Inspired by Jim McCann’s song, “Rare Ould Times.”
In one verse, he sings:
“Cause Dublin keeps on changing, and nothing seems the same
The Pillar and the Met have gone, the Royal long since pulled down
As the grey, unyielding concrete, makes a city of my town.”
I assume “the Pillar” is the old pillar where Lord Nelson’s statue used to stand by the General Post Office, before the IRA blew it up back in the Sixties.
But what are “the Met” and “the Royal”? And what would those landmarks mean, emotionally, to an old-timer in Dublin?
The song came to mind the other day, oddly enough, when I heard a group of Austinites making the same complaints growth and change in that Austin that McCann’s narrator was making about Dublin in that song.
That was part of what made the song a classic- it was both very local AND wonderfully universal (an old man in almost ANY major city on Earth can look around, shake his head and mutter, “I don’t recognize this place… this isn’t the town I grew up in”).