Forget the Spike - the DART could win the Turner Prize

RADIO REVIEW - HARRY BROWNE: In public art, as in journalism, timing is everything

RADIO REVIEW - HARRY BROWNE: In public art, as in journalism, timing is everything. This finely polished, frictionless radio review column, for instance, no longer tries to party like it's 1999. And while the fact that Dublin's "Millennium Spire" won't be up until 2003 may only be a bemusing footnote to future generations, the PR guys really need to come up with a new explanation for its symbolic significance in the here and now.

On a Wednesday morning RTÉ radio news bulletin, as the first massive piece was readied for positioning, architect Ian Ritchie's by-now ancient and venerable soundbite was unearthed to explain what the "Spike" is meant to be all about. It reaches to the sky, seemingly, to reflect Dublin's "new mood of optimism". Now, you could sell that stuff four years ago - Ritchie evidently did - but faithful readers of state-of-the-nation newspaper features have long since been aware that the country and its capital have suffered a severe mood swing.

So now we're getting a post-millennial monument to memorialise a brief moment of pre-millennial madness, when Ireland evidently dropped a hint to the world that it might cheer up and get its act together. For a more contemporary symbol, we'll have to look elsewhere. How about the Dublin Port Tunnel, a long, deep hole in the ground that no one is really convinced will ever have a light at the end of it? "The Monument of Darkness on the Edge of Town", we could call it (and get Bruce Springsteen to play at the dedication).

For those who like to sink their pessimism a little less deep, perhaps a more fitting metaphor for Dublin today would be another work, perhaps by the same artist, "Tuesday's Subsidence on the DART Line", which also had the advantage, in the 21st-century art world, of trendy ephemerality and a postmodern interaction with the urban environment (i.e., before it got fixed it caused a big traffic jam). That could win the Turner Prize.

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On Wednesday's Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday), there was a nice interview with the chief engineer for the Spike's erection, Michael O'Neill, who sounded only slightly nervous explaining how the first piece would be brought slowly - "and I mean slowly" - into place.

With all the talk about lining up the bolts with the clamps and the number of pieces that had to match and fit, the seasonal phrase that sprang to mind was "some assembly required". And the forecast completion date of early January will sound about right to many parents.

Ryan and reporter Eileen Heron also reminded us that, for most Dubliners, the monument that springs to mind on that spot in O'Connell Street is not Nelson's Pillar but that immaculately dressed Holy Auld Wan, spinning and warbling and offering righteous commentary on worldly events. That prompted calls from listeners with yarns about her origins or the time she was brought in to sing at a wedding in the Gresham when the band didn't show up. It also inspired Ryan to a falsetto rendition of Hail Glorious Saint Patrick. What it didn't yield was a definitive statement of her present whereabouts, and whether she is in any state to be winched back into position.

Further up O'Connell Street, the Rotunda Hospital is still standing - though, from the tone of some of the commentary this week about the number of asylum-seekers having children there, you'd have to wonder at that. Interviewing Michael Geary, master of the Rotunda, on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), Cathal Mac Coille presented the story of a new centre in Finglas, Dublin, for pregnant asylum-seekers as being essentially about easing "the pressures on your hospital".

Well, yes, by forcing heavily pregnant women to "disperse" around the State - far from potentially supportive ethnic communities in Dublin - in order to receive maternity care.

The media's capacity to see these women as just so many (unwanted) breeding cattle, and thus to endorse a measure that "facilitates dispersal" (Geary's phrase for what the Finglas centre will do), is sustained by the use and abuse of dehumanising statistics. Geary cited the dramatic increase in Rotunda births to "women from outside Ireland" - they are now about a quarter of the hospital's mothers. But wait. That's not the figure for asylum-seekers - the women we were supposed to be talking about - it's for all non-nationals. Should we also try to disperse Ireland's increased population of childbearing Swedes, Spaniards, Canadians, Germans?

Fiona Kelly, on 'It Says in the Papers', offered another figure, drawn from The Irish Times: "80 per cent of women of child-bearing age who have sought asylum in the past year were visibly pregnant when they lodged their applications for refugee status..."

The statistic, as it stands, is utterly mysterious. Were the women pregnant, or did they appear pregnant? Were they asked? Does "visibly" mean "last trimester"? Were these women applying on their own accounts rather than as spouses of potential refugees?

Of course some asylum-seekers deliberately seek to have Irish-born babies (wouldn't we have bred frantically in the US if it could have regularised our status?), but we need far more vigilance about anti- immigrant scare stories.