Dublin: A Gallery of Signs

We’ve shared numbers of sign galleries here on TravelGumbo, and usually they’ve featured signs that amuse, and signs with artistic merit.

But this one has a healthy dose of public debate thrown in, because we arrived in Dublin last May just as Ireland was voting on repeal of a law prohibiting abortion.

Although in the end, the vote to repeal was overwhelming, my first reaction on the way from the airport was that the vote would be very close, based on the nearly equal numbers of signs to be found everywhere: On lamp posts, on stores, walls around construction sites, in windows, just about everywhere. In the end, we found that in most of the central area, the pro-repeal YES signs were more numerous, as were the human campaigners.

For days after the vote, the signs were still everywhere, and then suddenly began to recede; we read later that curators of history and art museums were rushing around trying to preserve a collection for the future!

The campaign even lent possibly unintended meanings to other signs, such as the right-hand poster on the theatre wall below, and the graffito in the title image.

The non-political signs were there, too, and some weren’t easy to grasp at first; the one just below turned out to be taken from an Arabic poem, and was part of the decor of a bar called Zanzibar which occupied the ground floor a few years ago. Below it, another slightly-unlikely combo: a condom shop sharing a storefront with a coffee bar.

Because Ireland can be very serious (and at some moments touchy) about its early 20th-century history, it was no surprise to see this wall with famous figures of the time. The plaques below the picture reproduce the call for the 1916 rebellion in multiple languages.

Time out for a couple of less serious amusements.

And, going beyond puppies’ tummies to the next step, these signs are part of a public sanitation campaign that caught our attention.

And we’ll finish with a few interesting shop signs that reflect the name of the last one…