The 800 Years of Oppression Tube

I’m conscious of a certain high-mindedness here. In the mid-1980s, when we wandered these streets looking for music in progress, looking to slide unnoticed onto bar stools and get down to the business of watching Dubliners be Dubliners, we exercised an impulse to glimpse the past. We were colonizers, in effect. Now the Irish have reclaimed the territory. And having effectively seeded the global market with generations of emigrants disposed to consume a romantic vision of old Ireland, they’re only selling back to us precisely what it is we nostalgically demand.

That’s killer marketing power, folks. If it turns around 800 years of oppression at the hands of the English (a litany any Irish grade schooler can recite for you), surely the brand hangover will have been well worth the effort.

“There is a newfound confidence among Irish people, and that has resulted in a renaissance in Irish culture,” says John O’Donoghue, proudly dispensing with any worry that something integrally Irish might get tilled under in this ascendancy.

I’m inclined to agree. And when I leave Dublin, I find myself passing through an emblem of his point. It’s something I was encouraged to look for by Karen Fricker, Variety’s Dublin theatre critic. Fricker – who says “the transition from the old to the new Ireland is a big narrative, an aggressive trope” – has pointed out that there is a weirdly pure bit of old urban Dublin still to be found at London’s Heathrow Airport. She calls it the “800 years of oppression tube.”

It’s found at the distant end of Terminal 1, a Heathrow hinterland devoted to Republic of Ireland arrivals and departures. Here, wrapped in corrugated metal tubing, you can still find breakfast butty sandwiches and weak coffee, smoking lounges, Guinness on tap, all the unvarnished, precustomer service, old-style tattiness long eradicated in Dublin proper, but which brings to mind my honeymoon city with striking clarity.

And I find myself thinking that when the English finally give this place the facelift it deserves – the old adversary finally acknowledging Ireland’s dominance in the regional hierarchy of place, admitting that flow through this tube has been fundamentally reversed – then the new Brand Ireland will have finally overpowered the old.

To be missed? Perhaps not. But Dublin won’t swallow you up anymore either. It will talk you attentively through the door. It will carry your bags. Dublin, at the peak of its brand power, its cultural moons collecting all that energy so successfully and channelling it back to home base, will have grown oddly smaller relative to its visitors. And that is perhaps the more significant hangover, the headache that will linger. 

Read The Selling of Place part one and part two.

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