A tandem of post-modernism on the R827 – the young James Joyce and Flann O’Brien gadding about Blackrock

If you were a municipal historian you might take a passing interest in what de Selby has to say on the subject of roads, as interpreted of course by his acolyte, Noman, the nameless narrator in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. That discerning, fictitious, and eccentric philosopher regards roads as ‘the most ancient of human monuments, surpassing by many tens of centuries the oldest thing of stone that man has reared to mark his passing.’ It is fitting then that de Selby’s creator has rested since 1966 alongside what must be some class of an ancient thoroughfare, now known as Deansgrange Road, or, for the more exacting among us, the R827, which I have no reason to disbelieve has not been a conduit of human conveyance for thousands of years.

Produced and presented by Bernie Dwan.