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Actually Sue, though you throw the term around I think it is you who is the fundamentalist – since you want to erase the past. And it was that which equated you with previous generations who also wanted to erase the British past in Ireland.
Nobody defending the statue here is religious, I imagine. What we are is tolerant. I don’t even particularly like the thing. However it is part of the history of Ireland. You wish to erase that past much as a fundamentalist protestant would have destroyed Catholic iconography during the English revolutions.
The fact is the totalitarian mind will appear in different generations in different guises. And when it does appear there will be threats to human liberty which tend to be presaged by either book burning or Statue bashing. The Taleban come to mind ( and by the way in their mind they are the “progressive” future).
As for the present Catholic power curtailing people’s liberty in modern Ireland. Please. We have much more to fear from the PC mob. Ask a smoker – which I am not, by the way.
And I suspect strongly that your cultural genetic propensity to fanaticism would have made you the Catholic fascist back in the day, as you are the PC fascist now.It is not surprising that Ireland has taken wholesale to political correctness either, as it has always produced a minority of sanctimonious hypocrites mostly from the leafy suburbs. Take a bow.
The curse of being a libertarian, a real liberal, is that we have to fight your fanatic type in different guises across different generations.
Lets make this clear: There are statues all over Ireland which annoy somebody somewhere, either because of the ideology behind the statue ( British, Catholic, Anti-Capitalist like Larkin) or lack of ideology ( The Spire).
How much should go Sue? All of it, or just the stuff that annoys you? And when do you finish? When finished with Ireland do you move onto Italy? What about Rio De Janeiro. That horrible cross is build on Public land – should it go? Will you burn it down in a fit of “liberalism”. Should Paisley go with you , or will ya do it alone?
( Yes. My moniker is lazy. You really got me there)
I am no practicing Catholic and haven’t been to Church for 10 years, except for Weddings. I say that to pre-empt criticism about being “religious”. Statements like Sue’s display the inherent extremism in Irish society – which appears sometimes as Catholic Nationalism, and other times as a re-action to it.
The dislike of the Statue because it is Catholic, is similar to the dislike many Nationalists had for Statues of British Imperialists which they felt did not represent them. They wished, like Sue, to remove this from our history – to cleanse the “evil” past like a Stalinist airbrush.
If the Catholic church is an evil force in Ireland’s ( or the World’s ) history , then so is much of what the British Empire represented. In fact, both Catholicism and British imperialism had their good and bad sides for Ireland, though I think in general – given the famine, penal laws, et al – the Catholic church edges it over the British on the good side.
But nothing – no piece of statuary or building – should be judged by who produced it, or what ideology promoted it, but by it’s aesthetic value now. Otherwise we would have to burn down those fine Georgian buildings built on the wages of rack rents, or on the profits from slavery.
I dislike that statue and so it should go somewhere else – it is not suited to O’Connell street; but not because I belong to the new wave of fanaticism which would deny a particular part of the past.
Again.Lets hope she doesn’t blow the thing up.
Suppose there’s no seating there because – well, would you want to sit there!?
yeaah. I would actually. The traffic seems light enough these days – so that sitting outside on a bench facing the GPO would be pleasant enough. Nobody seems to walk this meridian as it doesn’t seem , yet, to go anywhere.
Why no street furniture in the centre median? Like something facing the GPO – it does look very good from there. Or is supposed to be a walkway only?
They’re hardly Roman ruins are they? Or even Stone ruins, which would have some value preserving. The vikings built in wood, a thousand years after other societies built in marble. I have yet, in fact , to visit an obvious viking ruin. Although there are parts are Dublin around ChristChurch which have been built over by the Normans – we have to strain to imagine the old trading post, or see it in reproduction.
So what exactly is the fuss? Viking architecture is shite, and did they produce much in the way of artifacts that would interest anyone outside of a specialized field of interest? I doubt it. And if so, and I so far missed the Dublivinia exhibit – then what would be in this new site that isn’t already on display. This “site” was unknown about 2 weeks ago, it was underground – it is fair to say that it would be preserved by keeping it underground.
The vikings were a materialistic, unlearned and exploitative culture. Nobody outside Ireland’s reactionary conservationist movement really gives a shit – not even in their homelands – about what this rather culturally bereft people produced. Irish culture at the time was far more advanced ( Book of Kells, etc) and is thus known outside the insular world of Ireland’s conservation movement. Norman culture was advanced. British culture was advanced. The fetishisation of the mad blonde-heads has always amused me.
