On a wall in the lobby of the Abbey, near the cloakroom, sits a discrete plaque, unveiled by Sean Lemass in 1966.  It commemorates the seven company members who downed tools to take up arms in the 1916 Rising.

One of them, an actor named Sean Connolly, was the first Irish casualty of the Rising, shot by a sniper as he attempted to take City Hall with a small Citizen Army force. Also amongst them was Peadar Kearney, the author of The Soldier’s Song. Three of the seven were women, including the Abbey’s first leading lady, Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh.

Nearly a century on from their decision to replace (or augment) cultural activism with revolutionary action, it seems that the Abbey might come – ostensibly – full circle, and move to a new home at the GPO on O’Connell Street. In vivid echo of the contribution of these seven, the Abbey would become a living memorial for the Rising, and an ongoing statement of the republican ambition of the signatories of the Proclamation.

The idea of moving the Abbey to the GPO was first touted publicly earlier this year by David Norris. Its appearance in the revised programme for government appeared to smack of tokenism and distraction; but now it seems that the Minister, Martin Cullen, to judge by comments reported last week, is not only fully behind the move, but has done extensive preliminary studies on it. He expects a government decision to back the move, at a cost of €80-90 million, within a few months.

The fact that this option is being considered at all is testament to a prolonged, dual failure on the part of both the Abbey and the government, stretching back over a decade.

The first, most obvious failure has been to get a new Abbey Theatre built. Since Patrick Mason’s practical and well-thought out proposal in 1997 to rebuild on the existing site, the theatre has been the victim of a combination of political procrastination, rising property prices, hubris (on the part of both management and government), and clientelism.

Both the rebuild on the Abbey site, and a subsequent prospective move to the Coláiste Mhuire site on Parnell Square, were quashed because of the prices being quoted for adjoining properties. A touted move to Grand Canal Dock (where the spanking new Daniel Libeskind theatre is soon to open) would have taken it out of Bertie Ahern’s back yard, and was blocked. A government-approved move to the IFSC stalled amidst confusion over the site’s footprint and technical requirements.

All along, the most attractive site for the theatre was clearly that of the old Carlton Cinema on O’Connell Street, but this was tied up in legal action for most of the past decade.

The move to the GPO, therefore, has immediate and obvious attractions: it replicates the advantages of the Carlton site with its prime location, and adds to it the considerable weight of the GPO’s existing status as a historical and architectural landmark.

But there are risks, however. The GPO is probably the country’s most functional “monument”: without any explicit “attraction” in place, thousands of citizens visit it each day – many more than would visit a theatre. Its epic proportions and beauty have a more tangible aesthetic impact on ordinary lives in the course of its everyday use as a post office than it might as a theatre.

The other risk is one of historical confusion. The legacies of the GPO and the Abbey may overlap (most notably in the actions of Sean Connolly and his comrades), but they are crucially distinct.

This is most obvious in the Abbey’s role as a site of dissent: when audiences rioted in 1907 at the premiere of ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ and, again, in 1926, at the premiere of ‘The Plough and the Stars’ they did so because the Abbey’s vision of the nation challenged – and even spurned – that upheld by the mainstream. There is a risk that relocating the Abbey to the GPO would subsume the former’s dissenting identity.

(The way to obviate this risk is obvious, however: stage something scabrously satirical as the inaugural production at the new Abbey in 2016.)

The second failure in the debate on the Abbey’s move has been, ironically, the lack of debate. There has been an utter failure to seek any civic participation in the question of the Abbey’s location, and as a result there has been none of what is now often called “stakeholder buy-in”.

Something critical, but largely unobserved, happened at the time of the Abbey’s crisis in 2004. As the Abbey teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, with a lame-duck board that was in the process of dissolving itself, the government made a decision that more properly should have been made by the theatre itself: that it would move to the IFSC.

For a company founded by Yeats and Lady Gregory as an independent, intellectual voice of Irish revival, that was an extraordinary coup.

Martin Cullen appears in a hurry to progress the move to the GPO. But haste has laid waste to previous plans. What is vital is that, this time, the assessment of the viability of the move includes a forum for public participation, and a survey of key constituencies, such as the Abbey company as a whole, the wider theatre community, and historians.

Dissent is a key element in the legacies of both the Abbey and the GPO. On this issue in particular, we need to hear it.