(Dublin, Ireland)
Last week Dublin got its glad rags on to celebrate Bloomsday. For those who don’t know, this is the day when all the people who claim to have understood James Joyce’s “Ulysses” flock to certain landmark places in the city and gaze in self-satisfied delight at what the emperor is wearing.
In the same week Taoiseach Brian Cowen urged Irish voters to say yes to the Lisbon treaty as he announced that the government was about to make a formal decision on the date for a new referendum. Naughty children, you got it wrong so you’ll have to do it again. It is reminiscent of the referendum on the Treaty of Nice which the Irish electorate “got wrong” in 2001 and were forced to repeat until they “got it right”. It also reminds me of how the mothers of my childhood would serve the previous night’s dinner at breakfast time to bring recalcitrant children into line.
Perhaps, in a land so steeped in tradition, this could become a new annual festival. The people could mill around outside the schools that are used as polling stations, dressed as Declan Ganley, Václav Klaus or Durão Barroso, and spout the stream-of-consciousness rhetoric of our leading pallyticians. They could call it “Gloomsday”, because it is a sorry day indeed when the government is allowed to instruct the people how to vote.
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