(A whole month in Paris and I didn’t max out my camera’s memory card. One week in Ireland and I have to upload it all to Snapfish for safekeeping so that I can purge the card and start over.)
May 17, 2011
Dublin feels like a much larger city than it is. Even after the economic crash it is at every moment visibly, audibly international, and the bustle is Manhattan-scale. Today large swaths of it were an armed camp.
I knew Her Royal Dowdiness was coming; who could not, with The Visit occupying the news for days, now. The Irish Times had informed us before I left Limerick that the public would not be allowed anywhere near the Queeene at any time. Yesterday, trying to get into Trinity College, mainly to visit the Page of Kells (as it is drily known, since that’s the extent of the Book available for viewing), I discovered it had been closed to the public Sunday, not to re-open until tomorrow, Wednesday. Manhole covers were being sealed, my cab driver had told me. There were beginning to be an awful lot of Garda everywhere (their day-glo chartreuse jackets being a dead giveaway, though of course everyone realizes those are only the uniformed ones).
I stopped in a shop for a sandwich, then, and proceeded to the National Gallery. Which has a really impressive collection, Goya to Vermeer to Picasso—but of course the one I was most looking forward to was the lost (and re-found) Caravaggio, “The Taking of Christ.” And it did not disappoint. Just as the Mona Lisa transcends the very best color photographs of it, this painting actually before you is breathtaking: so much color and light and power and emotion wedged so tightly into one small space.
But what is a trip without getting lost, losing all sense of direction (the sun wouldn’t stay out long enough—or at all, yesterday—to help with a sense of direction. The light seems to be from everywhere, hazy and diffuse, lingering until well after 9:30 P.M.)? Walking through St. Stephen’s Green in the opposite direction from that you think you’re going helps. Eventually I made it past Grafton Street, past Temple Bar, to Christ Church Cathedral, and past that to St. Audoen’s (“the only surviving medieval parish church still in use in Dublin,” named for the patron saint of Normandy), though by that time it was closed. There’s a beautiful little garden beside it, also inside the fence. By then, what all that country walking hadn’t done, a few hours’ pounding of city pavement had, and I was really ready to call it a day.
Today I got up planning to try to avoid the royal hoopla as much as humanly possible. Had a full breakfast in the hotel, trying also to atone to my body for near-fasting yesterday, as it turned out. I walked up O’Connell Street, already fully blocked off to vehicles and eerily quiet, pedestrians still allowed, but corralled by metal barricades into crossing it only at certain points. There were literally hundreds of Gardai out, massed in their chartreuse everywhere, eyeing every one of us suspiciously as we passed—particularly when I stopped to shoot a number of photos of the Easter Rising headquarters, the General Post Office, which they were blocking as much as possible. They lined the barricades, but there were plenty of them to form random clumps in various places as well.
I gradually left most of them behind when I walked east along the river toward the Customs House, where the “Famine” group of sculptures is located. Someone had laid bouquets of flowers at the feet of the haunting, emaciated figures. I crossed the Liffey and found the “Linesman” sculpture, too. As long as I had come that far, I tried—I really did—to find the statue of Patrick Kavanaugh beside the Grand Canal. With a woman’s assistance and a great deal more walking, I made it to the canal, but then I had still before me a bewildering amount of potential. I finally decided I needed that energy for the National Museum and the rest of the day (including making it back to base), so I abandoned the hunt.
And the National Museum (just the history and archaeology site; decorative arts are in another location entirely) was a high point of Dublin. I passed on ancient Cyprus and Egypt in favor of in-depth study of Ireland’s past. Whether wood or metal or stone or gold—or human remains found in bogs—it was thrilling (including the actual small, beautifully carved mace head—carved of brittle, flaky flint—found at Knowth, and only pictured there), Neolithic through medieval. Watching the locations of the finds, it was evident that the art, the technology, the social system were island-wide, for the finds ranged from the Giant’s Causeway on the north coast to Cork in the south, from Galway to Kildare. All the while I was fascinated by the elaborately beautiful old building itself, opened in 1890, its scrolled metal roof supports, ornate iron columns, and mosaic floors peeping around state-of-the-art exhibition set-ups.
Heading home, wanting to get off my feet, managing a few shots of the “Molly Malone” sculpture at the beginning of Grafton Street (having to have permission from the Garda to step behind the barricade to do so), I asked the policeman if it were possible to get to O’Connell Bridge, since that would have been my preferred way. He said yes, to go one street over. Well . . .
Yes. It was possible to get to O’Connell. It was even possible to inch one’s way across it, squeezing through a rapidly packing crowd. Unlike the Ha’penny Bridge, to which access was blocked completely. But when one reached the other end of the bridge, it was not possible to cross the street there, Bachelor’s Walk. My hotel was right there, half a block away, and I could not get there. I’d seen the motorcade making its way down that very street from the other side before I’d crossed the bridge, then turning to go up O’Connell Street to the Garden of Remembrance. The police told us they’d be able to let us through in “twenty to twenty-five minutes.” After about twenty minutes, the motorcade in fact came back down O’Connell, passing across the bridge in the opposite lane, the poor dim old thing waving her little robot wave, apparently under the impression we were all there willingly. Pity she couldn’t hear what was actually being said. One woman was relaying cellphone updates from her sister, who was watching “on telly.” Over an hour and a half later, the Garda was still keeping hundreds of increasingly irritated, disgusted, angry people behind the barricades for no comprehensible reason. Mutterings had become shouts, vulgarity, and open derision. One tiny old lady with a shopping bag was permitted through for some reason, and hobbled off up the street. “It’s the Queen!” a man shouted. One angry Irishman shouted it was all a load of bollocks, and called the policeman directly in front of us (who seemed to be barely keeping his tongue, as well; several policemen were seen to be rolling their eyes at the stupidity; at least they were being paid to be standing out there) a wanker. “Are we Irishmen or what?” he yelled. “Nick me if you like; you know I’m only telling the truth.” No one contradicted him; in fact quite a few of us agreed. One large group of police squeezed through the crowd across the street, heading in the direction of where chanting had broken out. I asked (only slightly rhetorically), “while they’re off beating them up, can’t you let us through?”
The royal pain had by this time visited Trinity College, left, and, along with her vast entourage, driven up the opposite bank of the Liffey, behind us, and we were STILL not being allowed to cross. Hundreds of us (“hundreds were out on the street today!” as one man sarcastically predicted the evening news). The one policeman before us (the wanker) agreed we had been very patient; he was obviously very frustrated and also thought it was ridiculous, but was waiting for orders. (No more ridiculous, mind you, than that—AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER—the snipers were still on roofs along O’Connell, including the—one would think—sacred ground of the Post Office, and that a helicopter was still hovering above us, when the woman was long gone.) There were men beside me from Liverpool, in town for soccer; they were disgusted. The Irish were venting about the 30 million euros spent on security for The Visit. One American, yours truly, lost quite a lot of already tenuous patience with a useless, expensive anachronism. When, finally, the Garda began moving barricades aside, the only cheer of the day went up.
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