The 18th Annual Sir John T. Gilbert Lecture - Transcript

The following is a transcript of the eighteenth Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture "Dublin as a global city: through time and space," given by Kevin Whelan, Director Keough-Naughton Institute, Notre Dame Centre in Dublin at Dublin City Library & Archive on 22 January 2015.

Audio

Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, 'Dublin as a global city: through time and space', Kevin Whelan looks at the evolution of Dublin from humble origins to global city of today. The 18th Annual Sir John T. Gilbert Lecture, was recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Library and Archive on 22 January, 2015.

Right, guys, I know there are people standing and whatever, and it's hot and warm, so I hope it doesn't get like the Black Hole of Calcutta. Thanks very much, Larry, and I want to thank the Dublin City Libraries for asking me to give this talk. I do, as Larry said, I've done lots of lectures. It's kind of odd for me to be speaking about Dublin, because, as you might guess from my beautiful accent, I'm not exactly from the city. I'm a yellow belly and proud of it. Just on the border between Wicklow, Wexford and Carlow. But by the grace of God, born on the Wexford side of that. But I've lived in the city of Dublin for a very, very long time. In fact, longer than I've lived in Wexford, but the savage loves his native shore. But I do work with an American university, the University of Notre Dame and, therefore, I introduce a lot of students to this city. A city I've come to love, and which it gives me great pleasure to talk about, really, for the first time this evening in public form. So thanks very much for the invitation.

I'm going, ridiculously, really, to talk very long term on the evolution of Dublin, and what I want to look at is how Dublin fits in space and time and, in particular, what we might think of as how the city of Dublin, from its very humble origins up there on the ridge overlooking the Liffey, how it has kind of evolved into what we might think of as the global city of today. So I'm going to go at very high speed, I'm going to go at very high altitude and I'm not really going to acknowledge the work of the many scholars on whom this lecture is based. So it's going to be quick, it's going to be at a brutal level of abbreviation. But I hope by the end that we have some ideas of how our city fits into this wider context. So that's the justification for the long lead-in. 

So really, we all know the story of the three little pigs. I got four little pigs this evening. And it's about the city of Dublin as being a city of wood, then a city of brick, a city of words, and finally, I want to talk about it as a silicon city. So my four little Dublin pigs are wood, brick, words and silicon. Again, to understand where we are and what we are, let's begin by just looking at the old heartland of Europe. Really, until, essentially, the late 15th century when Columbus discovered, not America, but there were 60 million people in America when he discovered it, and they well knew where they were. What he really discovered or rediscovered was the Atlantic crossing. But in the earlier period, really, the Mediterranean world, the old warm heart of Europe was the Greeks and the Romans. So it was very much a Mediterranean based culture, and the centre of gravity of Europe, economically, culturally, religiously – every way you could think of – was down there. Right? By contrast, northern Europe, our neighbours there in England, ourselves, these northern kind of places, were seen as remote, cold, isolated. Right? The Romans had a look at us; they didn't fancy it. They called us Hibernia, which means the Wintry Island. You know, who could blame them? They were used to the warm south and the wine. They didn't fancy these whisky drinking uisce beatha northern guys up in the mist and the rain and the cold of northern Europe. And, of course, remember too that they felt that off our shore, if you went too far, you could literally fall off a flat earth. So it wasn't too smart to be too far away from Clare or Galway or whatever. This marvellous map is of places mentioned by Strabo in the year 25 AD, where he produces this geography of the world. And this is an interactive map where you can see every place that he actually mentions. What you can see is there's a little mention London but, other than that, like Britain and Ireland may not even necessarily exist. 

When we look at how Europe viewed this, I want to quote from the Arab geographer Al-Mas'udi, from the Meadows of Gold. And in 947 he was talking about the Atlantic Ocean as it appeared from the eastern Mediterranean. He said there is no way forward for those who enter it from the Mediterranean. Nothing moves upon it. There are no inhabited lands there or rational beings. Its extent and where it ends are unknown. No one knows how far it reaches. It is called the Sea of Darkness, the Green Sea or the Encircling Sea. Well, the Mediterraneans were used to that Wine Dark Sea of Homer, the Snotgreen Sea as James Joyce called it, of the Atlantic, didn't appeal to him at all. So, from the Roman point of view, we might as well not have existed. And part of that is just simply to do with technology and movement. This is a map which shows you how long it took you in days to get from Rome to different parts of the Empire. And essentially, if you were moving from Jerusalem in the Far West to London or Hadrian's Wall in the Far North, it would take you about 70 days. And again you can see Dublin is not even, as we would now say, linked in. It just doesn't exist in that thing. So, very slow movement. Very, very disconnected kind of world, but still unified, to some extent, by the Romans. But in a kind of a slow kind of way.

Then somebody else entered on the scene. The Vikings. The Vikings, who mastered the Atlantic. We're still not quite sure exactly how they did it, but certainly the sunstones may have had something to do with it. And we have begun to find them in the archaeological record. But the Vikings, coming from this northern wintry snowy world up in the north of Europe, the Vikings begin to conquer these Atlantic ways. They do it really by coasting as well. Short routes, short hops, bit by bit. They eventually figure out how to get to Iceland, and then down to the Shetland Islands. Faroe Islands, down in to the Hebrides. And eventually, from there, begin to penetrate down into the, especially into the Irish Sea. They were smart enough to try to divide the very stormy windy west of Ireland coast. 

So they are the ones who first begin, as it were, to penetrate this world, and who begin to look at places like Ireland, which, hitherto, as I said, had been off the map. One of the most interesting features of Irish culture, in essence, until the… until, essentially, the Vikings arrived, is that places like Dublin didn't really matter. The coast didn't matter. My friend and colleague there, Tim O'Neill just produced a wonderful book on the Irish Hand, and if you look at where those great works were produced, they're almost all in the midlands; the monastic midlands, as George Cunningham sometimes called it. But Irish culture was, literally, insulated. It wasn't bothered about the edges. It was in the centre of the country. Even my own dear county of Wexford miserably fails to produce a damn manuscript for the whole period. But you go to Offaly or Tipperary or whatever is falling over itself in manuscripts, God, you even can find them in bogs over there now. You know? But Ireland itself turned in on itself is the wrong word. Let's say self-sufficient and inward looking in a positive kind of way. And incubated this tremendous culture in this period.

Now, interesting, when the Vikings come then, the Vikings come as a powerfully disruptive force. We've learned over the last 30 years or so, you know, to kind of think of them as traders rather than raiders. To think of them as a kind of a positive force, which, in some ways, they were, as I will talk about in a moment or two. But I first want to emphasise that we have to understand that the Vikings were, above anything else, pure cold-blooded killers. Right? You know, you can't get away from that. The other thing about them was these guys were aggressively and confidently pagan. They weren't waiting for the Christians to bring them the Word. The Vikings already had the word. And their world, they thought of their religion as being immensely superior to what they saw as the mix-up religion of the Christians. They had no time for Christianity because they thought their own religion, as I said, was way, way more important. And it's not just that they attacked the monasteries or attacked the rich churches in Ireland, but they attacked them with relish because this was the judgement of a superior religion on an inferior one. Thor was infinitely greater than Jesus, and even in the graves around Dublin you find very often the little miniature Thor hammers, the amulets, which they buried with themselves. 

