THE FRENCH couple in their 30s hesitated for a moment at the entrance to the crowded bar before deciding to go in. The woman was wearing a black raincoat, polo-neck and jeans, and her dark curly hair hung loosely around her shoulders. Her sunglasses – useful in the brilliant March sunshine – were perched on top of her head. Her partner, also dressed in black, stood closely and protectively behind her as she manoeuvred her way towards a space at the bar.
A determined, bare-legged blonde – making a diagonal beeline back to her drinks-laden table from a visit to the Ladies – crashed into her. “Pardon, pardon!”, the French woman exclaimed and smiled apologetically, although she hadn’t caused the collision. As the local woman charged on without acknowledging the visitors, the man shook his head in disbelief. He nodded towards the door, turned on his heels and guided his partner back into the sunshine – his desire for a mid-afternoon refreshment, Dublin-style, clearly gone.
The unfortunate couple had stumbled – as had I – upon the detritus of a charity lunch. The glamorous blonde woman, was unfazed by the incident. She rejoined her friends in time to share in their shrieks of delight as they popped the cork on yet another bottle of sparkling wine and refilled their glasses.
One after another, young women – and some not so young – strutted around the bar like prize ponies, noisily gushing greetings at each another and flaunting their “style” and money. They teetered, in outlandishly high shoes, through a sea of satin, lace and taffeta, with the odd fur wrap thrown in; short dresses exposed bare, tanned thighs and calves; glitzy handbags held the prerequisites for redoing perfectly made-up faces between drinks.
It was 4pm on a Friday in March, for heaven’s sake! Women of Dublin, catch yourselves on! Suited men sat along the bar with their backs to the women – occasionally turning sideways to fix their eyes on a posterior or pair of legs that caught their attention.
An excess of Spanx, body-hugging dresses, fake tan and stiletto heels had turned the women into clones of one another – Irish “Stepford wives”, although wedding rings were in short supply.
The tickets for the event they had all attended cost €100 per head: the price of two bottles of the Valdo Prosecco which groups around the room were downing by the ice-bucketload. Or just under half the price of a glass of Hennessy Ellipse brandy, available from the bar at €234. I couldn’t see in the crowd whether anyone had risen to the price of a bottle of Cristal champagne at €400!
A hundred yards far from the hotel, a young woman sat hunched on the pavement, with her back against a telephone kiosk and her head buried between her knees. She was wearing a white quilted anorak with the “fur”-trimmed hood pulled over her head and a blanket wrapped round her legs. She didn’t have the energy to beg.
A desolate-looking man in his early 20s sat further along, with a tattered dark green hoodie draped over his legs for heat. He silently held up a paper coffee cup to passersby who didn’t appear to see him.
Later that night, when the “ladies who lunch” had moved on, a man drinking alone in the hotel bar struck up a conversation with my husband and me. He spotted our tickets for the Randy Newman concert we had just attended and informed us he had left the event early. It wasn’t as good as he had expected, he said, and volunteered that he had been born in 1964.
“What’s your economy like up there?” he quizzed us, hearing our Northern accents and demonstrating that partitionism is alive and well. He didn’t seem particularly interested in hearing about our woes.
It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, he asserted, that the Government “down here” was considering cutting benefits to those out of work. “It’s a way of life for far too many of them. I see them every week when I’m going to work in Ringsend. Women queueing up with their prams to collect their money. They don’t want to work, their youngsters will be the same.” He had lived and worked in the US for four years, returning to live in Ballsbridge in 2008. “They’ve got the right idea over there. Six months out of work and your benefits are stopped. That gives you an incentive to find a job”. He worked in IT and had no problem finding a good position when he came home. “The jobs are there if you look for them.” Having said all he needed to say, he shook our hands, left his half-drunk pint of Guinness on the table, and went home.
The taxi-man who had dropped us off at the concert earlier that evening complained that there were more than 14,000 taxi-drivers in Dublin. A few years back, he told us, there were only 2,000 but now all these foreign men were coming in and taking the business.
On the night before we left, a pleasant black taxi-man explained the peculiar “reverse queuing” system the drivers observed outside our hotel. “The last will be first”, he laughed ironically. Rather unsure of himself, he tentatively spelled out the letters “N-I-C-O-S?”, when we asked him to take us to the old Italian restaurant of that name on Dame Street. His car radio was tuned into Spirit Radio, Ireland’s first national Christian music station.
As the governments in both parts of this island apply themselves to finding ways to commemorate a decade of centenaries – including that of the founding of the State – I pondered the words of WB Yeats in Easter 1916: “. . . All changed, changed utterly . . .” I wonder what the poet – and the French couple – make of Dublin today.