This morning I jogged along the Liffey to the old port and back. There is something captivatingly atmospheric about abandoned docklands. The rails on which cranes once travelled, the silted-up basins, abandoned warehouses, railway lines leading nowhere, heaps of rubble, cobbled lanes leading to weed-infested wasteland… The old dockland has been redeveloped a lot but there are still a few of these areas left and somehow I could imagine how they used to be, bustling with sailors and stevedores, steam engines and wagons, cranes and slings, ships and tugboats. Now, especially at an early hour, there is nobody. Just ghosts and a few relics of bygone times…

I am staying at the Clarence Hotel backing onto Temple Bar. The Clarence has a bit of a history to it. Although it was built in 1852, it was refurbished in the late 1930s in Arts and Crafts style. In the 1970s the Temple Bar area was earmarked by the local government for redevelopment as a bus station. As a result, property and rental prices fell and young artists, musicians, writers and designers moved in and the Clarence’s traditional clientele declined. Among young musicians who stayed at the Clarence were Bono and The Edge, of U2 fame. The hotel went into decline but then, in 1992 Bono and The Edge, with fond memories of former times, assembled a consortium of Irish investors and bought the hotel with the aim of restoring it to its former glory. And so it came to pass. This evening I got back around eleven and opened my window. I was almost bowled backwards by a wall of noise coming from a groundfloor bar, jam-packed full of young people, and an electric guitar school on two floors. I tried to capture the scene in the picture. The school packed up around midnight but the bar was still going strong at three in the morning – and this was a Thursday evening! Ah! Dublin nights…

In the evening I met an old and dear friend, Francis Jacobs, who is currently head of the European Parliament’s office in Dublin. We are both ‘Hopkinis‘ and Italophiles and political anoraks and academics manqués and European Parliament enthusiasts and authors and editors of books and…  Well, it was great to catch up – and in Dublin for a change, rather than Brussels, Luxembourg or Strasbourg, where we more regularly bump into one another.

The annual spring meeting of the Secretaries-General of the national economic and social councils and the European Economic and Social Committee is what has brought me to Ireland and this afternoon we began our meeting, out at Loughlinstown, at Eurofound‘s headquarters building, Loughlinstown House. Our chosen theme was ‘social and civil dialogue in a time of national and European crisis’. The national councils took it in turn to describe their respective national situations. Not surprisingly, it was the same basic story everywhere, with austerity measures imposing economies and a stronger obligation on all institutions to demonstrate the added value of their work. Such an imperative is not unhealthy. On the other hand, several member states have seen erosion of their traditional consensual, consultative politics and this is a matter of deeper concern. It would be a paradox if participatory democracy were to be thus undermined since, as the Lisbon Treaty made clear, the EU needs more civil dialogue at all levels.

Lunch at Leinster House (Dublin) as the guest of Senator Jillian van Turnhout, a former distinguished member of the European Economic and Social Committee and now Leader of the Independent Group in the Irish Senate. Before we dined Jillian gave me a short guided tour around the complex. A former ducal palace, Leinster House hosts both the Dáil and the Seanad. Both houses were sitting and I was able to sit in on the debates for a while – democracy very much in action! In the members’ restaurant Jillian explained the ritualised dynamics of the setting, with parties and groups and individuals always sitting in the same places. Great fun for a political anorak!

Back home we had, of course, to follow that debate. A fascinating spectacle, it was like a boxing match, with the two journalists restricted to ringing the bell at the beginning and the end of each round. Both candidates gave as good as they got and certainly the post-match pundits have generally declared it to have been a draw. Such are the electoral dynamics that a draw is probably not enough for Sarkozy, but will it be enough for Hollande? We’ll find out on Sunday. People will tell me that I am being naive and that both candidates have honed their skills over many years, but I am always impressed by French politicians’ ability to engage in such sustained televised debates. Whoever saw it will surely not have forgotten the 1992 televised debate between the then French President, François Mitterrand and  Philippe Seguin about the Maastricht Treaty. The combatants in these ritualised duels must be physically and psychologically drained by the end of each ordeal.

This evening to the opening of an exhibition at the Committee entitled ‘Rematerialize the future!’. The exhibition was opened by Vice-President Anna Maria Darmanin and the President of the Various Interests Group, Luca Jahier (picture), whose Group had spent the day in a conference on the opportunities of sustainable development and the green economomy. The exhibition is about the so-called ‘rematerialization’ of products, focusing on quality materials made of familiar, ordinary things that have been recycled upwards. These materials have nothing in common with the exhausted recycled products of the past, on the contrary, they have been ‘rematerialized’ into better products. The European Parliament’s TV channel covered the event here.

We profited from International Labour Day this morning to take a nice long walk. In the picture is a field – presumably untreated – full of dandelions in full bloom. I think I have written a post about a similar spectacular sight in the past. One could imagine a farmer in Gormenghast growing fields of dandelions, nettles, thistles and cow parsley (imagine the yellows, dark greens, mauves and whites!). They would be every bit as spectacular as the fields of colza that are just coming into flower now. May Day, like Christmas and Easter, is a very ancient festival, though somehow left secular as the Roman Catholics took over and transformed most ancient festivals. International Workers’ Day, on the other hand, is a much more recent creation, dating from the 1880s and 1890s. Specifically, it commemorates the 1 May 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, when the city’s police, provoked by an indiscriminate dynamite bomb attack, fired onto a striking crowd demonstrating in favour of the eight-hour week, killing dozens of people, including some policemen. In 1891 the Second International’s Congress (Paris) formally recognised the commemorative demonstrations as an annual event and in 1904 the International Socialist Conference (Amsterdam) declared 1st May to be a more general demonstration of workers’ rights.

At the Kaaitheatre tonight we saw the sublime fusion of Steve Reich’s music (Drumming) and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker”s choreography. Drumming is mesmerising. The dancers ebb and flow, dwindle and reappear, dance alone or in seemingly unconnected groups, and all the while the percussionists work their way through the phases, from drums to xylophones and back. The fact that such path-breaking pieces of music and dance are so freely available at such a high level of quality is a good example of why Brussels is reservedly renowned as one of Europe’s great cultural capitals. Long may it, and Belgian choreography, continue to prosper!

The dog took me running out at Berthem this morning and I heard my first Belgian cuckoo (I heard my first cuckoo of the year in Italy over the Easter break). That’s late and, as this article in last Sunday’s Observer explained, the lateness and the singularity of the call are both potentially worrying. Some European cuckoo populations are declining and nobody knows why. There was a theory that in some regions the bird was running out of nests in which to lay its parasitic eggs but populations of the reed warbler, its favourite victim, are on the rise. Although the experiment the newspaper article described involved just five birds it was nevertheless revealing. Cuckoos, like swallows, winter in Africa but nobody knew exactly how they got there or back. The answer, in part, is that some head down to the toe of the Italian isthmus and then cross the Mediterranean and the Sahara before reaching the Congo. But others traverse Spain and the Gibraltar straits and follow the African coast down to Senegal before turning inland towards the Congo. There may be other routes. In this particular experiment, one of the five birds died whilst still in Africa and the four others were returning late. Again, nobody knows why. Still, when I heard the cuckoo this morning I was a little more knowledgeable about how he probably got there.