We must puff out our chests and demand the €6m. granted to restore Mayo's Imperial Hotel is utilised

All Ireland Whinger column - by Caoimhín Rowland

Recent news breaking from the county council is one of huge disappointment with regard to one of Mayo’s finest historical landmarks, The Imperial Hotel, Castlebar.

Fantastic opinion pieces have made their way onto the pages of this paper and the latest ruminations are that a majority of elected representatives fancy selling this prime real estate across from the Mall to a private developer.

And why wouldn’t they?

Many of our councillors are auctioneers and estate agents, involved in the property game.

There’s little romance in foreclosing or room for ideas outside the norm away from the binary business of buying and selling.

This idea to put the property up for sale is in stark contrast to public sentiment and goes against the grain of our shared heritage as Mayo and Irish people.

The Land League serves as a crucial reminder of people power, the struggle and the eventual success of a boycott.

People power can breed change and the ideas that emanated from the rooms of the Imperial Hotel had an impact globally as non-violent civil disobedience against the empire inspired many more leaders and movements worldwide.

As Mayo people, we know this county, although small and on the periphery, holds such power.

We’ve no nuclear weapons, warheads or missiles, despite Louis Brennan’s inventions.

But what we possess in spades is soft power, which is defined as “a concept that refers to a country's ability to influence others through non-coercive means such as culture, values, diplomacy and attraction rather than through military or economic might.”

Essentially, it is about shaping the preferences and behaviour of others through positive engagement, rather than through force or coercion. Surely, that sounds familiar.

Here in Mayo, we are rightly proud of our culture, our heritage, literature and music. As we are across the country.

This is widely acknowledged and aids in building a perception of Ireland as the ‘Land of saints and scholars’.

However, let us take a look at the important role Mayo has played in several successful cultural events.

This county of ours regularly punches above its 150,000 or so populated weight.

We take pride in the daughter of Ballina being the first female President, Ballinrobe native Rory O’Neill’s role in the same-sex marriage referendum, as well as the recent Biden visit which saw thousands line the River Moy and millions more watch on globally.

Our rallying call “Mayo for Sam” was bellowed by the most powerful man in the world, not once but twice.

In the literary field, Castlebar’s own Sally Rooney’s depiction of growing up in a mid-sized Irish town culminated in one of the biggest hits of lockdown with the BBC series, Normal People.

Poor Paul Mescal owes his debts to Mayo, his father, Paul Senior, even chose Ballinrobe's Liam Horan’s famed ‘Championship Man’ to recite at Fleadhs.

Any chance you know the only TV series made by RTÉ that sold for a profit? In Castletown, they know that’s for sure.

Swinford’s own Hardy Bucks, when sold to Netflix, generated huge amounts for the state broadcaster. The only Irish series to achieve such a feat. Even the most successful Irish rock band of the current era, The Fontaines D.C., in their ranks possess two men from Castlebar and have achieved ginormous achievements recognised the world over.

Lest we forget Nora Padden, potentially the first Irish astronaut who is from north Mayo.

As we know, J.M. Synge’s trips around rural Ireland finally landed him in Geesala, where he wrote the acclaimed and resonant Playboy of the Western World.

We know what happened when Synge’s farce made it to the Abbey theatre when the third act of the play started.

The audience went absolutely ballistic at Christy Mahon’s line “It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the Eastern World?”

The riot began.

Those words, ‘chosen females’ and the idea of prostitution in lovely Mayo, a place the bourgeois Dublin onlookers have an altogether differing opinion on in their mind's eye, took umbrage to, thus resulting in a moral panic that spread like wildfire.

Going back even further, the first-ever nationally syndicated newspaper column in the USA was a satirical strip monikered ‘Mr. Dooley’, a barman from the west of Ireland running a pub in Chicago and pontificating on the political climate and global affairs of the time while serving beer to his regular patron opposite the counter.

With such popularity, it was read by Theodore Roosevelt in the White House and it was written by a gentleman called Finley Peter Dunne, entirely in the west of Ireland vernacular.

Dunne is said to have parents from Mayo and to give you an example of how he wrote it's hard not to see the influence.

“Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.”

Believe it or not, Dunne, a friend and contemporary of Mark Twain, was ten times more successful than him during their lives, but the history books unfortunately gloss over him.

In distillation, romantic Mayo in my view is fortunately not lost.

It is, I’ll concede, being stifled but the onus is on us as Mayo people to beat the drum, puff out our chests and demand the six million euro that has been granted to the county town to restore the Imperial Hotel and properties surrounding be utilised as a home for our soft power.

If not us, then who will do it?