OPINION:John Waters's view of Dublin as an imperial outpost is prejudiced and tinged with irony
IT IS hard to know where to start with John Waters' effusion about Dublin ( How Easter Rising Showed Dublin in Its True Colours; Opinion and Analysis, April 29th), so it might be best to start at the start.
Dublin “never quite seceded from the British empire, but seems to gaze forlornly across the Irish Sea”. Dublin has always gazed across the Irish Sea. Right from the time it was established by the Vikings to be exact. It is where it is precisely because of the Irish Sea and its orientation to it: it is the city’s raison d’être.
This eastward gaze is intrinsic and has exactly nothing to do with the British empire – although flinging in that term as a rhetorical pejorative is a good way of throwing heat on any Irish subject, albeit at the expense of light. As to the forlorn nature of the gaze, if Waters has hard information on this detail, he might care to share it with his enchanted audience.
Dublin offered the Vikings the easiest and most convenient anchorage for a coastal settlement at a time when the Irish Sea was a Viking lake. It was part of a seaborne trading network and it naturally looked towards the horizon that sustained its purpose. Just like London, New York, Venice, Cape Town, Barcelona, Genoa, Hamburg and Buenos Aires: make your own list.
And all these cities, with their marine orientation, are relatively indifferent to the back country except as a source of hostility or food (or both). For this, they are heartily disliked by the back country.
Tough: that’s how it is.
What the Vikings started, every subsequent settler group consolidated. When the Normans came, the city was granted to the freemen of Bristol, thus consolidating the eastward gaze. That said, Dublin over the centuries grew to be a vastly more substantial city than Bristol.
By the 18th century, it was not just the “second city of the British empire”, but one of the major cities of Europe. One visitor in the 1730s calculated that only London, Paris, Rome and Amsterdam had greater populations, which conveys the relative importance of Dublin in European terms.
The city experienced a long decline after the 1801 Act of Union, but to describe it as “just another provincial city of the British empire” in 1916 is simply wrong.
It had nothing in common with far-flung imperial outposts, and even in the internal context of the old United Kingdom it was an oddity. It was a Catholic city in a Protestant state, with its own well-differentiated political aspirations, which set it at odds with the imperial metropole.
For at least two generations, it had been the centre of radical nationalist endeavour: at the time of the split, it was uber-Parnellite. The only UK city to which it could even be remotely compared was Edinburgh and the relative degrees of nationalist energy informing both cities can best be measured by their subsequent histories. But Waters does not stop there. In his formulation, Dublin “was in hardly any sense a capital city”.
Well, how about some facts? From the 12th century, if not earlier, Dublin has been the largest human settlement on the island. It has been the undisputed centre of government and administration. Since the 17th century, it has been the only meeting place of such representative assemblies as Ireland possessed. It has been the country’s largest port.
It has been the commercial, legal and educational focus of the entire island, even during Belfast’s brief industrial flowering in the 19th century. It is the umbilicus of the island’s transport system. Even a sporting body as deeply rooted in the back country as the GAA never thought to build its principal stadium anywhere else. In what sense is this place not a capital city?
Quotations from the eccentric and unrepresentative Patrick Pearse deliver no authority to the argument. They are simply assertions whose prejudices are shared by John Waters.
Waters's is an old and universal cri de coeur. It gusts from the back country like a rhetorical mistral and is about as useful. It is the ubiquitous rural envy of the city. It is the assertion that urban people, with their openness to external influence – all the greater in a port city – are contaminated by the foreigner, while only in the back country is there to be found national purity, raciness of the soil and the timeless soul of the Gael. He even refers to that elusive sprite "the Irish mind", which he has apparently caught and tagged. Go on, John, tell us what it is.
He could be writing from Yorkshire or Languedoc or Tennessee. The tune is the same everywhere.
But wait: he writes from Dalkey, a prisoner behind enemy lines. Such teasing irony: such a post-modern jeu d'esprit.
Fergal Tobin writes on history as Richard Killeen, the pseudynom employed in his authorship of Historic
Atlas of Dublin
(Gill & Macmillan). He is publishing director of Gill Macmillan