CONNECTIONS:THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN between the Irish tourism industry and the realities of Irish history and heritage have always been pretty vague. And there is no better way to illustrate this than to wander down Dublin's Suffolk Street.
Or indeed look at these photographs. What we have here is a beautifully turned out lady, and some tumbledown gravestones. Yes, we’re talking about the graveyard of the former church of St Andrew’s. Or, depending on one’s point of view, the car park of the Dublin Tourism organisation’s headquarters.
The elegant lady depicted in the image (a “fancy”, by John Everett Millais) is Esther Vanhomrigh. She is the beloved Vanessa of Jonathan Swift, the same Jonathan much used as a promotional tool by Irish tourism. And “wait ’til I tell you”, as old fellas in Dublin pubs used to say, when there was still old fellas in Dublin pubs . . . or, for that matter, when there was still Dublin pubs.
Wait ’til I tell you. Esther Vanhomrigh is buried here, in St Andrew’s. In the derelict graveyard/car park. I took this photo last summer. A bit of greenery is always nice in an Irish tourism photo. When I checked back recently, nothing much had changed. Though maybe that pallet had moved ever so slightly. Unlike Esther. She’s still here, under the litter and the parked cars of the Irish tourism industry.
Enough said. Readers must forgive me now. This is all quite beyond parody, in another dimension of being. Some parallel universe. String theory could very well be involved. I suspect even grumpy old Dean Swift would have been flummoxed, great satirist that he was. Whatever about him, it’s definitely out of my league. Satire-wise it was already well beyond me when I started writing this piece. And it moved even further beyond me when I read in recent weeks that Dublin is bidding to become a “Unesco City of Literature”.
What could that be, I wondered? I didn’t care, actually, the words Unesco and literature combining to create a strange lassitude bordering on dismay. But I did wonder, like, would there be a few bob in it for us writery people? I investigated. It seems there are already three Unesco cities of literature. These are Edinburgh, Melbourne and Iowa. That’s good, I thought, very good, the bar has not been set too high. We’re in the money.
But spirits sank when I saw that the criteria for designation as a Unesco city of literature include an “urban environment in which literature, drama and/or poetry play an integral role”.
Um. The brow furrowed. I reviewed my mental image of the Dublin I know only too well. Um. Then, even more worryingly, I noted in the criteria not the slightest mention of car parking for tourism apparatchiks. Not even if that car park is built right on top of the grave of a major world writer’s girlfriend.
Oh dear me. I give up. Surely we’re going to have to think this all out again? Yes I know it’s a delicate balance, tourism and heritage. But it’s a slippery slope. And, somewhere on the route towards selling our children to tourists, there surely are other marker points involved. And one of these must be when ordinary respect for our ancestral dead goes out the window. Yes, along with Vanessa, also buried in St Andrew’s cemetery/car park are hundreds of ordinary Dublin citizens.
I have compiled a comprehensive listing, from various arcane sources. It’s not physically possible to reproduce all their names here, not without sacrificing quite a few pages of the TV listings. But I will e-mail the file to those of genealogical interest and bent. You may even find connections and ancestors there. But be careful if visiting to put flowers on the grave; there’s moving vehicles about.
So there we are. I’m wrapping up this series here. But better not leave without a word of thanks to the many hundreds of readers who took the trouble to e-mail me with their comments and additional interesting snippets of information about the photographs. Also not forgetting the few who wrote to tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about.
My late and slightly better known cousin Arthur Conan Doyle was described as possessing “overbearing self-confidence and depressive self-doubt”. Praise and damnation help maintain such family traditions. So that’s about it for now. Disconnections.
Series concluded
