We thought we were safe from crooning politicians with the departure from the political scene of Michael Woods, but now Dublin lord mayor Gerry Breen has emerged from the singing closet.
Proceedings at a free Bloomsday concert on St Stephen’s Green on Thursday night were interrupted with the announcement that there would be “an unexpected addition” to the programme, whereupon the lord mayor of Dublin stepped onstage for what the assembled throng, many clad in period costume, thought was going to be a speech of welcome.
Earlier, Breen had looked a little flustered as Noel O'Grady stilled the crowd with a stunning interpretation of Kavanagh's Raglan Road, which is featured on his album, The Enchanted Way. The reason for this soon became clear: O'Grady had snaffled the lord mayor's party piece.
The crowd chortled with relief when the lord mayor announced that he had intended to sing Raglan Road"but the feckers stole my song".
But Breen was not to be silenced. One might have expected a jaunty Dublin Saunter or Molly Malonefrom the city's first citizen.
Instead, he launched into a mournful rendition of The Butcher Boy, which includes such cheerful lines as: "He went upstairs / And the door he broke / And found her hanging / From her rope / He took his knife / And cut her down / And in her pocket / These words he found: / Oh, make my grave / Large, wide and deep / Put a marble stone / At my head and feet / And in the middle / A turtle dove / So the world may know / I died of love."
After an overwrought rendition by Breen, who stood unsuccessfully for Fine Gael on the so-called “dream ticket” with Dr Bill Tormey, even the ducks in the St Stephen’s Green lake were crying.
The general consensus was that, while it was a brave effort, the lord mayor should stick to the day job. "He makes Woods sound like John McCormack," quipped one critic. Another Joycean scholar went so far as to suggest the performance left him "longing for Biffo's rendition of The Lakes of Pontchartrain".
The late Brian Lenihan would have enjoyed the banter, not to mention the huge applause that greeted the mention of his name.
Near the end of the concert the master of ceremonies, Danis Rose, dedicated Love's Old Sweet Song, which features in Ulysses, to Brian, proclaiming him one of the great Irish statesmen and one of the few politicians to have read and understood Finnegans Wakeand Ulysses.
The crowd, which was still traumatised from the lord mayor's warbling, had scarcely dried their eyes after O'Grady's moving rendition when there was an unexpected and rousing encore in the form of The West Awake, again dedicated to Brian and a genuflection towards his Co Roscommon roots. Brian would have appreciated the gesture, but most of all he would have appreciated his ability, even in death, to upstage a Fine Gael lord mayor of Dublin.
