In all the fuss over the Dublin Castle reception hosted for Cardinal Connell by Bertie and Celia, few people have noted what an uncharacteristically passive role the media have taken. While the letters pages remain packed with differing opinions, the media have merely presented the facts of the matter and not deigned to offer much in the way of comment. This doesn't surprise those of us familiar with the private arrangements of a large number of our colleagues, who are naturally not keen to draw attention to their distinctly odd set-ups, many of which make the Bertie/Celia situation look the last word in conservatism.
Not very far from where I am sitting, for example, there is a quite eminent journalist of middle years who dwells with two women, both old enough to be his mother, but neither of them fulfilling that function. No one quite knows what goes on in this household, and though the trio entertain regularly and receive a steady stream of visitors, no one has had the nerve to ask.
The two ageing women, thought by some to be sisters, are notoriously protective of their male consort's privacy. Physically they are well preserved, and indeed quite striking, both with long milk-white hair which they wear in braids. Their rather forbidding manner belies their notoriously flirtatious manner with their guests (male and female).
The protocol at the regular dinner-parties organised by the threesome is rather complicated. It begins with the sending out of tiny handwritten cards requesting the pleasure of one's company at the journalist's address: but no name, either of host or hostess, appears on the card. Some 30 people are typically invited on a night, and I am assured that no one has ever failed to turn up. The house itself is undistinguished - an Edwardian terraced home in Dublin 6 - and by all accounts rather dilapidated.
The welcoming party on the night is particularly strange. Two Persian cats stand on either side of the open door, but there is no sign of host or hostesses. Guests are expected to pat each animal on the head in turn - which some visitors find rather terrifying, as the cats are on the large side - and then proceed to the drawing-room, where absinthe is ladled from an enormous copper vat into pewter mugs by a mute black child. No other drink is available.
The conversation is at this point rather hushed, though as often as not, many guests are known to one another. After about an hour or so, when the vat of absinthe is empty, double-doors are automatically opened, and the guests straightaway pour through to a candlelit and rather eerie dining-room: seated at the head of the table, and entirely naked, are the journalist-host and his two female companions.
It is difficult to get accurate information on the proceedings from this point onwards. Apparently the food is indifferent and the wine cheap, though plentiful. Nobody seems to mind, though the company regularly includes extremely sophisticated people, from bankers to bishops (and, on at least one occasion, a cardinal). Formal introductions are made, however, and argument is encouraged. As the evening draws on, it is not unusual to witness fisticuffs, and on one occasion a duel with genuine Elizabethan swords took place on the rather scruffy back lawn. It is believed that both parties (names well known in Anglesea Street) were too inebriated to inflict any serious damage on each other.
When in future the media make an issue of official functions and receptions, the various protocols applied and the welcoming parties arranged, and the "relationship" of hosts and hostesses, readers would do well to think about the sort of social evening with which most of the media are familiar, and draw their own conclusions. The kind of evening described above would not be at all unusual for the average journalist. I have neither time nor space to describe some of the considerably more eccentric domestic set-ups in the Dublin media world, though I may return some day to the case of a well-known RTE personality who has "Utah tendencies", as we say here, breeds his own dwarves in the cellars beneath his extensive Rathfarnham home and has his gardens professionally dappled.
bglacken@irish-times.ie
