It’s not quite Greenland but the United States has annexed another chunk of Ballsbridge. Uncle Sam is already planning a new $700 million (€641 million) embassy on the site of the old Jurys Hotel in the heart of Dublin 4 having outgrown its base on Elgin Road. Now we hear that the US has also bought three apartments immediately next door in the upmarket Lansdowne Place development.
A deal was recently struck for three adjoining units, with Arthur Cox solicitors handling the paperwork for the Americans, who declined to comment on the deal. While US ambassador Claire D Cronin will remain based in Deerfield House, the 62-acre pile in the Phoenix Park, the additional accommodation is likely to be used for staff and visiting dignitaries.
Officials from Donald Trump’s incoming administration may even bump into fellow apartment owner Roy Keane, another proponent of gunboat diplomacy.
US multinationals aim to consolidate power in the docklands
While US multinationals own vast chunks of Dublin’s docklands, it looks like they also want more say in how it’s being run. The Docklands Business Forum, which represents about 200 local employers, including many of the country’s leading tech, accountancy and legal firms, recently lobbied both Minister for Finance Jack Chambers and Minister for Public Expenditure Pascal Donohoe to amend the law to allow their employees vote where they work, rather than live, at the next local elections.
The idea comes from the City of London, where businesses can register a proportion of their employees to vote in the Square Mile. Alan Robinson, chief executive of the forum, says there are 70,000 people working in the docklands but few live in the area.
“Consequently, local employees spend more time in the docklands than their home area,” he says, adding that many are more affected by public policy in the docklands than in their own neighbourhoods.
“It is impractical for people working long hours, commuting 10-15 hours a week and with many domestic responsibilities, to make it to the polling station at their home address,” Robinson argues. “Dockland employees are effectivity disenfranchised.”
Local residents, many of whom already feel squeezed out by the area’s gleaming glass and steel citadels, may think otherwise, though.
John Banville’s amorous anecdote
One of the most intriguing projects granted funding by Screen Ireland towards the end of last year was a new feature film about JP Donleavy, written by John Banville and directed by Adrian Sibley, best known for docudrama The Ghost of Richard Harris. David Blake Knox’s Blueprint Pictures is listed as the producer.
Banville is also working on another memoir of sorts, he told the Guardian late last year, cheerfully adding: “It’s a pack of lies.”
The writer toiled as a subeditor in the 1970s. Recounting this period in the interview, he recalled returning home late one night to his then wife, the American artist Janet Dunham, who died in 2021.
“Janet had been asleep for hours and the house was in total darkness, so I didn’t turn any lights on. I just got undressed and crept into bed beside her, this lovely, warm body. And she turned over and things got amorous, as they do. Given the circumstances, it was quite quick and quiet, you know. And afterwards there was a bit of a pause, and then, with her superb sense of comic timing, my wife said: ‘John, is that you?’”
George Lawon’s Inis Mór blarney
Another spinner of yarns was George Lawson, a dandyish rare book dealer who died in December aged 82 and made his name by discovering two previously unknown James Joyce collections. The heir to his father’s Bovril fortune found a treasure trove of books in Joyce’s Trieste library with pencil dots next to quotations and other material that had made its way into Ulysses. His other great find was a lost Joyce archive that had been hidden by the wife of Paul Léon, Joyce’s French translator, when Léon was arrested and murdered by the Nazis during the second World War.
A passage in his obituary in the Times of London last week reads like a bit of oul’ blarney, though. Lawson left school at 17, it recounts, moving to Inis Mór, off Co Galway, “to study Gaelic before finding himself appointed clerk of works after the previous one had been taken off the island in a straitjacket”.
“Lawson was in charge of installing running water on the island, which was a failure because the locals preferred to go daily to the village well to socialise with their neighbours. However, he said some residents were grateful for his blasting through the rock to install the pipes, as they were able to deliberately acquire injuries which allowed them to claim disability benefits.”
He should have written fiction himself.
Just like that: Jack Mulcahy’s pitch for the Seanad
Jack Mulcahy, a son of the late Phoenix publisher John, seems to have a similar sense of mischief to his father. Jack, who has also worked in publishing and is chairman of the Irish Arts Review, is running for the Seanad on a platform of “promoting individual initiative”.
His official photograph on the ballot is him wearing an, er, fez (yes, just like Tommy Cooper). No, he doesn’t think he’s running for a seat in the Ottoman empire. Apparently, the headgear relates to lateral thinker Edward de Bono’s theory of six thinking hats. A red had stands for feelings, intuitions and instinct, I’m told. Given Michael Healy-Rae’s precedent-setting flatcap in the Dáil, let’s hope he’s allowed to keep it on in the Seanad if he gets elected.
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