EARLY one morning recently, while travelling up Dublin's O'Connell Street on the upper deck of a bus, I saw two young men sitting on a seat beside the monument to Fr Theobald Mathew, which is on the street's central meridian, writes BRIAN MAYE.
The two looked as though they were recovering from a hard night on the booze. I was struck by the incongruity of the location they had chosen to start their recovery, beside the monument to a man who had campaigned vigorously, and very successfully, during the early and middle 19th century, to wean the Irish away from their fondness for hard liquor.
Or maybe the two young men had deliberately chosen that location because the hangover they were experiencing had driven them to pray to the apostle of temperance to help them to mend their ways?
In any event, that initial sense of incongruity set me thinking about other public monuments around the city of Dublin.
O’Connell Street’s most imposing monument is surely that to the man who gave the street its current name. One often sees pigeons settled on his head, but perhaps doves would be more appropriate occupants of that lofty perch as they traditionally symbolise peace, and this would be in keeping with the non-violent approach to achieving political change that he advocated throughout his public life.
Also on O’Connell Street is a monument to the multifaceted Sir John Gray (physician, surgeon, politician, journalist and newspaper proprietor). He certainly deserves to be remembered because he did Dublin an enormous service by overseeing the introduction of a fresh water supply to the city and suburbs.
There was a certain congruity when the Anna Livia fountain (known to Dublin wags as the “Floozie in the Jacuzzi” and worse), with its flowing water, was situated nearby. It was removed in 2001 to make way for The Spire, and Sir John Gray lost a kindred spirit as a result.
On the southside of the city, I spotted a hare one evening sitting near the bust of Countess Markievicz in St Stephen’s Green. It would have been a brave hare that would have gone anywhere near the same lady when she was alive.
She was something of a crack shot and – typical of the landed-gentry class into which she was born – she was well practised at hunting.
Another commemorative bust in St Stephen’s Green is that of brave Tom Kettle, killed at Ginchy during the Battle of the Somme in September 1916.
One is often struck by the peace and quiet that sometimes surrounds the monument; it seems so incongruous, amid such peace, to think of the scenes of horror, chaos and carnage that must have attended his untimely death.
Thinking of noise and quiet brings me to the monument to Oliver Goldsmith, on one side of the front arch of Trinity College on College Green.
The noisy traffic passing him every day and the crowds milling close by are a long way from the world he portrayed in the early part of his most famous poem, The Deserted Village: “How often have I loitered o’er your green,/ Where humble happiness endeared each scene./ How often have I paused on every charm,/ The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,/ The never-failing brook, the busy mill,/ The decent church that topped the neighbouring hill,/ The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,/ For talking age and whispering lovers made.”
Then there is the monument to James Joyce, on North Earl Street. (The monument has been unkindly dubbed “The Prick with the Stick” by some Dublin wags).
I have seen people sitting comfortably on the plinth on which the statue rests and have thought that most of Joyce’s writings – particularly Ulysses and even more so, Finnegans Wake – have not exactly been comfortable for those who have tried to, or have had to, study them.
Which brings us back to O’Connell Street again and the sight of two young people wearing Union Jack shorts outside the GPO. They obviously do not realise that that building is one of the most sacred in the history of the Irish people’s struggle to free themselves from the authority represented by that flag.
Still, now that God Save the Queen has been played at Croke Park, and received with respect, perhaps this sight in O’Connell Street is not so incongruous after all.