TRAM(P) LAUNCH OF STRUMPET CITY ONE CITY ONE BOOK

Irish Times report by Patsy McGarry, March 26th, 2013 – Picture collage by James L Kelly courtesy of Dublin City Libraries

Siptu president Jack O’Connor was struck yesterday by parallels between the Dublin of 2013 and that of 100 years ago. He had been at a photo shoot outside the Custom House, part of the relaunch of James Plunkett’s Strumpet City, which deals with the 1913 lockout in Dublin . It is the City Libraries Dublin: One City One Book for 2013.
“On e of the things that struck me, as we were taking photographs and so on, there was a homeless man asleep at the steps of the Custom House there in the freezing cold,” Mr O’Connor said at Liberty Hall yesterday. “It struck me that the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
The book provided “a graphic depiction of a major unfolding event in a flawed society . . . which paralleled major events in Western/developed capitalism, because the great battle which was fought out in these streets was symptomatic of something that was happening throughout what was then the UK,” Mr O’Connor said.
It was “ultimately a conflict between two sets of values, the values some people chose subsequently in revisionist Ireland to describe as the values of the slum, interdependence, collective solidarity versus the values of the quick buck”. Heroic resistance “That heroic resistance was ultimately channelled into the narrow culdesac of nationalism . . . which resulted in the defeat of the values of collective solidarity.”
It has meant “that we end up for t he third time in 60 years confronted by a major existential crisis which continues to challenge our very existence as a sovereign state.”
Mr O’Connor said we should “abandon the values system that has taken us to this sorry place once again and embrace instead the values of collective solidarity to inform the building of a new republic”.