Abbey Church on Parnell Square finally sheds its scaffolding after 18 years
The church is 160 years old this year and was constructed under the guidance of Scottish architect Andrew Heiton. Dublin merchant Alexander Findlater bankrolled the £14,000 project which took two years to build.
The scaffolding on the tower face and spire was installed to protect people on the ground in case any remnants of the structural damage fell onto the street below.
The restoration – partly funded by the historic structures fund – involved extensive stone repairs, the installation of stainless steel components, as well as cleaning, repointing and decorative work.
According to Reverend Alan Boal, the church fell into disrepair after the wrong building materials were used on a restoration project in the 1960s.
Concrete was used instead of the original materials of lime mortar.
'The concrete eventually cracked which let water in and eroded the iron work which held the thing together,' Reverend Boal said.
'It's called a cantilever scaffold and it was there purely to protect people on the ground in case something fell off the building.'
Reverand Boal said it was difficult to fundraise for the restoration of the abbey.
'We really struggled to raise the money, so we sold a building that we originally had. The heritage grant has been a really big support for us,' he said.
Despite the tower being marred by scaffolding for 18 years, the actual building took just over a year.
'Ironically, the work we had to do actually hasn't taken long. It was redoing a restoration job that wasn't particularly well done in the 1960s and 70s,' he said.
'Because the Abbey is a protected structure, we had to ensure that all of the facing stone came from the exact same quarry in Devon.'
Green Party local councillor Janet Horner said scaffolding on a building can impact the way people view our city.
'Unfortunately, in Dublin, we have a problem with timelines. These maintenance projects tend to bloat very quickly,' she said.
'It does impact how people see the city, construction sites everywhere and scaffolding on display can lead to a hostile environment.'
Cllr Horner says the redevelopment of the Abbey Church has come just at the right time
'That whole area is up for redevelopment when the Parnell Library comes in. Having that building on display really helps to add to that cultural quarter,' she said.
'Between the library, the Hugh Lane Gallery and the Poetry Museum which is coming around, having the square looking its best will be incredible.
'I really want to see those projects delivered as soon as possible,' she added.
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Irish Times
25-07-2025
- Irish Times
Jung at Heart – Frank McNally on the Irish legacies of a Swiss psychologist
The psychologist Carl Jung, who was born 150 years ago this weekend, seems never to have visited Ireland. But he loomed large in the lives of two of our greatest writers, for very different reasons. He and James Joyce shared a city – Zurich – for a period during and after the first world war. Unfortunately, they also shared a deep, mutual scepticism, exacerbated by the attempts of third parties to bring them together. Here's Joyce, writing to his patron Harriet Weaver in 1921: 'A bunch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr Freud) amuses himself at the expense…of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets.' One of that bunch was Elizabeth McCormack Rockefeller, a Jungian disciple and philanthropist who subsidised Joyce for a time, but wanted him to undergo analysis and suspended funding when he wouldn't. READ MORE Jung, for his part, believed Ulysses was evidence of the author's latent schizophrenia, which he also thought explained Joyce's heavy drinking. Asked to write the preface for a German edition, he suggested among other insults that the book could be as easily read backwards as forwards. When the publishers showed that to Joyce, according to biographer Richard Ellmann, he telegraphed back a terse response in German, 'Niedrigerhangen', meaning: 'Ridicule it by making it public' (yes, they have a word for that too). Jung later repented by publishing a more respectful version and, in a letter to Joyce, admitting that difficult as he found Ulysses to read, 'I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it.' As for the author, family tragedy eventually forced him to relent in his scepticism enough to allow Jung treat his daughter Lucia for the actual schizophrenia with which she was diagnosed in her mid-20s. 