The sign says, "Help yourself to our lemon flavoured creams--just ask our staff." 

I must be in Ireland.  On top of that, I'm in what is billed as an Oriental Cafe but there's not a spring roll or a pu pu platter in sight.  It's Bewely's Oriental Cafe and my wife tells me it's famous.  I'm sceptical, but at least they put on good tea and cakes.  We just popped in for some light refreshment, and so my wife could nick a sugar packet with "Bewley's" logo on it so she can prove she's been here.  "You take pictures," she says, "I take condiments."

Lunch was at Eddie Rockets, a nostalgic American theme restaurant decked out like a 50's diner.  It seemed absurd at first, to have a chain of American diners in Ireland trying to lure people in by giving them a taste of an America that doesn't exist any more, but we have them in the US, so I guess it's only fair. 

The diner itself passed muster; whenever anything purports to be "American style" I take it as a personal challenge, but Eddie Rockets lives up to its image.  The interior looked authentic enough to make me homesick, with booths, Formica tables, a long counter with stools--the booths and the stools all upholstered in the same bright red vinyl--and even a jukebox with 50's music.  The portions were too large, the fries were called fries and there was a bottle of Heinz ketchup on the table.  The only oddity was that the prices were in euros. 

To walk off the bacon cheeseburger, we took a stroll through St. Steven's Green, a stunningly beautiful park liberally sprinkled with statues, sculptures and memorials.  We wandered at random for a while, reading up on Ireland's revolutionaries, all of whom seem to have a bust and accompanying plaque dedicated to them somewhere in the park.  Then a large, modernistic sculpture caught our eye and we went over to study it. 

It was a meager structure in stone, with three spare figures barely recognizable as a group of human beings.  The sculpture, the plaque told us, dramatized the famine and political repression of the Irish population, the latter being a more symbolic association, due simply to its proximity to the Wolfe Tone Memorial.

We had to walk behind the sculpture to find Mr. Tone, who was represented in a more classical way.  A larger than life statue of the man stood in a dignified pose on a pedestal.  Behind, and separating him from the famine family, was a wall of grey pillars, which is why the locals refer to this particular statue as 'Tone Henge.'

Near Mr. Tone (Can you picture his mother, after giving birth, thinking, "What name shall I give him? 'Wolfe' would be nice."), a map of the park detailed the locations of all the monuments.  That's when we discovered there was a memorial to The Magdalene Sisters. 

This wouldn't have meant anything to us had we not, several weeks earlier, seen the movie.  The Magdalene Sisters were an order who ran a chain of laundries throughout Ireland up until the 1970's.  The idea was to take loose women and give them something else to do to occupy their time.  I'm sure there were some good intentions involved, but what it amounted to was slave labour.  Young women could be sent to these workhouses by parents, schools, priests or nuns for the most minor indiscretions.  There was no getting out on good behaviour, either; for many young women, this was a life sentence. 

The movie follows the supposedly true stories of three of these women: one an unwed mother, another, an orphan whom the nun in charge of the orphanage thought might one day turn into a loose woman, and the third a teenager raped by her cousin.  It's a disturbing look into the absolute power of The Church and how it can be abused, and it made me wonder why, after throwing off centuries of English repression, the Irish were so quick to repress themselves. 

We were curious to see what sort of monument had been raised to people portrayed in the cinema as concentration camp guards, so we set out to find it.  We made it to the section of the park where the monument was supposed to be but, after several passes and consultations with the 'You Are Here' signs we decided to give it up before someone took note of us cruising the same area over and over, mistook us for child predators and set the guarda on us. 

The absence of the monument was quite a curiosity.  There obviously used to be one there, why had that one, and none of the others, been removed?  Did the movie have anything to do with it?  Had there been some sort of anti-religious outcry?  Had the nuns secreted it away to a Catholic safe house to wait until the heat blew over?  

Or maybe it was just out for cleaning?