City’s 1,000th Birthday to Be Celebrated : It’s Donnybrook Time in Dublin

Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty and the poets and playwrights so wickedly witty, is celebrating its 1,000th birthday.

The Irish city of Jonathan Swift, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Brendan Behan, the Abbey Theater and so many others could hardly observe the millennium without a decent brawl reminiscent of the great Dublin street fair known as donnybrook.

Toward that end, the city fathers--led by Lord Mayor Carmelita Hederman, who happens to be a city mother of five--have invited Boston College and Army to engage in the first American football game ever played on Ireland’s blood-stained emerald turf.

By Irish reckoning, the Nov. 19 encounter at Lansdowne Park would have a valid historic precedent. Dublin came into being in 988 when the High King Malachy of Meath beat the socks off Olaf of the Sandals in what the chronicles describe as “a spirited, fierce, vengeful and furious battle.” The Viking plunderers were evicted from their stone forts in the bogs called Dubhlinne , Norse for “dark pool,” along the banks of the Liffey.

Public House Debate

It’s still a matter of public house debate whether “the American match,” as the Dublin journals refer to it, will be any more vengeful or violent than the Wales vs. Ireland rugby internationals this month or the all-Ireland football (soccer) finals in September.

Speaking of fierce, spirited brawls, consider also next fall’s all-Ireland finals in hurling, an indigenous sport that adds a zest to the combined mayhem of the other three sports by arming each player with a stout shillelagh.

And when it comes to undivided gall, how about those freewheeling cyclists in the June 24 “maracycle,” already known as “the homicidal,” a birthday bike race between Dublin and Belfast? Well, the train sometimes makes it.

The big millennium parade, of course, steps off on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day. But the official birthday party takes place July 10, when the lady Lord Mayor rides out in her carriage to extend the city’s boundaries in the old-fashioned way, by tossing a dart as far as she can into the hinterlands.

Thousand Candles

A thousand candles will be lit on a birthday cake and 100,000 balloons released in Phoenix Park, Europe’s largest, which held nearly a third of Ireland’s 4 million population when Pope John Paul II came to town. There will be a Bloomsday Marathon on June 16, commemorating literature’s most remarkable one-day stand: Leopold Bloom’s wandering through the streets of Dublin in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

Dublin is a great walking city. Like the Homeric Bloom, the stroller can capture at a glance almost the entire political, religious and cultural history of the Irish people, as well as the roar and rush of a modern city of more than 1 million inhabitants.

A suitable birthday walk might begin at the Parnell Monument on Upper O’Connell Street, amid the clamor and clatter of shoppers, tourists and workers pouring off the double-deck buses. The walk winds up a mile or so later in the emerald serenity of St. Stephens’ Green, among the mums pushing prams and the old men drowsing on the benches by the duck pond.

On the left side of the broad boulevard, as you set off, is the Gresham Hotel, an Old World hostelry where the doorman tips his hat only to clerics above the rank of monsignor. They say that if you sit long enough in the high-backed chair out front, you’re sure to meet someone you know from far away or years ago.

A Friend, Enemy, Bore

“In a city like Dublin,” James Stephens wrote, “one meets every person one knows in a few days. Around each bend in the road is a friend, an enemy, a bore striding toward you.”

After being tossed out of one of the many pubs hereabouts, the Dublin poet pronounced a fearful malediction on the landlady:

The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there

Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer;

May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair,

And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.

The right-hand side of the avenue is dominated by the gray Ionic portico of the General Post Office, where the poet Padraic Pearse proclaimed the Irish Republic during the 1916 Easter rising and, in the slaughter and executions that followed, Yeats’ “Terrible Beauty” was born.

Serious About Theater

Down a side street is the Abbey Theater, founded by Yeats and Lady Gregory, the home of so many famous histrionics not always confined to the stage.

Dubliners take their theater seriously. They are just as likely to bust up the seats as burst into applause. There was rioting after the curtain rose on Dubliner J. M. Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World,” which the audience considered an insult to Irish womanhood. Another donnybrook erupted when Sean O’Casey unveiled “The Plough and the Stars,” which was deemed “unpatriotic, perverse and worse.”

In a cultural swap for the Army-Boston College game, the Abbey players are coming to New York in the millennial year with “The Great Hunger,” based on Patrick Kavanagh’s epic poem.

