The votes are in.

Last week, with a Currys PC World Voucher worth 20 big ones (€20) on offer, I asked you to name your favourite song by a Scandinavian artist?

You replied in your dozens, providing a Nordiculously decent playlist of seriously-sound Scandi choonage

But there could be only one winner.

Third Place:

We’re from Barcelona by I’m from Barcelona

Col writes:

“I saw this Swedish band in Galway many moons ago: 29 band members, many instruments and plenty of confetti, it was such an amazing live experience!”

Runner-up:

Slipping Through My Fingers by ABBA

Millie Bobby Brownie writes:

“I have a special place in my heart for this song. My own little lady is growing up much too quickly for my tastes and this beautiful, bittersweet song always makes me stop and appreciate every small moment with her, every funny little quirk, and appreciate how lucky I am to have a child like her.”

Winner:

Quiet Night by Anna Ternheim

Harry Warren writes:

“I nominate the haunting song that was used as the theme tune for the best Nordic noir TV series, the Swedish/Svensk version of Wallander. It breathes that dark part of Swedish society: cold, lonely, sad, perfect for Krister Henriksson‘s interpretation of Wallander.”

Nick says: Thanks all.

Currys Pc World

Dublin’s Diving Bell.

Harry Warren writes:

Strolling along Dublin’s Docklands today and being of a certain age you may notice that the city quays have changed so much over the years that it can be hard to recognise them. Old dilapidated once busy warehouses and depots are now modern apartments and office blocks.

Standing along the North Wall Quays and looking across the other side of the river Liffey, I often noticed what I incorrectly thought was the remains of an industrial chimney of some sort on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. On closer inspection it is an amazing piece of Dublin’s industrial maritime heritage and its story should be told.

The orange painted Dublin Diving Bell was used in the building of Dublin Port and its quays and walls. It is a remarkable feat of Irish engineering. The bell was designed by a Victorian port engineer with the wonderful name of Bindon Blood Stoney and it was constructed by Grendon and Co. in Drogheda. It went into operation in 1871 and was used in the building and maintenance of Dublin Port and the Port’s quay walls right up until 1958.

Bindon Blood Stoney was a superb engineer, not only did he design the Diving Bell and its associated equipment, he also engineered the Boyne Viaduct in Drogheda, the renewal of Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge (then Carlisle bridge) and the quay walls including Sir John Rogerson’s Quay and North Wall Quay Extension.

Stoney became Chief Engineer at Dublin Port in 1867 and his engineering expertise transformed the port. Half the quays along the Liffey were converted into deep-water quays using his new and ground breaking method of underwater construction which he had first advocated in 1861.

Huge concrete blocks weighing an amazing 350 tons were constructed on a purpose-built block wharf and then positioned into place utilising a specially engineered crane, a “floating shears” designed by Stoney. Workers in Stoney’s Diving Bell had levelled the Liffey river bed readying it for the placement of the massive concrete blocks.

Stoney described his method in a paper, ‘On the construction of harbour and marine works with artificial blocks of large size’, delivered to the Institution of Civil Engineers in London in 1874, winning the Institution’s Telford Medal and Premium for that year.

Stoney also designed the largest in their day, hopper barges, for dredging the port to keep it free from silt which was collected and deposited out at sea. Unusually for the time he was also responsible for introducing a graduated pensions scheme for his workers.

Standing in front of the ninety-ton Diving Bell along Sir John Rogerson’s Quay you will see it is quite large. The height from the top of the access shaft to the base of the air-lock chamber is forty-four feet. The bell chamber where five men worked in very harsh conditions is twenty feet square in area and the access shaft with its airlock chamber is three feet in diameter.

The bell had six and a half feet of headroom inside. A steam powered barge with lifting gear and a horizontal air pump accompanied the Diving Bell, pumping compressed air into the bell chamber at 20lbs per square inch. Even though the surrounding water cooled the air going to the bell chamber, men working in the chamber found the air and temperature oppressively hot.

In later years the chamber had an electric light and a telephone connection and the men worked in five-hour shifts. They also had to take account of the tides, resulting in going down in the bell in the small hours of the morning or very late at night.

Working in such harsh conditions and such high pressure, many men suffered burst ear drums and bleeding from their nose and ears. The effects of the air pressure on men’s lungs were severe and coughing was very painful. As a result of working in the bell it was said one individual could whistle through his ear!

Despite the very harsh working conditions and throughout the history of the diving bell, there is no recorded instance of any serious accident or fatality. Not only was the Diving Bell used in Dublin Port it was also used in laying the foundations for the Bull Wall Lighthouse and laying concrete reinforcing blocks around the Poolbeg lighthouse.

Today, the Diving Bell sits atop a two-metre-high plinth. When it is again open to the public the plinth allows visitors to walk under the bell chamber and experience a sensory water feature that gives a hint of what it was like working in the chamber. There is also audio-visual information telling the story of the bell and the brave workers who built Dublin Port.

So, the next time you are in that part of the Quays enjoy a marvellous piece of Victorian engineering and give a nod to the hard-working Dubliners who courageously worked under the Liffey’s waters.

