IRELAND DESK

“IT’S A DISGRACE,” said Mutton Ceann, an anti-slavery activist at the Niall of the Nine Hostages Foundation, a Left-Wing Think Tank supported by Hollywood celebrities, frustrated librarians and unemployed revisionist historians. “Dublin was founded on slavery, built on slavery and virtually sweats slavery from its stones. I once had to work here and I hated it, so I know what I’m talking about. How on earth is this city still tolerated? How many thousands of slaves passed through the place, headed for who knows where, condemned to a life of servitude and in the case of women, perhaps a fate worse than death: marriage in some eastern potentiate’s harem. This city should be utterly destroyed. Not a slave stone left.”

Mutton, who says he/she/it/they/them are non-binary fluid in gender, was protesting at Wood Quay, now the location of the City’s administration but decades ago the centre of another protest to preserve the same Viking heritage that the Niall of the Nine Hostages Foundation deplores. “Fascists,” is how Mutton described the previous protesters, who often use to call the city fathers by the same epithet. Plus ca change ..

The current protesters, who are demanding compensation for all the slaves bought and sold in Dublin during the Viking period, are divided as to who should pay the money. Some feel that it should be Denmark given the use of the word “Danes” in Irish accounts of the Battle of Clontarf (1014). Others say that Dublin was quite obviously a Norwegian construct, given the neat layout of its early streets and how long some of them have survived. Indeed, a small fringe see Swedish hands, and point to a similarity to Ikea when arguing that Viking Dublin was almost certainly a pre-fab town, carried with the Viking warriors on raids in case they found a place to establish a settlement for the winter.

As to who would be compensated, it appears the only person brought to Ireland as a slave, who can be verified absolutely, is St Patrick, who himself probably owned slaves. Anyway, he was brought to Ireland hundreds of years before the Vikings, when the Irish were in the slave trade themselves.

“Which brings us to the continued existence of Ireland,” said Mutton. “It’s an absolute disgrace that a country with such a vile history in the slave trade should be allowed to continue to exist. It should be laid waste and renamed.”

And the Irish?

Mutton, who is Irish, refused to be drawn on that. “One, two, three, four, bring this city to the floor,” he/she/it/them shouted.