Historians are sometimes puzzled by the astonishing way, really, that the Vikings raided the Skellig Islands in 824. And then their brutal starving to death of the poor old hermit, Eitgal, there in 824 as recorded in the Annals of Ulster. But I think it's very clear to understand what happened there was they had absolute contempt for this guy living on a rock out in the middle of the ocean and professing faith in a mild and loving Christian God. So, the way they treated Eitgal was about the contempt for this whole Christian kind of thing. And these were rough, tough, stone cold killers. Here's Al-Mas'udi again from the Meadows of Gold and he's talking about the Vikings as they came down on the other side, because these Vikings also found a route down along the Danube and the Dnieper and whatever, down to the Black Sea, and eventually down into the modern Arabic wars. And he said, wherever the Vikings went – and this is not an Irish commentary, this is an Arabic commentary from the mid tenth century – wherever the Vikings went, he said, they spilled rivers of blood, seized women and children, and property. What's missing there is men. They killed the men. They didn't want to be bothered with them as slaves or whatever. Too much hassle. Take the women and children. You can manage them. Seize women and children and property. Raided and everywhere destroyed and burned. The people who lived on these shores – this is the shore of the Caspian Sea – were in turmoil. It's not just that the monks were making it up that these guys were tough and rough and bothersome, right. But the Vikings did create this great (10:28 vest regar), the route, the Viking route along the western Atlantic façade of Europe. And it's the discovery of that passage which allowed them then to use initially Britain, and then the Irish Sea area, and then especially Dublin, as a kind of a staging point then to head right down along the Mediterranean and penetrate through, even over towards as far as Rome and Pisa and Constantinople. So, you know, almost circling back from where their eastern route went. 

But if you notice what instantly happens once the Vikings get going with that is that Dublin's relative location absolutely changes. Dublin now becomes an ideal point for a kind of interchange between the northern Atlantic world and the southern Mediterranean world. And that's really what the Vikings did. The Vikings, let us remember, did not bring the concept of the town to Ireland. The Vikings were not an urban people. Dublin, as it emerged, was a kind of a compromise or hybrid city, a Hiberno-Norse city. The Vikings, in a way, acted as a conduit for the transfer of the idea of urbanism, which had emerged in the British world, actually, in places like London and Southampton, Hamwic as it then was, over into the Irish context. But the city, as it emerges, is already a kind of a joint enterprise between the Vikings and the Irish. And really what Dublin was, to use the jargon, an emporium. A place where goods were assembled and then redistributed. A kind of a wholesale conduit, which linked the northern world with the southern world. And remember, the northern world was, as we would now say, resource-rich. It was rich in fur, rich in silver, rich in lots of products that Europe was interested in. Amber, for example. And really what then happened is that wine, silver and wool were going north; slaves, fur, amber, resin, ivory were going south. And when we look at the fantastic evidence we have from the Dublin excavations, we can see that Dublin, by the 9th and 10th century, was importing silk from Byzantium, skeins from Samarkand, gold braids from central Asia, Baltic amber, whale and walrus ivory from Norway, soapstone from Shetland, lignite from Yorkshire, wine from France, salt from England, and Cheshire pottery. And Dublin's silver – coins minted in Dublin – show up as far away as Iceland, the Pharaoh’s, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the Baltic States, Northern Germany, and even far away Rome. And we can even see the Irish becoming kind of style icons, the Irish crios, the belt, features in Norwegian dress. The Norwegians kind of liked that Irish belt.

By the end of the 10th century, Dublin had become the most famous port, the most famous emporium in this Viking network, and it is a network. Dublin is part of a group of cities which connect, so like other Viking centres. Birka in Sweden, Hedeby, Ribe, Roskilde in Denmark, Kaupang in Norway, which was probably the closest actual link to Dublin in terms of physical makeup. The houses in Dublin are modelled on the ones in Kaupang, but also Grobin in Latvia, Novgaritz, Smolensk, Netstova, Kiev in Russia, Jorvik or York as we now know it, in England. Dorestad in The Netherlands. Truso in Poland. Rouen in France. And Dublin is networked into that tremendous group of cities. 

The other thing I want to point out about the Vikings, which I think sometimes we don't necessarily talk too much about in Dublin, but when we need to talk about, is that this was also a slave civilisation. The Vikings were very, very interested in slaves. Again, when we think about why they were so interested in the monasteries, it wasn't so much that that was important that they could get silver and gold and all that kind of stuff there. The famous Hack-Bullion, as they call it. But it was also that, in the Irish setup, monasteries were sources of sanctuaries. So, when there was trouble or strife, people concentrated in those monasteries and that was respected, within the Irish dispensation, or at least, intermittently respected. But when the Vikings came, they knew that they could capture large quantities of people in those places. And there are slave raids on Howth in 821, a couple of hundred women taken from Howth there. Wonder how they got on when they ended up in Iceland. Armagh in 869, Duleek in 881, Kildare in 853, Armagh in 895. And I think we have to see those raids as being, essentially, slaving operations. And there was only one slave raid on the west of Ireland, but with the exception of those they are all within the kind of hinterland of Dublin. And we can see slavery becoming a very, very dominant feature of this city, which emerges on the edge of the Liffey. So when we think about Viking Dublin, and this is from the Lindsey Simpson's work, updating Pat Wallace's magnificent excavation at Wood Quay. When we think about that, we have to think about this city – and this assignment dig's a wonderful reconstruction of it, and I'll go back to it in a minute – we have to think of it as a slaving city. This is from the 12th century. This is just off Thomas Street, John's Lane, up on the old city, and that, without a shadow of a doubt, is a slave collar. And at times, for example, Dalkey was used as a slave holding pen. Nice handy little island on the edge of Dublin where people couldn't run away too easy. You find lots and lots of evidence of the slavery once you start looking for it.

Now, the key thing that I want to point out about that, though, is this city as it emerges. Key thing here is the Vikings didn't come about the beer, they came about the women. We have 90 or so graves in Dublin, and we know from those graves ten of them are of women buried in the Viking manner. In other words, the Vikings were overwhelmingly a male setup. Now, if you come as males, marauding males, high in hormones from being stuck on smelly ships for a long time, okay, when you hit it, you're not going to be looking for the harp. You're going to be looking for the damn women. Right? And then you have two options with the women, one of which is, as my kids would say, to go with the flow and maybe shack up with or marry or have a long term relationship with an Irish woman. And that's really how I think the Hibernia-Norse city comes. Because once you have children with a native woman, forget about it, because the children will be raised predominantly in the culture of the mother, not in the culture of the father. That's one option. The other option is, as at Haute in 821, to take the women with you and bring them back north. A lot of these were slaves. This is, essentially, early sex trafficking. Dublin was the centre of the sex trafficking trade in the Viking period. And these women then are brought northwards. Iceland had a population of 20,000 in 930, and at least, the recent estimates suggest, at least a quarter, 5,000 of those were Irish slaves. When you do the DNA evidence, for example, in the Faroe Islands 83% are, in the horrible phrase that art historians have recently foisted on us, insular. In other words, they're from Britain or Ireland. So there's a whole DNA of evidence now which has kind of shown us that these cultures – Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Greenland even, that desolate place that the Vikings briefly colonised – these were colonised with Dublin women, with Dublin slaves doing, I think, all the kind of hard work. And this is very, very, as I say, kind of tough. There was nothing too nice about it. This is one of the Viking skulls in King Harold's saga, you know, talking about the slave women. This is another Arab witness, Ahmad ibn Fadlan in 923 he met the Swedish Vikings, the Rus, as they were called, along the Volga River.

And just listen to this now. They arrived from – and this is eyewitness – they arrived from their territory and moored their boats by the river, building on its bank large wooden houses. They gather in the one house in their 10s and 20s, sometimes more, sometimes less. Each of them has a couch on which he sits. They're accompanied by beautiful slave girls for trading. One man will have intercourse with his slave girl while his companion looks on. Sometimes a group of them comes together to do this, each in front of the other. Sometimes, indeed, the merchant will come in to buy a slave girl from one of them, and he will chance upon him having intercourse with her but will not leave her alone until he has satisfied his urge. So we have to think of that when we think of the Viking city. So Dublin's ascent as a trading town, as it does in this period here in the 10th century, as it begins to spread out from the initial settlement around what is now Dublin Castle, its ascent as a trading town is predicated, partially, on this very, very vibrant slave trade. In 997, for the first time, coins are minted in Dublin, with Sihtric Rex Dyflin is the name on the front of it. And we might be interested to know that the name on the back of it is of the first banker in Dublin, a guy called Falstaff. So you know the bankers have been with us for a long, long time as well. But there's about 130 silver Viking codes that we know of. Again, all of them, with coins found within 30 to 70 miles of Dublin. They might have got down as far as Baltinglass but they certainly got into places like Kildare, Meath, those kind of areas. And this is the beginnings of a kind of a commercial coin based trading economy, and Dublin is now beginning for the first time not just to look outwards, even though it was, essentially, a ship rather than a shore based operation. But Dublin is also beginning to impact on the interior of Ireland. And, in a way, it was these silver coins, the sailing ship technology of the Vikings, but slaves too which were the keystone of the rise of the monetary and commercial economy. And slaves were a luxury item; the most significant European export of the early medieval period, as the recent book on the archaeology of Europe expresses it. And by the 11th century, Dublin was the prime slave market in Western Europe, furnishing customers in Britain. Bristol was a major slave market in Western Europe. And if you look at the ‘Domesday Book,’ for example, you'll find that the concentration of slaves in Britain is in the areas which are close to Dublin.