All pics by Harry Warren

Meanwhile…

Al writes:

Further to Harry’s article about the Diving Bell…please see this short documentary (above) The Coop produced for Dublin Port about same…

From top: A still from Give Up Yer Auld Sins (2001); David Langwallner

Several years ago, I gave a talk on The Common Causes of Miscarriages of Justice in The University of Milan, subsequently published by Kluwer.

Professor Luca Luparia, an estimable man, but I suspect a very religious man, always perhaps a failing, took me to a lovely little church full of Christian bones and skeletons. An ossuary. Perhaps a lesson or an intimation or the sort of lesson I have always resisted. Santuario Di San Bernardo 10 minutes walk from Duomo, but a world apart.

Well I do not want to meet my maker yet Luca? I choose the light Eros not Thanatos and I certainly do not want to be thrown to the lions. That is, if I can choose? Can anyone? We are all powerless before god and acts of god, to use a legalism which describes the pandemic.

Though the persecution of the Christians evident in the ossuaries is yet another example of awful human barbarism, there are others such as the Crusades or the destruction of Inca civilization by venereal disease on behalf of the church,or all sorts of pogroms and acts of genocide. secular, tribal, religious or atheist. Crimes against Humanity.

It should be noted that the barbarities of virus lockdowns have no intrinsic demonised enemy, as in other such crimes, though the weak suffer the most. Thus compassion, christian or secular compassion or indeed moderation, l vote in favour and it is not much in evidence in these awful times.

Also pertinent In Milan is Santa Maria Delle Grazie where Da Vinci’s restored but battered Last Supper resides. Now I am not a fan of the clunky prose and dubious speculations of Dan Brown, but it is a fact that the church suppressed the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the fallen woman. Mary Magdalene is, of course, the inspiration, such an oddly resonant word, for the Magdalene Laundries.

I visited another Catholic bone ossuary subsequently in Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic while a visiting professor. I am a terrible cultural omnivore and it had exactly the same effect in terms of memory and reflection. Memory of the history of infamy as detailed above.

Let us atone for our sins? Give Up Yer Aul Sins, as in the title of a CD and an Oscar-Nominated animation. The church profited from at the expense of children as they often do and still do and I historically represented a client who was not compensated by them, but oddly by EMI based in London.

So she was abused or exploited also by the church as they did in the persecution of the Magdalene Laundries and the non-payment of compensation. Here is the video they made millions from featuring her as a five year old.

Some souls are worth more than others? Some girls or indeed boys are better than others? Sinners are discounted or exploited. In God we Trust Inc.?

Though in this day and age we have all been thrown to the lions, not least by the greed, not just of rapacious Catholicism and consiglieres to the Vatican such as Mr Peter Sutherland, but to the world wide wealth cartelisation and the corruption and manipulation of the innocent.

And now Ulster Bank is leaving the country and Goldman Sachs and Cerberus will likely step in. More evictions and repossessions in the centre of the storm of a global pandemic.
So the full force of our odium and contempt should not be reserved for those who seek to break minor lockdown regulations. It is a misplaced moral outrage.

The full force of odium should be reserved for those that murder, for that is what is is, children and babies in Magdalene Launderies and Mother and Baby Homes and those that cover the deeds up in useless reports and time delays with a very belated and pointless act of apology or exploit children reciting bible stories for commercial gain to line the coffers of the church and their own pockets. To baby farm the innocent. Or use vulture funds and corporate transnational entities to funnel wealth out of the country while evicting those in the country.

Throwing Christians to the lions with politics, bread and circuses and a vastly overstated emergency at one level that is pandering to excessive compliance, control and the destruction of liberal democracy, as Lord Sumption argues, as well as the obliteration of the leisure and small business community.

The full force of odium should be dedicated against the inappropriate adults in the room creating a Road To Serfdom for all the children and indeed child adults of the universe.

So awful though the Magdalene laundries and other historic crimes against humanity were and are in certain sectors of the globe let us focus on the present crimes against humanity of economics and ecocide and the all too obvious creep of a police and authoritarian state morphing the universe into a form of sanitised Chinese capitalism where as all the indicators show the major corporations and law firms have had profits escalate during the pandemic and one wonders why?

Who is profiting from what. the infliction of misery, the selling of dud products, the mining of our identities or perhaps an even more complex derivative for the further cartelisation of wealth into ever narrower hands,

The trends Arundhati Roy identified in Capitalism A Ghost Story (2014) where huge swathes of India were dispossessed and left to die or simply murdered have taken an insidious grip in the developed world and It is tolerably clear who are suffering and stand to lost their jobs and livelihoods and, as Sumption and I both maintain, that precious sliver of protection afforded by civilisation and liberal democracy of rights of liberty, movement and privacy.

The thin blue line steadily eroded. a kind of reversion to a form of social primitivism. The dying of the light.

David Langwallner is a barrister specialising in public law, immigration, housing and criminal defence including miscarriages of justice. He is emeritus director of the Irish innocence project and was Irish lawyer of the year at the 2015 Irish law awards. His column appears here every Tuesday and Friday. Follow David on Twitter @DLangwallner

Brownbag Films

Government sources have told The Irish Times that Level 5 restrictions will stay until April

Instead of spokespeople who speak
Our leaders have leakers who leak
It’s just how they choose
To handle bad news
Without tarnishing their mystique

John Moynes

RollingNews

Meanwhile…

Broadsheet.ie