Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?

Notes on a Cultural Tour of Dublin Dundrum to Temple Bar

After arriving in Dublin the plan was to have a quick wash and a bite to eat with my friends, the Macs, then start going through the Yellow Pages looking for Opel (the Irish brand of Vauxhall) dealers. I already had a few leads to check up on, people I’d spoken to in London before I left. Then Sarah Mac looked me in the eye and said, ‘Do you really want to spend all afternoon driving around Dublin trying to sell that car?’

(Of course I did. That was why I was here.)

‘Nah, not really. What I’d like to do is a cultural tour, and maybe work out a plan of action for the car later on.’

I took the bus with Sarah from where they lived in Dundrum into the centre of Dublin. During the journey we worked out the best way to do a cultural tour and give ourselves time to discuss the car. We decided we would go round a few pubs and have a pint in each one. Every pint we drank would represent a different aspect of Irish culture. I told her about one of my previous visits to the city when along with friends I had trawled around looking at the Book of Kells.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘we’ll start there then.’

‘What a great idea,’ I said.

(The following tour is a mental and physical assault course of culture and Guinness. I moved around Dublin like a terrified blind man being led by a sadistic, hedonistic guide dog, hearing strange amplified urban voices, following the smell of cheap tourist perfume and beer-stained wooden floors, my fingers caressing the smoothly polished bar-tops and tables of grand pubs, my mouth bitter from the black stuff and the salty taste of laughter’s tears. I thought about writing some of it down, but instead relied on memory. With no particular plan in mind except to imagine I was no longer some East Midlands Kerouac-lite sad bastard but a latter day Dr Johnson-style cleverperson, sitting in pubs and watching people, learning this and that and writing things down then stuffing it all into my rucksack like some kind of demented memory snail. Some of the places we went to have simply disappeared forever. These are the ones that remain.)

The Book of Kells

This seemed like a logical choice for our first cultural stop-off point. The big pub with glass partitions, somewhere off Grafton Street, was quite austere and formal, perfect for viewing a thousand-year-old manuscript that had been illuminated by monks. As the first pint of the day, the Book of Kells was always going to be popular. There was a bit of a queue at the bar (bloody tourists) and we then had to wait to let the pints settle. It was worth the wait. The Book of Kells was just the right temperature and very smooth. You have to keep thousand-year-old manuscripts that have been illuminated by monks at the right temperature. We talked a bit about people we knew and I hoped the car would be all right.

The Martello Tower at Sandycove

This was an interesting pub, with two levels and lots of strange pictures on the wall.

Maud Gonne

This was a quiet old pub on a side street. It was Sarah’s idea to name it after the great Irish heroine, Yeats’ lost love. I’d first met Sarah out in the west of Ireland in the early nineties. In those days she was into karate and was a rumbustous hard-drinking wild woman with mad long hair. Now she had slimmed down to become a slinky hard-drinking wild woman with fashionable long hair, pierced bellybutton and celtic tattoo on the small of her back. She was a Gaelic footballer and also well-versed in ancient Irish history and modern Irish politics. Her grandmother’s family had been old republicans – the grandfather had been De Valera’s driver for a while and had also worked for John McBride, husband of Maud Gonne. I’d talked to her grandmother about all this just after Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins had been released. Being an old anti-Treatyist, Granny Mac wasn’t quite so rosy and sentimental about the likes of Boland and Collins as Jordan’s film. She had also met Maud Gonne. I won’t tell you exactly what she said, but you won’t read about it in the history books.

Charlie Haughey

There was racing on the telly and I was dying for a piss.

The Divorce Referendum

A serious, dark pub. We got into a big talk about Irishness and what it means. From the point of view of someone living in London who goes to pubs a lot, Irishness could be a marketing man’s creation, the vision that is Heritage Ireland, the fake Irish pubs.

