The war of words rages over the future of the Joyce-linked The Dead house on Usher’s Quay, but another remarkable Dublin dwelling is under the hammer unnoticed.
Number 63 Baggot Street, in the heart of the city’s Georgian core, was the childhood home of the painter Francis Bacon. Over four storeys, a basement and a “turnkey” mews at the back, it’s 395sq m and comes with a weight-loss-oriented personal training business as a tenant.
There is a plaque up in the painter’s honour at the house where he was born in 1909 to Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon of the British army and Sheffield steel heiress Christina Winifred Frith. They had many addresses over the years, from Straffan, Co Kildare, and Abbeyleix, Co Laois, to South Kensington in London, as Eddy Bacon pursued horse training. The troublesome Francis was eventually whipped off to boarding school, London and international fame.
But it all started in Dublin, where Bacon’s studio is recreated in the Hugh Lane gallery but his international renown is not traded upon to anything like the degree of the capital’s writers.
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Estate agent JLL is asking €1.6 million for the lot, which might be a bit pricey for cost-conscious Minister for Arts and Culture Patrick O’Donovan. But these things are relative. Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucien Freud went for an eye-watering €105 million at auction at Christie’s in 2013. Perhaps €1.6 million, for an authentic Bacon, is a decent deal.
Wonk v Trump
As Donald Trump sticks it to his friends and neighbours, businesses will have an experienced head to look to for guidance on what exactly they are supposed to do about it all.
Simon Coveney, getting restless a few months after his retirement from the Dáil and the Cabinet, has joined EY Ireland as a consultant in its geopolitical strategy unit.
“In recent times the speed and complexity of decision making has greatly increased,” he said in a comment, “and it is now imperative that organisations assess the impact of geopolitical risk on their operations in real time.”
The Corkman is a political lifer, having replaced his father in Cork South Central at by-election in 1998 to take over the family business of governing. But his experience is wide – TD, MEP, minister for agriculture, housing, foreign affairs, defence, enterprise and trade, as well as tánaiste, leadership candidate and all-round Fine Gael grandee in recent years.
He became a low-level bete noire for Brexiteers when his foreign affairs brief left him delivering uncomfortable truths on BBC morning radio and objecting to Boris Johnson’s latest impractical border wheezes. That’s a gig that is as close as you can get to relevant experience for Trumpworld.
The consultancy hopes that Coveney can help businesses make “no regret” decisions at a time of great turmoil. Good luck with that.
Gone fission
Another Irishman finding himself in a high-stakes environment is John Fingleton, formerly of the Competition Authority of Ireland and lately spreading the word of fair business practice in Britain.
UK prime minister Keir Starmer, keen to kick-start the UK’s ailing economy by occasionally getting things done, has tapped Fingleton to head the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce, a new body designed to get atomic energy moving again.
The native of Cullenagh, Ballyroan, Co Laois, and former pupil of St Mary’s CBS secondary school in Portlaoise – thanks, Leinster Express, for finding the local angle – will be devoting much of his attention to the fishing hamlet of Sizewell, Suffolk. By now, the unbuilt Sizewell C nuclear project was already supposed to be providing 13 per cent of British power, alongside plucky smaller reactors elsewhere.
A big part of Fingleton’s gig will be to get it over the line, reducing British reliance on natural gas, backing up patchy renewables and ameliorating envy of the French, whose uranium-heavy power mix kept them partly insulated from inflating costs for consumers.
Such power plants are not traditionally popular on this side of the Irish Sea. Millions of Irish postcard writers once urged Tony Blair not to let Sellafield become a new Chernobyl, under the inspirational leadership of Ali Hewson, wife of U2 frontman Bono. Luckily for the UK’s new nuclear delivery tsar, Sizewell is on the other side of the island.
Hard Labour overseas
Higher up the food chain in Westminster, Keir Starmer’s master strategist Morgan McSweeney is being associated with a new political concept that is a long way from the republican revolution his grandfather was honoured for.
In The Times of London, columnist Jason Cowley credited the Macroom man with a new ideology beyond Blairism, Corbynism or even the socially conservative “Blue Labour”, to which he has links.
“McSweeney is less Blue Labour than what is being called Hard Labour,” said Cowley.
Sounds tough, but what is it? “Hard Labour rejects default progressive orthodoxies and the pieties of left-wing virtue-signalling,” Cowley wrote. “It does not believe that liberalism will inevitably prevail in a disorderly world. It believes in the centrality of the nation state and strong borders. It champions rearmament and re-industrialisation.”
Okay, that is quite tough. How this blood and iron pivot might affect the Fine Gael-linked adviser’s pacific homeland remains to be seen.
Invasion of the boffins
The League of Ireland’s renaissance deepens as a group of international fantasy football experts turn their attention from more cash-rich leagues to the big-hearted grassroots.
The move involves a test of the thesis that you don’t actually have to know anything about a league to dominate its fantasy league, as long as your statistical models are good enough.
One of the participants, Jonas Sand Labakk, actually won last year’s Fantasy Premier League, beating 11 million others in one of the world’s most competitive contests.
They’re deploying their models on the Irish game now, with spreadsheets spitting out valuable selections for their teams without anyone ever having to brave the terraces on a blustery Friday night.
Will these overseas superstars have a greater impact than Bohemians’ ex-Sheffield United striker Lys Mousset? It’s looking good so far. As of last week, there are 10 of them in the top 14.
