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CULTURE SHOCK: IF YOU leave Ireland, at least through Dublin airport, one of the last things you’ll see are the ads for a mobile phone company that line the air bridge. They show deliberately jumbled images of New York and Dublin, smoothly spliced together to make it look like the distance (cultural as well as physical) between them has been eliminated. And this visual trick is now almost a cliche of Irish advertising. It seems to have a particular kind of appeal to our globalised, displaced sensibilities.

The interesting thing about these ads is that it’s possible to be pretty sure where the original idea came from. They are a sanitised and adulterated version of Sean Hillen’s brilliant photo-collage series, Irelantis. From 1992 onwards, Hillen created funny, startling and disturbing images by working ancient monuments like the pyramids of Giza or the Colosseum into John Hinde postcards of a bucolic Ireland, often in an explicitly apocalyptic context.