Property God provides an uplifting experience at County Hall

CORK is indeed the right city to hold the title of European Capital of Culture 2005; it just took me some time to figure out where in the city the ultimate cultural experience is to be had.

Simple reasoning led me to it, and I was not disappointed.

My reasoning went like this: Nietzche said ‘God is dead’, and certainly it appears that the Christian era is over (a few peeks into the empty churches will confirm this).

But if one god is dead another must have taken his place, for nature abhors a vacuum.

By observing the nature of the tracts the modern Irish so keenly read of a Sunday, I was able to deduce that now ‘Property is God,’ and that this new god is alive, well and being worshipped fervently in every parish.

Now, if Property is God, then it follows that the high priests of this new religion must be the planners at County Hall; and given that great religions have always been patrons of the arts and culture, county halls are now the obvious places to go to have real cultural experiences, in the same way that cathedrals once were.

Specifically, in this the year 2005, Cork County Hall must be the place.

On entering the County Hall itself, I was immediately struck by the magnificent cultural homage to Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001 - A Space Odyssey’ in the form of the large, cylindrical crew module from the spaceship in that film now thinly disguised as a council chamber and suspended (rather precariously, I thought) over the heads of the receptionists.

Faux-Cork red marble for a floor and faux-wood on the mezzanine floor above appeared to confirm the presence of alien technology.

“Truly, these creatures are by nature priests, not carpenters,” I said to myself as I looked at planer tear-out, filler and nail-heads visible on the surface of the slatted timbers of the sacred chamber walls, and I started to worry.

I am by nature something of a worrier.

For instance, for some years now I have been concerned not just by the terminal decline in the cohesive substance that held the Irish people together - their religion - but also by the effects on our society of the recent, somewhat secretive and yet central government policy best described as ‘welfare for the rich’... a policy intimately bound up with this wonderful new religion of Property and applied in the form of tax breaks for those deemed sufficiently worthy of this fiscal form of salvation.

Heading towards the lifts, I was thinking, “surely this is the very place where many of the decisions affecting an individual’s relationship with this new god are made... what on earth has become of the egalitarian ideals of the Republic?”

But on entering the device that the man from Kerry famously called “the wee houseen that goes up and down”, my concerns were put to rest by a cultural experience of the very first order.

In County Hall, you are to understand, even the inanimate lifts themselves are irrevocably committed to the manifestation of the complete and ideal republic.

For as the lift rises towards the realm of the high priests, an electronic female voice intones: “urlár a haón”, “urlár a dó”, “urlár a trí”, etc.

Evidently the electronic voice circuits have been programmed in accordance with the uncompromising republican motto: “Tiocfaidh urlár!”

I can recommend this ‘uplifting’ experience to every one of Cork’s famously cultured citizens.

Stan Reynolds

The Old Schoolhouse

Toames West

Macroom

Co Cork