Terry Prone: I learned to shout properly during my trip on Dublin’s Viking Splash tour

Yes. I did clamber into a thing that looks like an overgrown skip on wheels to whiz around Dublin roaring at passers-by

Sore-throated from yelling, we all dispersed after our Viking Splash tour — the jet-lagged to go to hotel beds, the rest to buy coffee or ice-creams. File picture: Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews

Letting a sudden yell at law-abiding citizens and tourists, thereby causing them to drop their phones and spill their iced coffees, is not the behaviour expected of Irish Examiner columnists, but that’s what I was doing last Thursday afternoon. Repeatedly. The citizens and tourists took it remarkably well and the occasional passerby even smiled and saluted.

The Viking Splash is the bright yellow vehicle that looks like an overgrown skip on wheels which transports people wearing horned Viking helmets on a tour of Dublin, starting from the north end of Stephen’s Green. Not that you can just rock up to the Green and get on one of the vehicles.

So popular is the tour that booking well in advance on the efficient Viking Splash website is essential. When I climbed the stairs to the seats, a guy down the front looked at me with such hostility, I defensively waved my tickets at him. He demanded to know which tour I proposed to join. The three-thirty, I told him. Gone, he said. How could it be gone, at ten past three, I demanded. He shrugged. Gone.

Our tour guide insisted our initial attempt at roaring was not sufficiently raucous so he coached us until he was satisfied with the quality of our yelling. File picture: Patrick Bolger  

It took me another three sad seconds to realise that he was sending me up rotten and that I was in the right place at the right time. I sat down and tried on the horned helmet. My hair being in a pony tail meant that it would tilt forward, preventing me seeing anything, so I put it on the floor and watched later passengers arriving. 

One woman from New Jersey told me she’d waited six years for this trip and was SO excited, she’d heard so much about it. Lauren from Boston, who sat beside me, was fresh off a flight from the US along with four girlfriends.

A guy with a mop of curly hair arrived up the steps at the back and demanded to know where people were from. Five from Boston, three from Philadelphia, four from Seattle, two from India, and a scatter of others. I seemed to be the only Irish adult present.

The guy introduced himself as Vinnie. He was in charge. Which meant he was going to enforce health and safety rules while ridiculing them. Heads and arms were to be kept inside the vehicle. We were to be seatbelted in, except later on when we went on water, because being belted to seven tons of metal was not recommended in the event of accident afloat.

We were to shout raucously when he went “One, Two, Three,” and he would now try us out. 

“One, Two, Three,” he went, and the passengers made noise.  Not good enough, he indicated, like an old vaudevillian or a Butlin’s redcoat back in the day.  Going to give us another chance to get it right. We ready? Dozens of horned heads obediently nodded. 

“A-one, a-two, a-three,” he repeated, and beamed acceptance of the responsive roar.

He then got behind the wheel of the thing, made some snide comments about its engine, and headed off towards Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, telling the tourists that on the right was Grafton St, Dublin’s poshest shopping area. Of course, he added, all the same shops were in Henry St on the northside with the exception of Brown Thomas. 

Dublin's civic offices under construction at Wood Quay in 1980. Vinnie, our tour guide, described the controversy about the rapid development on top of the remains of the Viking settlement. Irish Examiner Archive picture: Donal Sheehan

The people in the vehicle were like a Saturday night audience for a comedy show; willing, nay, positively eager to laugh, even if half the time they had no clue what Vinnie was on about, and even if his presentation was shot through with an irony none of them seemed to understand.

When Christchurch was built in the eleven hundreds, he told them, it was the highest point on the south side of the city, which is why High St was so called — unlike most city High Streets, the title of this one referred to its elevation. This was one of the location-specific but otherwise random bits of information he imparted. No string connected the bits, so Pádraig Pearse appeared, it seemed, mainly to be executed. None of us minded the lack of narrative because, half the time, we were wondering if we’d heard him right. Like when he claimed that Vikings had encased coins in beeswax and stuffed them into their unshaven armpits for storage. And that, Vinnie assured us, was just the female Vikings.

In sharp contrast with the beeswax and the armpits, Vinnie hit the high moral ground when we arrived at Wood Quay, portraying what had been done to create space for a godawful corporation building as a civic disgrace. Several groups of potential Viking yell victims went unmolested while he furiously described how activists at the time protested against this, how the archaeologists were given just one year to investigate a massive site, and told of all the Viking artifacts they’d uncovered.

From our double-decker height, it was possible to see how the paving stones had been laid out to illustrate buildings which had once been there, based on evidence found during the dig. 

At Grand Canal Dock, we were stuffed into water safety jackets, and huge metal sausages of air were secured around the vehicle in less time than it takes to tell you about it. Then we were down a slope and into the water. Vinnie showed us the studios where U2 record and made cracks about Bono walking to them on the water.

Kids were cannon-balling into the cold water in the sunshine while we learned of the medieval executions that took place in the area and how the dead were placed in metal cages up high pour encourager les autres. He also talked of a leper colony, efforts to escape from which were defeated using long poles which he claimed had led to the expression “wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole”.

'Only in Dublin would you have a tour guide showing off the city who would do a three-minute severely contemptuous riff rubbishing the street art'. File picture

This, in other circumstances, might have met with some historical scepticism but the sun was warm on our shoulders, the vehicle was lumpily efficient in the water, and nobody was going to argue with Vinnie. 

He had the general air of an actor or standup comic who had bested recalcitrant hecklers in theatres or nightclubs. Only in Dublin would you have a tour guide showing off the city who would do a three-minute severely contemptuous riff rubbishing the street art outside the waterside theatre, undeterred by his largely American audience from sideswiping the originating US artist.

On the way back to Stephen’s Green, Vinnie gave a brief history of the vehicle in which we were travelling, claiming most of them had been made by women personified by Rosie the Riveter who worked in shipyards during the Second World War while their menfolk were at the front.

Then he indicated we should not restrain ourselves from being positive about him on Tripadvisor and, sore-throated from yelling, we dispersed, the jet-lagged to go to hotel beds, the rest to buy coffee or ice-creams and relish the golden dying of the day.