Neighbours of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin are martyrs to modern art installations. On a residents’ WhatsApp group this week, they were again debating whether the other-worldly soundtrack coming over the wall was “noise pollution” or “art, dahling”, to quote the opposing views. The jury is still out.
The source of the noise was “Europe’s largest digital art screen”, now and for the next two years occupying the front lawn of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma). When I dropped in on Friday, it was broadcasting a short film called The Art of a Tree, which in fact depicts a tree-less, post-apocalyptic future, in which oxygen has to be harvested.
The eerie soundtrack suits the theme and will be enjoyed by art lovers. In the meantime, however, it is also being passively inhaled by those who just happen to live next door to the museum.
But this is not the first time the local civilians have been caught in a cultural crossfire. A few years ago, I recall, the neighbourhood was also alarmed by sudden daily broadcasts of the Muslim call to prayer.
Art Attack – Frank McNally on the dangers of passive exposure to art and culture
No-Ivy Day at the Committee Room - Frank McNally on an Oval Office mystery
Old Mister Brenon - Frank McNally on a remarkable Dublin-born Hollywood director and his even more remarkable father
Gnomes of Donegal - Frank McNally on William Allingham’s peculiar brand of Irishness
It happened every morning at 11.30, just before the Angelus. And yet there was no mosque in the locality. So for a time people wondered if it was an overenthusiastic freelance muezzin, broadcasting from an apartment window.
Then that too turned out to be an inhalation – sorry, installation. It was a show by a Bethlehem-born artist who sought to juxtapose the colonial pasts of Palestine and Ireland in what, long before it became Imma, and at the height of empire, was a British military hospital.
Art lovers apart, potential targets of that installation included residents of the nearby officers’ cemetery, some of whom may have been woken from the dead by the noise.
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On a related theme, the Dublin Saint Patrick’s Day parade passed me by this year, literally and metaphorically, as it usually does now. I could hear it from my window but, having covered the event for many years in this newspaper, I was not tempted to go out and have a look, lest it reawaken old traumas.
The truth is that for those of us who live along the route, it’s a bit like being a resident of Portadown’s Garvaghy Road on a 1990s Twelfth of July.
Not that I’m against the parade, as such. I fully support the right of green, white, and orangemen to walk the Lord Mayor’s highway on March 17th. I know that marching in bands on this date is a fundamental part of American culture, in particular.
Even so, feeling my human rights infringed by the celebration, I’m sometimes tempted to escape to Portadown for the day.
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Dublin once famously had a Wide Streets Commission, which created such broad, handsome thoroughfares as Parliament Street. It was aesthetic as well as practical, adding vistas including what is now City Hall to close the view from Capel Street and the (also widened) Grattan Bridge.
But with the return of tourism season, it strikes me that Dublin could now do with a Wide Footpaths Commission. This would target some of the same areas. For ironically, or not, one of the worst pedestrian pinch-points in the city these days is the pavement opposite Parliament Street, at City Hall.
At the best of times, two sumo wrestlers would struggle to pass each other there without one of them being bounced into the street. And okay, that doesn’t happen very often.
But with the constant tour groups, people stopping to cross at the lights, City Hall wedding parties taking pictures (with the constant threat of bridal train derailments), etc, I as often as not find myself having to take to the street to get past.
That used to be dangerous enough when you only had cars and buses to worry about. In the era of high-speed food-delivery e-bikes, stepping off the footpath is like Russian roulette.
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Speaking of things passing me by, the renaming of Trinity College’s former Berkeley Library after Eavan Boland has indirectly alerted me, nearly 50 years after the fact, to an extraordinary link between a 1970s TV sitcom and Theobald Wolfe Tone.
Tone, as readers may know from Tommy Graham’s letter on this page last week, received by far the highest number of public nominations to have the library named after him: 264 to Boland’s 59. Alas for his supporters, the issue was not decided by popular vote.
But Tone has other monuments. And as I have been amazed to finally learn, they include the 1977 BBC comedy series Citizen Smith, starring Robert Lindsay as a would-be urban guerrilla with the “Tooting Popular Front”.
It seems obvious now. “Citizen Smith” was also Tone’s code name when he sought support for the United Irishmen in revolutionary Paris.
And the sitcom’s lead character was nicknamed – what else? – “Wolfie”.
This was all presumably the idea of series creator John Sullivan (1946–2011), the London-born son of an Irish plumber, who later wrote some of Only Fools and Horses too.
But I can’t find him saying so on the record anywhere. Also unclear is whether the BBC knew they were commemorating the great Irish revolutionary in a series that coincided with the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher.
