Saying sweet prayers for the gang below my window

IN DUBLIN to promote my book, the taxi drops me at a Georgian house-hotel next to the Dáil.

‘Great’, I think, yawning. ‘Early night for me’. The evening is so hot it doesn’t seem like Ireland, so I open the window. It’s not just air that comes in. Hail Marys through a megaphone come in, too. Then Ave Marias, then invocations for all the saints of Ireland to intercede. Crikey.

I go down to have a look. On the pavement, outside the Dáil entrance, is a group — middle-aged women in pastel clothes, a priest, and youngish chaps, who are wearing red t-shirts printed with the words ‘Youth Defence’. They are holding up a banner that says ‘Rosary Crusade For Ireland’, as the priest drones the Hail Marys into a microphone and the small crowd call their response. On the other side of the gate is a handful of young women, sitting on the pavement, holding up a homemade sign: ‘Keep Your Rosaries Off Our Ovaries’.

Two gardaí, looking a bit hot, stand by the ornate gate of the Dáil. I ask them how long the loudhailer Hail Marys will be going on, because I would quite like to go to sleep. “All night,” says one, glumly. Then a woman grabs the loudspeaker and makes a speech about something called the devil, which sounds a bit cartoony and made-up. More Hail Marys.

It’s very loud. Back in my hotel room, I shut the window, but, this being Ireland, there is no air conditioning, anymore than hotel rooms in sub-Saharan Africa would have central heating. I swelter, relent, and reopen the window. The woman has grabbed the mike again and is building to a fever pitch of vivid rhetoric, before telling everyone that tea and coffee are available from the wagon parked directly under my bedroom window. ‘Oh, God. This could be a long night’.

I phone down to reception, to ask if they know when these people will stop shouting about tea and coffee and the Virgin Mary. “It’s a very sensitive subject,” says the concierge, diplomatically. The crowd outside the Dáil have lit candles, and are still saying very loud prayers.

The priest sings hymns into the mike, but, unfortunately, he is a bit tone deaf. I phone reception again, feeling like Elton John off his head on coke, when he phoned his manager to ask him to make the wind stop whistling around his hotel room in Chicago.

“They said they’d turn off the mike by 10,” says the concierge, even though it’s almost 11. I lie there, sweating, thinking about my early start the next day.

Finally, they turn the amplification off, but the Hail Marys carry on all night. Up the street, in a doorway, a very thin, old homeless man huddles, but everyone ignores him. Nobody brings him a cup of tea, even though he is born, not unborn.