them it’s the derelict looking one with weeds,” said Mark Farrell, 53, who runs a nearby scooter rental business. “It’s going to rack and ruin. Most of them can’t believe the state it’s in.”

Farrell did not consider it to be a good neighbourhood for backpackers and students. “To have a hostel down here is insane. After dark it’s bandit land.”

Whatever the fate of the House of the Dead, the man who immortalised it may make a posthumous return. Two city councillors want to repatriate his remains from Switzerland. Joyce’s tomb would be Dublin’s newest tourist attraction.

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