'I wouldn't go to him, but maybe he can help her,' he wrote. Jung thought Lucia had the same madness as her father, without the genius to channel it, and famously likened them to two people going to the bottom of a river: one diving and the other drowning. Ellmann thought Jung was fundamentally wrong about Joyce's supposed self-medication against mental illness, in part because of his unfamiliarity with Irish drinking habits. 'It was not easy for Jung, who had been brought up in a 'fanatical anti-alcoholic tradition', to understand Joyce, whose rearing was diametrically opposite,' he wrote. The writer drank at night only, Ellmann pointed out, and with a combination of 'purpose and relaxation'. He enjoyed company but also used it to study human behaviour and to unburden himself of anxieties. In summary: 'He engaged in excess with considerable prudence.' By contrast with Joyce, Samuel Beckett had only one encounter with Jung, but it brought a shattering insight that changed his life. When he attended a lecture by Jung in 1934, it was at the suggestion of his psychiatrist Wilfred Rupert Bion, who had been treating Beckett for depression. Some of that related to an intense relationship with his mother, an austere woman from whom he inherited his tall, thin frame and hawk-like features, but not her narrow worldview. Relations between them were exacerbated by Beckett's apparent prenatal memories of a claustrophobic life in the womb. In the lecture, Jung recalled the sad case of a pre-teenage girl he had treated years before. She was troubled by recurrent dreams, which the psychologist thought (but didn't say) were premonitions of imminent death. And she did indeed die soon afterwards. But the bit that astounded Beckett was Jung's one-line summary, added as an afterthought. For Beckett, that explained a lot about his own life. Bion thought so too and went on to develop theories involving 'psychological birth' in the womb, a result of which was that 'biological birth did not necessarily bring mental separation from the mother'. Beckett gave up therapy the same year. But he often referred to Jung's story in conversation. And a 20 years later, he put it in the mouth of Maddy Rooney, the main character in his radio play All That Fall (which I had the strange experience a while back of hearing at Tullow Church, Foxrock, in the Beckett family pew, among a blindfolded audience). All That Fall is the most localised of his works, set along Brighton Road on a race day in nearby Leopardstown. Mrs Rooney goes to meet her blind husband off the train, which we later learn has been the scene of a tragedy involving a child, never explained. On the way home, she remembers something she heard in a talk once, from 'one of those new mind doctors', that had 'haunted' her ever since. She goes on to retell the story Beckett had heard, about the 'strange and unhappy little girl' and recalls the doctor's conclusion, which he had found so mind-blowing: 'The trouble with her was that she had never been really born'.
The Irish Sun
22-07-2025
- The Irish Sun
The little-known reason Scots should love BATS and why they're a lifesaver in the garden this summer
KING Charles is to provide a new home for bats at his Scottish mansion so work can go ahead. Surveys found evidence of potential roosting sites after he applied for permission to build a luxury wedding venue in Dumfries House near Cumnock, Ayrshire, where bat boxes have now been installed in the grounds of the A-listed building. 4 The common pipistrelle is having to fight for survival. 4 A cloud of dreaded midges, that can blight any summer event. 4 Dr Joe Nunez-Mino is one of the UK's top bat experts. But The King isn't the only one to be left in a flap over bats with a £100million 'bat tunnel' also constructed for the controversial HS2 rail line in Buckinghamshire. Chief Features Writer MATT BENDORIS speaks to a top conservationist about why we need to help these nocturnal flying mammals. DOCTOR Joe Nunez-Mino has many reasons why a thriving bat population is good for the environment but one should endear them to Scots more than others - their voracious appetite for midges. As the biting insects continue to cause havoc at family barbecues and day-trips this summer, the one thing helping to keep them at bay are Scotland's airborne mammals. And Dr Joe from the Bat Conservation Trust insists that our nine species of resident bats help in many other ways too. He said: 'We can only estimate but we do know bats eat a lot of insects, each individual bat eating hundreds or even thousands (of midges) every night. 'Different bat species specialise in eating different insects, from biting insects like midges through to moths, including some insects that damage crops and gardens. 