And we are – given the long history of the country – going to run into these ruins as we build roads, are we not?
the Italians manage to build roads despite overturning, no doubt, roman ruins and artifacts every kilometre. We have enough viking shite in the museums. Build a road.
I think Ms BullDozer, that you don’t necessarily understand that Dublin could do the Dubai thing, knock down all it’s old buildings, and build to the sky. Even if it did that and create a Manhattan, it would not be Dublin anymore. More than likely, however, we would create a soggy Los Angeles with no soul, nor meaning.
i am not sure what you mean by a “modern” city; such wanton destructiveness would see Rome burned to the ground and replaced by shiny Steel and Glass monstrosities, and new roads destroying everyting in their path: all to facilitate traffic flow. Dublin needs some more newness, tis true, but not at the expense of the old. Even if the old is not, we admit, quite as old as Rome.
i’ve been to Dubai myself and wasn’t altogether impressed, though it was nicer than Abu Dhabi. It would shock you to find that on that trip to the UAE ( where my brother lives) and surrounding countries, I prefered Muskat.
Try visiting one of Dublin’s Mansions, they have playgrounds, c/w broken glass, used hypodermics especially for the local children.
They could of course get on a national subsidized city bus to go to a city park subsidized by the general tax payer, or go to the National Library, subsidized by the national income tax.
i have yet to understand why anybody in Dublin actually thinks that the distribution of resources in Ireland is fair: mostly we get a re-hash of the “populist”, “gombeen man”, “boreen minded” nonsense” to any pertinent questions. The Tasice minded snob who generally makes these remarks seems to think that they answer the question. Not so. Let me explain:
Some taxes are paid for services that we are all beneficiaries of – like defense and a national police service; some taxes are re-distributary to the poor from the rich, and some are destined for capital projects, or maintenance thereof.
it is the last sort which are maldistributed to the Capital from the rest of the country. And it is this maldistribution which gives Ireland one of the largest metropolitan areas relative to general population in the world. I am tempted to say the largest.
Private capital follows public capital, and labour follow capital, so it is no surprise that people flow into Dublin from the rest of the Country, and abroad.
Most of the developments mentioned on these boards, from the luas to the Metro – all of which I support – can, and should be funded by local taxation. The best way to do this is a local sales tax, and if Dublin could get VAT receipts it may well be able to fund these projects, or issue bonds to fund them. You can see that there is no real benefit to LetterKenny, or Tralee from a metro in Dublin, can’t you?
so why tax them?
Paul,
why not stick a PayPal button up there and see if people donate occasionally. $5 a year wouldn’t kill anyone ( have a pledge week)
Brian/Garethace,
As someone who generally just lurks on this board, I was interested to see you compliment Devin’s “communicative” writing skills.
You should learn from him. In fact learn from George Bernard Shaw who – at the end of a long letter to a friend – apologised for it, saying he didn’t have time for a short one.
Why not write your spiel offline, go away, re-read it and then re-write it again to make the same sense with half the verbiage.
Sure it take more time but it’s worth it – you will get more readers.
Rome, is a very dirty city, with so much graffiti and filth on the ground. Still my favourite city , though. Stockholm – which is cleaner – is not.
Dirt really means nothing.
I find the comments of Mr. Hickey hilarious. Seemingly it is petty nationalism to believe that the Anglo Irish houses built around the country are less Irish than the indigenous buildings. If so then the inhabitants of the mansions must have been petty Irish nationalists because they believed themselves to be English or Anglo Irish, and thoroughly unrelated to the Irish aboriginals whom they quite clearly oppressed. I am sure that other previously colonized countries make the distinction between native and imposed architecture and certainly more so than Ireland; any Indian would differentiate between the Taj Mahal and an Anglo Indian imposition, the latter been seen – quite correctly – as less Indian.
And given the real costs of this imperialistic feudalism , the penal laws, the famine and the general servitude of tenancy, any love for such buildings is as pathological as would be an African American’s love of a slave holders house. Even if it were a fine piece of architeture it would have been built and maintained on the sweat anf blood of his ancestors. So no descendant of slaves would eulogise these buildings; only the progeny of tenant serfs. True slaves.
