Tony Blair's book signing in Dublin mixes Good Friday with bad Iraq
Literature and politics have always laid claim to Dublin's O'Connell Street, bookended by statues of James Joyce and Catholic emancipator Daniel O'Connell. Tony Blair, in his modest way, was no doubt hoping connections would be made with both traditions by choosing to launch A Journey here yesterday morning.
Easons bookshop has been on this site since 1917, the year after the Easter Rising, which began on the steps of the GPO next door. By starting his brief book tour here, the former prime minister was italicising those chapters concerning the Good Friday agreement, of which he is most proud. Having read most of memoir overnight, I would have to say the Joycean association also holds true, however. Not for the deathless prose, but for the affinities with that other rambling self-obsessive, Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.
All first-time authors dream of stopping the traffic; with the assistance of a security operation costing tens of thousands of pounds, Blair managed to bring a large part of the Saturday morning city to a halt. By the time he arrived in a blacked-out motorcade, and was hustled in through the bookshop doors under an umbrella and past the three-for-two offers, O'Connell Street and Dublin's main tramline had been shut all morning. The store was hemmed in on two sides. Those waiting in line at the side entrance for a chance to buy a book outnumbered those arguing that he "shouldn't be writing books, he should be doing time", out at the front, by about three to one.
Literary criticism comes in many forms, but the Stop the War Coalition are not the most nuanced of deconstructionists. As any writer will testify, the most demoralising response to a book signing is to stay away, leaving the author grinning at the back of the shop, brandishing his pen in expectation.
Instead, 100 or so protesters kept up a chorus of "Butcher Blair" for nearly three hours outside the bookshop entrance (no doubt outraged about Tony's grasp of syntax and services to cliché). A smattering of stones and coins landed around the car as he drew up and three people were arrested after a scuffle.
Blair knows this audience, he confides in his memoir, though on this evidence he seems to have given up on his confidence that even he, the great communicator, can reach them. "We are like two people standing either side of a thick pane of glass trying to have a conversation," he observed of his public at one point. "I thought and still think they could be persuaded, but when I spoke they couldn't hear me and after a time they stopped trying to."
Some were determined in Dublin that these glass walls should be broken down; a few protesters even went to the trouble of queueing to make their judgments on his book in person. Kate O'Sullivan, a 24-year-old from Cork, and a member of the "Irish Palestinian Solidarity Movement", got past the concentric rings of security that involved Garda and Special Branch and Emergency Response Units, and while Blair scribbled his signature informed him: "Mr Blair I am here to make a citizen's arrest for the war crimes you have committed." She was dragged away, she said, by five security people.
Others didn't get that far. Niall Farrell, whose sister Mairead was, he says, "killed in Gibraltar by another British prime minister in 1988", had "wanted to give Blair a taste of Iraqi hospitality by hurling his shoe" at the author.
He had worn his slip-on Birkenstocks especially, but didn't make it past the scrutiny of the bookshop muscle. "The worst of it was," he said, "I had already bought a book by the time I was turned out." After some protest he managed to secure a refund.
However, at least as many had come to support Blair as to protest. A local man named John O'Connell expressed the sentiment of several others when, clutching his book under his arm, he explained: "I know Iraq is going to be written on his gravestone, but there should be a place there on it for what he has done for peace in Ireland also."
He was glad he came, though the experience was surreal. "You hand over your wallet, your phone and your address, then you get a ticket. You exchange that for a wristband, then you are brought up to the second floor by escalator, you are taken around and around the bookstacks past a cordon of Garda and special branch, in a loop, and your book is taken off you, and he signs it and says hello."
Personal greetings were apparently outlawed, along with anything in the way of authorial small talk.
Despite an apocalyptic thunderstorm, some had been here since two in the morning. At the front of the queue a Wimbledon-style bonhomie prevailed. Third in line Patrick Marshall said he had travelled down straight after Blair's appearance on RTE's Late, Late Show on Friday night because he felt he wanted to show support for a man who was getting "far too much stick. I mean he was asked whether his son Leo was planned or not..."
The television interview dwelt on Blair's conversion to Catholicism, a subject of much debate among those seeking an audience in Dublin. They are disappointed to discover that, despite the spiritual connotation of his title, his book strangely doesn't do God. Though he says towards the end that "religion always interested him more than politics" there is, I tell them, not a mention of a prayer or even a biblical reference. The solitary reference to the saviour is the messiah complex that Jonathan Powell attributes to him. The only index entry under "church" is Charlotte, who once sang at a rally.
The signing lasts for two hours, during which time the protesters are joined by the Hare Krishna proprietors of an Indian restaurant, who come out to drum up custom. Among the last to emerge are two who epitomise the contradictions that Blair's book, with its curious mix of wide eyed naivety and towering hubris, seems designed to excite.
Aidan Walsh, an IT manager from Tyrone, got up at 4am to drive down to Dublin. "Because I grew up in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, I've never been to a book signing before. I went to school when the hunger strikes were on; we all knew those who had been shot and killed, and if any single man put a stop to it, it was probably him. I wanted to acknowledge what he had done." Brendan Pierce was less enamoured. "I felt I had to go and see the gobshite in person," he said. "It's surreal in there. I had to hand the book over. He looked at me. I said to meself, 'What's he got to smile about?' I was going to throw it at him, throw it back in his stupid smiling face, but they've thought of that. They take the book off you first." As he walked away he dropped the signed first edition in the nearest bin.
The author himself appears serenely unaware of both his devotees and his critics. For a man who claims to have had premonitions of John Smith's death in 1994, who suggests straight- faced that he discovered much of his philosophy for foreign policy while watching Schindler's List, who is prepared to write of his sense of destiny to become prime minister "this is mine. I know it and I'll take it", none of this probably seems too unusual.
He is removed from the building without seeing the light of day, driven at high speed to the next leg of A Journey that shows no sign of getting less surreal.