'To give one example, a study published last year estimated that bats in apple orchards reduce the total weight of apples damaged by codling moths by 50 per cent.' Most read in Fabulous In the UK all bat species and their roosts are legally protected by both European legislation and domestic laws including Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations (2017). But since the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 it has been a criminal offence to disturb a structure or place bats use for shelter or protection. 'He is spooked' - Moment The Open commentator hides under his jacket as BAT invades broadcasting booth at Portrush It means DIY and commercial builders have to carry out expensive bat surveys costing several thousands - or more if the mammals are found and need to be removed. Dr Joe said: 'There is a cost associated with protecting the environment just like there is with health and safety or protecting historical heritage. 'While we as an organisation don't have any control or influence on the costs of bat surveys, we have worked with some Statutory Nature Conservation Organisations (SNCO) to streamline the process where possible. 'To avoid delays, it's important to take bats into account from the earliest stages of planning work.' He adds: 'Having a bat roost does not prevent developing a property, bats just need to be taken into account as part of the process. Householders should seek advice from their SNCO.' However Dr Joe believes that bats get a bad press including the 1km long bat tunnel in Buckinghamshire that added an extra £100million to the runaway cost of the HS2 rail line. He said: 'We were not involved in the process. However, we do know that multiple cross-party inquiries have found that HS2's delays and cost overruns stem from mismanagement, not nature protections. 'HS2 did not carry out a timely strategic environmental assessment which could have identified viable alternatives that could have avoided significant expenditure and delay.' While in 2002 Scottish wildlife artist David McRae, 56, from Tayside, died from rabies after being bitten by a bat - it was the first case of indigenous rabies in the UK in 100 years. Dr Joe said: 'Two rabies-related viruses have been detected in two bat species in the UK and in only a very small number of individuals. 'If someone is bitten, licked, nipped or scratched by a bat they should wash and disinfect the area and urgently seek medical treatment. 'The NHS has said prompt post-exposure vaccinations have been 100 per cent effective in preventing the disease.' But Dr Joe believes that work done by organisations like his and the stringent laws are helping bats, which have been in decline, to slowly make a recovery. BATS HAVE DELAYED HOUSE DEMOLITION BUT I STILL WANT TO PROTECT THEM LAST March my wife and I bought an uninhabitable bungalow on Scotland's West Coast and wanted to pull it down before it fell down and replace it with a shiny new build. But 16 months on there hasn't even been a spade in the ground because late on in the planning process it was suddenly announced we needed a bat survey. The problem was by the time we were informed last year, the flying mammals would be hibernating for the winter and a dusk survey - with infrared cameras and sound equipment - couldn't be carried out until the spring. In the end we didn't have any roosting bats, but it has added a £1,800 bill to the project we hadn't budgeted for. Someone else in the area wasn't so lucky and it cost them £5,000 to have their bats removed by an ecologist. But surely with all the technology now available there has to be a quicker - and far cheaper - way of checking where they are roosting, so people can get on with their projects? And when I do finally get my new house built any neighbourhood bats are more than welcome to come and live rent free. He explains: 'All bat species have suffered historical declines in population numbers but we have seen signs of initial recovery in some species. 'We are currently able to monitor five of the nine resident bat species in Scotland through the National Bat Monitoring Program. 'Of these five, four species - Daubenton's bat, Natterer's bat, common pipistrelle and brown long-eared bat - show no significant change since the base line year of 1999 and one species has increased - soprano pipistrelle. 'Bat conservation is important because they are a vital part of our natural heritage which make up around a quarter of our mammal species and they also play a critical role in the ecosystem. 'There is very good evidence that bat populations help to reduce the need for pesticides which ultimately harms the health of other wildlife and people too.' Read more on the Irish Sun He adds: 'Scotland would have a lot more midges and other insects without them.' *For more information on the Bat Conservation Trust visit 4 Soprano Pipistrelle bat numbers are showing signs of recovery.
