"The viceregal houseparty which included many wellknown ladies was chaperoned by Their Excellencies to the most favourable positions on the grandstand while the picturesque foreign delegation known as the Friends of the Emerald Isle was accommodated on a tribune directly opposite": readers are to imagine these two groups viewing the execution from roofed stands of the kind found at racetracks. While a "torrential rain" pours down on the 500,000 common people gathered to witness the spectacle, the mucketymucks from the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park (some of whom were seen parading through Dublin in the last section of Wandering Rocks) are seated high and dry in these stands, while a contingent of uppercrust foreigners who have come to town for the occasion look on from a nearby "tribune"––another word for a grandstand. The Friends of the Emerald Isle are introduced in the following sentence, with names whose unsavory connotations bring the entire idea of nobility into scathing disrepute.

According to the OED, "tribune" can denote "A raised and seated area or gallery, esp. in a church; also applied to stands at continental race meetings (French tribune)." This usage entered English in the second half of the 19th century. The word bears etymological traces of its origins in Roman officialdom, meanings that are better preserved in the word "tribunal." It is perhaps worth asking whether "grandstand" similarly derived from an association with aristocratic grandeur, since its verb form implies performing ostentatiously in an effort to impress important onlookers. Etymology aside, it is clear that Joyce wants his readers to see both the local grandees and the foreign ones as elites occupying "favourable positions."

Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner note that, far from being Joyce's coinage, the phrase "Friends of the Emerald Isle" seems to have been a common expression for foreign lovers of Ireland. They quote from an article in the 20 March 1845 Freeman's Journal: "Last evening nearly one hundred of the Irish resident in Liverpool, and friends of the Emerald Isle, celebrated the anniversary of St Patrick, by dining together at the Angel Hotel, Dale-street." Joyce imported this stock expression of celebratory Hibernophilia into his novel, attaching the phrase in a fully capitalized form to his international contingent and then abbreviating it self-importantly as the acronym "F. O. T. E. I." But a subversive message has been detected in this evocation of high-and-mighty officialdom: in Italian the word fottei means "I fucked."

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