The closure of Kylemore bakeries in one sense is merely to be expected. After all, business has cycles: the success of the Kylemore bakeries in the past must have been at someone else's expense. That is the nature of commerce; and when Kylemore's competitors faded, their loyal followers presumably deplored their fate.
But it's not just Kylemore. Too much is changing too quickly in Irish life (and in life everywhere) for us to be complacent about the forces at work. For what we are seeing is the rapid extinction of regional forms of commerce, with local names reflecting local tastes and which in turn helped communities shape local identities, local vocabularies, local habits, all within a common and unspoken knowledge that we call lore.
Lore is what enables you understand local jokes without explanation. Lore supplies a vast intellectual framework which can bind commmunities around local knowledge, local individuals, local affairs. Lore is the hidden syntax, the enabler, of non-syntactical exchanges. Johnson Mooney and O'Brien means nothing to a Scot or an Eskimo; but to any Irish person those four words have vast resonances, way beyond any verbal description.
Liverpool merchant
So too Kylemore. What is Kylemore? Well, among other things, an abbey in Connemara, but it was originally built as a luxurious home by a Liverpool merchant called Mitchell Henry at about the same time that in Dublin W.J. Hogan was opening his first bakery, Kilmore, on North Earl Street. It was only when Kylemore ceased to be a private house and became an eminent convent that it assumed its huge (and now much diminished) status in Irish life, one which the Hogan family cleverly exploited by changing the name of the Kilmore bakery to Kylemore, with the logo of the Kylemore turrets to complete the image.
It was a classical example of the convergence of commerce and local myth, local culture and local moral hierarchy; for surely a bread which shared its names and its symbols with one of the most esteemed religious houses in Ireland must mysteriously imbibe some convently virtue? Who knows, maybe even diligent little nuns rose at dawn to bake the scones, baps and fairycakes. And this harmless conceit worked. In 1935, Kilmore had one bakery shop, on North Earl Street. The Kylemore chain which is now closing had 24, supplied by a central bakery in Finglas.
And how symbolic that is; for in the new secular Ireland, most young people wouldn't know the least thing about Kylemore Abbey. If they know the name at all, Kylemore is a bread. The lore which bound up a bakery with a religious order, and within which over time the two exchanged cultural significance - buns becoming mightier than nuns - is now all but extinct.
It is being replaced by an Anglo-American lore which consists of rapidly-changing popular-culture icons, with just a very few local resonances to provide a regional dialect of what is otherwise a global phenomenon.
Consumer reaction
Unless there is a reaction to this process, very little that is recognisably Dublin, or Galway or Cork or Roscommon or wherever will remain. There is no evidence of a serious consumer reaction, as opposed to once-off street disturbances by the dedicated or the demented in Genoa, and the fate of the Kylemore bakery helps tell us why.
Kylemore breads have been replaced in supermarkets in recent years by image-driven, par-baked breads from Cuisine de France. There could be no comparison between a traditional Kylemore baguettes and those from Cuisine de France.
The Kylemore is precision-baked by professionals; its crust was crunchy and flaky, its inside light and airy. With the thick wodges of butter it simply cried out for, it must have kept our heart surgeons well-supplied with holiday homes.
The Cuisine de France batons are well named, for they are as free from that seductive lightness or crunchiness as a police truncheon. They are, however, thoroughly chewy, rather as Kylemore is after about three days, which is perfectly splendid if you have undeveloped jaw muscles which need exercising. Circus strongmen who suspend their spinning wives from their teeth probably swear by Cuisine de France: without their daily C de F chewing exercises, little wifey would have spun through the big top, or - SPLAT! - would have made sawdust strawberry jam for the lions to lick up. C de F has much to recommend it in this regard, but not alas as bread.
Taste and image
Yet Cuisine de France has something far more important than taste: image. Eat Cuisine de France, and mentally, you are not eating Irish bread, but sophisticated Parisian baguettes. For marketeers, the mind wins over the taste-buds - and even the jaw muscles - every time.
While such victories occur, we can be sure our hold over our local lore, over the certainties which bind our platoons, large and small, together, will continue to vanish. High streets across the world are merging into one; food fads move with the speed of e-mails - sun-dried tomatoes one day, caffe latte the next, pesto the next, and squid ink pasta following that.
Yet do not despair. The history of mankind is of cycles, of power moving backwards and forwards between barons and kings, regions and capitals, empires and peoples. The colossal energies which once carved all those nation states out of the empires of Europe might one day discover fresh ways to weld and wield local lores once again. The death of Kylemore might be a milestone towards global homogenisation, or a first milestone in the opposite direction. Time will tell; may it say the latter.