A friend from darkest South Co Dublin suggested I write something about a church billboard in Mount Merrion, where Foster Avenue meets the Stillorgan dual carriageway.
She’s been passing St Thomas’ church all her adult life and thinks the slogans, which change annually around now, are a calming constant in a crazy world. Sometimes funny, sometimes profound, she says, they often transcend their primary mission to become value statements for the community at large.
The current one, for example, is relatively secular. “Stand up for what you stand on,” it reads. “There is no Earth 2.” But even when the message is religious, it tends to avoid the fire and brimstone of traditional wayside pulpits.
Another slogan, from some years ago, was: “Jesus the carpenter is looking for joiners.” That recruitment campaign resulted in at least one direct application. A man turned up at the Anglican church soon afterwards, declaring: “I’m a joiner.” He was a taxi-driver actually, but no less welcome.
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The current rector, Gillian Wharton, tells me that the tradition predates her, “and I’ve been here 21 years.” The message has changed every autumn since then, except during Covid when even spreading the Word had to be suspended for a while. A committee will meet next week to discuss the slogan for 2025/26. Suggestions aimed at making people “smile or think” are welcome.
Living in Hope
“Foster” Avenue is a good address for a church. It’s named after a person, of course, presumably John Foster (1740-1828), last speaker of the Irish House of Commons. But the word works as a verb too, meaning to encourage the development of something: a child, an idea etc.
Fostering is usually a good thing, although in Ireland we have been known to foster grudges too, sometimes over years or decades, in a process usually leading to formal adoption.
In similar vein, Belfast (among other places) has a “Hope” Street. And that also used to have a church with a billboard, although the slogans there tended to be of the more fundamentalist “repent for the end is nigh” variety. Also, ominously, Belfast’s Hope Street was (and remains) a dead end.
That name can be a mixed blessing, clearly. When I mentioned it in a previous column, a Letter to the Editor subsequently drew our attention to a Hope village, located in England’s Peak district. The writer’s cousin had moved to a place a few miles outside it many years ago. Since when, he said, she delighted in telling people she lived “beyond Hope”.
There’s a Hope Street in Dublin too, I realised only recently. It’s one of those little roads between “Silicon Docks” and Ringsend. But that’s a mixed area, in every sense. if you walk northwest from Hope Street you will, within minutes, find yourself on Misery Hill.
Canal takeaway
Near Baggot Street Bridge recently, a concerned reader scanned the menu of a Chinese restaurant and saw a dish described as follows: “Supreme Swan Crispy”. This was close to the scene where Patrick Kavanagh wrote one of his beloved canal bank poems, which included the line: “A swan goes by, head low with many apologies.”
The concerned reader wondered if the local swans should now go by, head low, in a hurry, lest they end up as someone’s dinner. But no. As far as I can establish, fear for the apologetic canal swans appears to be unfounded. The dish in question is a Cantonese-style snack which, while sculpted in the shape of the bird, appears to be otherwise swan-less.
It should be said here that Kavanagh himself was not averse to eating Dublin’s wildlife. As recorded in John Ryan’s memoir Remembering How We Stood, the poet was heading for Ryan’s pub on Haddington Road one day when he rescued a duck that had been caught on spiked railings near the canal.
“Possible his original intentions were good,” Ryan wrote, “but the primitive hunter must have come out in him ... for instead of bringing it to the Cats’ and Dogs’ Home (as he had promised several solicitous old ladies who had assembled out of nowhere), he nipped smartly back to [his flat], wrung the duck’s neck, plucked, cleaned, roasted and ate it. ‘It melted in me mouth like butter,’ he confided later.”
At a crossroads
Getting back to landmark Dublin corners, I’ve mentioned before the tendency for them to be named after pubs. But maybe the one at Foster Avenue should become Thomas’s Corner, for the church. Certainly, in their attempts to guide passersby, churches would seem to have at least as profound a relationship with big road junctions as pubs.
I’m reminded of one of my all-time favourite cartoons, by the Australian Michael Leunig (who died last Christmas, a few months before his 80th birthday). Like many of his works it featured a sad-eyed little man. This one is walking along a gloomy street when he comes to the junction with one that, by contrast, is brilliantly lit. The street sign above his head reads “The life you lead”. The sign around the corner is “The life you could have led”.
