An Irishman's Diary

AT A LOOSE END in Munich the other day, I did what people are often compelled to do when visiting strange cities. I climbed something.

Not in the manner of Alain Robert, the mad Frenchman who has just added the Petronas Towers in Malaysia to the list of skyscrapers he has scaled using only his bare hands and feet. No. I stuck with the tourist convention of ascending structures from the inside, on stairs provided for the purpose: the structure in this case being the 300-foot tower of St Peter’s Church.

I suppose there is a rational aspect to this obsession. By climbing to the high-point of anywhere, travellers gain a panoramic view: a well-known tourism product. But there is also a ritualistic element to the exercise, a bit like the circling motions of pilgrims when visiting ancient religious monuments.

At any rate, going up and down things is a staple of modern tourism. When you’re wandering around a new city for a period, horizontally, you generally experience an urge to do something on the vertical plane too. And especially if this involves actual climbing as opposed to taking a lift, there can be a sense of achievement afterwards; at which point, chances are, it’s time to eat again.

“Old Peter”, the name given to Peterskirche tower, boasted the added frisson of a narrow, railed-in viewing platform at the top, about the width of one-and-a-half people, beyond which there was a sheer drop to the streets. So as well as the view, it offered mild claustrophobia in addition to the acrophobia some of us were experiencing: thereby increasing the sense of satisfaction afterwards.

I’m sure the railings, flimsy as they looked, were constructed to the usual high standards of German engineering. But when a wider-than-average tourist nudged past me at one point, I made sure to hug the wall and let him takes his chances on the outside.

In between such attacks of vertigo, I studied the pilgrims as they emerged, breathless, from the stairs. And everyone did the same thing. There was an initial “ooh!” (or “wow!“) at the spectacle; followed by a tour of all four sides; then a couple of photographs; and finally another parting look at the sky-line before they started their descent. All completed, typically, in six-and-a-half minutes.

EVERY CITYworth its salt has something for visitors to climb, usually after paying for the privilege. One of the more notorious exceptions is Dublin: a European capital that bucks the trend, not merely by failing to build sky-scraping monuments, as some cities do; but, perversely, by building them and then just failing to provide any access to visitors.

I refer to such vertiginous follies as the Wellington Monument – Europe’s tallest obelisk – and the Millennium Spire: Europe’s tallest something else. As a famous former resident of the city might have said, to have one egregiously lofty structure that lacks a stairs and a viewing platform might be considered unfortunate. Two seems like carelessness.

Never mind the normal tourist. Not even Alain Robert could climb either monument. Which, since Liberty Hall is hardly on his to-do list, makes Dublin a complete write-off for “Spiderman” and his likes.

Even the steps at the base of the Wellington Monument are sloped, as if to deter the public. The irony is that the obelisk would be even taller except that its designers ran out of money mid-project. Whereas, with a bit of foresight, they could have added a small restaurant half-way up that would have paid for the work within five years.

This could still be done, arguably. I often think that, even now, the monument would benefit from the addition of a tastefully designed wrought-iron spiral staircase on the outside, leading to some sort of

platform near the summit, with a few coffee tables, or whatever.

As for the Spire, there is no such hope. Its haughty contempt for the need of tourists to climb things is all the more notable since its controversial predecessor, Nelson Pillar, was fully compliant. For generations, people paid to enjoy its view over Dublin: like the two old ladies from Fumbally Lane, mentioned in Ulysses, who parted with threepence each at the turnstile and ate plums at the top, spitting the stones through the railings.

If I remember correctly: the “parable of the plums” was for Stephen Dedalus a symbol of the Irish condition, circa 1904: the old ladies feeling simultaneously alienated from Lord Nelson as he towered above them, yet also terrified of falling, and so preferring to cling for the foreseeable future to their colonial masters’ mid-section.

When the Spire was built at the height of our modern-day boom, by contrast, it was taken to represent an independent Ireland reaching for the sky. It didn’t need to do anything so grubby as pay for itself: its very extravagance was in keeping with the times. Now, of course, Dublin could do with the money. And for a symbol of the Irish condition, circa 2009, how about all those people standing at the bottom of the gleaming structure, looking up, but with no means to get there?