Dublin's Fair City: Drugs, Tarts, Rebels, Scholars

What's in a name? Well, quite a lot, actually ...

The General Post Office, Dublin - one of the most famous and iconic buildings in Ireland. This was the rebels' HQ during the Easter Rising of 1916. You can still see the bullet marks made by British troops on the columns outside. MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse / Now and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born. WB YEATS Easter 1916

Near the junction of North Earl Street and O'Connell Street you'll find a jauntily aloof James Joyce, popularly known - and forgive the vernacular - as 'The Prick with the Stick'.

(There are many literary and political statues in Dublin. The monument to Anna Livia - a personification of the river Liffey - is known as 'The Floozie in the Jacuzzi'. The buxom Molly Malone, who wheels her wheelbarrow at the end of Grafton Street, is variously nicknamed 'The Tart with the Cart', 'The Dolly with the Trolley', 'The Trollop with the Scallop', 'The Dish with the Fish' and 'The Flirt with the Skirt'.  And Oscar Wilde, who sits on a large granite boulder in Merrion Square, has of course become 'The Queer with the Leer' or 'The Fag on the Crag'.)

I think it's good these literary figures have been brought down to earth and humanised in this way. And a very Irish thing, I venture. Here in England we tend to worship our artistic gods and goddesses, putting them on pedestals, talking about them in hushed tones, freezing with awe and admiration whenever they enter the room. But in Ireland it would be expected, and indeed entirely natural, to share the craic with Seamus Heaney or Paul Muldoon or Roddy Doyle or Patrick McCabe if we found ourselves  rubbing shoulders with them at the bar.  

Three views of Trinity College, Dublin.

A Henry Moore sculpture on Front Square, Trinity College, Dublin.

The Ha'penny Bridge over the river Liffey. By now you won't be surprised to learn that a nearby statue of two women gossiping on a bench with their shopping is known as 'The Hags with the Bags'.

And, incidentally, the new, needle-like 'Spire of Dublin' - erected at the hub of the city in 2003 - is not generally called by its official name, 'The Monument of Light'. No, it's known colloquially as 'The Spike', 'The Nail in the Pale', 'The Pin in the Bin', 'The Rod to God', 'The Stiletto in the Ghetto', 'The Stiffy at the Liffey', 'The Erection in the Intersection' and 'The Binge Syringe'. But I didn't need to tell you that, did I?

(By the way, we saw drug dealing going on quite openly in shop doorways in O'Connell Street.)