O’Connell Bridge spanning the Liffey offers a fine panorama of Dublin: the bookstalls along the cobblestone quays and old warehouses turned into outlets for Irish tweeds and knit sweaters.

Then there’s the granite grandeur of the Custom House and the Four Courts, where British gunboats took aim during the rising; the spire of Christ Church, where Strongbow, the Norman invader, is entombed in his armor; sea gulls wheeling and screaming in a cloud-dappled sky that changes color every minute, and the tinkers or Gypsies in their bright shawls brashly begging coppers to feed a baby that always seems too big to be carried.

A Barley Forest

And, oh yes, an occasional barge-load of barrels bound for the Guinness Brewery, which every year denudes 75,000 acres of Irish barley to slake a national thirst averaging an astonishing two pints a day per citizen.

Not all Dubliners are enchanted by the view from the bridge, George Bernard Shaw for one:

And as for angel’s laughter

In the muddy Liffey’s tide,

Well, me Irish daddy said it,

But the dear old humbug lied.

A block in from the river is John Mulligan’s pub on Poolbeg Street, an authentic Joycean relic where literary criticism is not always a peaceful pursuit. Dik Browne, who draws the comic strip “Hagar the Horrible,” found that out one day when he wondered out loud whether Oliver Gogarty, the Dublin surgeon and author, took umbrage at being cast as Buck Mulligan in “Ulysses.”

Bartender’s Caution

“If I were you, Yank,” the bartender cautioned, “I’d belt up about James Joyce. That fellow doesn’t have too good a reputation around here.”

Continuing south on our stroll, the statesman Edmund Burke and the poet Oliver Goldsmith stare in stony grandeur from the lawn of their alma mater, Trinity College. Half a million visitors a year come to view the Book of Kells on display, one page a day, in the college library. Ironically, this 8th-Century masterpiece of illuminated manuscript by Irish monks came to Dublin as the gift of Oliver Cromwell, who spent the rest of his visit slaughtering the inhabitants and adding to the monastic ruins so generously scattered about the landscape by previous invaders.

“Dublin, though a place much worse than London, is not as bad as Iceland,” conceded a somewhat ungrateful Samuel Johnson, who owed his title of doctor to a degree conferred by Trinity College.

“The Irish are a fair people,” he also observed, “they never speak well of each other.” Shaw echoed the sentiment, calling his native Dublin “that city of tedious and silly derision where men can do nothing but sneer.”

Along Grafton Street

Anyhow, just ahead in “Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin,” as the poet Eammon MacThomais saluted his birthplace, looms Grafton Street with its fine department stores gift-wrapped in the wonderful aromas coming from Bewley’s, the tea and coffee importers.

One block away is Mansion House, where in another puzzling paradox the Lord Mayor proclaims her authority over this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic city with a gold chain conferred 137 administrations ago by Protestant William of Orange. Up in the British-ruled north, King Billy’s victory over Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne is celebrated every July 12 with parades and riots, depending on your religious preference.

Nonetheless, Dublin’s fairness doctrine dictated ignoring Irish neutrality in World War II to send fire engines racing north across the border when the Luftwaffe bombed Belfast.

Beyond St. Stephen’s Green is the Georgian glory of Merrion Square and the famous front doors enshrined on a popular tourist poster. Next is the Gothic gloom of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Cromwell stabled his horses and that savage satirist Dean Swift is buried beside his beloved Stella under the bitter epitaph, “He lies where furious indignation can no longer rend his heart.”

Unobtrusive Government

Dublin, of course, is Ireland’s capital, but government presence is unobtrusive, almost ignored. The ticket-taker on the DART, the new rapid transit system, or the sidewalk news vendor enthroned behind her shock headlines--”Queen Mum Spanks Crown Prince”--aren’t sure of the way to Leinster House, where the Irish Parliament meets, or to Aras an Uachtarain, the president’s residence. But they have “no trouble a-tall, a-tall” directing you to Jameson’s Distillery or the Leopardstown Race Course.

These days, Dublin’s jaunty air is somewhat stifled by her 19% unemployment rate, inadequate housing, maddening traffic, dreary slums festering with crime and drug problems, and parching taxes on whiskey and stout that could drive a man from drink. But with inflation down to 3.2%, well below the U.S. level, Lord Mayor Hederman sees “the economy turning around and brighter days ahead.”