Irish Times
11-06-2025
- Irish Times
Reading Ulysses: Splendid literature that can suck the life out of you and your family
Recently I decided to stop pretending I've read Ulysses . It is January 2025, I am 40 years of age, and when James Joyce 's masterwork comes up in conversation, I have to stay quiet and listen respectfully to whoever is holding forth. 'Oh it's brilliant,' I'll tell anyone who asks. It's not that I haven't tried over the years, haven't skipped hundreds of pages to the best bits (breakfasts, 'Nighttown', Molly), and soaked them up in intermittent bursts of awe and incomprehension. I could tell you that Ulysses begins as 'stately plump Buck Mulligan' climbs the Martello tower for a morning shave, and ends with Molly Bloom in bed that same evening, thinking pleasurably about her husband, Leopold Bloom, possibly while reaching sexual climax. READ MORE Like a lot of people I have started Ulysses and been enthralled, then given up when it became so inscrutable as to alienate and bother me. Ulysses must be the best novel almost nobody has read, and even fewer have finished. To quote the judge in America who ruled against banning Ulysses for obscenity, 'it is not an easy book to read or to understand'. But I make a decision: it is time for this reader to put an end to her ignorance and read what Joyce called his 'damned monster-novel', set over a day in Dublin , with 18 Homeric 'episodes', named by Joyce after characters from The Odyssey in the detailed charts he helpfully drew. Really read it, cover to cover. It is early January, so I hope to finish it in good time before Bloomsday to write this article from a place of high Joycean authority. Five months seems like a generous amount of time to beat through 933 pages. That breaks down to six or seven pages a night, which can easily be fitted around family, work, a bit of a social life and, well, the rest of the chaos. Right? That's what I reckon anyway. The book has been wrested from my late parents' book haul, a Penguin 2004 centenary edition celebrating 'Bloomsday 100″. On the cover is a bleak Martello tower overlaid on to the text of Molly Bloom's soliloquy, oddly spoiling the end. Mum and Dad's copy is in suspiciously good nick. Sandwiched between its weighty pages I find a clipping of an article from this newspaper by the late Eileen Battersby , which I know my mother would have cut out and kept to serve her with some insights before a book-club meeting. So on a friendless winter night, I shove all other books aside and open Ulysses. Wow, yes, it's all coming back. Episode 1, Telemachus, instantly catapults me into the tower with Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus. Buck is a medical student given to rants with sprinklings of Latin, Stephen is a dreamy, self-serious schoolteacher sporting an ashplant. Their banter is so vivid I feel like we're all in the tower together making witty repartee. I'm sucked in, and my only question is: why read anything but Ulysses? A few nights in, I'm lost. We have accompanied Stephen to pick up his pay cheque at school, where he ends up conversing with the dreary headmaster, Mr Deasy. We spend a good while in the schoolyard. At least I think we do. I have no need to read about schoolboys telling riddles and shouting about the church and money. Maggie Armstrong, not contemplating a bunch of men talking about Shakespeare in the National Library. Photograph: Laura Hutton Next then, our Stephen is crunching on shells along Sandymount Strand and philosophising to himself. Joyce's seascape is an intoxicating carnival, it's wonderful. But the famous 'ineluctable modality of the visible' passage comes on an evening my three-year-old has no interest in sleep. Eight o'clock crawls towards 10.30pm and I develop a frazzled unrest I associate with reading great literature while ignoring the call of duty. I resent these effete young men contemplating the abstract while the rest of the world toils at jobs and housework. Then the fourth wall comes down. 'Who anywhere will read these written words?', Stephen asks, and I think Joyce is defying me to read on. In Episode 4, Calypso, we meet the curious Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew and advertisement canvasser, and his wife, Molly, a singer, who is having an affair with her disreputable boss, Blazes Boylan. Like Stephen, consumed by guilt over his failure to pray for his mother on her deathbed, there is raging inner conflict and big passion. So much has happened to these characters, there is little need for plot or incident to keep us engaged. [ Chris Fitzpatrick: I re-read Ulysses after 45 years. It did not go well Opens in new window ] Bloom's meandering thoughts make for a change from the doomscrolling I'd otherwise have lapsed into at this hour. He may be best known for eating the 'inner organs of beasts and fowls' but he's a dream husband. He slathers butter on the diva Molly's toast and fusses over her tea while he burns his own breakfast. He carefully chooses books and face cream for her. He lives with tragedy – standing at a funeral, imagining the things he would have done for his late, infant son Rudy ('teach him German'). And even if he does stroke himself on a beach near a group of teenage girls, there are lots of other things to like about him. His inner world is not just a stream of consciousness, it's a gushing whirlpool of perception, ideas, memories, reported speech, with letters from his adorable daughter Milly bringing us teenage text-speak directly from Edwardian Dublin. The voices that jabber through Ulysses are real and magical, the words coined sparkle brightly. 