Dublin can look with pride down the Liffey at the new Samuel Beckett Bridge sitting astride the river like a great sail. Like the James Joyce Bridge upriver at Blackhall Place it is designed by Santiago Calatrava Valls.
Looking at the structure, from the slim and stylish Seán O’Casey pedestrian bridge your eye is drawn just past it and along the north quay towards the sea at a hulking, storied, concrete shell, fronting onto the river. It was conceived as a dazzling new corporate headquarters for Anglo Irish Bank. Planned to stand in a line of magnificent structures along the north quays from the National Museum at Collins Barracks to the Four Courts, the Customs House and onto the new National Conference Centre, it is now at a standstill, unfinished and forlorn. Begun by Liam Carroll, its hiatus and his present predicament are a mirror of our own situation. In the sense that we all own Anglo Irish, it is conceivably a future public space. Standing between the National Conference Centre and the O2, it is the unfinished tomb of the Celtic Tiger.
This eyesore is important cultural archaeology. It tells our story in a tangible way. Perhaps it will be visited by guides leading alternative tours of the city? It could appropriately function as a necropolis for deceased great bankers and developers. As such it could rival Wood Quay both in the significance of its buried remains and in its present inappropriate state. Funerary monuments are a cornerstone of great architecture in history. El Escorial was conceived as a burial chamber for the Spanish Hapsburgs. The Taj Mahal is one of the wonders for the world, a great tomb and a temple of love. Michelangelo’s monumental Moses in marble, part of an unfinished tomb for Pope Julius II is one of the great sights of Rome at the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. If an incomplete office block appears crude by comparison with these more refined, but no less financially ruinous exhibitions of vainglory, there is perhaps something of ours, which is particularly appropriate for us.
Every generation leaves its mark in intended and in other ways. We intended the Spire but we baulked at the Bertie Bowl. Croke Park and Lansdowne Road will serve as our Coliseum and Circus Maximus. No new national theatre has emerged along the river at George's Dock. Perhaps the unfinished Anglo Irish building will serve as a theatre of the absurd. It would be an inspired set for Samuel Beckett's Happy Days.
Winnie, buried first up to her bosom and then up to her neck, taking her worn toothbrush and exhausted lipstick out of her bag every day, a theatrical echo of the shades in Dante's Infernoand an allegory, if not of banks, then certainly of their shareholders now.
Whatever about a possible future as the burial place for fallen heroes, it is by virtue of its prominent position, an important part of the cityscape of our capital. The new Samuel Beckett Bridge will provide an almost ceremonial route to it.
All great cities have famous ceremonial routes to mark important national occasions. We can only march down O’Connell Street past the GPO and an Ann Summers shop. Calatrava’s new bridge could link a new ceremonial route from Merrion Street, down Westland row, along the quays, over the new bridge and towards the unfinished tomb of the Celtic Tiger. Think the Cenotaph on Whitehall in London or the Brandenburg Gate on Unter den Linden in Berlin.
Our success at modern monument building has been lamentable. The memory of heroism and tragedy alike has been scarred by squalid, overly literal sculptural daubs, inappropriately planted on the landscape. Great deeds and good causes are not ennobled by ugliness nor public spaces enhanced by sentimental representations. But the headquarters of Anglo Irish Bank was never intended as a monument to either heroism or tragedy. Now in its unfinished state and unintended ugliness it is a perfectly composed commemoration of the comedy of our current condition.
In France it is expected that successive presidents will leave great buildings behind. Our leaders did not collectively have the nerve or our people the imagination to persevere with a new national theatre good enough or a national stadium large enough to accommodate the ability we actually have. An opera house in Wexford is an exquisite exception.
Now the public purse is empty and the Celtic Tiger is decomposing. An empty catacomb is the perfect present from Anglo Irish Bank to the Irish people. There will be well-intentioned efforts to complete this building. It will be done to remove an ugly scar from the landscape and to improve the visual amenity of the quays. But maybe those romantics who wanted to preserve O’Connell Street from refurbishment and to save important “memory trees” will reappear to save us from ourselves. For now Samuel Beckett is its absurd sentinel. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.