It continues to be my belief that Ireland in the world’s most colonized nation. Other colonized, and previously oppressed people, do not generally love the architecture and mores of their previous occupiers ( by which I mean the Anglo Irish and not the English, it is meaningless to blame English people en masse for imperialism), with the same gusto as Irelands elites.
The colonized mind with it’s absorptionand internalization of imposed (self) hatreds, and love and desire of the mores of the previous oppressor – very obvious on this board – is an interesting study. I suggest reading some of Said’s works.
Well Brian, this is an architectural site so I think that this thread may have passed the limits of the discussion as described in the faq but however since it is here, and before it is locked:
Clearly Dublin is too big relative to the size of the country, and Dubliners seem to think that the public purse is theirs for the taking. Why are the people of the west paying for the DART, for instance, or even for the city bus service? These are local services and should be paid for by local taxes. There are plenty other examples. All of which encourage growth in dublin at the expense of the regions.
If the US had followed the policy of keeping the administrative and economic center in New York alone , and had New York grown to have the same percentage of the US’s population as Dublin has of the Republics, it would now have a population size of about 100 million people.
That to me would be a sick urban entity – though New Yorkers may well prefer it to the boondocks of Montana.
i hold these beliefs – despite the fact that I see you have salted your adversaries with the same “backward” brush – despite being atheistic and not really that fond of the GAA – mostly a soccer man myself.
Nice to see the Dublin 4 mentality is alive and well ( I noticed the “only in Ireland” sneer in the last thread as well) and your liberal worldview does not tend to an appreciation of the indigenous culture outside of the pale – the nasty aboriginals are described as being “Godzilla nothing more than a shower of post-modernist rosary bead mauling GAA types who want their Magdalene Laundries, contraceptive bans and fair maidens dancing at the crossroads back”. Not that that sentence makes much sense gramatically, but we get the drift.
Agh no. We just want Dublin to be smaller and a proper distribution of resources in the country. Let me finish – in the nature of the ad hominems above – by calling you and your class a a shower of self hating, post colonial sleeveens who hate your Irishness and anything that makes ireland different from the rest of the world – which is of course a product of the totally colonized mind. This country needs an Edward Said.
As an aside : though I never played GAA, I think that people who like a Munster hurling final are fair in their judgement of a great game, but some of us are pluralist and can like GAA and Rugby and Soccer. I even like cricket and baseball.
I think its even possible to hate the GAA, be anti-Catholic, and still believe Dublin is too big. Dubliners increasingly think so. So less of the non-sequitors…
By the way, anti-Dublin sentiment is not helped by the nature of the way you sophisticated urbanites tends to conduct your debate , is it?
Given that the people of the west tend to be more religious I imagine that the city might reflect that – however the name is indeed naff. As for the quote about “The winds of change” – that could have been made by any reformist, or any socialist, and not just a fascist.
Nor do they seem to want an Atlanta, because they make clear their commitment to public transport throughout, and not to the car. However there is this :
“
A pleasant city to live and work in. It will be a “green city” with extensive parks, tree-lined boulevards, playing fields, forest walks, orchards, public gardens, river walks, wildlife parks, lake and river facilities, and plenty of open space for people._This will complement the beautiful scenery of the west of Ireland. The new city will be_a pleasant working environment and an ideal venue for conferences, seminars and business meeting”Sounds like too much parks and not enough city – which is what they say about Melbourne. Its not clear if surrounding these parks will be high density housing ( why would they need gardens with so many parks?).
Anyway I was merely agreeing , in theory, with the idea of a city in the west – I think any real attempts to build it may be a disaster, will overrun it costs enormously, and cost the revenue massively in building costs and the cost of transferring public servants. And may well fail.
So we stuck with Dublin sprawl – the Atlanta of the east.
What is so funny?
A large city in the west would balance the the overly centralised state we live in already, nor is it unique in world history for cities to be founded by fiat, after a conquest or revolution , or for administration to be moved to a once small city to avoid over centralization. Unfortunately Galway – a prime target – has no room to grow.
Think of Constantinople, Washington, Alexandria, Melbourne, Bonn ( as was) , and Brasila.
There are plenty more.
Do you have any real intellectual points to make, besides Dublin centralism, or an aversion to the admitedly silly name of the City as suggested on that site?
