The new passport design…a melting pot of Irishness
The new Irish passport is rather wonderful - a montage of graphics, images, music and writing communicating our Celtic past and present - ideal if you’re stuck on a plane with no reading material other than the mildly depressing Skyshopping and Skycafé. The intriguing way each page-edge on the new passport depicts half of a Custom House river headstone* that can be curled to reunite with its other half on the previous page is, by a long shot, the best feature of the whole booklet. In fairness it must have been a political and creative nightmare deciding on what to include (and what to leave out) – hence the odd melting pot of Irishness we’ve ended up with.
However, on close inspection some of the graphic design raises questions: why, for example, was the Convention Centre and the Aviva Stadium allowed such a strong billing in our national identity document? The Convention Centre is already at odds with the architectural sight line along the river, but its ugliness is only highlighted by the comparative elegance and diminutiveness of the Samuel Beckett Bridge. The bridge itself probably doesn’t best illustrate Beckett’s minimalism – but featuring the enormous listing beer can in the background is for me, er, a bridge too far.
On other pages the Aviva stadium looks like a spaceship that has just landed in Sandymount - the houses depicted here are cosy, snug and rural with their backs to the stadium. Is this really Sandymount? Are the residents not aware of the giant rubber tyre in a strange topological collapse behind them? Was it included as a nod to rugby because Gaelic players in Croke Park were already featuring on other pages?
The runes add a nice Irish hieroglyphic feel; the National anthem music is appropriate; the Tara brooch is intricate and delicate; but the last modern building depicted (between Croagh Patrick and James Orr’s poem “The hedge-hauntin’ blackbird”) puzzles me. Once again it looms in a disproportionate way to the buildings it runs alongside – trompe l’oeil gone wrong. What building is it? Where is it? Why is it included?
Anyway, the thing is here to stay for the next while so we’ll have to get used to it. A relative of mine renewed her passport about five years ago. Not one to risk identity theft, she carefully followed the instructions to dispose of the old one: as advised she cut it up into pieces (and she told me this wasn’t easy or quick as the cover is made of a toughened plastic). Not a good moment when she discovered that she had cut up her new passport into hundreds of pieces - and there was the old one, lying forlorn, with just four little corners of Ireland missing. The return of the chopped up passport in a plastic bag must have brightened up some official’s day on Molesworth Street.
*The fourteen river headstones were designed by sculptor Edward Smyth for James Gandon’s Custom House. They are based on the traditional classical motifs of the river gods and incorporate the principal features of the counties through which the rivers flow: Bann, Barrow, Nore, Blackwater, Boyne, Erne, Foyle, Lagan, Lee, Liffey (the only woman – Joyce’s Anna Livia), Shannon, Slaney, Suir and Atlantic Ocean. He worked on them throughout the 1780's and they were completed in 1786.
25 January 2014 AH
The new Irish passport is rather wonderful - a montage of graphics, images, music and writing communicating our Celtic past and present - ideal if you’re stuck on a plane with no reading material other than the mildly depressing Skyshopping and Skycafé. The intriguing way each page-edge on the new passport depicts half of a Custom House river headstone* that can be curled to reunite with its other half on the previous page is, by a long shot, the best feature of the whole booklet. In fairness it must have been a political and creative nightmare deciding on what to include (and what to leave out) – hence the odd melting pot of Irishness we’ve ended up with.
However, on close inspection some of the graphic design raises questions: why, for example, was the Convention Centre and the Aviva Stadium allowed such a strong billing in our national identity document? The Convention Centre is already at odds with the architectural sight line along the river, but its ugliness is only highlighted by the comparative elegance and diminutiveness of the Samuel Beckett Bridge. The bridge itself probably doesn’t best illustrate Beckett’s minimalism – but featuring the enormous listing beer can in the background is for me, er, a bridge too far.
On other pages the Aviva stadium looks like a spaceship that has just landed in Sandymount - the houses depicted here are cosy, snug and rural with their backs to the stadium. Is this really Sandymount? Are the residents not aware of the giant rubber tyre in a strange topological collapse behind them? Was it included as a nod to rugby because Gaelic players in Croke Park were already featuring on other pages?
The runes add a nice Irish hieroglyphic feel; the National anthem music is appropriate; the Tara brooch is intricate and delicate; but the last modern building depicted (between Croagh Patrick and James Orr’s poem “The hedge-hauntin’ blackbird”) puzzles me. Once again it looms in a disproportionate way to the buildings it runs alongside – trompe l’oeil gone wrong. What building is it? Where is it? Why is it included?
Anyway, the thing is here to stay for the next while so we’ll have to get used to it. A relative of mine renewed her passport about five years ago. Not one to risk identity theft, she carefully followed the instructions to dispose of the old one: as advised she cut it up into pieces (and she told me this wasn’t easy or quick as the cover is made of a toughened plastic). Not a good moment when she discovered that she had cut up her new passport into hundreds of pieces - and there was the old one, lying forlorn, with just four little corners of Ireland missing. The return of the chopped up passport in a plastic bag must have brightened up some official’s day on Molesworth Street.
*The fourteen river headstones were designed by sculptor Edward Smyth for James Gandon’s Custom House. They are based on the traditional classical motifs of the river gods and incorporate the principal features of the counties through which the rivers flow: Bann, Barrow, Nore, Blackwater, Boyne, Erne, Foyle, Lagan, Lee, Liffey (the only woman – Joyce’s Anna Livia), Shannon, Slaney, Suir and Atlantic Ocean. He worked on them throughout the 1780's and they were completed in 1786.
25 January 2014 AH
