So Hayes Conyngham & Robinson has fallen. One of the last traditional commercial houses of Dublin has been gobbled up, and what remains in trading life which is distinctly Irish?
Superquinn, of course (bring back the T-bones steaks, Feargal); and Alex Findlater guards his garrison in the old Harcourt Street railway station. There are Elverys, Waltons, McDowells, McCullough Piggott, Bewleys - mostly relics of the Protestant and unionist trading empires which pre-date Independence. Whatever their origins, they were thoroughly Dublin, and only now as the sun sets on an independent Irish retailing sector can we see how much the capital owed them.
And with the demise of HCR, we know that we have finally entered the era in which the heart of Dublin will soon resemble that of any largish English town. It is horribly sad; but international conformity does seem to be the irresistible way of commerce. The Irish capital is no longer the one founded by Vikings beside a black pool, nor is it the one by the ford of the hurdles; it is the new one in which the brand-names of Anglo-American commerce are triumphant: Dublin Keynes, with probably Galway Keynes and Bandon Keynes to follow.
Sentiment and nostalgia
And yes, I know, it really shouldn't matter whether people buy their aspirins in something called HCR or Boots, or whether they snack in Bewleys or Burger King, but of course it does, even if only at the level of sentiment and nostalgia. On the other hand, aspirin is aspirin, and nothing is as simple as it sounds.
Possibly in some British city, people are resenting the intrusion of this Irish incursor called Bewleys, displacing a much loved local, as English brewers once cursed the arrival of Guinness. And Burger King is not an American-owned intrusion, but a British one - though, needless to say, trading in American culture.
And that is one truth about today. Bono does not sing in Hiberno-English. He sings in American. Elton John sang "Goodbye England's Rose" largely in a fairly godawful American accent; when Cliff Richard sang "Abide with Me" on BBC last year, he too sang in American. Commercially and culturally, we and the British are becoming outposts of the Great American Empire, with merely regional trading dialects and engaging local ways which, along with the weather, distinguish us from Tulsa or Sante Fe.
And this brings us to our particular and undiscussed quandary. We are at a crossroads; but we seem not to know how we arrived there.
We don't know which is the road behind us: is it that simple road called independence, or is it that road we have been travelling for the past decade, and which we can call Anglophonia? For another truth of the past decade is that it has been the Anglophone countries which have been turning around economically - not just (most spectacularly) ourselves and the British in Europe, but also the US and Canada in the Americas, and Australia and New Zealand in the Far East.
Economic culture
One obvious benefit of being Anglophone is that Americans don't like learning other languages. They prefer to set up their industries in places where people speak English and their children can go to school without any problems. That is one reason why we have been doing well. But another is that an Anglophone economic culture which arrived as effortlessly as rain has led to drastic cuts in personal taxation and in relative government expenditure and a revitalisation of the notion of personal responsibility. We have seen the most extraordinary flowering of enterprise in our history; and in that process we have seen so much indigenous enterprise be thoroughly Anglo-Americanised. No blessing is unmixed; and the blessings of Dublin Keynes are so mixed as to be almost unbearable.
Still, we have reached growth rates which are almost unique in the world; and yet, at precisely this point in our commercial history, we have decided to enter a currency bloc whose primary players, the Germans and the French, have not even begun to learn the lessons virtually all Anglophone countries now take for granted.
Currency bloc
They, the French and the Germans, have accordingly had to cook their books to almost criminal levels to qualify for membership of the euro currency bloc. The culture of statesubsidised dependency is at its strongest in the very countries which will effectively be ruling the currency we are sleepwalking our way into.
We hear about the independent policing system, similar to the Bundesbank stewardship of the mark, which will guard the euro from political interference by Paris or Bonn/Berlin. Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The Bundesbank was neutral - but neutral between Germans, among whom there was a consensus around the almost Eucharistic inviolability of the deutschmark, minded by its high priests in the temple of the German central bank.
The euro commands no such loyalty; so what is to stop the hugely powerful German or French government-banking elites from suborning the guardians of the new European currency in their particular national interests? Are those interests in any way comparable with ours? Who will notice if our trim little barque is capsized by the high winds their high priests might conjure out of the skies as they try to get their own floundering economies under way? And who else in Dublin Keynes, apart from the almost lone figure of Anthony Coughlan, is scared witless of what we are about to do?
Me.