An Irishman's Diary

IS IT POSSIBLE that Ennis could be in the process of becoming Ireland’s first “Urination Rage Town”? I only ask because, two weeks after a local music store owner electrified his doorway to prevent late-night drinkers relieving themselves there, a town councillor has also now proposed employing special street wardens – pee police – to combat the menace. A shock-and-awe strategy, you might say.

It’s 12 years since Ennis pipped Killarney, Kilkenny, and Castlebar in a competition to become Ireland’s original “Information Age Town”: on which memorable occasion the chief executive of the sponsors – Telecom Éireann – said he looked forward to seeing what happened when an entire community became “wired”.

Clearly that process is taking Ennis in unexpected directions. But is this just the start of the town’s onslaught against street urination? Having pioneered information-age technology, could Ennis now also be leading the assault on a problem that affects urban areas everywhere? Until recently, one might have expected such an initiative to happen somewhere in Dublin: Temple Bar, maybe, which can be a bit of a urination super-highway after midnight. As in Ennis, doorways there are especially at risk. And personally, I used to think that doorways could also be part of the solution.

We may not be ready for those permanent “pissoirs” that continental cities have in the middle of footpaths. But when, a few years ago, London began targeting the problem of “wet-spots” – late-night-bus stops and other such areas – with periscopic urinals, hidden during the day but popping up out of the street after dark – I thought here was an opportunity for Dublin to introduce its own, customised solution.

No doubt with the help of JC Decaux, I envisaged the city council installing a series of pop-up Georgian doorways, with suitable plumbing, in known wet-spots: thereby killing two birds with one stone. The doorways would cover the maximum “spray area” of the average male – calculated in one scientific study at 1.3 metres (which is wider than many people’s bathrooms) – while also providing the scheme with local branding.

Neat as the plan was, sadly, it still hasn’t happened. And now that Ennis has led the way with an electrocution-and-policing approach, I fear that my more benign scheme will never see the light of day. The fact that a record store should be pioneering the shock treatment tactic could be especially far-reaching, it seems to me.

As anyone familiar with big music festivals will know, they tend (late at night anyway) to involve epic amounts of public urination against all available stationary objects: walls, fences, trees, tents – your leg if you stand still long enough. For anyone in the urinary shock-device field, this could be ideal research-and-development territory. Already I shudder to think about next year’s Electric Picnic.

WE WERE talking here a while back about “nominative determinism”: the theory that having a suggestive name may influence a person’s vocation. The most famous example of this apparent tendency – still in the urinary area – was a paper on incontinence once published by the British Journal of Urology and written by two real people called JW Splatt and D Weedon.

Although not nearly as funny, the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt is the latest high-profile example of a surname that perfectly matches a career. But the question is whether a similar phenomenon exists with place names. I only ask because, as I write, the RTÉ website is reporting a €1 million cannabis seizure in a part of Wicklow I had never heard of until now: “Hempstown”.

Which is exactly where you’d start looking for the stuff, all right. But you’re probably thinking: that’s just an outrageous coincidence. So answer me this. What was the name of the west Cork village near which the largest drug seizure in the history of the State and involving an international gang of criminals was made two years ago? Yes, that’s right: Crookhaven.

Clearly the influence cannot extend to nature, so the fact that Birr is one of the coldest places in Ireland is pure chance. But what about that three-time winner of the Tidy Towns competition: Trim? And there must be other examples. I’ll leave it to readers to advise me whether the local place-name affects the pace of life in Rush, the nature of politics in Strokestown, the incidence of assault in Battery Heights, Athlone, etc.

As for Gorey, I don’t want to know. And I don’t even want to think about Hackballscross, except to note in passing that there is a townland in the last-mentioned place, called “Stumpa”. The story of John Wayne Bobbitt comes to mind. But yes, it really is possible to live in “Stumpa, Hackballscross”, which must be the most painful address in Ireland.

Being in Co Louth, it also brings us back to where we started. Because if there were to be a national competition to choose the site of a project piloting strategies to stop street urination, I suggest that along with Ennis and Temple Bar, it should also involve at least one town in Louth. No, definitely not Hackballscross. But maybe Drogheda or Dundalk: each of which would be doubly qualified as one of the largest urban areas in a place called “the Wee County”; or in Irish, “Contae Lú”.