An Irishman's Diary

THERE CAN’T BE anyone alive now who is not familiar with the concept of a “window of opportunity”. It’s an apparently deathless cliché, though it only dates from about the 1980s. And not the least bad thing about it is the way it lends itself to horribly mixed metaphors.

Yet again recently, I read about a window of opportunity that needed to be “seized”. This despite the fact that seizing a window is almost impossible. Unless, maybe, you work in the repossession department of a window sales company. And even then you’d be hoping the frame hadn’t been cemented in already.

The “door of reconciliation”, by contrast, is a little-known phenomenon. Yet it’s more than just a metaphor. There really is such a piece of furniture, as I’ve been reminded by a book called Past Lives: the Memorials of St Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin.

The door in question, which can still be seen in said cathedral, is a very old one – 520 years old, at least. Even before it became well known, it had already led a useful life, guarding the entrance to St Patrick’s Chapter House. Then one day in 1492, the door suddenly had fame thrust upon – or rather through – it.

What happened was that two great families, the Ormonds and the Kildares, had fallen out with each other, again. The Earl of Ormond marched on Dublin with an army, demanding talks. The Earl of Kildare suggested they meet in the cathedral.

In the meantime, however, a fight started between soldiers and the Dublin populace. Blame settled on one of the Butlers, “Black James”, who fled into the chapter house, pursued by archers. And a measure of the pursuit’s vigour is that a number of cathedral statues, possibly mistaken for Ormondites, were later found to have arrows stuck in them.

Happily the Earl of Kildare devised a peace process. First he had a rectangular hole cut in the door – in a later era the hole would undoubtedly have been called a window of opportunity – through which he invited the enemy to offer his hand. Then, when a nervous Black James declined, Kildare thrust his own hand through the opening. Thus was the conflict resolved.

VISITORS to the cathedral – which incidentally is open until 9pm this evening, for Culture Night – are told that this is the origin of the expression “to chance your arm”. It’s a plausible theory. And it’s the sort of thing that certainly ought to be true.

But a slight problem for etymologists is that the phrase only appears in print from the 1880s, at which time one dictionary suggested it came from tailoring (while I’m at it, I might as well mention that Tailor’s Hall is open until 10pm tonight, just up the road from St Patrick’s).

The term “door of reconciliation”, meanwhile, has been even slower to take off. Which is a bit of a mystery, given the obvious scope for such a phrase here. If the first item on every Irish organisation is the split, after all, it should follow that doors of reconciliation are much needed.

And indeed, over the past 15 years, Ireland has witnessed a long series of historic handshakes in the Kildare-Ormond mode. So not only could these handshakes have been through metaphorical doors of reconciliation, they could have been through the real thing.

Maybe if the St Patrick’s door was promoted more aggressively, shaking hands through it could yet rival kissing the Blarney Stone as a tourist attraction. Former enemies everywhere might flock to use it. In the process, the portal could even play a part in resolving the world’s more intractable disputes: the Arab-Israeli conflict, Roy Keane V Mick McCarthy, and so on.

THE DOOR of Reconciliation is only one of 200 memorials listed in Past Lives. And not all of them are quite so salutary. As the author Albert Fenton, a member of the cathedral board, concedes: “It is unfortunate that two of the finest monuments [commemorate] the

British Empire’s most unforgiveable wars” – in China and Burma.

Sure enough, one of these is a beautifully executed bas-relief sculpture depicting the death of an Irish officer during the opium wars, which as Albert points out frankly, were part of a struggle to protect Britain’s interests as the world’s largest “drug trafficker”.

But the memorial is no less interesting for that. It's all part of the historic pageant that is St Patrick's, towards whose upkeep all proceeds from the book ( www.stpatrickscathedral.ie) will go.

Speaking of wars, by the way, and getting back to windows of opportunity, it is apparently to the Cold War that we owe the popularity of that awful phrase. It evolved from a linguistic predecessor, during the space race, when ideal conditions for take-offs became known as “launch windows”.

From there the phrase mutated to apply to rockets of a different kind: referring either to “windows of vulnerability”, when the enemy could attack your missiles, or “windows of opportunity” when you could attack his.

Underlying all of which was the notion that the “window” was only temporarily open and would soon close; although one might think that, when you’re firing rockets through it, the question of whether a window is closed or open would be entirely academic.