An Irishman's Diary

WHAT a masterfully subtle piece of rebranding that was earlier this week by the festival formerly known as “KBC Music in Great Irish Houses”.

In case you missed it – and you easily might – the organisers relocated one of their adjectives slightly, so that the title now reads: “KBC Great Music in Irish Houses”. Thus at a stroke, they removed the restriction on their choice of venues, while the G-word was redeployed at no cost to the musical marketing department, where it’s already settling in well.

Venue flexibility was the stated aim. But I sense the dark shadow of Phil Hogan here too. In these straitened times, nobody wants to advertise the greatness of their residences, temporary or otherwise.

Except maybe the Lord Mayor of Dublin, whom I note from the same story will be hosting one of the concerts at his so-called “Mansion House”.

If I were him, I’d do something about that name.

Getting back to the G-word, though, it has always been politically problematic in Ireland, long before the property crash. Who among us, for example, has never railed at the snobbery in Yeats’s line when he laments that Maud Gonne [would have] “hurled the little streets upon the great/

Had they but courage equal to desire”? Mere begrudgers that we may be, some of us may even have answered Yeats in the words now enshrined on a statue in Dublin’s greatest street of all, viz: “The great only appear great because we are on our knees”.

But in general, the G-word has long been considered with suspicion here, especially when applied to real estate. Sure, only the most bigoted nationalist would now object to its use in the term “Great Britain”.

Which as the rest of us know is not imperialistic braggadocio, merely an attempt to differentiate from the historic “Little Britain”, better known these days as a Brittany.

Even so, it’s a coincidence that 20th century Dublin shed itself of a “Great Britain Street” (now named after Parnell), while retaining “Little Britain Street” as an apparent gesture to tradition.

Little Britain Street was immortalised in literature as the location of Barney Kiernan’s pub, where the funniest scene in Ulysses takes place.

Yet despite its literary fame, the pub – like much of Joycean Dublin – is long gone. Whereas the street-name remains resolutely in place, more than 100 years on.

LIKE GRAND, the word “great” has a uniquely Irish meaning. It’s dying out a bit now, I think. But – speaking of Joyce – I was reminded of it while re-reading The Dead recently. It occurs when, in the closing pages, Gabriel demands to know if his wife was “in love with this Michael Furey”, whose memory clearly haunts her. To which she replies only that she was “great with him”.

This is paradoxical. On the one hand, it suggests a certain modesty on Greta’s part, as if she’s reluctant to use the word “love”, with all its import. Yet that very restraint only serves to hint at the depth of emotion involved. And indeed, as the story unfolds, we and Gabriel realise for the first time what a paltry part he has played in Greta’s life, compared with this lost love.

If readers detect an element of Joycean analysis here, I plead guilty. It’s impossible not to get caught up in the fever that has gripped the Joyce industry since the lifting of copyright restrictions. His oeuvre is now the literary equivalent of the Klondike. And like many people, I’m wondering if I too could carve out a piece of the action.

The problem is, all the big insights have already been found. Only the most inhospitable sections of Finnegans Wake, perhaps, remain under-prospected. So the chances of my publishing a slim volume on the Barney Kiernan pub episode, with enough new annotations to justify royalties, are not good.

Everybody already knows that events in the pub correspond to the episode in Homer’s Odyssey where the hero lands on the island of Sicily, meets the one-eyed Cyclops in his cave, has several crewmen eaten by same, and escapes only by blinding the giant, who nevertheless chases him out to shore and throws a boulder at his retreating ship.

It’s equally well-known that Joyce’s Cyclops was “the Citizen”, aka Michael Cusack, the Fenian and founder of the GAA, who instead of a boulder, flings a biscuit tin at Odysseus (Leopold Bloom) as the latter flees the pub and, “amid clouds of angels ascend[s] to the glory of the brightness at an angle of 45 degrees over Donoghue’s of Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel”.

It’s no secret, either, that amid all the comedy, the chapter is one of Joyce’s most political passages, rejecting the rival hatreds of Irish nationalism and British imperialism alike. And Joycean specialists, at least, will be aware that in the scheme of bodily organs which was one of his sub-themes, the Barney Kiernan episode represents “muscle”; while its recurring literary motif – inflated, bombastic language – is what Joyce himself called “gigantism”.

All this is well known. But I took a stroll past where the pub once stood during the week and it struck me that I might be the first person ever to have noticed a certain Joycean wit in the location of the nearby Republican Sinn Féin headquarters.

These are positioned at the very end of what used to be Great Britain Street, just before it becomes Little Britain Street. And the wit of the address is only slightly undermined by the tautology of a banner celebrating the party’s centenary. “100 years of Unbroken Continuity” this reads: which, unless it’s conscious homage to Joyce’s gigantism, is surely one word too many.