Come Here To Me!

Cheers to Johnny M. for this snap, taken in Kilmainham today. The General Election was pretty much open-season for election poster re-decoration, has anyone spotted any more posters like this one around the city?

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Why are people ‘occupying’ Dame Street? Various newspaper reports will tell you different things, but those involved in the occupation have issued their own statement which is available to read here.

It is interesting to go down to Dame Street and read some of the placards, messages and signs appearing. I photographed some of my favourites. Be sure to pop down to Dame Street, there have been excellent gigs and talks organised as part of the protest, and tomorrow a march of support with leave the Garden of Remembrance at 2pm.

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Like many people I was taken aback by jaycarax’s post on here earlier regarding the statue of James Connolly opposite Liberty Hall, and what many believed to have been an awful act of vandalism against the work. The sheer level of web-traffic too indicates that a great many people were interested in the story. Personally I found the idea of somebody attacking the monument disgusting, it is among my favourite statues in the city, with the Plough and the Stars behind Connolly complimenting a magnificent sculpture from the late Eamonn O’Doherty. It stands facing Liberty Hall, albeit a completely different building to the one Connolly would recognise!

Thankfully, Liveline have cleared this one up. It should be noted that neither the Council nor Siptu knew anything about this repairs when Lorcan contacted them, and as such the conclusion he (and I and a great many Dubliners) came to that the statue had been vandalised was a logical one. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case.

LORCAN COLLINS was bringing a group of tourists down to the James Connolly Memorial Opposite Liberty Hall and was shocked to see a large chunk of the Plough had been sawed off. Has contacted the police. Bobby Blount phoned to explain the story of the missing sculpture. It hasn’t been stolen. It is in his foundry for repair. It was a private commission. People were climbing up on it and damaging it. He is a stone sculptor. It will be back in place in the next few weeks.

You can listen back to the Liveline piece here. Fair play to Lorcan ringing in, if anyone hasn’t taken the time to do it yet I can’t recommend his 1916 walking tour of Dublin enough.

Graffiti on a wall of the original Liberty Hall at the time of its demolition in memory of James Connolly.

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Yes, that is a fresh pint glass, with a drop remaining. While I’ve heard people often leave pints and bottles by the grave, I’ve never stumbled across anything there before on my visits to the cemetery. In that place there should be a plaque of Behan himself, but it was robbed from the grave before. True Behanesque antics that.

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An incredible and rather odd image above, not everyday you see United Left Alliance TDs hanging around Shebeen Chic on Georges Street I’m sure you’ll agree!

It looks like Shebeen are being evicted sadly, with an interesting report on the Irish Independent website containing more information.

“We are not going to close down. We’re going to keep working. We’re keeping the furniture, we’re keeping ourselves here. It’s business as usual as far as we’re concerned” restaurant manager Orlagh Murphy told the Irish Independent last night.

The Shebeen Facebook page has been posting this message widely, encouraging supporters to join them tomorrow as they march to the Bank of Scotland nearby:

Shebeen Chic Needs your help. We are organizing ourselves to meet tomorrow at 12 o clock to petition our landlords to Save Our Jobs. We will then be marching on to Bank of Scotland to demand why they have not responded to our letters & calls as our fate is in their hands too. Please click ‘LIKE’ below if you can join the parade.

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The great Flann O’Brien, frequenter of that wonderful establishment The Palace which now includes a memorial plaque in the ground outside to his memory, was born 100 years ago today. One of our greatest wits, be sure to mark the day in some small way. I’ve taken The Best Of Myles off the bookshelf. As the below extract from Bookhandling shows, not all books on shelves are read.

From Bookhandling:

A visit that I paid to the house of a newly-married friend the other day set me thinking. My friend is a man of great wealth and vulgarity. When he had set about buying bedsteads, tables, chairs and what-not, it occurred to him to buy also a library. Whether he can read or not, I do not know, but some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses. So he bought several book-cases and paid some rascally middleman to stuff them with all manner of new books, some of them very costly volumes on the subject of French landscape painting. I noticed on my visit that not one of them had ever been opened or touched, and remarked the fact.

‘When I get settled down properly,’ said the fool, ‘I’ll have to catch up on my reading.’

This is what set me thinking. Why should a wealthy person like this be put to the trouble of pretending to read at all? Why not a professional book-handler to go in and suitably maul his library for so-much per shelf? Such a person, if properly qualified, could make a fortune.

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This is why Ireland is doomed.

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Hmmmmmm, I don’t know about this:

1) Arthur Guinness is dead a while.
2) Some of these Dubliners are not Dubliners at all. Louis Walsh was born in somewhere called ‘Kiltimagh’ in Mayo.
3) Georgia Salpa, really?
4) They’ve omitted the entire cast of Fade Street.

What a city this is.

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That’d be The Workman’s Club in Inchicore, not the one on the quays 😉

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Spotted up by The Bernard Shaw drinking establishment, this will go down well with the Garda Street Art Division.

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You know that old turn of phrase “You should never judge a book by it’s cover?” I really hope it doesn’t apply to Brian Kennedy’s book “Just Follow the Floodlights,”  being launched in Dalymount Park’s Phoenix Bar after the Bohs vs UCD game on Saturday October 8th. Why? Quite simply because the front cover of the book is stunning.

The picture, taken by Peter O’Doherty sums up Bohs, and the league for me. A far cry from super stadiums in the wilderness of suburbia,  the picture depicts Connaught Street and the Dalymount Park floodlights. Its always something I love on the trip up to Dalyer when the evenings start getting darker toward season’s close; walking up the NCR, Peters Church in front of you and the floodlights blazing to your right; I don’t know how to explain it- theres a sense of personal smugness to be honest, a certain sense of pride. 

Experiences like the above are all too sadly rarely catalogued in this League, as there is an absolute dearth of material published on the League itself. In saying this though, there are some around covering individual teams, a notable nod to “There’s Only One Red Army” by Eamonn Sweeney,  a great read that goes some distance towards summing up the madness (or some might say empirical reasoning) that drives us to follow this League of ours.

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It’s been a busy week here at HQ we admit. We’re all off now until Monday with the Dublin St. Pauli Supporters Club to see Hamburg’s best in action. The above pint is as close as you’ll get to any Arthurs Day coverage this year, maybe that’s for the better.

If you are in the capital this week never mind Arthur, make the most of Culture Night.

My tips for the night would be:

1) The brand new Little museum of Dublin
2) The old library of Trinity College Dublin (amazing how few Dubliners visit that one isn’t it?)
3) The Freemason’s Hall on Molesworth Street
and 4) The recently launched museum inside the General Post Office on O’Connell Street.

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