And here's the town then. So this town that emerges, it begins in, essentially, in 917, when they create the defender town. As we know, it's on the high ground overlooking the Liffey and tidal estuaries and tributaries were ideal for the Vikings. They liked to have their ships in fresh water rather than in salt water. The reason for that being there's much less marine encrustation in the fresh water, and that's why they really liked the Poddle and the Dubh Linn, the black pool, just there below where Dublin Castle is. Now the Dublin Castle gardens. That's the real origins of Dublin, that black pool, the Dubh Linn there, from which we get Dublin. And then from there you could launch out into the Irish Sea. So the town really crystallises in the 10th century. It begins to establish a kind of identity, as it were. It has its large bank, it has its woven post and wattle palisade on the top, and there's superb archaeological evidence in Dublin for houses, streets and plot boundaries. So, following the contours of the ridge and this wooden wall of 925, replaced shortly afterwards in the 12th century by a stone wall. But what is striking in the Dublin excavations, and which Pat Wallace has meticulously documented, is the absolute continuity of the boundaries of properties and streets once they were set down. Again, let me say – and I think Klaus Regling was on about that yesterday, wasn't he – the Irish obsession with property. Let me tell you, these guys in the 9th and 10th century were equally obsessed with it. The damn boundaries hardly moved a metre over centuries from its origins in the 18th century.

So there you go. A small city with a Poddle. A small town, really, with Poddle there coming out into a much wider and much wilder Liffey, and I'll talk about that later. But with this slave trading operation on the go and lots of stuff going north as well, this is Norway and this is Scandinavia, every one of those dots are graves in which Dublin or British material has been found. So these guys were moving a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff was moving north and south from Dublin in this period. 

Now that city that we have been looking at there, that town there. Now, what is the interesting thing about it? What I want to say about it is it's a wood town. City is maybe too large a word. It's a town build of wood. It's wooden technology. Wood for shipbuilders. The ship, the most famous item of the Viking technology. The ship was a wooden ship. Clinker built. But everything in Dublin – houses, fences, paths, baskets, barrows, bowls, even wooden shovels appear in the Dublin excavation. And the all-important fording point here in Matthew Stout’s lovely map, which he did for me this week, Dublin is schizophrenic from the get-go. Two damn names. Dubh Linn and Baile Átha Cliath. With the four hurdle marks, even the hurdles there are a wooden technology. So this was a city which was, essentially, based on wooden technology.

Now let's move on. I talked about the insulated nature of early Ireland, early Christian Ireland, early medieval Ireland, as we've learned to call it. I talked about the way the Vikings begin to reorient it outwards. And I've focused on Dublin, but we could say plenty, really, about Wexford, Waterford and Limerick as well. But let's leave it there for tonight. But what we get then is Dublin is beginning to be pushed outwards, and it becomes more central in Irish culture. It's the Vikings who pull Irish culture towards the coast. Now, at the end of that period, as you come into the 11th and 12th century, especially the very important date I want you to go out of here with is 1052. In 1052, a good Wexford man took over in Dublin. That was Diarmait mac Máel na mBó (25:30 inaudible), Diarmait Mac Murchada, not Mac Murchada but Diarmait Máel na mBó Kavanagh. The Kavanaghs take over the city and hold it, really, for over a century. But as that happens, the links with Scandinavia are severed, Dublin now begins to start looking more towards England. The Vikings are beginning, the Hiberno-Norse are beginning to become more and more acculturated, more and more indistinguishable from the native culture. The Irish kingdoms themselves get stronger and are able to repel the Vikings. One of the striking features about Ireland in this period is, unlike large parts of England and whatever, is the Irish were good at fighting. They were good at resistance. The Vikings never got a toehold in Ulster because the O'Neills and the others up there were very, very tough hombres to deal with. And the Vikings feared them. So eventually they gave up trying to settle there. But now you get the city coming. 

Okay, now I'm going to go very quickly through the Norman period. The historians in Ireland, for some reason, love the Normans but, in some respects, they're not all that significant. But one thing we can say about them is the Vikings didn't like guys from that North Country. In the excavations, one of the really interesting things that was found in the excavations is a whole load of severed heads, and the severed heads, we think, or Barra O Donovan who is an expert on them, he thinks that all of these were spiked heads. In other words, they were heads which were put on poles. They were, interestingly, located facing north. They were looking toward Meath and Armagh and Tyrone. Places that maybe the Dubs or whatever still don't kind of like. So this city presented a hostile face to cultures. But the first problem with him was in the north, but by the time the Normans came in, the real problem is these damn Tooles from Wicklow. And the Kavanaghs from down in Wexford. And what did they do on their castle? Look at that there now, over the gate. What have you got? You've heads, Gaelic heads, and those are heads of Tooles and Byrnes. We know one of them, Aedh Dubh O'Toole or Hugh Dubh O'Toole, who was burned at the stake in Dublin in 1328 for, of all things, the crime of blasphemy. But he was spiked. But look at those heads there. I mean, Dublin from the get-go didn't really like cultures all that much. Might have liked the women, but no way Jose the men. Dublin was designed to keep the cultures out, and when they couldn't do it with the city they put an outer kind of ring called The Pale, and The Pale was really about genetic and linguistic contamination. But Dublin has a long history of, as it were, taking it to those very civilised people from Wicklow and Wexford and parts further south and north. 

The other thing I want to say about the Vikings is they don't much extend the Viking town. Really, there's just an extension along from Wood Quay and up at the back of Thomas Street. There's a kind of a long reclamation there up towards Usher's Island and whatever. But the core of the medieval city was already in place in the Hiberno-Norse period. There's only 20 acres within the medieval walls of Dublin. 20 hectares. That's a little less than twice the size of St Stephen's Green. And I do want to point out as well, and I'll move quickly over it, but at that time, for example, New Ross, the walls of New Ross enclosed 40 hectares. New Ross was twice the size of Dublin in the Norman period. Admittedly, they mightn't have built the whole damn thing, but still. Let's remind ourselves of that. Now, you can see lots of activity outside with the churches and the whole kit and caboodle there, and you get this ring of medieval churches and you begin to get the spread into Oxmantown and all that. But let's not worry about that. There's the medieval city or town of Dublin. As I say, not really stretching too much beyond the Viking thing. The Poddle, which is so important in the city. But absolutely central to Dublin. And we have invisible-ised it in the modern city. That's about all that's left of the Poddle. And even that is, historically, tremendously interesting. This is where it enters the Liffey. The Poddle was culverted and kind of pushed underground, still runs across under Dublin Castle and across Dame Street and down into the Liffey, and not many people know this but, do you see that Ireland Rail in there? You know what that was? That was the Fenians hit on a great plan in the 1860s. The Fenians were wonderful men for plans, which they never really executed. But they came up with some great plans, and their idea was to sneak guys up through that culvert right in under Dublin Castle and blow the whole thing to smithereens. And that's an antiterrorist, early antiterrorist device there. No, seriously. Deliberately put in to stop people being able to get up the culvert and do damage on Dublin Castle. So there's a huge span of Dublin history in that slide there. But not to be too derogatory, but here is a map of the towns of Europe in 1400. Towns with over 20,000 population. What can we say? Nary a sign of poor little old Dublin. Its significance has shrunk and sank dramatically, as the Bruce Springsteen glory days back in the Viking period when it was a very central spine along the Atlantic. But what we can see here is the emerging two things. The old Mediterranean culture in northern Italy, the emergency of modern banking, Lombardy, all that kind of stuff, this great core of Europe.

