So Dublin has been named a UNESCO City of Literature. Greeting the news, the Irish Republic’s Minister of Tourism said, "Being one of only four cities in the world to achieve the status of UNESCO City of Literature, will enable Dublin to increase its market share of tourists and attract more people to both the city and the island of Ireland."
Indeed, Dublin is one of four cities, along with Edinburgh, Iowa and Melbourne – which are all, by the by, English speaking - to make it onto this apparently monolingual UNESCO programme. It is hard to know where to put the inverted commas around such titles as Cities of Literature awarded by an organisation best known for sending actresses out to Darfur for famine zone photo ops, but fortunately the Minister has helped clarify the issue. Literature, for her, and in Ireland in general, is merely one other article of consumption useful for generating revenues in the economic wasteland that is the actual existing Irish Republic. Read on at 3am magazine...
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