A few years ago, a startling sight greeted the hard-pressed yuppies of Wall Street, as they descended for another busy day at the New York Stock Exchange. In front of their venerable exchange building were large papier-mache puppets of famous Irish writers Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce. It was 1999 and Minister Mary O'Rourke was leading a perhaps less than hard-pressed posse of Irish business journalists, PR flunkies and sundry officials to witness a great event - the public flotation of Telecom Eireann.
The puppets were provided by Macnas, the Galway-based theatre group, hitherto known for their street protests theatre and left-of-centre politics, but here fully incorporated into the corporate hubris which was of the Irish boom.
But what must would the writers themselves have thought, spinning in their mostly foreign graves: the impecunious Joyce or the taciturn Beckett, for whom financial patriotism and "fun" street theatre were not high on the agenda and for whom the telephone was hardly humanity's most joyous invention.
But no, the Irish had come to flog themselves and, in true "Jack's army" style, even the dead scribes were being co-opted. Complimentary "full Irish breakfasts" were handed out to bemused yuppies and, inside the exchange, a bodhran was banged instead of a bell to begin the day's trading (a rather different role than Christy Moore might have envisaged when he was beating the humble pigskin in the back bars of Doolin).
Dawn raid, indeed. Truly, the stockbrokers must have felt, like Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities, that "someone was painting them a picture". As would, eventually, the Irish shareholders, since the next time we saw a public event concerning Telecom shares was when angry pensioners were waving them at public meetings. Perhaps we can look back at this giddy New York flotation, and its over-sized puppets, as one of those great symbolic moments in the Irish boom of the late 1990s.
We might also look back at the way it illustrates another development - the wholesale use of writers' images to sell absolutely anything. Where once, especially in the US, it was harps, shamrocks and rolling hills, now it is spiky-haired Beckett, monocled Yeats, and a usually none-too-pleased-looking James Joyce. Foreigners rightly applaud the our sophistication of us in having writers on our banknotes, as opposed to monarchs and war heroes. But is it not because the writers themselves are like currency, an interchangeable medley of famous faces, which can be trotted out for any purpose? As the political culture, and the Catholic Church, become further tarnished, along with other former paragons of virtue (including, ironically enough, the banks themselves, ironically enough), the "wild and noble writers" are elevated, for precisely those qualities that would once have had them excluded: rugged independence, irascible bohemianism and - here we may see their symbolic appeal - an incurable desire to live beyond their means.
It now seems that there is nothing that they cannot unwittingly endorse. We recently had "the world's biggest ferry" named after Ulysses, the world's most unread book, in a launch ceremony presided over by (who else?) An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, a man who always looks like he can't wait to get away from that night's official launch/party/cosmetic promotion and get home to his trusty volume of Shaw or Yeats. And yet the name Ulysses suggests a boat which is unlikely to take the quickest or most straightforward route somewhere. Irish Ferries also has a fast ferry, however, which they it named the Jonathan Swift (Swift, geddit?). But, again, this has connotations of being washed up on a beach somewhere and surrounded by pygmies (although this is to suggest that the people concerned are actually reading the works).
The high, or rather low, point, or rather low point, in all of this (and certainly a low point in Celtic Tiger vulgarity) was the construction of "millionaires row" in Carrickmines Wood, a set of luxury houses, each going for £1million and each named after a dead and unconsulted writer: Joyce, Yeats, O'Casey and, more aptly, Goldsmith. How O'Casey, the inner-city socialist, with his tenement upbringing, might have felt is only to be imagined. Or Joyce, the dedicated metropolitan, whose early fate was usually to find himself in smaller and poorer dwellings as his childhood and youth went on.
Along with Joyce, Kavanagh probably has the most common usage. A poet who once asked to be "commemorated where there is water" has had his wish granted, even when there is none. In his honour, there are two plagues at his Pembroke Road habitat, a canal bank seat and a bronze statue which that appears on RT╔ most evenings before the Six One News. Kavanagh is also spread across umpteen bar walls, dishcloths, bank lobbies and hotel brochures. Again ironic, given the moody Monaghan man's general excoriation of anything he deemed popular or "establishment", be it banks, expensive hotels or the many city pubs which barred him.
This Hall of Fame treatment of our writers is particularly popular in Dublin, the birthplace of most of them (although, curiously, not their death place - they may have had an idea of what was coming). But the cult has also been transferred abroad and, throughout Europe, it is now standard for Irish bars, or any sort of Irish establishment, to put up the famous writers beside the old street signs and the pre-aged medicine bottles. In Dublin, however, they are impossible to avoid: the heroes are hung in the reverential way once reserved for the 1916 martyrs, an irony in itself. It is also in reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, with its endless pictures of Marx, Lenin and Stalin - depending, as with O'Casey, on whether, like O'Casey, he who is in or out of favour.
Over-exposure to these grainy photographs gives them the cosy familiarity of icons, although sometimes you will see the extravagance of oil paintings, such as in bars such as the Palace on Fleet Street, where Kavanagh looks down on the supping faithful like a kindly but stern-faced saint.
Most popular is a set of black-and-white images, in which a Brendan Behan looks like an ageing comic gone to seed, a la Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, while Senator Yeats is puckering his lips like an old drag queen. Kind of appropriate, when you think of how both their careers ended up. These pictures appear everywhere, from O'Brien's sandwich shops to Kehoes pub on South Anne Street. But there is also a composite poster with the full team, including the subs' bench of Millington Synge and Oliver Goldsmith, who don't often get to turn out for the full game. But "gotta collect 'em all", as the Pokemon slogan goes.
With such usage, unfortunate lapses occur in quality control. The Duke Lounge, on Duke Street, has wallpapered the writers up their steep back stairs, so that inebriated revellers, groping for the handrail, have end up scratching the multiple faces of Wilde and Behan. In one pub on Merrion Row, a hand-drawn Joyce appears to be melting, in the style of those "Stoned Again" posters beloved of 1970s students. Meanwhile in O'Reillys, an anguished Shaw wraps his hands around his face as if to say: "Make it stop, make it stop now." But there's no stopping, and further along Baggot Street, Joyce appears on a wall mural next to his friend, Patrick Kavanagh, just as if they were contemporaries, which is, indeed, the effect of all this imagery - the suggestion of some kind of contemporaneous "literary gang".
Joyce's image is probably the most popular, a prospect which might have pleased this most competitive of writers. The James Joyce postcard is the only serious rival, with tourists, to that of the Molly Malone statue (for whom, it seems, a deadly fever does not preclude a winning smile and an unfeasibly large bosom). Joyce has also become synonymous with the Irish pub, which is especially ironic, given that pubs in Joyce's work are usually miserable, mean-spirited places full of rancour and wasted elegance. In Ulysses, it is what Bloom flees from to avoid the ranting Citizen.
But this hasn't stopped the publicans from instituting a ludicrous James Joyce Pub Award, marked by a bronze plague plaque with a tiny sculpted head of Joyce himself. According to the inscription, the award is given to an "authentic public house" which reflects the qualities Joyce appreciated and which "throughout the years has retained its down-to-earth genuineness, friendliness and presence of good company". Recipients include Oil Can Harrys on Mount Street (yes, the one with the loud rock music and glaring neon, and popular with the American College next door). Another winner is the Wellington on Baggot Street Bridge, a chrome and pink-lit youth bar which has been through about four changes of identity in the last few years alone.
So much for authentic consistency. A further recipient is Paddy Cullens late-night bar in Ballsbridge, in which the authentic Joycean dialogue tends to be drowned out by the shrieking of Britney Spears' songs by office workers who didn't go home. Small wonder that the tiny head of Joyce looks like it is grimacing with pain.
The sad thing is that the real venues associated with these writers are being ignored or destroyed. Barney Kiernans pub is gone, as are some of Joyce's former homes. Even small harmless, small touches have been removed. For years, there used to be a brass plague plaque for the Beckett family business on Dublin's Clare Street, a delightful low-key surprise opposite Greene's bookshop.
This meant that, in and around one corner, we had Greene's bookshop, where Joyce used to meet Nora Barnacle; Sweeney's chemist, where Bloom buys the lemon soap in Ulysses; Oscar Wilde's family home on Merrion Square, and the Beckett family business - an amazing conglomeration of associations. But now the plaque is gone. Perhaps to restore it would be cheating a little, but not nearly as much as the blanket use of these writers elsewhere in the culture, including the pumped-up puppets (and I am not referring to the minister) who encouraged being used to encourage innocent people to buy Telecom shares. Now that's what you call feeling cheated.
Eddie Holt returns next week