"What," Oliver St John Gogarty asked, "would Dublin do without the Shelbourne Hotel?" Elizabeth Bowen put it another way when she wrote that in no other capital city did "any one hotel play such an outstanding role". One imagines, therefore, that either the literary and historical knowledge possessed by those who hold power in the Meridien Hotels group is somewhat limited or that it does not count for much. Some hard-headed international businessmen have a strong cultural awareness. Others do not.
In recent years Dublin has seen a remarkable increase in the quantity and quality of its hotels and restaurants. There have, however, been some notable losses as well. The premises of what was once Louis Jammet's classical French restaurant in Nassau Street is divided now between a Tex-Mex eating place and a night club. The Red Bank, once the capital's leading seafood restaurant, went through a remarkable series of reincarnations, once as a church and now as a centre for budget accommodation.
As a result of its change from being something of an elegant backwater to a bigger and brasher city, it is now far easier to find a jalapeno pepper or a block of Monterrey Jack cheese in Dublin than it is to come across a native oyster from the west coast. The global economy, it would appear, is achieving a level of homogeneity which the Soviet Union worked towards but failed miserably to accomplish. Amusing articles were written in guidebooks about how all Soviet hotel rooms looked the same and the menus in restaurants were identical from the Gulf of Finland to the Sea of Japan.
In the western world nowadays the hotel rooms are better than their old Soviet counterparts but there is such a sameness about them that it might be difficult for a traveller readily to identify whether she or he is in Dublin or Durban. It is open to individual taste to decide on whether the food in McDonalds is better or worse than that consumed, when available, in the restaurants of the USSR. There is no question about the sameness of the menus from Belfast to Bangkok.
But even the loss of Jammet's and the Red Bank, even the closure of the Russell and the Royal Hibernian hotels to be replaced by office blocks can be grudgingly accepted in the name of dubious progress. For the Shelbourne to retain its physical existence but, like a fugitive criminal, adopt an alias instead of its real name is intolerable and insulting.
The Shebourne is not a mere hotel. It is certainly not an "outlet." It is part of the history of this country and of its capital city. The constitution of The Irish Free state was framed in one of its public rooms, known now as the "Constitution Room." Who knows what it might become in the future; perhaps the "Regency Room" or the "Savoy Room". At all events, the phrase "Le Meridien - the best address in Ireland" carries no ring of truth.