'biscuitfully', 'mighthavebeen' (as opposed to 'hasbeen'), 'occultly', 'fruitsmelling', 'yogibogeybox'. Though you might wonder: does Joyce write the way people think, or just the way he thinks? He being a genius. Maybe some minds are more eloquent company than others. I assume my consciousness on a good morning would be less of a stream than a sad few drops of conscious thought, something like 'coffee, coffee, late again, f**k sake,' or just non-verbal. I guess none of us have anything to compare it to. The irrelevant godawful debates of insufferable bores from 100 years ago feel incongruous On the nights when I'm already spent, or may have had a little wine, I really can't fathom the stream. I know it's full of treasure but that doesn't mean I want to read it. I think back to 2022 when Ulysses turned 100, and it was proposed for my book club. We had the summer to read it. The conversation is quickly located on WhatsApp. 'Can't say I'm enjoying it!' 'Unfortunately losing the battle with Ulysses ... again', 'a bit lost in the woods'. 'There's been a bit of a witch hunt over who recommended it!'. Our book club has about 33 members, all serious readers. For the Ulysses meeting our host welcomed a turnout of four. Ulysses was only ever mentioned again with accompanying sniggers, like schoolchildren pleased to have flunked their exams. In Episode 7, Aeolus, Bloom goes into a newspaper office to sell some ads. That's my best guess, as we encounter a formal experiment whereby sections of text are turned into short newspaper articles. I would rather read anything else at all. We are often told about the parts of Ulysses we should read but not about the parts we shouldn't. In Episode 9, Scylla and Charybdis, a bunch of men are talking about Shakespeare in the National Library, and why should I care? Paging back to get a grasp of Episode 5, Lotus Eaters, the prose seems to mean to confuse me. The layering of speech alongside deepest thoughts can be like reading two books at once, or a whole pile of books at once. I put Ulysses off every day until so late that sleep will be a certainty, mid-sentence, waking to hear the thud of the book as it hits the floorboards. Author Maggie Armstrong with her copy of Ulysse' by James Joyce. She has been reading a few pages a night since January of this year. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien Reading Joyce's damned monster-novel at night-time is not working. It comes with me on the tram, it comes in my suitcase to Ennis, Sligo, Limerick, Dingle. It comes to the football sideline and swimming gallery and playground. I feel pretentious reading such a statement book in public and it wins me no new friends. Ulysses becomes, by springtime, a deadweight, an utter drag, an albatross, creating feelings of endless guilt and homework. Someone, probably my eight-year-old, has decided to scrawl the leaves with a diamond pattern in permanent marker. The cover is cracked and the pages are dog-eared, so at least we have a seasoned copy now. [ At ease with Ulysses: Daunted by this notoriously difficult novel? Here's a good way in Opens in new window ] In the rough, storm-tossed winter that delays the arrival of spring, when a book should bring comfort, I can't bear the sight of it. Something about all the men inside it talking. The irrelevant godawful debates of insufferable bores from 100 years ago feel incongruous in a life already stuffed with nonsense from the internet. The reason I read books is to escape the scintillating company of men. In the bitter winter days of March I abandon Ulysses. The monster novel clogs the nightstand, a useless block of solid gold artistic wonder. Bloomsday draws near and I feel guilty and bad to have failed on the Ulysses front. The only hope for completion is an audiobook. The acclaimed Andrew Scott adaptation is being hoarded from Irish listeners by the BBC, so I download a recording whose narrator ( Donal Donnelly ), sounds oddly like the late Gay Byrne. His delivery is droll, and Joyce is finally flowing in, even if I'm unconscious for a lot of it. I listen in the night, then walking along the street, or driving the car, but the effort it costs to listen to such splendid literature does not make for a splendid experience. [ James Joyce in a dozen great quotations Opens in new window ] I can say for sure that my bustling middle years were not the moment to have tried to read Ulysses. In fact I would be very seriously annoyed with anyone caught doing so. This novel of everyday life sucks the life out of you and your family. It's one to read with time on your hands, ideally when you are young, retired or have a house husband as lovingly servile as Bloom. Read it a la carte, open it at random. But as a book to read straight through for pleasure, it should be banned. Maggie Armstrong is the author of Old Romantics
