Ireland’s universities hope to benefit from the US crackdown on academic free expression. ACivil Service special-ops squad has been deployed to San Francisco to talk up our merits and colleges are already well aware of the value of American undergrads, who pay top non-EU fees.
In advance of the hoped-for arrival of exiles, Ireland’s oldest university, Trinity College Dublin, is cleaning up its act. This week it issued a €1 million tender for pest control. The job encompasses both the city-centre campus and the college’s many satellite sites, including buildings at St James’s Hospital and, intimidatingly for any ratter, the boat club at Islandbridge.
About 68 per cent of the buildings on campus are more than 100 years old, and being a university brings unique challenges for pest control. The challenges range from bed bugs to carpet moths and something called “booklice”, termite-like little creatures that may menace the more than six million printed volumes in the various libraries and repositories.
The lucky bidder will inherit more than 200 existing rodent monitoring points, which they will be expected to upgrade, along with baiting and carcass collection duties. The standard rotation is eight visits a year, though certain sites – including cafes, the nursing school and the science building – will get 12. Still, can’t be worse than Manhattan.
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The Monk on stage
The reviews are in for The Monk, the cafe-theatrical one-man show about Gerry Hutch written, directed and performed by Rex Ryan, son of another Gerry.
Critical consensus is mixed for the play at the Glass Mask on Dawson Street in Dublin, with praise for the “superb” performance and staging (Daily Mail), the “fascinating portrait” of its subject (Sunday Independent) and the “not boring” experience in general (Sunday World) – something far from guaranteed in a theatre that has introduced audiences to a string of challenging European expressionist pieces in recent months.
But there are moral and other quandaries raised by the semi-fictionalised multimedia extravaganza.
The “mishmash of fact and fiction” is “sometimes an uncomfortable watch for the wrong reasons”, says the Mail. It’s like “A Christmas Carol, with added misery, and without the redeemable protagonist,” says The Irish Independent. The Sunday World muses that “there may be” objections to the “somewhat glamorising” portrayal of the gangland figure.
The Monk is a man you might not want to annoy by, for example, staging an entire play where you dress up as him and re-enact important moments of his life in a fashion that recalls a more miserable Christmas Carol. But Ryan says Hutch doesn’t seem to mind. “I don’t give a bo***x, Rex,” was the exact verdict from Hutch himself, Ryan told the Sunday Independent’s Barry Egan.
Shamrock shake-up
Welcome back Síofra the Shamrock, the limited edition plush toy that returned to sale this week after what can only be described as a period of enforced scarcity in the wake of her St Patrick’s Day launch.
Síofra is “a charming, cuddly celebration of Irishness”, which is to say a stuffed shamrock with a smiling face. She’s no regular teddy, however: she’s a Jellycat, part of a range of virally collectable baby toys focused, perplexingly, on desirable bourgeois lifestyle foods. On the shelves of Arnotts in Dublin currently are the likes of a cinnamon roll, a bowl of oats and a wedge of Brie – all in teddy form.
Those with suitcases full of Beanie Babies in the attic might be feeling once bitten twice shy, but people go wild for Jellycats in a very similar fashion. Some buy them for babies, sure, but plenty of adults feel compelled to complete the collection, and harbour daydreams about the future cash value of their stash.
There were queues up Grafton Street outside Brown Thomas – and a larger-than-life Síofra to pose with – which produced plenty of content for the video-sharing platform TikTok last time for influencers. It brought plenty of hype for the British brand’s own account, which is followed by 1.8 million people.
Desirable items are readily resold online. There was a Síofra from the first batch available on Adverts online sales platform this week for €90, while Marcus Mussel was going for more than €250 on online second-hand clothes shop, Vinted. This can make them a target for shoplifters.
Legit fans who make it to Brown Thomas or Arnotts, where the shops issue new ‘drops’ each day for a limited period, can expect to pay €30 for their 12cm of Irish charm.
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The green, green grass of home
No awards for Castleisland, Co Kerry, in the 32-county Best Kept Towns competition won by Naas in Co Kildare this week. And no wonder, given the level of political turmoil over keeping a patch of grass cut.
“All hell broke loose,” The Kerryman reports, at a Kerry County Council meeting over a letter sent by Sinn Féin offering to deploy members to mow the grass on an estate if the council would not do it.
Jackie Healy-Rae jnr, of the Kerry political dynasty, insisted a €900 lawnmower had already been purchased for the residents and Independent councillor Charlie Farrelly demanded an apology from the Sinn Féin members over the letter, “sarcastically implying” that the “Army Council” had sent it.
This went down roughly how something like this would go down in the Dáil: ructions, rancour, appeals to the chair, calls to withdraw. Farrelly said he would withdraw the Army Council remark, which was intended “in jest”, but he still wasn’t happy about the letter. Sinn Féin councillor Robert Brosnan decried the “dirty digs” and ultimately he and his party colleagues stormed out.
There is no update on the status of the grass.
Fine, okay
Christmas comes earlier every year and Bloomsday is lasting longer. But six weeks on from this column’s first reference of the year, this is the last, I promise.
Our sympathies with the Joyceans of China, where the Irish consulate spent the past week in the cities of Shanghai, Nanjing and Suzhou bringing the complicated novel to new audiences. One cultural issue: there’s no word ‘Yes’ in Mandarin.
In the last chapter of Ulysses, the only one in Molly Bloom’s voice, the word “Yes” features more than 80 times. The last part of the last line, as erudite Irish Times readers no doubt already know, goes like this: “And his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
The American writer and translator Brendan O’Kane notes that one translation into Chinese, by Jin Di, opts for “really”, giving: “and his heart was going like mad and really I said I will Really”.
But our favourite is Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo’s version – “by far the most widely read”, says O’Kane. This goes with “好吧” – “okay, fine.” This gives us the climactic line: “Okay I said okay fine OKAY.”
Which is also Overheard’s position on cutting down on the Joyce references.