Now, this is tremendous energy coming out of here. This is Genoa and Venice, and it's the Genoan and the Venetian fleets now which begin to power the European economy. But also you can see now for the first time the emergence of the Hanseatic League, the great poets of Belgium, northern Germany, Rotterdam, the great port Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, all these places are now beginning to become economic powers. So there're two clusters there, which are then joined together in this kind of European network of trade and how trade is operating. Two clusters there. And this is from, say, 1300 to 1500.

And look at poor old Dublin. Nowhere. And this I think is really striking again. This is the very earliest map, and it's only just shown up. Costs about 2.5 million now, if Dublin City Library wants to buy it. It's the first single sheet map of Ireland. And I don't have the greatest copy but it says there (32:26 Irelande qui Hibernitor Adicitor), Ireland which is called Hibernia. But what I want to say about this, the really interesting thing, if you look up to the top of the map they have Hy-Brasil, this island off the West Coast of Ireland, this miraculous island which appeared and disappeared, but it's shown there as a fact of geography. This is 1468. Nobody still has a clue what the hell is going on, on the Irish west coast, and you've got an amazing set-up there in Clew Bay as well. But for all you Dubs among you, 1468, the first really serious map of Dublin and, guess what, Dublin isn't even mentioned on it. And if you look at the Dublin Bay there on the bottom right hand corner, on the curve, it's Drogheda that's mentioned, not Dublin. 

So one in the eye for Dublin. In 1468, not really all that much known. Not too much going on in Dublin. Even though you're beginning to get the integration, as I showed you there, of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic world. And Dublin also, at this period, let me say something else about it, it's beginning to be pulled into the gravity of Britain. It takes a long time, but this is a map of British and Irish towns in 1290, and you can begin to see Dublin's hinterland, Dublin's trade and whatever now, it's no longer going north and south. It's increasingly focused into a British realm. This map is from the mid-16th century, shows Ireland on its side. Does show Dublin down there on the bottom of it. Shows the River Liffey. River Liffey, which was an absolutely useless river. From this point of view. You couldn't navigate the damn thing. If you looked at those 20,000 population cities that I showed you, almost all of them, without exception, are unnavigable rivers. Dublin lacked a navigable river and that made it very difficult for it to penetrate. Waterford, much more important with the Barrow, Nore and Suir which gave it access into these hinterlands, and Dublin also absolutely useless because of its shape. It goes out then the damn thing curls around and ends up nearly back down in Baltinglass. Up in the Wicklow mountains. And the Wicklow mountains again – what use is that? Like 80 kilometres of granite and bog and no Tooles and no Byrnes. Hanging right over the city. It doesn't do anything for you. And then, if that's not bad enough, if you've got the bloody Wicklow guys on that side, within 30 miles of Dublin there are also bogs. The famous Bog of Allen. All that kind of stuff, which doesn't even allow, in this period, Dublin, never mind dominating in Europe, it can't even dominate its own country. But it is very, very worried about these Gaelic guys. This is around 1600, the dialogue of (35:10 Silvan and Peregrine).

It was not tolerable amongst us of the English to permit or suffer any of the O'Neills, O'Donnells, Maguire, McMahons, O'Reillys or any other Irish borders to inhabit amongst us, which means we are so fast tied in consanguinity, common blood, alliance and amity, friendship, one to another, that it was as hard a matter to snap a sheaf of arrows and pieces being fast bound together. You know, the Dubs must hold together against these wild men from up in Ulster and in Monaghan and Cavan and places like that.

So, what I want to say is, this period from the Normans onwards, not really all that much happening in the Irish context. Now, that's a horrendous generalisation, but let me leave it there. Okay, when does the thing shift in Dublin? It shifts again after 1492 because understand that in 1492 you've got this tremendous reorientation of Europe. The European economy, which I said had been Mediterranean based, is now extroverted into the Atlantic, and Ireland, almost overnight, shifts from being nowhere, on the edge, the wintry edge of Europe, to being absolutely central in terms of being the nearest point in Europe to America. So Ireland's relative location switches, and when that happens everything switches within Ireland.

Now, in 1610, Dublin was still tiny. In Speed's famous map, it's about 30 hectares in size. It would take you about two minutes to walk from one side to the other of Dublin in 1610. And then you get this meteoric rise of Dublin, when it surges from, give or take, about 10,000 population in 1600, to 40,000. 60,000 by 1700. And close to 200,000 in the year 1800. Dublin has gone, again, in an incredible surge of population from the 1600s onwards. And it's absolutely predicated on this new economic energy coming in from the Atlantic world. By the end of the 18th century, Dublin, incredibly, is the sixth biggest city in Europe. It's bigger than Rome and Madrid and it's only eclipsed by London, Paris, Vienna, Naples and Amsterdam. So Dublin has gone from zero to hero across these two centuries. The most productive period in its growth. And, of course, as I want to say, this is also, when we now talk endlessly about the Georgian city, but it's also the period when Ireland is more fully integrated into the British Empire. And I will talk about that as well. So this Atlantic moment, if we can call it that, this Atlantic moment reorients Dublin. And it begins to change. In 1620, Luke Gernon said of Dublin, the buildings are of timber and of the English form, and it resembleth to Bristol but falleth short. It's still a wood city. Timber. And it's not even up to the mark with Bristol. But Dublin quickly kind of changes. And now I want to talk about this world of brick. The great Georgian city that now emerges. The Great Fire of London in 1666 created a panic about wood, and, you know what you now get is all that timber down in Wicklow, Shillelagh and places, is used to rebuild London. The last of the Irish oak is really in the 17th century, and after that Dublin no longer can rely on oak and it has to start importing timber. This is, as the librarians among you will instantly recognise, Marshall's Library. This is a plan of it from 1707.

What's interesting is the timber in Marshall's Library has been dated chronologically to 1702, and it was cut somewhere in Scandinavia. So you're now beginning to get, for the first time, pine. You're moving away from oak. Eventually in Dublin you're getting some of this stuff from the Miramichi Valley and New Brunswick and godforsaken places out in Atlantic Canada. I love this photograph. This is Mick O'Dea's studio in Henrietta Street, built around the 1720s, and what we can see here is what we might call primary pine forests. These are very, very large pine trees with very wide boards. You can see there on the right hand side. And if you're in Mick's studio, you don't usually see floorboards exposed in early houses because we all covered them in carpets and stuff, but look at the quality of the wood there. But look at also how wide the boards are. And it's also got this matter of a working man, which you kind of like as well, on the floor. But Dublin begins now to import timber, and then it has to go to brick.

The first brick making operation in Dublin in 1599 with George Burroughs and then, eventually, the brickyards in the Merrion estate become very, very prominent. In 1610, Dublin prohibits the use of thatch in the city. And you get the transition from the daubers, who were plasterers, the guys who could put mud, plaster on wooden walls, you now get the movement towards proper or improper plasterers. And you get the movement also from carpenters, who really did all the building of these wooden houses. Now you're beginning to get builders, joiners, plasterers, bricklayers. In 1671, the bricklayers Guild of St Bartholomew is created. On average, I think, we can say, and Rolf Loeber and others here will contradict me because he's an expert on brick now, but I'm going to say this anyway, so Rolf, if I'm wrong, tell me afterwards. That, on average, about 10,000 bricks were used in a Dublin house. And I reckon, give or take, there's about 8,000 surviving 18th century or Georgian houses in Dublin. So if I do my maths there, and my wife's a maths teacher so she'll correct me if I'm wrong here, if you multiply 10,000 by 8,000, you get around 80 million bricks. And again, interestingly, of those 80 million bricks, somewhere like around 97% of them were locally generated.

