I was sorry to read last Saturday of the demise of Ireland's "bible of cool," dSide magazine. The news was all the more disconcerting since, in the nine years during which it apparently reinvented the country in terms of dance clubs, trendy cafés and mobile phone accessories, I was barely aware of its existence.
So I'm in no position to dispute the magazine's success in, as the article put it, "selling the Irish an image of themselves as edgy, urban and cool". A few of us obviously slipped through the net.
I'm almost embarrassed to say it, but my own self-image remains predominantly rural (with a small built-up area). I haven't felt truly cool since the heating oil ran out during the big freeze of 1981. And the nearest I get to edgy is when I'm in a trendy café, at the "please wait to be seated" sign, and I'm hoping one of the staff notices me before I resort to waving my arms. As for the contemporary music scene: until recently, I thought clubbing was something that happened to baby seals when you didn't pay your subscription to Greenpeace.
But then, dSide was never interested in me. It was targeting the trend-setters - the people "at the top of the triangle", in its publisher's words . And this trickle-down strategy clearly worked. Nine years on, even from the bottom of the triangle, Ireland has become visibly more edgy and urban and cool. The global cooling of culture has played a part. But if dSide was even partly responsible for the transformation, it must have been very influential indeed.
Some of the cultural changes are subtle. You rarely hear Chris de Burgh on the radio anymore, for example, a welcome development for which the "bible of cool" must take credit. Maybe it laid down biblical rules for DJs at some point: "Play ye not Spanish Train, nor Lonely Sky, nor especially Lady in Red, for they are unclean. Patricia the Stripper and In a Country Churchyard: these too ye shall hold detestable. A Spaceman Came Calling ye shall avoid like the plague also.
"Pay ye not the Ferryman, nor let him anywhere near your turntable either. Anyone that playeth these discs shall be brought before the high priests. And barring that he hath a very good reason, such as that he playeth the record for purposes of irony, he shall be cast out; yea, even like the lepers of old."
But this is only one change. The dSide revolution can be seen in everything from the chrome-and-steel bars to the ubiquitous designer clothes to the dance music stations that you tune into accidentally on the car radio and think "Good God - who listens to that?". It can also be seen in the fact that, in cafés from Cork to Donegal, you can buy a double espresso, albeit generally spelt with an "x". This is the new Ireland - edgy, urban and cool, is right.
Yet the great breakthrough in our self-image cannot be taken for granted. I was horrified to read during the week, for example, that Bord na Mona is proposing to return "70,000 hectares" of cutaway bog to the State. What on earth is a modern, outward-looking country supposed to do with 70,000 hectares of bog, I thought. And in the midlands, of all places.
Although a glorious part of Ireland's past, the continued existence of Bord na Móna is a little embarrassing. Why, even in the 1970s, it was a subject of satire, memorably lampooned by the Boomtown Rats and their bass player, Pete Briquette. As for its returning land to the State, we already have as much of the midlands as an edgy, urban country can deal with.
Also, there was the sight in Thursday's paper of the jarvey in Killarney, plying his 250-year-old trade despite a Gap of Dunloe-sized hole in visitor numbers. The jarveys could be said to have invented the tourist trap (although some of them use the bigger carriages too). But the Americans who embrace this as real culture are not coming now; and it doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody to re-brand the jaunting car experience as post-modern and ironic. The top of the morning may be on the way out, but the top of the triangle is nowhere either.
As if this wasn't worrying enough, the Irish weather remains mired in the past, with temperate, rainy conditions all year round, instead of the harsh winters and steamy summers an edgy, urban culture needs. Indeed, I see the rain has forced an extension of the deadline for slurry-spreading under the Rural Environment Protection Scheme. The tanks are full, apparently, but they can't be emptied till the fields dry out.
And to think dSide is gone, with so much work still to do.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie