GIVE ME A BREAK:SUNDAY was gorgeous in Dublin's Docklands: warm weather, blue sky and sparse traffic, with kids jumping into the Liffey and the city gloriously showing itself at its best. An architect friend from New York was visiting, so where better to bring him than to see the magnificent Calatrava-designed Samuel Beckett Bridge and Libeskind-designed Grand Canal Theatre? Two international architects defining the new Ireland that people seem to have stopped believing in.
I felt like a proud Dubliner as we headed for an outdoor table at a restaurant overlooking Grand Canal Basin. As we sat in the sunshine, taking in this new city within Dublin, I tried to explain the vision behind it to my friend, with a nod to the persistence of Harry Crosbie.
My friend’s questions led me back to the Vikings and earlier, but I got it terribly wrong – according to an eavesdropping local, anyway.
She heard my friend’s American accent – with my accent still quite American as well, despite 30 years living here – and she assumed we were ignorant tourists. She castigated me for what she thought was an ill-informed potted history. She angrily traced her family’s history back 800 years, and it was all about oppression by foreigners: Vikings, Normans, English, everyone who wasn’t from the Bronze Age. What if I really had been a tourist, I thought. I wouldn’t have got a good impression after that tirade.
When she’d left us alone I mentioned to my friend that the multinational Disney was opening a store on Grafton Street but that it isn’t seen as an oppressor, even though it has colonised our imaginations from infancy, making it more powerful in our imaginative worlds than the Brits ever were.
Disney’s appeal to the Irish seems to indicate that, although many Irish resent Americans, they have no difficulty with Disney. Maybe Disney is a creative culture that has got it right in the way it has condensed human experience into fairy-tale stories that people relate to.
With Disney bringing some prestige back to beleaguered Grafton Street, I’ve been thinking lately, why stop there? Why not let Disney take over the marketing of Ireland?
Disney has a lot of things right: stories that explain good and evil and the circle of life. The Disney ethos taps into the human instincts of what a good story should be, with hope and aspiration winning over negativity, and were Ireland to become a theme park, Disney would write a perfect story for the country.
With everyone on board and agreeing a Disney version of Irish history that appealed to tourists, there’d be no risk of Americans being told off in sidewalk cafes.
From the outside, Ireland is quite Disney in its marketing of itself. Riverdanceand U2 have marketing concepts that, each in its own way, tell outsiders that Ireland has solid values. And yet Ireland doesn't have values at all. Ireland doesn't know what it is.
Were Disney to take over, teams of imagineers, as they’re called in Disneyspeak, would define our values in quick time, complete with theme-park rides.
Irish people trust Disney. If Disney were to take over Ireland and turn it into a profitable theme park, millions of Irish people could actually live and work in a fantasy Ireland utopia while entertaining millions of visitors, and Disney would make sure all of us were on message.
Ireland would be a John Hinde postcard come to life, with every citizen trained to communicate a message that we all agreed on. Unemployed construction workers could give Ireland a makeover, putting thatched roofs on the ghost estates while Riverdanceperformers danced at newly rebuilt crossroads.
We could have rides like Pirates of the Celtic Tiger, modelled on Pirates of the Caribbean, with out-of-work bankers playing the pillaging pirates for tourists cruising up the Liffey under the Samuel Beckett Bridge and past the International Financial Services Centre, where giant pots of gold would sit at the end of rainbows. The tour guide would be Ryan Tubridy, as Woody, since he looks exactly like him, and is so good natured.
One of the scarier rides would be Spaced Out Mountain, where visitors would be propelled through a terrifying insight into the drug culture and Mountjoy gangland, complete with roller coasters and a splash ride inspired by the Victorian jail’s plumbing facilities.
Just imagine Disney’s Fantasy Land re-created as the Celtic Twilight Zone, with Rosanna Davison playing Maud Gonne, at the ready to have her picture taken with anyone, while interminable hen parties spin around in teacups.
The absurd possibilities are endless, but at least we’d know who we were and what we believed, and would be nice to visitors, thinking that it’s quite a good idea to have tourists coming to Ireland to spend their money, instead of going out of our way to alienate them.
