Bringing it all back home

I’ve been back in Dublin since Christmas Eve. Every year I find myself less in touch yet more reconciled with the city. After 5 years I feel my links with it are no longer vital. I suppose that as the years pass in BCN, the young roots I have planted there strengthen, while those in Dublin weaken from neglect.

I have to say that the Vodafone poster ads that greeted me in arrivals made me cringe. While I respect and applaud the attempt to represent Irish culture, I feel embarrassed by its provinciality – its lack of sophistication. Of course, that may just be me. I am not claiming to be a worldly sophisticate. Nor am I under any illusion that Barcelona is less provincial than Dublin. But Barcelona isn’t my home city. Nobody gets embarrassed by other people’s families, do they? Just their own.

When I lived in Dublin, I used to bemoan (being hypercritical, I moaned a lot) RTE’s failure to represent Irish culture to its viewers. I guess it can’t be easy operating in the shadow of the (once?) great BBC. Anyway, I don’t know to what extent it is a failure on the part of the national broadcaster, and not, rather, a national failure occasioned by our forsaking of our native tongue. After all, TG4 has made a good job of representing us to ourselves using a language that the vast majority do not understand.
The Vodafone ads are evidence of a culture that is trying to create its self-image. My failure to identify with them may simply be just that: my failure. I got to thinking about the crude old placard ads that used to appear on RTE after the international ones. Des Kelly carpets and Boylan’s shoes sales were announced in 5 seconds with a voiceover and a few words on a block background. A national embarrassment, I thought as a child. In those days I felt hugely aggrieved by RTE. Until mid-afternoon all you had to look at were the big numbers 1 or 2 on the screen. With the other British channels broadcasting from early in the morning, it seemed like pure laziness on the part of Montrose. My disappointment was compounded then by an output for children that was nowhere near as entertaining as what the BBC was broadcasting. Say the words “childhood” and “depression” to me and I’ll think of Angus McNally on Anything Goes, Anois agus Aris, and Garda Patrol. Indeed my disappointment has never really left me. The inexplicable decisions taken regarding presenters (Pat Kenny doing entertainment television!!!!!). along with the dire programmes that passed for comedy were the cause of my enamorment of the BBC and consequently of British politics. I read a comment on Disillusioned Lefty recently along the lines of how British politics held the author’s attention much more than Irish politics and I could understand exactly what he was saying. Back in the 1980s I was utterly seduced by the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Michael Heseltine, Geoffrey Howe et al. swanning in and out of 10 Downing Street and pulling away in Jaguar XJ6s.
British politics gave us the suave and brutal Michael Portillo in the mid-1980s. Who did Irish politics give us? Brian Cowen?

I realise now that none of this is good. You could say that I’m plainly showing up a failure to engage with politics at any real level. I would counter, though, that I was simply ahead of my time in deciding that in politics image is key! Like I said earlier, it can’t be easy competing with the mighty BBC, even though Channel 4 and ITV have never really had any problems, have they? So was Montrose the problem or was its failure to get to grips with Irish culture simply a symptom of an ailing culture?

I won’t be flippant and say that I don’t care anymore. I do. All the same, I feel less responsible for coming up with an answer to that question than I did in the past. Anyway, not really being in touch with what’s going on here these days, I think it would be irresponsible of me to try to provide some answers.

My brother has on loan a beautiful Cannondale R3000. That’s something like €5,000 worth of road bike. I took her out on Christmas day for a short spin to Howth Head. As I cycled along the sea front through Clontarf and past Dollymount to Sutton and Howth I thought of Dublin’s former grandeur. I don’t know if it’s simply imagined – a result of reading Joyce, perhaps. It’s hard to associate grandeur with TB and consumption and slums, but maybe they are its necessary foundations. I think for a long time it was difficult to be committed to Ireland. She was “the sow that eats her young”, as Joyce put it. But today, I firmly believe in a commitment to Dublin and Ireland. Am I being hypocritical if I don’t share it? I support it. Maybe in the future I’ll come back and affirm a commitment to Ireland. In the meantime, I’ll simply say that I understand that commitment. There is hope.