But there’s the cold-eyed heavily moral and religious Irishness, which has ruled more or less since the twenties. Some of that pious moralism must come from the impeccable double standards of the Victorian English, and has attached itself to a devout Catholicism. But, I’m reliably informed, the church and state thing is already well on the way out, or at least becoming just a part of the heady cultural mix. Travelling in the west a few years ago I found myself in a B&B which was stuffed full of religious icons, lifesize statues of Mary and Jesus scattered around, making the place seem as though it was full of people. In our room, along with a bleeding heart painting of Jesus and another giant statue of Our Lady, was a well-fingered German porn mag. You could have cut the juxtaposition with a knife.

And yet younger folk probably don’t give two craps about all the old-style stuff. Irishness is no longer Collins and Dev, Willie MacBride and Yeats, but Boyzone, Roy and Robbie Keane, Bono and Sinéad O’Connor. Behan and Kavanagh? Zig and Zag!

Bored with that one, we swapped coats, swigged down the last dregs of the Divorce Referendum, took a couple of pictures and headed off in search of more culture.

Gate Theatre

I tried to remember Jockser’s speech about the stars in Juno and the Paycock, but was already starting to lose it. We had to stand up because it was so popular. Sarah showed me her tongue stud and talked about Gaelic Football. From what I understand, having a tongue stud (and other piercings) is now the rule for anyone who wants to join the official Gaelic Athletic Association (the GAA) and I had this image of all these old lads with nipple studs and Prince Alberts, along with their broken noses and false teeth.

Sharon Shannon and Donal Lunny

Music pub. We start to get mystical and Sarah talks about her dad in the west. We wonder what it’s all about. None of the cosmologists currently writing today believe in the universe as a swirling bazaar governed by market forces. But if we see the universe as being like a business what were the conditions needed for it to exist? A gap, a need for a universe for a start. Until the idea of existence became real. But where did the funds come from? What bankrolled this fledgling business? Was it a loan? There was nothing. The question is, did it happen spontaneously like, say, the craze for rock ’n’ roll heart tattoos, or did it come from above, like Coke or Barbie?

The Peace Process

Noisy boozer. Drank very quickly and flirted with each other a little.

Ireland 1–Italy 0 World Cup ’94

A real dodgy backstreet boozer. Guys in football shirts and littles ’taches, red faces, little slit eyes. A tall old man at the bar looked different. In a suit. Heard us talking.

‘Where are you from?’

‘I was born in Louth.’ I think I’m so clever. It’s true and makes some people think I might be Irish.

‘I presume that’s Louth in Lincolnshire.’

A smart one. It turned out he had been stationed in Lincolnshire in the RAF. He started asking me questions and knew more about Lincolnshire than I did. I went to the bog. A fat bloke in a Man United second strip (the blue and white one – by the time this comes out that will probably be ten second strips ago) came in and said I’m lovely and would I like his limited edition plate then he says I’m not really lovely I’m a daft bastard. Back out in the pub he confronted the RAF lad in a mock fight and they put on English accents.

My head was going, but me and the RAF lad (who by now could hardly stand) then got into a mad conversation which went something like this:

RAF lad: Ah, you English fucker.

Me: I’m not surprised by your reaction. Any conversation I have with certain friends in pubs about Irishness and Englishness eventually leads someone to expressing their distaste at eight hundred years of English rule in Ireland. In some ways it’s a tricky conversation for me, because I still haven’t really got a handle on what it means to be English. I mean, who are the English? What do they stand for? Some would say that’s obvious. The English are the British.

RAF lad: You daft bastard.

Me: Right – the English may have created the idea of Britishness for their own ends. After all, it suits the English power base if an Ulsterman, a Welshman and a Scot all claim allegiance to the British crown. This doesn’t mean that the English don’t exist, but they are perhaps more likely to admit to being British than anyone else in the ‘British’ Isles.

RAF lad: British? Ha!

Me: And there’s another thing. It really pisses off some of my friends when people say the ‘British’ Isles. Ireland isn’t in the British Isles. It’s a geographical term which has become a geopolitical term. And an outdated one at that. I read somewhere a suggestion that they be called the Celtic Isles. After all, as well as Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Cornwall, a large proportion of the people in England must be descended in some way from the Celts, or even further back is more likely.

