Carl Kinsella

IF YOU’RE A regular reader of the beloved Surrealing in the Years column, you’ll know that what the government and local authorities spend their money on is something that Irish people tend to worry about quite a bit.

Well boy, do I have some news that’s going to put their minds at ease.

The Giant Company, which has received some measure of financial support from Enterprise Ireland’s High Potential Start-Up programme, is doing its utmost to tempt investors at large to cough up somewhere in the region of €29 million to finance an absolutely massive robotic statue, to be located in Dublin’s Docklands. The Giant, which is how the company refers to this horrifying, faceless titan, would serve as a tourist attraction, event space, false idol and general affront to God.

And let me tell you, dear reader, I am pro. I am a hard, hard pro on this one. I have listened to Lyle Lanley, and I am ready to ride the monorail. We must build the golem.

The CEO of The Giant Company is Dublin businessman Paddy Dunning, who is also behind the city’s National Wax Museum. Dunning was last in the news a few summers back, following the unveiling of a botched Sinead O’Connor wax sculpture, which was removed from public display not more than 24 hours after it was first revealed. 

The sculpture of O’Connor was criticised for its janky likeness to the iconic singer, and many were perplexed by the decision to situate the sculpture in the Star Wars section of the museum when it was first shown to the public. And that statue was only about a metre and a half, so… One might wonder how Dunning expects to fare with something substantially larger.

Different sources have suggested different heights for Dublin’s proposed colossus, but The Giant website specifies that it will be 35 metres minimum. That’s a great start, because what the hell does it mean? Does that mean that the giant might expand? Does it mean that there is no limit to how large it might in fact be? How big can we make it if we’re prepared to spend more than €29 million? Big enough to wield the Spire like a lance? I’m just thinking out loud here.

Not all of us will be immediately able to put 35 metres in context, so let’s think of it this way. You know the statue of Big Jim Larkin on O’Connell St, the guy with his arms outstretched, often in the foreground of photos of The Spire? That statue stands about 21 feet tall (roughly the same height as the real Jim Larkin), which is about six metres. So ‘The Giant’ would be roughly six times the size of that statue. It’ll be more than half the height of Liberty Hall, one of Dublin’s tallest buildings.

The robotic nature of the creature means that we can project images onto it (the promo video uses the examples of Serena Williams and Spider-Man), that it can speak, it can sing, and it can even move. Probably crush us underfoot if it’s programmed to do so. 

The marketing campaign to sell us all on this project involved promotional images of The Giant mocked up to look like James Joyce, for reasons that could not be described as ‘clear’. What’s especially good is that The Big Joyce has his arms stuck awkwardly out by its side in a sort of helicopter motion, as if he were to start spinning around really fast, he would become untethered from the earth and blast off into the sky. These are all reasons to invest in this project, rather than reasons to pass it up. Think how upset we’ll be if this thing ends up in Prague and they put that sadcase Kafka on it instead.

The Giant is such a good idea that it actually makes old, disregarded ideas sound workable. Nobody wanted the George’s Dock whitewater rafting centre before, but if the whitewater rafting is being overseen by some kind of multimillion euro monstrosity that occasionally takes on the guise of an enormous Patrick Pearse and says things like “REMEMBER TO WEAR A HELMET AT ALL TIMES WHILE INSIDE THE RAFT,” then I bet the public would be ready to raft.

Some might see The Giant as, quite literally, an enormous waste of money, little more than a blank canvas in humanoid shape, but I see him as a jumping-off point. An answer to a question that I have long been asking, which is ‘Why did we, as a civilisation, stop building colossuses?’

The Colossus of Rhodes was one of the Seven Wonders of the World and he was only 33 metres tall! This one is 35m minimum, and probably way fewer people will die building it. We could start our own Wonders of the World! We’ve already got our equivalent to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, though naturally we are doing our level best to turn it into something that is almost fetishistically generic. 

But there’s nothing generic about a big scary statue that can shapeshift into a big Garda and occasionally bellow things like “WEAR A SEATBELT” or “DON’T USE COCAINE BEFORE DRIVING”. Forget the Colossus of Rhodes and say hello to the Colossus of Road Safety. 

Critics of the concept have said that it represents only corporate interests. That it would do nothing for the people of Dublin but split the skyline, standing astride us mere mortals like Julius Caesar from the play Julius Caesar. Those critics include sitting Dublin city councillors. 

Going by the website that exists to promote The Giant, the critics aren’t wrong. The plans are short on detail, dense with buzzwords, and God only knows how long it would take to build this thing once you remember that we can’t build a hospital for children even when we spend €2billion doing it. But here’s the thing: the critics don’t get it.

That The Giant is a bad idea is precisely what makes it such a good idea. Imagine being saddled with an enormous robot we can do basically nothing with for all eternity? So that generations from now, when only its feet are left, children can play in the baking future heat and tell stories about what gods we must have worshipped in the 21st century. Technological shapeshifting behemoths that, at the flip of a switch, could turn from Serena Williams to James Joyce while revellers below cheer and applaud. History is not the study of good ideas; history is what happens when you put an ill-conceived, nonsensical, 35 metre statue in a place it has no business being, purely in the hope that people across the world will travel to see something because it’s big.

The Giant has the potential to be something much more meaningful than any good idea. A lasting monument to all of our regrets. And that is why we must build it.