The Queen's visit has underlines how petty bureaucracy rules

This town is coming like a ghost town. It is Monday. Outside the streets are virtually empty. The Queen isn’t due in Dublin until tomorrow but the city feels deserted. I
wonder why.

At 10 o’clock this morning, there was one car to be seen on Drury Street. Normally there wouldn’t be a parking space available at all, but on this occasion you could have stuck a few buses and an articulated lorry into the wide open spaces. “It’s dead here,” they tell me in the car park. “Everyone thinks they can’t come into town. It’s a disaster.”
Saturday was the same. Tourists walked around, maps in hand, occasionally looking skywards, to observe a building. They must have thought they’d landed in the wrong city. Dublin is supposed to be a vibrant place but there was a feeling of barely-alive about the metropolis, as if the oxygen had been sucked out of it. I checked out one of the major department stores: it was almost completely deserted, a small number of bodies rattling around its cavernous depths. It was like a Monday morning in the rest of the shops. The staff behind the counters looked around desperately for something to do. Smaller shopkeepers wept in frustration. As far as the ordinary business of the the city is concerned you can file the Queen’s visit under “Seemed Like a Good Idea to Someone at the Time.”
Let’s get the political issues out of the way first. I have no time for royalty of any persuasion, whether they’re from Sweden, Spain, England or elsewhere. I’m sure some of them are nice people, but they represent a view of the world that does not deserve the time of day and never did. In particular, I cannot abide the stupid deference with which some Irish people treat the House of Windsor. They are of no interest whatsoever, except in as much as they confirm just exactly what we gained when we styled ourselves as a Republic along French lines. We may, on occasion, have idiots in charge but at least we can throw them out in due course.
The idea that Queen Elizabeth and her greater family have been chosen by some alleged God to rule over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (and indeed the Commonwealth countries) is, of course, feeble-minded nonsense, rooted in feudal times. It is impossible to imagine how any half-intelligent, half-sane person can give the notion even a smidgeon of credence. The whole concept is risible.
But then, while so many of us here in this little neck of the woods remain in thrall to the equally ridiculous and reactionary office of the Pope, we can hardly claim any high moral ground. Religion is, one (ahem) accepts, a slightly more cerebral area, touching on elements of human experience that might not yet be amenable to purely rational analysis. Fine. But it still beggars belief – given what we now know about the origins of planet earth, when the very ancient ancestors of homo sapiens first got up on their hind legs and started to act in a human-like way and so on – that the Christian myth still enjoys such widespread credence, as if heaven and hell, purgatory, damnation, redemption and related human inventions were indeed the work of a far-seeing divine designer.
All of these notions were coined not in any imaginary heaven but right here on earth. At least the religious impulse, in whatever guise it presents itself, has at its heart a grand conceit that makes it semi-forgivable – the idea of saving people’s immortal souls. But the Monarchy is just about money, the maintenance of privilege and the preservation of the assumption of entitlement on the part of the few. Should we therefore protest against the Queen’s visit? In truth, I don’t see the point. For a start, someone invited her here. Our beef therefore, is not with her but with whoever among our own politicians, probably President McAleese, decided it would be a good idea. And secondly, whatever we might think about monarchies, for the moment at least she is a visiting head of state. It is up to the British people if they want to unseat her and the rest of the royal mob. Until they do, where’s the percentage in Irish people insulting the majority of British people with a show of ungraciousness?
If there was the slightest possibility that some tangible good might come of making a lot of noise on the streets, then I’d be all for it. But there is no prospect of that. And so they are best ignored and left to get on with it, with a minimum of unnecessary fuss or disruption.
But of course that isn’t the way things are
done here.
As the Queen is on Irish soil, the authorities here need to take appropriate security measures. No argument. There are lunatics on the fringe of the remnants of the Republican movement who might just think it was worthwhile taking a pot shot if they were given half a chance. But, as ever in Ireland, instead of keeping things tight, the securocrats have spread the disruption in the most hamfisted way. In the process, they have discommoded citizens and risked completely wrecking business for everyone in the centre of Dublin for an entire week. And the same in Cork, where the Queen is also visiting.
This is the way the Gardaí work. Their only concern in relation to public events is to make their own lives easier. And so, in this instance, they created the impression that there were huge restrictions in place in the centre of Dublin from Saturday onwards. As a result, the place virtually ground to a halt.
In fact, it was possible on Saturday to drive into town and park in the centre without even being looked at by a cop. The same on Sunday. And again on Monday.
We had all heard the scare stories. Roads would be closed. There would be no on-street parking. Every car was going to be searched. And so on. Who needs the hassle? A lot of people responded simply by staying at home. This is what the Gardaí wanted. No skin off their noses. A quiet day at the office. They don’t give a damn that the city is like a morgue. They don’t care that businesses might go to the wall because of the loss of a week’s trade.
In far too many ways, every other segment of society is forced to bow to the dictates of the Gardaí. It is why the madness of Dublin’s early closing times persists. It is why a once-great capital is now looked on as a curious relic of some pre-historic time by so many young Europeans. It is why a gathering of more than 12 people constitutes a riot.
And if it isn’t the Gardaí that are crushing people’s capacity to operate, it is one or other of the multitude of bureaucrats and inspectors that have infiltrated virtually every aspect of life here to chronically limiting effect. I was in Lisbon recently and visited a fine restaurant, with a buzzing atmosphere, on the top floor of a tower, above an arts centre, on the top of a hill in the elevated Alfama district. To get to the restaurant, you had to clamber up a narrow wrought-iron spiral staircase. It is a magnificent location offering a spectacular view over the city – but there is no way that the restaurant would be allowed to operate in Ireland because Irish regulations would deem the staircase to be ‘too narrow’.
Similarly, I was on the mezzanine of a brilliant, bustling, wonderfully amospheric Moroccan restaurant in Paris a few years ago and it was the same story: the authorities here would have had it closed down in a jiffy because of the tightness of the walkways. But these businesses are central to the character and appeal of cities, where the best possible use of old buildings is being made without people having to invest a fortune in redesigning and rebuilding them. And it is the same in bars, clubs and venues. The dead hand of bureaucracy stifles everything here and makes it far harder to operate in Irish cities than elsewhere.
To far too great an extent, pettiness, rigidity and an obsession with bureaucratic detail have become the dominant concern of the authorities in Ireland. Our institutions are run by people who don’t just not care about businesses, but who also don’t care about people or how much they are inconvenienced in the interests of maintaining someone’s idea of law and order.
The Queen’s visit has demonstrated this once again, in a spectacular and hugely damaging way. I hope it all goes off without anyone getting hurt, and the same for President Obama’s short stay. But when it is all over, we need to start to unloosen the dead hand of bureaucracy, the limitations on personal freedom and the debilitating effect all of this has on Irish life.