Now let me move on again. What I want to say is now you get this first great architectural expression also of Dublin as a design city, a planned city, an organised city, rather than an organic incremental bits and bobs type situation. And as we know, and I'm not going to belabour this, the vision is initially the Duke of Ormond's and what he sees, and again I want to emphasise this is initially a kind of a Parisian vision. What Ormond had seen in Paris was that Paris had reoriented itself towards its river, and it had done that through a wonderful series of esplanades. The earlier houses were set right on the river, and the river was kind of cut off from the citizens. The streets didn't open onto the river. What the Parisians did for the first time was to create an esplanade, pushed the houses back from the river, and opened these esplanades on either side of the river. And Ormond's great vision of Dublin, which took almost two centuries to realise, but Ormond's vision then was of these great esplanades, which would run all the way from the mouth of the Liffey right back up to what eventually became the Phoenix Park.

So the twin esplanades, interestingly again, almost built with the debris of the medieval city. For example, Ormond Quay was built with the debris of St Mary's Abbey. And then you're also getting these set piece places like Smithfield, a paved piazza, but way too large and open for a windswept city like Dublin. And nobody has ever been able to make a go of Smithfield. Then Phoenix Park, which transcends its origins as a deer park in 1662 to become the largest designed landscape in any European city. Stephen's Green in 1664 where they're saying you have to build of brick, stone and timber, and to be covered with tiles or slate. So you're getting this tremendous drive now, set piece of the city. And again within that crucial thing is what to do to the river Liffey. The river Liffey, which was known in the Irish language as Ruirthech which meant the angry or violent or turbulent river, and the Liffey because the bar up in Wicklow again, the water could come down very quickly and you got sudden floods and whatever. And it took Dublin a long time to tame the river Liffey.

The modern Liffey as it comes through Dublin is, essentially, a canal. A fairly fast flowing canal. But it's essentially canalised. The old city, the river was very, very wide. The Liffey was without quays and embankments. And it washed out into a sprawling mud-clotted estuary. You can see it here in 1757 in John Rocque's Great Map. This is not the map of the city but the wonderful map of the bay and harbour, which is much less known, but which shows there the canalised bit of the river. And then the way it very quickly opens out below Trinity into a mud-washed estuary, a little bit like what now happens in Sandymount or whatever, except it's stretched much further in.

I'd like to remind my two sons who are down there in Trinity that in 1570 to '71 it was dictated that all the dung of Dublin was to be carried to the great hole of All Hallows. And All Hallows was the birth of modern Trinity. So if there's a certain substance in high demand in Trinity, you know where it came from. The rest of the city was dumping it there. Okay, especially from DNS on the north side.

In 1674, the tides were still going, actually, as far as modern Trinity, and it's really been a tremendous effort to build these walls. This was from the Royal Irish Academy's wonderful atlas of Dublin. And Matthew has colourised it, where you can see this effort to first create the esplanades, then move the river. And then this building along the slow curve of the Liffey. And then, gradually, kind of ramping it out, digging it out, building it out into the quays. So it's really only well on into the 18th century that we can kind of say that that work has been accomplished, and that creates the modern Liffey as we now know it. But that's a very long duration project.

The other thing I want to say about Dublin is, you know, the architectural historians, when they look at Dublin, can sometimes be a little sniffy. A little sniffy. Because they want to kind of say ah, you know, Dublin isn’t really properly kind of planned. There’re no royal palaces, it’s not under absolute central control, and that that makes Dublin less, not a unified planned city. But in fact, I think that’s actually what gives it its character and interest, and if you’re interested in what I’m going to say here, it’s all taken, essentially, from Neil McCullough, the very distinguished contemporary Dublin architect.

But what we have to emphasise in Dublin is it began, the modern city, the planned city began as a series of independent estates. The largest of them being, obviously, the Drada, or later Garda estate on the north side there. You have other little bits and bobs, Eccles, Dominic and so on, down in the south side. You’ve got modern industry. Obviously, Molesworth, Dawson, Temple Bar, all of that. And then this very important estate on the west of the city, the Modern Liberties, the Earl of Meath’s property, and the earl of Meath down in Kilrush when he said, absolutely useless for the city of Dublin. Nothing happened in the Liberties. They did absolutely tiddly squat. The gardeners and the Merrion estate, Fitzwilliam and whatever, very, very active.

But what is really interesting in Dublin then is in 1757 they created the Wide Streets commission, but what the Wide Streets commission does as well as very significant infrastructure and very significant projects like the modern original Sackville Street, the later O’Connell Bridge, unifying the north side and the south side, also creating the spaces for the great, the claret of architecture at customs house, forecourts and all that. But the really interesting work, I think, that the Wide Streets commission did, and this again, Neil McCullough is brilliant on this, was the beautiful way that they stitched together these essentially independent islands of property based development, which each of them doing their own thing, as it were, and then the marvellous way that they very carefully and in a very well thought out manner actually stitched these different estates together to create what now looks like the unified modern city. And they’re doing that using the characteristics of the Georgian terrace, these long brick sombre façades.

Here’s my own neck of the woods now, Merrion Square, a marvellous photograph from 1945, where we can see what we’ve lost, really, especially at the back of Merrion Square is what I want to emphasise there. Look at all the gardens still intact in 1945. Unfortunately, all of those now under concrete and tarmac because of the presence of the all-important car. Very few cars in that photograph. But Merrion Square, now you get the Georgian terrace, you get the great squares, all of that kind of… and I’m not going to go into that in detail. Except to point out, and this is again something which is significant to understand in Dublin, and maybe not as well known as it should be, which is that the key to all this too, the key to creating that unified façade on Merrion Square was the invention or the adoption of the Mews Lane. If you look at Stephen’s Green, over on the other side there, Stephen’s Green, let’s say, take a place most people would know. Newman Church. Number 85 and 86 on Stephen’s Green. What is interesting there is you have the archway and you have to enter down through that, now it’s covered over, obviously, to get into University Church. University Church is in the back.

But if you look around Stephen’s Green, it’s all archways and then you have to have a three bay house and you have to have a joint entry to get back into the gardens. The beauty of the Mews Lane, which seems to first appear on the Aungier Estate in the 17th century, and then is given an architectural expression in Henrietta Street in the 1720s, and by the time you’re building Merrion Square from the 1760s onward, it’s working really well. And so here’s that street. No arches. Nothing to break the long façade. Unfortunately. The greatest and the longest façade of them all, this magnificent mile here, all the way up along here, wrecked by the ESB and an act of absolute scandalous vandalism, okay, so let it be said, right, which wrecked the longest passage, continuous terraces, of 18th century houses anywhere in the world, full stop. Right, never let it be forgotten.

But look, here’s the back lane. The Mews. Here’s Baggot Street. Now you’ve got Baggot Street, entering that way, Merrion Square, you enter this way. And these are Mews, which is the old word for a stable. And this then allows you to create these magnificent facades. And these are the kind of places nobody looks at, really, too much in the city. But unless you understand how the Mews Lane functions, you ain’t got a good handle on modern Dublin. And then Dublin – one thing you’ve got to love about Dublin is Dubliners never lack confidence. For example, Conor McGregor there, the boy from Crumlin in the UFC. Okay? I don’t know if he’s any good at UFC or whatever, but I can tell you one thing, he can out-talk everybody else in that game a million miles, right. Your Dub always has a great deal of confidence.

And now this is from Belfast, actually. But talking up Dublin in 1764. And Dublin now also adds these marvellous buildings, set piece buildings, really, like the customs house, the forecourts and all the rest of them. The Dublin newspaper in 1782, about the Customs House. This most magnificent edifice will take a high ranking, if not be the first of modern buildings in Europe. And Dublin, he says, without vanity, may now boast of a greater number of superb edifices than Paris or London. And foreigners may visit the Irish metropolis to admire its architectural magnificence. Dublin prides itself, if that’s the right word, on being the second city of Empire.

