Sir, - On the morning of the Abbey Theatre fire, I shot down from my student digs to survey the damage. Austin Clarke, our senior poet, was on the same errand. The green room had burnt, and a small portion of the stage, but it seemed to us that repairs would take only a few months. The firemen, professional of such problems, agreed.
Instead the Abbey went into dramatic exile (incidentally terminating the variety tradition of the Queen's). I formed the opinion that this move was intended to dramatise the need for a new theatre, but it should not have required the destruction of the old. The former morgue should still be there, playing the Abbey classics for our more literary visitors.
Some decades later, we are debating another new Abbey, because the job could be only half done the last time. Mr Blythe had, it seems to me, a limited, not to say a blinkered vision. Or did Austin Clarke and I have simultaneous visual hallucinations? - Yours, etc.,
John Montague, Ireland Professor of Poetry, Morehampton Road, Donnybrook, Dublin 4.