RAF lad: Ah you.

Me: Yes, although I look like a mangy German or Scandinavian, my mother’s family are all short, dark-haired and sallow-skinned. Anyway, the culture of the so-called British countries is obviously non-Anglo-Saxon. But all this stuff about ancient races. What on earth is ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture? In the context and history of Ireland, Anglo-Saxon culture represents a centralised blanding out of traditional folk culture as a way of damping down Celtic nationalism. Exactly the same thing happened in England. Over the centuries we seem to have lost so many of the things which make a culture rich – like music, dress, language, food. Much of the local traditions have been lost because of centralisation. In Ireland, Anglo-Saxon culture has generally meant Protestant culture. It wasn’t always like that. When Henry II invaded Ireland he wasn’t introducing Protestantism. But he wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon, he was a Norman.

RAF lad (to Manchester United bloke): Hear this fellah.

Me: So when did the Anglo-Saxons take over in Ireland? I mean, they invaded England in about the fifth and sixth centuries. Can it be true that it wasn’t until a thousand years later that Anglo-Saxon culture came to the fore. I’ve always felt that this Anglo-Saxon thing is a bit of a problem. The English are as much to blame as anyone because we like to see ourselves as Anglo-Saxon. But in reality when people talk about the Anglo-Saxon race they are referring to a total mix of Anglo-Saxon, Jute, Norman, Dane, Norwegian and Celtic, plus ‘Wessex’ Culture and the Beaker People. And now add some Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Turkish, Jewish. Englishness must always have threatened to take on multifarious forms. But up until now, Englishness has been confined to what the ruling elite choose to portray it as. Is there a general malaise afflicting people in their thirties? Maybe we are the new lost generation like Kerouac and his mates, not knowing what the hell our core values are or where we want to go (for instance, like the two-headed god Janus we straddle the cultural divide of punk and dance music, but we sit in neither camp, with our balls being tickled by the new romantics). Politically we are the last of the passionate left wingers, left high and dry by the New Labour experiment, left to thrash about in a muddy sea of irony.

I’d describe myself as English, but not in some pastoral, village-green sort of way. There are many forms of Englishness. You can take your pick. Mine is an expressive, multi-racial socialist humanist hedonism. Manifested by something like Glastonbury, Ken Livingstone, William Morris, John Cooper-Clarke. I’m a fucking hippy do-gooder.

RAF lad: Well, yer a cunt at any rate.

Dana

Couldn’t fit any more Guinness into my belly if I tried. Sarah was still going strong and laughing at my pathetic attempts to keep up. Music playing. Started to sway. This one was Dana – had to finish it.

‘James Joyce and we’ll be half-way there.’

‘No, we’ve already done the Martello Tower,’ she smiled.

I started going on about the car, how I had to get back and start driving it around. That’s the last I remember for a while. We apparently got a cab home. Later, Sarah showed me some Gaelic football moves.

… Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh and then I woke up …

This seemed like a logical choice for our first cultural stop-off point. The big pub with glass partitions, somewhere off Grafton Street, was quite austere and formal, perfect for viewing a thousand year old manuscript that had been illuminated by monks. This was an interesting pub, with two levels and lots of strange pictures on the wall, his was a quiet old pub on a side street. It was Sarah’s idea to name it after the great Irish heroine. I’d first met Sarah out in the west of Ireland in the early nineties. There was racing on the telly and I was dying for a piss. A serious, dark pub. We got into a big talk about Irishness and what it means. From the point of view of someone living in London who goes to pubs a lot. Irishness lose it. We had to stand up because it was so popular. Music pub. We start to get mystical and Sarah talks about her dad in the west. We wonder what it’s all about. Noisy boozer. Drank very quickly and flirted with each other a little. A real dodgy backstreet boozer. Guys in football shirt and little tashes, red faces, little slit eyes. Couldn’t fit any more Guinness into my belly