PRESENT TENSE:PERHAPS ANTIQUES dealers are a pragmatic rather than nostalgic species, but this week, there are some who will have been pining for better days, writes SHANE HEGARTY
In April 2007, at the annual Independence-era auction at Adams’s on St Stephen’s Green it wasn’t simply that there was standing room only, it was that there was standing room only on the staircase outside.
The urge to spend money was palpable. Many had come not just with the intention of buying something, but of buying anything. They were determined to spend their money, and that determination far exceeded their intention to set limits. There were people who had gone in with an eye on a particular item and had been outbid – but, having made the trip and built up the gusto, they were not leaving empty-handed. They kept bidding until they got a flotsam of history to call their own.
The prices for some items exceeded their estimate, others obliterated it. Relatively minor lots induced frenzied bidding. Some random examples: a ticket from the Bloody Sunday match sold for €30,000 – 10 times its estimate. Cheques written by Padraic Pearse each sold for more than €4,000.
This was the small stuff. The big stuff brought mild hysteria to the room. A Citizens Army mobilisation order, written by James Connolly, sold for €80,000. A Proclamation went for €240,000 – almost twice its estimate. From their seats, leaning against the wall, craning their heads around the door, the gallery gasped and oohed and clapped in reaction to the smallest wave from a bidder. It is the paradox of such auctions, that the most outrageous bidding is accompanied by the most restrained gestures. There is poker face. And then there is auction finger.
Also present, mostly in the front rows, were the representatives of the museums and libraries, with specific targets in mind, scrapping it out with the bidders and the farmers. This is a standard way in which collections are developed, but there was a supreme irony in how these institutions were going head to head with the Irish people in order to secure items that would be held for the benefit of the Irish people.
The year 2007 was a trying time for many of these institutions. The National Museum talked about the increasing difficulty in attracting donations, given the prices even the most minor items would attract at auction. It had stepped up notably in 2006, when a renewed interest stoked by the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising had combined with a surplus of cash to create a frenzy. Or, more accurately, a bubble.
It is understandable that people feel an urge to own a piece of their national heritage. It may commodify history to a grubby degree, but it also personalises it. For some of those in the Adams room and at other similar auctions it was also, perhaps, an attempt to make up for what had been given away, or destroyed, or allowed to rot in the attic during the previous decades.
It spoke, in a way, of a generation that was keen to reconnect with its parents and grandparents, of a national confidence being expressed in the twin languages of patriotism and cash. Of a country that identified another generation’s achievements as priceless but put a price tag on them anyway.
No more, perhaps. That price tag now has a slash of a pen through it.
This week, in New York, half the items in an auction of Irish memorabilia was withdrawn, having failed to sell. Most attention was paid to the only full-sized tricolour said to have survived the GPO during the Rising, which was withdrawn at $400,000 (€300,000).
It’s a hefty price, but not what the owners wanted. Its estimate was $500,000 to $700,000.
That many lots failed to sell will not be a surprise to those who have been watching this bubble deflate at a rate that is perilously close to sounding like a pop. Minor ephemera that once sold for high prices are no longer snatched at. For example, during 2006 and 2007 the Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook– printed by The Irish Timesin 1917 – suddenly started fetching as much as €1,000. As happens, that price encouraged a few others on to the market and it became clear that this vital, but tattered, paperback was uncommon but not particularly rare. Recently, you could pick up a decent copy for under €100 on eBay – one-tenth of its price at the height of the bubble.
The annual joint Adams and Mealys auction takes place next month giving a better idea of just how much calm has entered that green-tinged market, and how many people have ransacked the attic in the hope of bequeathing their family heritage to the highest bidder. But this week’s New York auction is a sobering omen.
And those who bought at the height are left with one of two things: a calm at owning something that satisfies their soul in some indefinable way; or just another bad Celtic Tiger investment.