This is a map shown from the ESTC, the 18th century short title catalogue. Books printed in the English language in the 18th century. And obviously London dominates, but Dublin is, then Edinburgh up in Scotland, but Dublin is the third in terms of publications in the 18th century. And that gets totally eclipsed in Boston or New York or any of the Anglophone areas on the other side of the Atlantic. So Dublin has pretentions now to be a global or an Atlantic kind of city as well. 

And now I want to move on from this because, in some respects, once we’ve said all that I’ve said about the Georgian city, and I could say plenty more but I won’t, but when we’ve said all that, what we have to ask ourselves is, back to my three little piggies, or four little piggies. You know, was this house of brick able to withstand a big bad wolf when it came huffing and puffing? And my answer to that would be, it wasn’t.

Now, I studied the 1798 rebellion and really what you have to say is, you know, the lost centuries in Dublin are the centuries from 1800 up to almost the year 2000 now. I’ll come back to that in a moment. But what I want to point out here is, you know, we were a colonised city. We didn’t control our own economics. We didn’t control our own destiny. Look at this map. This is an amazing map which shows every voyage which was made across the Atlantic in the 18th century, from the Port records. Very laborious and tedious. But there you go. And look at what’s happened. Look at all that stuff that’s just going south of us. And what can we say about that is we were prohibited from having a re-export trade. No ship from America could land in Ireland without first landing in Britain. We could provision them, we could give them food, or whatever, but we couldn’t act, as it were, on our own economic two feet. And by the time that we achieved what was called free trade in 1782, it was way too late.

In a sense, then, Dublin couldn’t compete with the competitive advantage that places like Liverpool, Glasgow and Bristol had already achieved. Once of the saddest places to be in Dublin, if you look at it historically, is the great Camden Dock, now, the modern Grand Canal Dock, in 1796. Because when that was built it was built to take 150 ships. Ships on this trade here. Did any of them every go there? The answer is no. And yet Dublin is, in some respects, addicted to its connection with Britain. We have records, and this is from work by a New Zealand historian called Karen Sherry, we have records from Dublin from 1785, in 1785, of individual ships going out of Dublin - where they were going, what they were doing, what was coming in and what was going out. And at that period, 65% of every ship that left Ireland was heading for England, predominantly Liverpool, then London. 20% were going to Scotland. And the remaining 15%, most of them going to Spain and France for the wine and whatever. And then, a tiny handful for North America. 

So in other words, we were totally dominated by, and Dublin was a kind of a shadow city within this. So while it might boast of being the second city of Empire, in some respects it wasn’t so much a city of brick but it was a city of kind of shadows. And unlike Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow, Dublin’s trade was essentially confined to the Irish Sea. So even though in 1821 when King George IV arrives in Kingstown as it was called after Dun Laoghaire, you know, like Dublin is out in its finery to welcome him. But in some ways, I think, it wasn’t all that helpful. Now, look at the population. We can see there that tremendous spike from 1600 to 1800, but what I want to focus on is what happened between 1800 and 1900, and even up to 2000. Dublin goes from 180 to 383. Now, compare Dublin with comparable cities. Okay, it went up a bit, but anyway, what I wanted to… I don’t know how that happened.

But anyway, basically, what I want to point out is in 1750 Dublin was about 125,000; Glasgow had 32,000; Liverpool 20,000; Belfast was eight; Manchester was 18. By 1800, Dublin is 180,000; Glasgow is 77,000. Now, look in 1900. Glasgow, which was only half the size of… less than half the size of Dublin in 1800, is now twice its size. Liverpool, one third the size of Dublin. Less. No? It’s slightly more. Less than half. Sorry, less than half the size of Dublin in 1800. 685,000 by 1900. Look at Belfast - 20,000, one sixth; one ninth the size of Dublin in 1800. Gee, I’m really working on my fractions today. And then by 1900 it’s 350,000 give or take. Right. And in another ten years, it’s actually grown beyond Dublin. Look at Manchester. Now, interestingly, look at what happens to the figures between 1900 and 2000. Dublin rises, at the millennium year, at the turn of the millennium, to over a million. Glasgow has dropped back to 590,000. Liverpool has dropped back. Belfast has dropped back. Manchester has dropped back. Read those figures, and what conclusion can you come to except that the artificial constraining of Dublin into being a kind of a provider of cheap food for the British market is, essentially, what holds it back. And we can see this across the 19th century that Dublin's trade just continues to narrow and narrow and narrow, and eventually it's just really trading in the Irish Sea area.

Now, moving quickly on. This is, as far as I am aware, and somebody will contradict me now and that's fine, but I think this the first colour photograph that I know of, of the city of Dublin. This is from 1890. It shows Trinity College, and I'm going to say this now because Larry is here and Mary Hanafin is here, who might have some responsibility in that. You know what the biggest, stupidest thing in the whole of Dublin is at the moment? Them damn trees in front of Trinity College. Stupid plane trees which block the view. The whole of Trinity was designed to be the view at the end of Dame Street. Trees are great. When you say cut down trees, people look at you as if you're advocating that you're a paedophiliac or something. Trees are great in the right spot, but they shouldn't be in the centre of cities at all hardly, and especially in a great design city like that. So get rid of those damn trees. Anyway, here's King William. 

(member of audience intervenes at this point) They’ll be gone in the morning (laughter from the audience).

Okay (laughs), I would be very grateful, and if you find those trees are mysteriously cut down some night, you know where to come to, Larry. Us Wexford and Wicklow people get on very well.

In 1991, I went on the train to Thurles to watch Wexford play the third game, it was a drawn sequence of national league final and we were absolutely done in the third game by a stupid referee. Martin Storey scored a perfectly good point with the time up and he called it back for a free, and of course then John O'Connor took the free and drove it wide. Anyway, he should have left it and we would have won it. Cork beat us in the extra time and, by, coming back up on that train was I annoyed? I said 1991 but it was 1996, but anyway we won't go there. But my spirits were totally lifted because there was a guy from Bray, the other side of Wicklow, and every few minutes on the way up he used to shout out, Wickla – the biggest county in Ireland if it was flattened out. (laughter). And Larry knows well that if you go to a car boot sale in Wicklow you'll be able to get a few cheap referees here and there.

Now, let me go back to this picture. What is striking about that picture? As I say, apart from the fine façade of Trinity? Look at the soldiers, the British soldiers there in their full pomp. King William is there. This is a city which is still seeing itself very much as a kind of a British city. It is, and Dublin apes Britain, in a way, you know. The circular roads, which we like, in 1763, are modelled on the new London roads from Paddington to Islington. The Dublin Metropolitan Police 1836 modelled on the London Metropolitan Police of 1829. The Dublin exhibition of 1853 following London's of 1851. Clery's Department Store is a copy of Selfridge's in London. Blah-blah-blah. In the 1880s, British multiples like Tyler's arrived in their shoes. It's very much a kind of a shadow city. It doesn't have too much on the go. Here's John Gamble – the people of Dublin are as provincial a people as perhaps are anywhere to be found. On no subject of taste, not with the exception of politics, scarcely on any of literature, have they an opinion of their own. As good as, as fashionable as, as beautiful as in England is the climax of praise. Not presenting a chance to be reckoned either good or fashionable or beautiful, unless it comes from England or has been approved of there. So even our own great industry like Guinness. Guinness, the biggest porter brewer in the world, but they moved their stock flotation on to London rather than the Dublin market in 1886 and they built a huge site in Manchester in 1913 to move the whole Guinness operation over there. And Jacobs did exactly the same thing at Aintree outside Liverpool in the same year. Even the biggest employers in Dublin, the industries of Dublin, weren't really all that committed to the place.

