Books of Evidence – Frank McNally on a Dublin Garda station’s homage to literature

Walking past the new(ish) Kevin Street Garda station a while back, I was arrested – in a manner of speaking – by the art installation embedded in the railings and on the building behind them.

It comprises a literary history of Ireland in quotations dating back more than a millennium and cut into metal panels or etched into the wall.

The result is both a wonderful and, considering the context, incongruous celebration of Irish literature.

I imagined the gardaí inviting all the country’s famous writers, living and dead, into Kevin Street for questioning, then warning them that anything they said might be taken down and used as fence decoration.

In any case, there on the station’s Bride Street side is the mythological Amergin, chief poet of the Milesians, making a personal statement about his shape-shifting powers:

I am a wind on a deep lake

A tear the sun lets fall

A hawk above the cliff

There too is an unnamed 11th-century bard, as also translated from the Irish, expressing the opinion (hard to argue with during last weekend’s storms): “Autumn is an excellent season for staying at home.”

Further along the railing, we reach the 1700s, where a cynical Jonathan Swift (who didn’t have far to come in for questioning, being dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral around the corner) says: “Promises and piecrust are made to be broken.”

Then there is Edmund Burke: “We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.”

And so it goes via GB Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce into modern times, where women belatedly get a look-in. Via Jennifer Johnston, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paula Meehan, they make a strong finishing burst before the railing ends at Kevin Street corner.

One of the last quotations is from Kerry Hardie: “To remember in a time of forgetting.” Which is indeed the sort of thing a Garda interviewer might encourage.

Amid the eclectic selection from 1,500 years of Ireland’s oral and written tradition, not the least impressive inclusion is this reflection on mortality by another anonymous bard, the 19th-century author of The Waxies’ Dargle:

“Here’s a nice bit of advice/I got from an old fishmonger/When food is scarce and you see the hearse/You know you died of hunger.”

Most of the quotations are horizontal, but many are perpendicular, so that you too have to bend over sideways to read them. This can earn you funny looks from passersby, if they look at all.

But my impression is that most walkers don’t even see the railings, rushing past on this commuter route between Christ Church and Portobello.

As for those in traffic, the small-print literary tribute is even more lost on them. So despite its dramatic juxtaposition, I fear that this may be one of the more underappreciated art works in Dublin too.

It was the stated aim of the Office of Public Works architects who designed the station “to move away from the idea of the Garda barracks and to a public building”.

That may explain why there was no room among the quotations for John McGahern, whose debut novel was The Barracks.

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Flann O’Brien didn’t make the cut either, for “Is it about a bicycle?” or any other line from The Third Policeman.

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And another notable omission is Brendan Behan. Which may be ironic – because there was a writer “known to the gardaí” in every sense – but also understandable.

His play The Quare Fellow was inspired by a spell in Mountjoy Prison for attempted murder of two Garda detectives. Whatever about recording his statements on file inside, it might be too much to expect to see them advertised on the railings.

The unprepossessing Bride Street is not exactly tourist-trail Dublin, except for the bit that looks on to St Patrick’s Park.

Even so, the park is flanked on the southside by the aforementioned Garda station and on the north by the Iveagh Flats. And those two very different complexes could now bookend a short walking tour.

In contrast with the station’s extracts from Ireland’s greatest writers, the small plaques on the Iveagh walls – which continue all the way around the block – feature quotations from unnamed current and former residents.

Chosen by the artist Chris Reid from interviews made 20 years ago, the extracts range from the pleasantly banal – “I am lucky to have this flat. It is all I really have and I really adore it” – to the traumatised memories of a son with an angry father:

“Sometime in the 1960s he caught me mitching from school and gave me an awful hiding. Ripped the clothes off me, lashed me with the belt and punched me in the eyes.”

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But a few bring moments of the distant past back to life with writerly economy. Such as this one, remembering Nicholas Street in the middle of the last century:

“The hill was steeper, the street narrower. The surface was all cobblestones. When winter weather made them freeze, horses struggled to climb. Sparks flew from their hooves.”