Separation

"Ireland, Sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse."

― George Bernard Shaw

‘Oppressor. It’s a harsh word but I use it anyway. Now…’ a voice started louder, ‘I am not a religious man, but we all can see clearly….’ The soapbox tumbled as the speaker got pummelled by a crude wooden cross wielded by a red-faced Irish priest.

    ‘You fecker!!!! Don’t ye dare mess with dear God!’ the offender cried and he continued to bash the ill-starred speaker with the end of his cross.

The crowd responded tentative, yelping with the religious power released from its hold by the angry priest. Contenders quickly grabbed him before he could brutally murder the speaker, and as he was jousted and pulled towards the nearest pub, he rasped: ‘God sees everything!’

Hearing a rowdy mob approach the pub owner quickly opened his doors and ordered them all inside. Several men jolted the priest to the bar to have some serious talks about the use of violence and if it was alright to cheat on the Miss’s on a bachelor party. Someone ringed the bell for free drinks and the black kept pouring. The rumour that emerged from the pub while it had been dead as a grave only minutes before, seemed to set the whole world in motion.

    ‘It’s all bulox anyways eh?’ a hardy man said to the priest, who was in the process of loosening his clerical collar. The priest stopped.

    ‘Don’t ye…’ he started. Tup. Someone put a heavy beer in front of him and he turned to it. Another man aside the priest tapped him on the shoulder.

    ‘The ambulance is scraping the fecker off the street now; he’ll be alright my man told me. The Razzers knows it was you but have a chat with ye t’morrow.’

    The priest thanked the good man and lifted his glass in a cheer. Everyone who noticed him toasted and drank. It was a Dublin daydream, and none but God had seen.

‘Invasions.’ Another man standing on a soap box started in the park to a new audience. ‘Masses of aliens, just ready to kill…’ the new speaker said, building up a deliberate tension by raising his hands, ‘They are out there!’ the speaker tried, but his skinny arms carried no weight. His eyes twirled around as he added: ‘...And they are here!’ He squinted his eyes looking around him wildly, scaring a little girl in a daisy dress that turned crying to her father, who patted her but paid no attention.

    ‘The grey men, who want to stop me? They are RIGHT HERE!’ The speaker said, and a short man who stood upfront wiped off some spittle from his face. As he rubbed his eyes he looked around him. He noticed the little girl still crying and her parents and a big brother standing behind her. Her father had the looks of a Liverpool man, with the stern face of a dock worker and the far away look of a long time unemployed. The short man frowned as he discerned a grey skin complexion on the man’s face, but felt sure enough it wasn’t the grey the spitting speaker in front of him referred to. Apparently he was still warning for the aliens to come, but the short man shook his head and wandered off, going for a pint.

Lower in the city’s richer parts, a man in black jeans and t-shirt grinded an electric guitar and shouted from on top of his lunges: ‘Lay lady lay!’ A wet-cell car battery supplied the energy for a roaring metal sound, that started slowly but quickly filled up with murky chord structures and a down tuned rhythm that overplayed with infectious guitar licks.

    ‘Lay lady lay!’ he blustered in between. Bob Dylan had never meant it like that. There wasn’t much else going on in Grafton Street, safe for the occasional pub hoppers and lost tourists and youngsters running amok. On a street where no-one seems to get excited about anything, a black hat slowly filled with small change and the guitar man would play till his battery went dead or the last round sounded in the pubs.

As the night crept onwards and cornered the sun in the dark of an alley, and the moon gently appeared, a silence settled over Dublin. A city without the reed hurdles that once gave it its name. Where only the river Liffey, mother to the old land, remembered the rare old times, when long ago four tribes once came to Ireland clad in black smoke, their ships burning ashore and their presence a sudden mystery to the local people. And now, with Ireland’s sudden economical boom that rattled through the moist island, there were sudden newcomers again. After decades of mass emigration, the Irish suddenly found themselves welcoming fortune seekers and dreamers from Europe, Asia, Africa and descendents coming back from America. They came in their many thousands, leaving home and house to arrive in a country surprised to see so many new faces again. They came with progress and brought diversity. Dubliners would look at their Liffey and wonder if she knew why ‘for fuck’s sake what the wankers are doing in their towen’. A dreamy spirit might take a sudden movement on the water for an answer, the chaffing of water around the bridge piers for a smile.

And yet every Dubliner could know it if he’d only searched his heart: here is the homeland where you are truly welcome, here be the country where the grass is always greener.