1 2 April 2016
W
hen paper tycoon Michael Smurfit told
his wife Norma he was dumping her for
a tall Swede and wanted a divorce, in a
restaurant in 1985, “she threw a glass of
wine over me and left”. Apart from that
all she ever does is good.
Michael Smurfit told the Irish Times a few years ago:
“Norma was very feet on the ground. She was working-
class people in London. She has very, very sound
values and still has. She wasn’t interested at all in mate-
rial things to any great extent”. Michael ruefully if
despicably claimed “I was very lucky with my first wife
[Norma] and probably a bit unlucky with my second
[leggy Birgitta]”. Norma's self-
declared weakness is East
Enders, though somewhat
redeemingly she detests golf.
After she left school, Norma
worked as a hairdresser for
seven years on Regent Street.
She later told the Examiner: “It
sounds much more glamorous
than it was. It was all pin curls
and tight curly perms back then,
and we were on 19 and 6 pence
a week”. Later, she claimed:
“I first got involved with char-
ity work when I put together a group of women, mainly
made up of Smurfit company wives, to buy mini-buses
for the blind and Central Remedial Clinic. We called our-
selves ‘The Helpers’ and began by raising money
through coffee mornings and jumble sales, before we
moved on to more ambitious events”.
Norma went on to found First Step, registered at the
hideous Smurfit office in Donnybrook, a not-for-profit
to help start-up young businesses, especially by loans,
but it was in effect superseded by State-owned Micro-
finance Ireland on whose board Norma Smurfit now
serves. She is also on the board of Gaisce, the Presi-
dent’s award and the Denis O’Brien-chaired National
College of Ireland. Norma Smurfit, who lives in Mount
Merrion, also set up the Irish Youth Foundation and the
Irish Arthritis Foundation.
The striking bronze sculptures titled 'Famine' (1997)
were commissioned by Norma Smurfit, presented to the
City of Dublin and installed on Custom House Quay in
1997. Subscribers of £750 are named in the quayfront
stones below the piece.
Sculptor Rowan Gillespie said that he felt his memo-
rial would not be complete until "the figures are
crossing a sea of names, names cast in bronze and set
into the cobble surround, thousands of names, names
of those who have pledged to care".
Norma Smurfit is now proposing a €2m pavilion for
the west side of Merrion Square in Dublin . In 2014, con-
servation architects Howley Hayes and Associates drew
up a conservation and management plan for Merrion
Square premised in the idea that it is always best to
improve something charming and fragile.
The park was overgrown, with more tunnel-like paths
than it used to have, they noted. The vegetation, they
declared, needed to be thinned out, and the old path
network reinstated. They did not consider that an oasis
from the traffic was a better amenity for people who use
Smur fit-up for
Merrion Square
Do-gooder again seeks to do
good but doesn’t
by Michael Smith
NEWS
'Famine' (1997) was
commissioned by Norma
Smurfit, and installed
on Custom House Quay
in 1997. Subscribers are
named in the quayfront
stones below
Rutland Gate
April 2016 1 3
the city. There are no shelters in the park for the
public even though it rains a lot — no bath-
rooms, and nowhere for park-goers to buy
refreshments. It was time to spend some
money.
A pavilion-style shelter with tea-rooms and
toilets was proposed. But now Norma Smurfit
has refined the idea, with an international,
charitable and success-celebratory thrust.
It has all prompted Mannix Flynn, a writer,
member of elitist arts convocation, Aosdána,
and an independent councillor, who labelled it
an “elitist ego trip”, to walk out of a generally
supportive Dublin City Council local area meet-
ing after Smurfit presented her plan for the
'Ireland Legacy' pavilion.
Its centrepiece would be a digital map of the
world from which would radiate names of sub-
scribers, all of whom would be charged €100
for their stake. It would also feature artistic
imagery and quotations from Irish writers.
Smurfit had originally wanted to inscribe the
names of some of the Irish diaspora in a glass
wall, though her Monaco-based ex-husband
was not among them.
The money raised from the digitally-
acknowledged would go to charitable causes
around Ireland. “So the money that’s raised
from this initiative will make a lot of difference
in the future”. The building would replace the
long-demolished nineteenth--century park-
keeper’s lodge behind the (long waterless)
Rutland fountain. The new structure would be
made of granite to match the memorial, as
would the stone benches inside. A new
entrance to the park, a third of whose trees
have been removed in the last year in a bid to
make the park’s relationship with the historic
buildings which surround it more legible,
would be created opposite the National Gal-
lery, either side of, and originally through. the
fountain. Fine Gael councillor Kieran Binchy
claims it would be crazy to turn down a gener-
ous offer like Smurfit’s for all this.
There is a history of big-thinking for Merrion
Square. The government of Éamon de Valera
proposed to demolish the “un-natural” ie tree-
filled parkland. These plans were only
prevented from going ahead by the Nazi inva-
sion of Poland. Later, the Catholic archbishopric
wanted to build a proper cathedral there.
Moreover, it is not our almost irrepressible
parks departments' only current interventionist
adventure. Elsewhere the OPW is facilitating
access for a proposed new Children's Science
Museum from the National Concert Hall site into
the underused and mystical Iveagh Gardens.
On the other hand the Council's parks depart-
ment is considering reinstating the wall and
grass of the now-sterile former graveyard to
Dublin’s oldest parish church St Mary’s, Wolfe
Tone Park, removed by it in the nineteen-nine-
ties to facilitate access from the Jervis Shopping
Centre.
Merrion Square was laid out by the sixth and
seventh viscounts Fitzwilliam whose estates
stretched as far as Booterstown and Mount
Merrion. The town houses and 12-acre garden
were complete by the beginning of the nine-
teenth century. It was first opened to the public
forty years ago. Dublin City Council concedes
that “it remains one of the most intact and
imporessive examples of a Georgian garden
square in Dublin”.
Dublin’s City Development Plan provides
that, as with other parks, Merrion Square is
zoned Z9, “to preserve, provide and improve
recreational amenity, open space and green
networks”. In general the only uses permitted
are those associated with “public and private
open space and privately owned sports facili-
ties”. This is unusually deferential to private
agendas. “Community facilities, craft shops,
crèches, cultural and/or recreational buildings,
kiosks or tea rooms”, public or private, are all
excitingly possible.
The plans will go before the full council at its
April meeting, to see whether they should move
forward and should go out to public
consultation.
Objective observers will fight to work out
which is more well-meaning – Smurfit, Dublin’s
parks department or the city’s supplicant
councillors.
Citizens can make their views known to Coun-
cillors now, and to the City Council later.
Mannix Flynn, an
independent councillor,
labelled the Ireland
Legacy pavilion an “elitist
ego trip”, and walked out
of a generally supportive
Dublin City Council local
area meeting’
Montages of Diaspora Pavilion proposal

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