And now I'm moving to my city of words. You see, what I want to say is, look, this was a bad, as it were, show. This is not just great. Here's an American observer, WG Hoskins, and he's talking about Dublin in the 1850s. And he praises the beauty of the city architecturally, but then he says, in the midst of all so rich and beautiful, a solemn sad, loneliness hung a black pall over everything. The streets, though wide, were deserted. The stores, though lofty and built for endurance, were close. Business there was almost none. Dublin was like a deserted village or a city of the dead. And the dead is a great, as you know, short story. The greatest short story in the English language. But it's about our city of Dublin.

And then what happens? Then, I think, what we have is we've got this tremendous energy which comes into the city from the 1880s onwards. And it's based, essentially, on the work of the cultural people, but especially the writers. And it's these, and I can only talk about one of them, and I can only do that briefly, but it's really – and my colleague Declan Kiberd has written a marvellous book called – and if you ain't read it, you should – called ‘Inventing Ireland,’ which talks about the way in which this generation – now this is the big three or Yeats, Samuel Beckett, that wonderful photograph by Jane Bown. Is there ever a better photograph of Beckett? And our man here, James Joyce, looking like a hipster. Okay. Could walk down Grafton Street today and nobody would look sideways at him (laughter). Okay, except they'd probably expect him to be heading to … (laughs) No, I'm not going to go … (laughter) Okay, our boy, James Joyce, right. The greatest of them all.

But what I want to say is Declan's book is about the way in which this generation of writers, as it were, reinvents or reimagines Ireland out of that deadly pallor, out of that kind of second-handedness. Out of that shadowed-ness, if there is such a word, which the 19th century had, in some respects, become in Dublin. And what is marvellous here is the way in which they take this on. And the question which many of us have asked ourselves, and there're Joyce experts here like Liam Lanigan and literary people. But the really interesting question is this. Explain why in the period from 1880 say to 1940 that Dublin produces the great poet of the modernist period, Joyce; the great novelist of that period. Well, the great poet is Yeats, of course. The great novelist, Joyce. The great dramatist Beckett. And one should say that Beckett's stock keeps soaring and soaring. But within that, not just those guys but a whole string of other guys as well. And some girls. But this is Bram Stoker, this is Oscar Wilde, this is George Bernard Shaw, this is Sean O'Casey, this is John Millington Synge. This is a tremendous galaxy of talent which emerges and which, in some respect, takes this moribund shadowy kind of culture and gives it a new sense of purpose and identity. And let me talk about Joyce in relation to this. I don't recommend you do this, but over Christmas I re-read ‘Finnegan's Wake’ from start to finish. Now, was this guy obsessed with Dublin or what? By the way, I'm copyrighting that because I think it will make a great poster. I went through it and I'm sure I missed half of them, but these are all the names of Dublin that I can find in it. And it's just, you know, I think if you found that on somebody's computer you might say this guy was obsessive compulsive. But anyway, you can see the names there for yourself. But the city of Dublin, imagined in so many ways, like these 50 different languages which are kind of burlesque or whatever in there. All beautiful in its own way. And some of the just marvellous. I love the one, do you belong, for Dublin. And there's another beautiful one there too that I think the city should adopt as well, where he talks about Dublin as bláth ... you know Baile Átha Cliath, the Irish speaker for something said bláth but bláth which can also mean, obviously, a blossom or a flower. And there are so many. There are other ones which make Dublin look like it's in the Arabic world. There're others which make it look Polish. There're so many varieties of it. Now, what I want to emphasise there is the obsession with the city. And what Joyce does is to say to the English, okay, you've colonised us. Okay, we speak your language. Badly, or unless we're in Drumcondra where we speak it very well (laughter).

Okay, but I'm going to take that language of yours, I'm going to take your preeminent forms like the novel and I am going to recreate them in such a way that I am going to absolutely destroy your language, or reinvent it in a way that makes it possible for me to say I am no longer a mere little mimic man or a mere little Seaneen, a mere little John Bull. What I'm also going to do is I'm going to take this godforsaken, and not so much godforsaken, but to take this city of Dublin and show it on a world stage. It's an incredibly arrogant operation. So what does he call his great book of 1922? He calls is ‘Ulysses.’ And what he does is no less than the scandalous ambition to rewrite the great classic of western literature and to re-centre it in Dublin. And not alone that, but what does he do, he creates as the hero of that novel a wandering Jew, Leopold Bloom, an immigrant. And most people when they read that novel didn't really understand it. Most people's reaction to it would be ‘WTF’ or whatever the equivalent in the 1920s was. What the hell is this? What's he doing? And it's really taken us almost 100 years of criticism to understand it. It was almost as if Joyce understood that eventually we would become multicultural and then this Jew from Lithuania, Leopold Bloom or whatever, right, would be a suitable emblem for our city. You know, Joyce is ahead of us as writers or great artists always are. Great artists are always in two spaces, or times. They're in their own time but they're also able to imagine a future.

And it's only when the artists imagine that ordinary – not so much ordinary – but that a culture can then actually be created in the space that they have imagined. So like this is the task of the artist. It's the task of artists in Ireland today. And I'm waiting for them to kind of say, okay, what kind of Ireland do we want to kind of live in. And you see the real… This is what Yeats does, this is what Joyce does, this is what Beckett does at an incredibly advanced kind of level. Whereas I’d say today to you as an Americanism, I think a lot of our contemporary writers are more Monday morning quarter-backers. They're very concerned or bothered about what happened in the past. But really they need to be more looking at how to invent the future. And I am coming towards a close as well. Maura has kindly brought us the greatest book, the greatest novel, by universal repute, of them all, Joyce's ‘Ulysses.’ So if we look at that wonderful book… Now, again, interestingly, it's published in Paris. Not in Dublin. In 1922. But it does put Dublin on the world stage in an incredible kind of way. And there now is a city, you know, in that book it's just the imagination and the recreation of a whole city. It's an amazing achievement, this city of words, essentially, that they do. And now let me say just something else, just to show you. Let's move to the other one. This is ‘Finnegan's Wake.’ And if ‘Ulysses’ can be hard going for some people, try ‘Finnegan's Wake.’ But again it's a wonderful book and we still haven't really fully learned how to read it. But look at that string of names there. You look at that and you say what is that. Now, these are the Catholic churches of Dublin. Like Wilhelmina's, William Street, all the way down. It's maniacally organised, but they're all just brilliant puns and witty puns on the names of the different churches. This one here. Edam and Yves. You know, Adam and Eve. In a Dublin accent. And it's just funny, you know. Rings end. Whatever. And I spent a lot of time today and with the help – you should always have a monsignor on the end of a phone line (laughter). I rang my friend Ciarán O'Carroll and said ‘What the hell is that? Saint Angel Calzata?’ Right. This is how maniacal Joyce was. This is the Carmelite Church on Whitefriar Street, as we now go up Aungier Street, right. So that's what they are there. And what's this calzata thing, it’s because this is calced ... they were calced Carmelites. There were two types of Carmelites. You all know this, of course. Discalced Carmelites and calced Carmelites. Discalced Carmelites – barefooted. Calced Carmelites wore shoes. And the word calzata, if you want to tell a child to put on its shoes in Italian, you'll say calzature scarpe, or something like that. So Ciarán told me. So it's the calced Carmelites. Now, go back there. Look, when you look at that, how in the name of the Good Lord is anybody from outside Dublin to understand what the hell that is? And then within that to say, okay, let's start looking at it. And, by the way, I make this contribution to the Joyce Scholarship, I'm not sure that, you know, there're a couple of scholars, we've identified various ones, but I think that I claim credit, or I go on to give the credit for that Saint Angel's Calzata to Monsignor Ciarán O'Carroll, the Rector of the Irish College in Rome. 

