Originally
published in the travel section of the now-defunct Poland Monthly magazine in
December 2005
Dublin
Revisited
Dublin has always been one of those reassuring cities,
like Paris or Krakow, that would always be there waiting for me just as I had
left it the last time. That could be because it has always been my most
frequently-visited ‘other’ city. Though I was born and bred in Birmingham, both
my parents are Dubliners.
But this time round I had had a seven-year break
from the place, my longest yet, and what I saw came as a shock. One sure sign
of change is scaffolding everywhere and you get to see plenty of it just
minutes from the airport. It was in abundance all along the city’s main
thoroughfare, O’Connell Street, large chunks of which were being refurbished.
Construction work is a pain, especially when you are
visiting a place at your leisure and O’Connell Street has always been my
favourite part of the city, despite any need for reassurance, mainly because it
is testimony to radical and often violent change. The dust brought on by all
the noisy labour forced me to give it a miss for much of the time I was there
but there was an addition to the line of monuments that characterise the
street, which made you realise that Ireland now has a very different attitude
toward its past and how it relates to the present.
I had visions of myself walking up that avenue
hand-in-hand with one or other of my parents, craning my neck up at Daniel
O’Connell’ statue and being told all about his heroic role in Irish history.
Then there was James Larkin, the trade union leader at the time of the 1913
Dublin Lock Out, and Charles Stewart Parnell, the parliamentary nationalist of
the late nineteenth century, both of whom my dad would always point at with
pride. And then later, there was Anna Livia Plurabelle, the character from
James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake, also clad in stone on O’Connell Street,
who was also there to personify the River Liffey, running under O’Connell
bridge. A fictional heroine-cum-icon, it would seem. And she wasn’t the only
one. Irish imaginations feed off one another. A minute’s walk or so away leads
you to Grafton Street where Molly Malone stands, the subject of a mere song,
yet plying her cockles and mussels (“Alive, Alive o”) stiffly next to her
wheelbarrow.
Yet right smack in the middle of O’Connell Street is
an interloper. And no-one in Dublin seems to know what to do with it. Since I
was there last time a big needle, calling itself the ‘Millennium Spire’ has
been planted in ground that until then had been hallowed turf for the nation’s
heroes, real or not.
The sentimental among the Irish, who it has to be
said constitute the vast majority, have not had much truck with this spear in
the sky, which has played little or no role in rallying the population to the
cause of the country.
Literary Dublin (i.e. most of its citizens) has
predictably garlanded the ‘spike’ with a wealth of disparaging nicknames, such
as the ‘Stiletto in the Ghetto’, the ‘Scud in the Mud’ and the ‘Stiffy by the
Liffey’. But this is nothing new. Before she made way for the spike Anna Livia
Plurabelle was dubbed the ‘Floozie in the Jacuzzi’ or the ‘Hoor in the Sewer’.
Her inventor, the revered James Joyce, still stands at street level with his
cane in nearby North Earl Street and has for long been known as the ‘Prick with
the Stick’.
This all goes to show that a visit to Dublin brings
with it very little in the way of reassurance, however much you may hope for
it.
If that rather bland needle on O’Connell Street has
lanced the Irish propensity for sentimentality, then so be it, though it is not
that clever a symbol in my view. What it does represent, nevertheless, is a
country that is far from gazing at its historical navel anymore. It is all
upwards from here on in, aside from the beer, might I add.
Take the pubs these days. They all look as they ever
did, which is a relief if you have just travelled in from the UK as I had, with
all its obnoxious ‘vertical’ drinking and ear-bursting ‘fun-pubs’. Dublin’s
boozers still put conversation first.
The guy handing me my pint of Guinness in one bar
looked as if he could have come from Malaysia or thereabouts. In one of the
previous places I had been served by someone who appeared Middle Eastern. It
was disconcerting. Not because of where they were from, you understand, but
because of where they were at that particular time: serving behind a bar.
Dublin has become an even more intriguing city since it began saying ‘Cead Mile
Failte’ (a hundred thousand welcomes) to foreigners hoping to make a new life
for themselves there.
A trip back to Dublin has invariably meant that I
imbibe as much of the black stuff that my liver and budget can handle and on
previous visits the velvety slide of a mouthful of ‘stout’, as the Dubliners
call it, down my throat always came courtesy of the patience and skill of that
staunchest of the city’s institutions: the local barman.
In most cities, people serving behind a bar do so as
a stop-gap before they move onto better things. But, until very recently, that
was never so in Dublin. The barman there had always served an apprenticeship,
which meant that when he passed you your pint he would be giving you the
consummate drinking experience. You would have ordered that drink some fifteen
to twenty minutes before putting it to your lips, the professional opposite
ensuring that it had been through at least three stages of being poured and
settled before presenting it to you as if some mysterious chalice of nectar.
But Ireland’s rampant economic success has called
time on the Dublin born-and-bred barman. The only ones I came across were in the
airport bar, a telling observation in itself. Now, overseas students man the
taps and although tradition no doubt dictates that they still respect
Guinness’s need to be at ease with itself before they deliver it to the
customer, the tender loving care afforded to a pint by the Dublin barman is
just not in their blood.
Molly Malone’s ‘fair city’ is no more. By that I do
not mean you are likely to get ripped off in the place than you were in the
past, just that the Irish capital has become one of Europe’s genuinely
cosmopolitan cities it what seems like no time at all.
Every time I got on a bus, every time I looked out
onto the street, there was a black or brown face. This in a country which not
only did not have an empire but was active in opposing one for much of its
history.
The Poles have made themselves known, as well,
particularly on Grafton Street where the buskers and street artists gather. I
spotted a Polish girl about to strike up on her guitar with a “little piece of
Polish culture” as her notice on a piece of card stated, until she was
interrupted by a passer-by and engaged in the compulsory chat.
Dublin has become a melting pot that O’Connell
Street’s statues do no justice to. Time waits for no one, the city has become
intangible and I do not feel I understand the place anymore, as I used to in
the old days when strolling the streets with my parents and brother, or at
other stages of my life. But that may not be a bad thing at all. At the end of
the day you don’t travel to be reassured.
