Music on Clinton Street – An Irishman’s Diary about Hillary Clinton’s Dublin shopping trip and the fate of Flann O’Brien’s hat

Strolling along Dublin’s Nassau Street over Christmas, I was sorry to see that the Celtic Note record store has closed, after 18 years. I spent some pleasant moments in it during that time – none more exciting than one afternoon in 2002, when the only customers present were me and Hillary Clinton.

In fact, I was only pretending to be a customer on that occasion. How it happened was that the then senator for New York had been doing a well-publicised “walkabout” elsewhere on the street, accompanied by a large retinue of aides, security men, media people, and well-wishers.

And in keeping with Article One of the unwritten Irish-American trade agreement, which requires all US tourists to buy at least one jumper (or “sweater” as it says in the US version of the pact) while here, she had started her tour in the Blarney Woollen Mills.

Music shop

There, turning to the media, she affected to seek advice on buying presents for her husband, who had not travelled with her. So someone suggested there was an Irish music shop further up the street. And spotting an opportunity here, I skipped ahead of the posse and ensconced myself in said shop before it could be sanitised by security.

When she arrived in, I recall her joking that before she left home, Bill had played “about 25 of his Irish CDs”. So he probably had all Martin Hayes’s stuff already. Even so, I suggested helpfully that she couldn’t go far wrong with buying something by the brilliant Clare fiddle player. At which point, she looked at me for at least a half a second. And I like to think we bonded.

Bill Clinton had of course vacated the White House by this time. Whether he had vacated the dog house – this was only three or four years after the Lewinsky scandal – yet, I don't know. But I remember noting that she spent time browsing a section in which lurked that famous recording of Dublin school children, Give Up Yer Oul' Sins. To my enormous regret, she passed over it.

In the end, she bought a whole rake of albums (for any US readers, a "rake" is about eight), including the Chieftains' 40th anniversary collection The Wide World Over. This was a typically judicious choice for a possible future presidential candidate.

As with many Chieftains records, it covered not just the Irish lobby, but also featured Hispanic (Los Lobos), Asian (A Chinese folk orchestra), and Afro-Caribbean (Ziggy Marley) acts. If there was a message for Bill, it may have been in the last-mentioned collaboration, which had the Chieftains joining Marley jnr on one his father's classics, Redemption Song.

Anyway, I bid a fond farewell to Celtic Note. But there’s better news elsewhere in Dublin 2 this week, courtesy of the Little Museum of Dublin, on Stephen’s Green. That too has been closed of late, although only for an annual spring clean. And when it reopens this coming Saturday, it will have some exciting new additions.

I mentioned here before Christmas the sale at auction of several items formerly belonging to Flann O’Brien, aka Myles Na gCopaleen, formerly of this parish, chief among which was the mahogany chair he used while writing, and his trademark hat.

As a committed Flannorak, I was tempted to bid for these treasures myself, in fact. And when they went instead to an unnamed buyer, my secret hope was that it was one of the universities, which would use the furniture as the centrepiece of a new school – calling it the “Chair of Mylesian Studies”, or whatever – and invite somebody suitably qualified (ahem) to sit on it.

Rare editions

Well, that didn’t happen. But the next best thing did. As I can now exclusively reveal, it was the Little Museum that bought the collection, which also includes the writer’s briefcase and a library of some 100 books – variously rare editions of his work. The Flannorabilia now joins the recently acquired relics of another Dublin writer, Christy Brown, in the museum’s ever more impressive collection.

I noticed, by the way, that both the auctioneers and the museum referred to Flann’s hat as “iconic”. And as regular readers will know, that adjective is normally banned from this column due to its hideous overuse in connection with things that don’t remotely deserve it. To celebrate the LM of D’s acquisition, however, I am temporarily relaxing the restrictions. After all, this is one of the few contexts, outside religion, where “iconic” is fully justified.

@FrankmcnallyIT