Peter Costello
The World of Books
There is no end to the making of books about Dublin and Dubliners. Many, especially guide books, are destined for only a brief, May-fly existence. They flash over the waters of the Liffey and live for a brief moment before disappearing.
However there are exceptions. I came on Pól Ó Conghaile’s Secret Dublin: An Unusual Guide (JonGlez, €17.90 / £13.99) on a recent visit to the National Museum in Collins Barracks. Though the Breton publisher is Paris-based and responsible for a host of other such guides, the author is very definitely a local man, with a local man’s deep knowledge and love of the city and its bye-ways.
Indeed, this book is less about the broad streets of the city that the narrow bye-ways, some of them, one suspects, unknown even to Molly Malone. She, by the way, has gone off duty for a while to facilitate LUAS works, but will be back soon enough at her familiar pitch on Grafton Street in due course.
The death of Molly Malone is supposed to be recorded among the registers of St Andrews’s church which once flourished nearby by. This may not be believable, but what is striking about this book is that though it covers many familiar landmarks, among the lesser known ones it mentions are many with a religious interest.
From the city’s medieval past there is the Chapter House of St Mary’s Abbey, which finds a place in Joyce’s Ulysses, but which for non-Joycean visitors invokes the lost splendours of medieval Catholic Dublin.
Bizarre
Also included is that shrine well known more to the young women of Dublin (or perhaps their grandmother’s), the shrine of St Valentine in Whitefriars Street chapel. But while there the visitors should not miss the black oak statue of Our Lady of Dublin, discovered by the famous Fr Spratt being used as a water trough. A friend of mine is convinced that this is the work of Durer, but I have my doubts about that too.
Then there is St Kevin’s Park, known to most Jesuit associates as the burial place of Fr John Austin, as well as the supposed burial place of the martyred Bishop O’Hurley. The author mentions that body snatchers once haunted place ñ it is near to the Meath Hospital, of course. But he fails to mention that it was the scene of a sad child murder back in the early 1960s. This reminds us that the associations of many Dublin places are not always happy ones.
More bizarre is the plaque on O’Connell Bridge which records the accidental death of a ìFr Pat Noiseî whose carriage is said to have plunged into the Liffey on August 10, 1919. But this is a hoax, strangely contrived for Millennium Year, which passed without notice by the old Corpo for two years before being removed. It was quickly reinstalled by the hoaxers, threatened again with removal, but saved by a public outcry. The priest is said to have been ‘an advisor to Peadar Clancy’ one of those murdered in the police office beside Dublin Castle on Bloody Sunday, 1920.
Spiritual signs
On a more serious level there is an entry for St Nicholas of Myra, surely a church for all to visit around Christmas time.
The most unusual entries are truly so. One is ‘Wittgenstein’s Step’ a spot where the philosopher during his 1948 stay in Dublin, was wont to write in the heated comfort of the Palm House of the Botanic Gardens. It was not, of course, that he published anything ñ in his life time only the mere 75 pages of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The later Wittgenstein (pictured) had an ambiguous relationship with notions of the divine, but such matters are best kept for another place.
However, one of the author’s own special favourites in the ‘Spiritual Signs’ that stand on the road beside St Thomas’s Church of Ireland church, Foster Avenue. This changes regularly over the years, but is always catchy enough to lodge in the memory.
One in the past was “When God first saw you, it was love at first sight”. But the rector says that her favourite is one that I well recall: “Jesus the Carpenter is looking for joiners.”
