London/Dublin Day 6/7: 2004 Arrives

Dublin awoke slowly on New Year’s Day, and our apartment was no exception, but unlike most we had somewhere to be: the Lord Mayor of Dublin’s first annual New Year’s Day Parade. So I ran down to the SPAR for a newspaper and a cereal bar, then we made our way to Westmoreland Street.

I’m not sure whether the apparent disorganization of the event (in my American eyes) reflected simply first-time jitters, or a different idea of what a “parade” is, but for whatever reason, the design of the parade was a bit unusual. The six groups participating converged on the intersection of Westmoreland Street and Fleet Street from all four directions; the two largest groups, the MRDs and the Garda band, approached from the south via College Green. Each group played a few songs marching in, but the main focus of the “parade” was a performance in-place at Westmoreland and Fleet, with each group allocated two songs. A mass performance of about four songs, all out of the JMU repertoire, then took place with rotating directors — although start and tempo were dictated by the Dukes’ drum majors. The MRDs made up nearly half of the total number of performers.

The rest of New Year’s Day was pretty non-descript — I spent a few hours wandering around Dublin, just kind of taking the place in. Although I still had most of the important sights left to see, I was beginning to agree with an assessment I’d heard earlier: you don’t go to Dublin for the scenery, you go for the people. That evening, we confirmed that, finding a different neighborhood pub near our apartment and settling in. The other customers were clearly regulars, and the bartender had some fun with them, DJing a round of Name That (70s/80s rock/alternative) Tune with the house music system, and closing the evening with Billy Joel’s masterwork, Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.

Friday was my main sightseeing day, so we’ll just hit things in order:

• Christchurch Cathedral — notable both for the church building itself (originally constructed in the 12th century, although a Viking cathedral predated even it by a century or so) and for the crypt beneath.
• Trinity College — until the 1970s, studying here could get a Catholic excommunicated. Trinity was long viewed as the “third school of the [British] Empire,” behind Oxford and Cambridge, and that required it to stick to a Protestant identity. One footnote to that status is that starting in 1801, the Trinity College library by law received a copy of every book printed in the United Kingdom, giving it a function similar to that of our Library of Congress. To facilitate that, Trinity constructed and expanded the Long Room for housing those books throughout the 19th century. (That legal right has continued even post-Irish independence.) Beneath the Long Room today is the exhibition area for the Book of Kells, a 9th-century illuminated manuscript of the four Gospels.
• National Museum of History and Archaeology — after I took a fifteen-minute spin through the Irish independence exhibit, I’d had enough of this one. That turned out to be a good thing, since they kicked all the visitors out ten minutes later, a half-hour ahead of the advertised closing time.
• Carroll’s Irish Gift Shops — yes, this is a tourist attraction. American readers may know somebody — relative, family friend, whoever — who is fiercely proud of his or her Irish ancestry, and chooses to advertise those roots by scattering all manner of Irish souvenir junk cultural artifacts throughout his/her house. Carroll’s carries three stories full of that stuff.

Having spent several days in the UK before flying over to Ireland, it was easy to see the identity issues left over from British colonialism. In some ways, the public manifestations of these issues reminded me of the French-Anglo divide I saw in Quebec. Now before the Quebeckistanis get excited about me comparing them to a country that successfully fought for independence from Britain and seems to have turned out OK, I should note that this isn’t a totally complimentary comparison. The use of language as a political tool rings a bell, although in Ireland it’s a much more superficial thing (bilingual street signs, naming government positions in Gaelic) since only 2.5% of the country’s population is even fluent in what is the country’s only official language. You also see small changes to UK-derived institutions, apparently just to assert their difference — like calling executive-branch organizations Departments rather than Ministries, even though they’re each headed up by a member of Parliament (er, Teachta Dála) called a Minister. That even extends to silly one-upsmanship: Dublin’s beltway carries the route number M50 (M stands for motorway — think Interstate in the US), and it doesn’t seem coincidental that this number is double London’s M25.

We wound up at a Temple Bar pub for dinner, where a group of Irish teen/twentysomethings provided all of us diners around them with entertainment in the form of grand social drama. You’d see the same thing from American high-schoolers on any Friday night at a suburban Friendly’s, only the ready availability of alcohol here turned these folks’ volume up quite a bit. So by the end of their meal, we were all quite convinced that “Erin” (I’m making up names here) would never do that, and that “Kevin” was terribly wrong for ever thinking she would do that — the whole thing started to remind us of a reality show. When the last member of that group cleared the door, and the other three tables in that corner of the pub broke down laughing, I wandered over to the table closest to the main dramatic characters, and broke out the TV Announcer voice: “Next week, on Temple Bar Uncensored: Kevin finds out that Erin, in fact, would do that.” The joke was well-received by our fellow sufferers.

Friday night was dedicated to packing, postcards, and a bit of Virginia a cappella highlights for the apartment courtesy of the iBook. Saturday morning, I’d be beginning the long trip home.

Next up, our trip ends: St. James’s Gate to Richmond in 37 hours.