An Irishman's Diary

IT HAD somehow escaped me – until I read about those trees being removed to make way for it – that the new Luas line through Dublin’s city centre is to be known as the “BXD”. And although it may already be too late to change it, I have to ask: is this wise?

Yes, it’s good that the project has survived the cull of public works imposed by our dire financial circumstances. But even so. It is surely an unnecessary tempting of fate to name such a crucial piece of infrastructure with what looks like an abbreviation for the state of the economy (and I don’t mean “banjaxed”, although that’s the polite version).

What was wrong with just continuing the colour theme? Now that the red and green lines are finally to be linked, after all, the obvious conjunction – suggested by every traffic light in the city – was an orange line.

And all right, maybe that had unfortunate connotations. Maybe the municipal authorities are still traumatised by what happened that last time an orange line passed through the city centre. But we didn’t have to evoke memories of the Love Ulster parade: any colour would have done.

Whereas putting random letters on tram-routes is always problematical. Just ask the transport authorities in Seattle, which a few years ago opened the first of a planned network of “trolleys” (the American term for trams) between their city centre and a suburb called South Lake Union.

An unfortunate acronym was staring them in the face. But ever since, the people of Seattle have been riding (as Americans say) an abbreviated version of the South Lake Union Trolley: with predictable embarrassment whenever they mention the activity to visitors from this side of the Atlantic.

As for the Luas, if another colour theme was deemed superfluous, we could have gone for a more oblique angle. I myself, for example, have always seen the red and green lines as star-crossed lovers: the Romeo and Juliet of the Irish rail network.

So now that they are finally to get together, why mark their intersection with something as vulgar as an X? Why not instead be romantic and link them with – say – a streetcar named Desire?

SPEAKING OFXs, and as all Scottish people will know, today is the feast-day of St Andrew. Who, according to tradition, earned his saltire because he was crucified on a cross of that shape. And it's a nice story, although probably apocryphal, because in earlier versions, his cross was presumed to be of the conventional kind. The saltire idea came later.

Still, all the accounts agree that he was at least martyred – the usual prerequisite for Christian saints having any kind of cross named after them. So if his saltire is spurious, then St Patrick's, to misquote Alice in Wonderland,is spuriouser, he having avoided the inconvenience of martyrdom altogether.

Anyway, there used to be a tradition on this day – more in England than anywhere else, strangely – for people to go squirrel hunting. It has long since died out, more’s the pity. Indeed, the custom could usefully be reintroduced today as part of efforts to control that modern wildlife pest, the American grey squirrel.

But in former times, it must have been the poor red that was hunted. Which said, squirrels seem always to have been incidental to the exercise. Certainly, by the 19th century, the hunt had degenerated – if it was ever anything else – into an excuse for general hooliganism.

One contemporary account described the custom, rather sniffily, thus: “. . . the labourers and lower kinds of people, assembling together, form a lawless rabble, and being accoutred with guns, poles, clubs and other such weapons, spend the greater part of the day in parading through the woods and grounds, with loud shoutings, and under pretence of demolishing the squirrels, some few of which they kill, they destroy numbers of hares, pheasants, partridges, and . . . whatever comes in their way, breaking down the hedges, and doing much other mischief, and in the evening betaking themselves to the ale-houses . . . as is usual with such sort of gentry”.

The criminal damage aside, it all sounds not unlike the hunting of the wren, a tradition still carried on here by a few “wren-boys” every St Stephen’s Day to commemorate another Christian martyr. But what squirrels had to do with the fate of St Andrew I have no idea. And whether there is any other link between the two winter wildlife hunts also seems now to be a mystery.

SPEAKING OFwren-boys, I see that the vice-president of the European Commission, Ollie Rehn, has marked the first anniversary of the bailout with encouraging words for Ireland. He sent them via an op-ed piece to the Irish Examiner yesterday.

Which, incidentally, brings me back to where I started.

The tenor of his article was summed up by the headline: “There is light at the end of the tunnel”. And this is, of course, nice to hear. But I’m sure all Irish citizens will join me in expressing hope that the light is not an oncoming train, especially not a train with the abbreviation “BXD” written on it.