Hibernian rhapsody – An Irishman’s Diary about the greening of Prague

Long before the international Flann O’Brien conference opened there yesterday, Prague had been colonised by members of an Irish cult, albeit one more mainstream than that of the self-styled “Flannoraks”.

The original invasion was in 1629, when a community of Franciscan friars arrived to set up a college. They were fleeing anti-Catholic oppression in Ireland, and found a sympathetic host in Emperor Ferdinand II, who was organising some anti-Protestant oppression at the time.

But they proved a troublesome bunch, breaking down into provincial rivalries and having regular arguments, sometimes violent. So when the reforming Joseph II came to power in the late 1700s, he disestablished the “Hibernians”, as they were known. By the 19th century, their reconstructed monastery had become a customs office.

They had, however, left at least two permanent marks on the Czech capital. One is Hybernska Street, now housing the main railway station, and, on the site of the college, a concert hall called the Divadlo Hybernia.

Their other gift to Prague – and to Czechs in general – is the potato. Apparently, until they arrived, the plant was considered ornamental. The Franciscans established the custom of eating it.

Now it’s a staple in Czech restaurants, albeit usually in the form of dumplings – a barely recognisable Bohemian cousin of the potato cake. In my limited experience, the dumplings are a cross between the ornamental and the edible. The ones I had last night were so stodgy you could have used them as paperweights.

There have been many Irish visitors to Prague in the centuries since the Franciscans left, some of them equally controversial. Strolling down Hybernska Street yesterday, for example, I awoke disturbing memories from 15 years ago, of long afternoons at the Flood tribunal, and in particular of the late, unfortunate Liam Lawlor.

Lawlor had extensive business dealings in Prague, some of them centring on a so-called “Hybernska Project”. The details now escape me, and they probably escaped me then too, because as with many tribunal witnesses, Lawlor could answer questions at very great length without imparting anything recognisable as information.

But I do remember one occasion when, queried about a large loan he had taken out, he explained that the files relating to it were in the Prague apartment of a man he didn’t know and couldn’t contact. He explained that the apartment used to be the office of a business partner, but the partner had since died, after which the place was sold to the man unknown, with some of the files still trapped inside.

This sounded a little Kafkaesque at the time, I recall. So I wasn’t at all surprised yesterday to see that Hybernska Street is just a short stroll from Franz Kafka Square. I wondered if that was where the apartment with the imprisoned files are.

The Flannoraks are located nearby too, in the arts faculty of Charles University, where they were wrestling with questions of a rather different kind on conference day one. Not untypical was the one in the title of a keynote talk given by Joseph Brooker of the University of London, viz: “Do Bicycles Dream of Molecular Sheep?”

Science fiction fans will recognise the echo there of Philip K Dick's 1960s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which in turn formed the basis for the classic 1982 film by Ridley Scott, Blade Runner.

The bicycles bit (and some of the sheep molecules) came from Flann O'Brien, of course. And one of the main points of Brooker's talk was the uncanny similarities between another of Dick's novels, Ubik, and O'Brien's weird masterpiece, The Third Policeman.

In both books, a bomb explosion is central to the plot. In both also, the main protagonists spend most of the time dead, or in severely altered states of consciousness. And the many strange things that happen along the way are attributable in both to mysterious but all-powerful substances – the titular “Ubik” (from “ubiquitious“) in Dick’s case; “omnium” in O’Brien’s.

If anyone was copying anyone else, well, it wasn't our man. O'Brien wrote The Third Policeman in 1940, and after its rejection by his publisher buried it in a drawer, never to emerge again in his lifetime. It was published a year after he died, in 1967, while Ubik followed in 1969.

But those who know agree there was no direct connection. In Brooker’s words, quoting another expert, it was “almost certainly a case of parallel development”. As for the bicycle/molecular sheep/dream question, the jury is still out.