An Irishman's Diary

EXCITING NEWS from the Flann O’Brien statue campaign, wherein already there are developments to report. Yes, barely two weeks since we first broached the subject here, a bronze memorial to the writer has been designed, struck and erected in central Dublin.

Which would suggest the Irishman’s Diary has even greater influence than was hitherto suspected. Except that, annoyingly, the commissioning of the work appears to have predated the column.

Also, the memorial is a plaque rather than a statue. And it hasn’t been so much erected as laid down – on the footpath outside the Palace Bar in Fleet Street. Furthermore, the memorial is not exclusively a tribute to the man born Brian O’Nolan. Although it will be officially unveiled on the centenary of his birth next week, the plaque is part of a group of four dedicated to famous scribes who frequented the pub over the years.

On which note, special congratulations are due to Con Houlihan, who – alone of the quartet – has achieved this form of immortality without the usual formality of dying first. Happily, the great Con is still with us and still writing columns. Even so, his plaque takes its place alongside that of O’Nolan, Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan, who, combined, have been dead for 136 years.

Of course, some of Con Houlihan’s words have preceded him in earning immortality. I can hardly have been the only observer for whom the recent sight of Stephen Cluxton racing back towards goal in the All-Ireland final will have awoken memories of another Dublin goalkeeper making a similar, but even more urgent, backward journey at the same venue 33 years earlier.

Mike Sheehy’s quickly taken free may not have been the GAA goal of the century.

But if there had been a competition for the greatest goal description of that period, nobody would have bettered Con’s comparison of Paddy Cullen’s hapless retreat to that of a woman who’d been chatting with a neighbour at the gate and then smelt a cake burning.

FROM CAKE back to Flann, however, and the quest for a more monumental monument, which, despite the Palace plaques (designed by Tipperary sculptor Jarlath Daly), continues. Enter David O’Kane, a Berlin-based artist, who produced the illustration pictured. It’s only a preliminary design, first submitted earlier this year for a possible public-art bursary in Strabane, where Brian O’Nolan was born.

Hence the presence in the picture of Strabane library, whose window shutters carry an extract from a Myles na gCopaleen column. But as it happens, the Strabane sculpture proposal was stillborn. So readers in Tyrone and elsewhere may be relieved to know that the library would not have to be part of the design were the monument relocated to, say, Dublin’s College Green.

On the contrary, the concept would be developed to suit the chosen site. And I must say I like the basic idea, which in the right place could be a very dramatic addition to the capital’s street architecture.

O’Kane proposes to deal with the question O’Nolan’s multiple identities by retaining the famous (yes, readers, I’m fiercely tempted to call them “ic*n*c”, but I won’t) overcoat and hat, while eliminating the man inside it. The bronze figure would comprise only an arrangement of clothes, backlit to cast a ghostly shadow on the writing (on the wall).

Thus the aptly chosen quotation: “My presence here is a ‘phenomenon’ so completely outside and beyond the planes of existence which human thought is able to hypothesise into the structure of the universe that – considered in ‘relation’ to that presence – the whole monster procession of life can only be understood as a sort of epiphenomenal magic lantern show, too dim, too dull, too intolerably indistinct to amuse even the most backward, the most barbarous, of infants.

“I am the shadow on the wall of the cave mentioned by Plato. I am the second one from the left in the grey frock and dundrearies. My wish is that I should not be disturbed. Please do not speak to me. I appear, perhaps, to make requests, to ask favours, to issue commands? This is a misunderstanding, I ask for nothing.

“These be the merest of ghost imperatives – they are the expression not of the gross, unsublimated, merely human will, but of wisdom, humility, holiness, greatness, the projection temporally of qualities unfamiliar even to the dead and the unborn. (I have, I warn you, been both and speak on this difficult matter with authority).”

There are those who argue that, through his various false identities, O’Nolan was in fact striving for what psychologists and philosophers call “self-negation”. Perhaps. That said, it should be noted in passing that his above reflection on being and nothingness, part of a much longer and even more altitudinal flight of prose from a 1944 Cruiskeen Lawn column, was provoked, according to Myles, by a letter from a reader attempting to amuse him with samples of comic verse.