Seal of approval
As noted here last week, not even Dublin City Council seems to know what its own symbol represents, one of several guesses on the official website suggesting that – the flames issue aside – it features Dublin Castle in triplicate “because of the mystical significance of the number three”.
The second was part of “Silken Thomas” Fitzgerald’s rebellion. The third happened during the War of the Three Kingdoms, when Irish Royalist and Confederate forces tried to capture the city from English republicans under Michael Jones. Senan in any case comes to this subject from the perspective of a fourth, more literary siege. In his 2022 book Helen of Joyce, he argues that Joyce’s Ulysses, rather than being inspired by Homer’s Odyssey alone, is also shot through with another Homeric epic, the Iliad, and thereby with the Trojan War itself.
So much for WB Yeats’s suggestion, in lamenting what he saw as Maud Gonne’s waste of her talents, that early 20th-century Dublin was “No Second Troy”.
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