But this is Joyce for you. Now, okay, we're not going to worry about 1916 and all that. I just want to come to that to say, okay, look, does anybody know what that is? I think you could tell the whole of Irish history from this one. That is the only bit surviving of that King William's statute that I showed you earlier. It's the fourth King William. And it's in storage in the National Museum. But I think you could tell the whole story of Irish history from that. But this is also about how Dublin changes. Queen Victoria unveiled there with great pomp and ceremony in 1908. And in the mid-1980s, the city of Dublin very kindly dispatches her on a one way ticket to Sydney, where she sits at the moment. And we gradually remove all our statues. This is 1966. And when we look at that now, that's Nelson's head. And you can say, again, who are those guys. But those were all very respectable south siders from very respectable Dublin families from the National College of Art and Design who stole Nelson's head. 

Now, let me come, finally, the last five minutes I want to talk about this silicon city because again I want to say it's really in the last 20 years or so you've got this amazing change within Dublin. When you look at it, we are now, again for the first time, because up to this I want to say, you know, we haven't really been fully global and we're still not. We've begun to move in the right direction. On the left there, the cities ranked by the number of international companies that have headquarters in them. We're not in that. But there's over 600 cities, I think, in this. But if you look on the right, headquarters of foreign subsidiaries, we are number 24 in that. So Dublin has repositioned itself in a very clever way, really, and very inventive way as a kind of cross-roads between Europe and America. For example, these are Matthew Stout's lovely maps of the Google offices all over the world. And look at Dublin there. Dublin as a centre for what in the jargon now they call EMEA. Europe, Middle East and Asia. You see, and again, what we have done, really, is we are not so much a global city now as a transnational city.

We're a city which doesn't penetrate across the whole globe, but we are really a city which allows America to function into Europe. And we are, in that sense, we belong to a group of kind of second tier cities, kind of transnational cities. The cities that we are most comparable with are Vancouver, Miami, Hong Kong and Sydney, and Dubai. And the reason for that is, if you think of those cities, what are they? Vancouver is where America and North America meets Asia. Miami is where America, North America meets South America. Sydney is where Asia meets Australia and that area. Dubai is where Europe meets the Middle East. And Dublin, really, is where, as it were, America meets Europe. 60% of our exports are into Europe. If we look at where we're sending stuff, and this is a map which is deliberately distorted, what is really striking now, in the mid-19th century, 90% - 90% of our exports went to the UK. The North Circular Road was a cattle drove, really. By 2013, these are relatively recent figures, and even after this massive downturn, which Dublin has emerged from with incredible rapidity, really, but what we can now say is the major export country we have now is 20% into the USA. The rest of it then is going into Europe. And the UK is now no longer our major trading party. So Dublin has kind of reinvented itself as a kind of a base into Europe. But what is striking there too is very little presence yet, for example, into Asia, into Africa, into other parts of the world. We're not fully global. Look at our airline network. Again we have fabulous connectivity in many ways into Europe, maybe, courtesy of Ryanair and Air Lingus and many other places which now use our airport. We can reach America and we can even reach West Coast America. But you know what we don't… And we can reach as far as Istanbul or Constantinople or whatever it used to be called. But what is striking about Dublin is we've very good connectivity into Europe and into America, but we don't have a runway long enough to launch into the wider kind of world. We have to kind of piggyback on others. But it's still a very striking feature. And let's look at it. This is a wonderful map by the German company, SAP, which shows again all the airline flights in the world. And you can see here America on the left hand side, Europe on the right, and Asia, Southeast Asia over on the far right. But again, look at where we're located. And we're right in the right time zone, the right location, the right everything to be that connection point. And if you look at international passengers, now this is not regular passengers, but once you filter out people who are from your own country. So you won't see Chicago or whatever in this. We are in the top, we're number 28 in terms of the amount of international passengers that passed through an airport in 2013. Now that is again something we need to value, it's something we need to realise is hugely significant.

And we've other stuff, again in terms of our location, which now favours us. This is a map which shows fibre optic cables crossing the Atlantic. And the rest of the globe as well. Now, what's significant about that? Of course, most of what we now do in the internet space and whatever requires a material world as well. The internet is still a material manifestation as well a something which passes through the air. But look at where all those things are going. And look at how many of them are passing through or close to Ireland. We are one of the best connected countries in the world in terms of our ability to have high speed broadband and everything like that. And look at that Hibernia Atlantic and the whatever. Hibernia, I think, goes into City West. Am I right? Then there's Emerald Bridge. But look at all the stuff even back and forth from England. So we have tremendous connectivity and networking on that front. And our city has done a great job with that. Now the other thing with that, and this is my last couple of points, is around what has happened in this city in the Celtic Tiger years. And I know there are – and this is going to drive everyone mad, but anyway, let me say it – you know, in some respects we've repositioned ourselves. And then, within that, there's other stuff that happens. Now Dublin is trying to project itself as a global city. And what you need with global cities is you need the claret of architecture. It's like the Customs House and the forecourts in the 18th century. You now need these buildings which are built by well-known architects, or very well-known modern architects. This is of course Grand Canal Docks, but designed by the landscape architect, Martha Schwartz from New York. This is Daniel Libeskind's theatre. This you also need, iconic sporting stadia. And this is a marvellous photograph of the old Aviva. And then the best of them all, but only when it's full, because I don't think it works at all when you've only 50,000 in it. But when you have a good crowd in Croke Park is there anything better. And that's the Cork Clermont. Now, my very final comment, and perhaps somebody would be kind enough to pass these around because it's pretty hard to read them. This is where I always get in trouble when I say this. I can't do this for Dublin, it's much more difficult to get it for a city than for a country, but what I did was I looked for all the rankings that I could find of where Ireland fits on a global level, which is a proxy for Dublin because the other thing I would say about Dublin now is it’s hugely important to the country as a whole. You can no longer talk about Dublin and the country.

In some respects, the Irish economy is increasingly a function of how well Dublin does, and we all have to be very cognisant of that. But within that, if we take that as a kind of a proxy, look where we are. These are all different ratings. And I've taken a whole clatter of them. Some of them, we wouldn’t want to be so high on. We're fifth in the world for alcohol consumption, for example. And maybe not something to be laughed about, the amount of healthcare problems and whatever, and the amount of social misery that's sowed by that might be something to talk about. But there are other ones. Good country. We're number one of 125 ranked in 2014. Globalisation, first out of 187 in 2014. Skilled labour, the first of 60. Global connectedness, and so on. Even things where people think sometimes we do badly, the gender gap in Ireland, we're number eight of 142. Discrimination against minorities, where again we're ranked as being fourth best in the world in terms of that. And all the way down. These are very, some of these are very… they're impressive, I think, when you put them all together because what you can clearly see is that Ireland as a country, and in some respects Dublin as a city, is very much within the top rank globally of where we are and what we do. This is the most recent one, which appeared yesterday, so you can't say I'm not up to date. It's the global talent index, where we ranked tenth. We got a horrendously negative report in the Irish Times, and yet, in some way, look, we're ahead of Norway, The Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand, Belgium, Japan. If somebody had told us in the 1980s that we'd be ahead of Japan in that, they'd have taken their hands off.

And again, my two final points. Number one, cities have to be allowed to change, adopt, flex their muscles, evolve. Cities are about mix of uses. They build on and they develop. In some respects, this would be my own favourite space in all of Dublin, and as you know, this is the Long Room in Trinity. But what is the most striking feature of that architecturally? It is that it wasn't built to be like that. There used to be a floor there and it was only later on that they put in the barrel vault and made that full height room, which we now think of as one of the great spaces of Dublin. If somebody had taken a very architecturally pure line to it, they'd have said no ways should you take away that roof, don't mess with this. This is history, or whatever. But look at what happens as a result. And this city of ours always has the capacity to astonish and delight and surprise us. So, last week, for example, this is from a local photographer, Graham Harkness, and I apologise, at least I'm acknowledging him but I apologise for using it. But I just wanted to kind of make the point. Cities are full of astonishments. They're cities of wonder. And that is a meteorite over Dalkey Island, where I began with the slave trading back in the 9th century. So that's a very quick overview of Dublin in space and time.

[Applause].

 

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