As a frequent visitor to Dublin’s Secret Book & Record Store – not exactly secret but discreetly located at the end of a long, narrow hallway off Wicklow Street – it had escaped me until now that it shares a locale with one of James Joyce’s most famous stories.
But reader John O’Connell tells me that No 15 Wicklow St was indeed where the action, or lack of it, in Ivy Day in the Committee Room takes place. And after he broke the same news to the bookshop’s owner, Dermot Carroll, recently, the latter was so grateful he paid him a consultancy fee: two old pennies, from 1904.
If that does not seem a large amount, it is at least impeccably Joycean. The recipient has been assured they were the same two pennies that Simon Dedalus (Joyce’s fictionalised father) threw his daughter Dilly (Joyce’s fictionalised sister), although O’Connell is awaiting DNA analysis to prove this.
The number of the Wicklow Street premises would not have been lost on Joyce. His story title deliberately evokes the Parnellite split of 1890, which took place in Committee Room 15 at Westminster.
Prince of the church – Brian Maye on Cardinal Michael Logue
Conflict of many colours – Frank McNally on a finely illustrated atlas of the Civil War
Lunar quest – Frank McNally on moon missions, misinformed quiz questions, and mountweazels
The Dromcollogher cinema fire disaster – Frank McNally on a fateful day in 1926
Ivy Day in the Committee Room is set 14 years later, with a downcast party still haunted by Parnell’s fall and death. And as noted in The Joycean Way – A Topographic Guide to Dubliners & A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1981), to which O’Connell refers me:
“[No. 15 Wicklow Street] establishes a connection with Parnell’s parliamentary defeat [. . .] at Westminster and suggests that, like the sinners of Dante’s hell, these modern remnants of Parnell’s party must come together once again to reenact the ‘crime’ of abandoning their leader.”
The bookshop (officially at 15A) is not the story’s exact location, if such a thing exists. Joyce places his characters in an upstairs room, somewhere, rather than the ground floor. But I note that among the businesses there now is a beauty parlour. Split ends are not treated, according to the menu, but you can get a “Brazilian waxing” for €30 and a “Hollywood” for €8 extra. As Yeats once commented on an unexpected turn for Irish nationalism: “All changed, changed utterly ...”
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On foot of a recent column suggesting that the music of Amhrán na bhFiann was borrowed from an old Protestant hymn, composer Gerry Murphy sent me a CD of his 1998 overture Good Friday – Belfast, in which he successfully merges the Irish National Anthem with The Sash My Father Wore.
Murphy wrote the overture to celebrate the Belfast Agreement. And in his closing section, The Sash and The Soldier’s Song are played together in “nearly perfect harmony”. More precisely, he tells me, “the two tunes work together about 90 per cent of the time”.
The piece is recorded on a collection called Music From Six Continents (Vienna Modern Masters, 1999). But “given the year that’s in it”, he had hoped for a 25th anniversary live performance in Dublin and Belfast.
That celebratory prospect has been somewhat undermined by the absence of an executive in Stormont, although he hasn’t given up hope that the “Sash” and “Soldiers” might yet march in near unison across a stage somewhere.
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This reminds me that, while strolling around Paris last weekend, I was amused to see a café called “RUC” (all capitals, at least on the sign). Located at a busy junction opposite the Comédie-Française. It subsequently detained me for half an hour or so before I was released on a minor charge, for coffee and a croissant.
While there, I learned it was part of a group or “twenty or so upscale Parisian restaurants, hotels, and clubs”, under the same ownership. Perhaps it’s their special branch, although the website went only so far as to call it “the must-visit Parisian brasserie in the 1st arrondissement”. I was also slightly disappointed to see that it is officially “Café Ruc”. The word is not an acronym, apparently. It’s just French for “ruck”.
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One the subject of another gallic phrase, mentioned in yesterday’s diary, my regular correspondent from Meath, Damien Maguire, wonders if the word “couilles” is related to one of similar meaning, still widely used in Ireland: “goolies”.
It seems plausible. But on further reading, I see the matter was discussed in these pages some years ago by the great wordsmith Diarmaid Ó Muirithe.
He had been watching an All-Ireland hurling semi-final in an Irish pub in Vienna, where the company included an Australian pharmacist. Although new to hurling, the Aussie was sufficiently clued in by the end to comment that Galway had Kilkenny “by the goolies”.
Ó Muirithe was astounded to learn that “goolie” was an Australian aboriginal word for “stone”. Or so the pharmacist believed. But the Irish slang term is popular in England too. And the usual etymology is that it came from British India, via the Hindi goli, meaning “ball, bullet, or pill”.