The veteran conservationist Kevin B Nowlan, who will be 90 on Wednesday, is still working tirelessly on ‘saving what’s important about the past for the future’. But he wishes that more young people would get involved
EVEN AS A 15-year-old schoolboy at Belvedere College, in Dublin, Kevin B Nowlan was called the professor. His classmates knew of his unusual interest in archaeology, and he was already going to meetings of the Old Dublin Society. Now, asked how it feels to be approaching 90, he says: “I feel more or less as I always did. Perhaps, in a sense, I was always old . . . As long as you’re in good health and keep your mind active you can’t ask for much more. Being active is the important thing, and I hope to remain active for some time.”
He is talking in his cosy livingroom in the house on Dartmouth Square, in Ranelagh, where he has lived alone since 1976, surrounded by prints and pictures of historic buildings. On his desk is a big old computer terminal and keyboard that, he admits, he uses only as a word processor, printing out what he writes. Like many of his generation, he has no internet link and doesn’t do e-mail. But the phone “never stops ringing” and he’s often out and about, even though he retired from University College Dublin in 1986.
The veteran conservationist and champion of Dublin’s heritage wishes that more young people would get involved in An Taisce, of which he was president, or the Irish Georgian Society, of which he has been vice-president for 25 years, or one of the other organisations and ad-hoc groups dedicated to saving what’s left of Ireland’s cultural inheritance. He is “particularly worried” about the fate of historic buildings in the hands of Nama and how they “will be affected by the deals that may emerge for the disposal of properties”.
In the meantime, he wants the law to be enforced to ensure that buildings such as Aldborough House, the last of the great Dublin town houses, don’t go to rack and ruin.
Formerly a professor of Irish history at UCD, Nowlan – or Kevin B, as he’s known to most of his friends and associates – has been a stalwart of the conservation movement since the battle for Lower Fitzwilliam Street in the 1960s. Indeed, he likes to think that he was one of those referred to by Kevin Boland in his 1970 Dáil tirade about the occupation of Hume Street. Boland, then minister for local government, made his antipathy to the conservationists’ case abundantly clear, railing against “the consortium of belted earls and their ladies, and left-wing intellectuals”, as well as “the Guinness nobility who pull the strings to which the Georgians dance”.
“Dublin was being destroyed in the cause of a debased nationalism that saw its Georgian houses as the relics of British rule in Ireland,” Nowlan says. “But I had very good republican credentials, as my granduncle Séamus Nowlan was president of the GAA as well as being an Irish Republican Brotherhood man. Nowlan Park in Kilkenny is named after him.”
Kevin B threw himself, diminutive though he is, into the battle to save Tailors Hall on Back Lane, Dublin’s only surviving guildhall, when it was threatened with demolition in the mid-1960s; it is now An Taisce’s headquarters. This campaign led to the formation of Dublin Civic Trust by Nowlan and others, including the indefatigable Uinseann MacEoin. FH Walker, Sheila Carden, Dr Edward McParland and the late Deirdre Kelly joined the informal group, monitoring big planning applications, making submissions to Dublin Corporation (the heartless bureaucracy that ran the city then) and lodging appeals to uncaring ministers for local government.
Nowlan believes that our politicians have a lot to answer for. Other than the former lord mayor of Dublin Carmencita Hederman and the late George Colley, who introduced tax relief for the owners of heritage properties so that they could carry out repairs, he “can’t think of a political leader who wrote conservation large on his or her banner. There was this attitude of mind, this devotion to large-scale change, and indifference to saving what’s important about the past for the future. Hume Street helped to focus attention on Dublin’s great inheritance, but our awareness about the value of heritage is still very weak compared to many other countries.”
Nonetheless, as he says, 20,000 people marched through Dublin in September 1978 to save the Viking site at Wood Quay. Led by the late FX Martin, the Augustinian friar and a fellow professor at UCD, and “two Great Danes with helmets on them”, it was “probably the largest nonpolitical and nonreligious parade in the city’s history”.
“Wood Quay was very important in helping to make a wider section of the population aware of conservation issues, and that opened the way for the legislation we eventually got in 1999 and 2000. So, at least on paper, the new planning laws were good. But, with all the cutbacks, I’d be worried about enforcement in Dublin and throughout the country.”
During the boom years, Nowlan says he was “very unhappy, going through the country, to see the extent to which the landscape was being savaged by developments that seemed to have no relationship to existing villages or towns. And this has contributed to a serious depletion of one of our greatest assets: the Irish countryside.”
Nowlan is chairman of the Castletown Foundation, which continued the work of Desmond Guinness, who, with his first wife, Mariga, saved Ireland’s largest and most important Palladian house in the late 1960s. Castletown House, in Co Kildare, is now in the care of the Office of Public Works. Like many others, Nowlan remembers Mariga Guinness with fondness as a “wonderful friend”.
He is also a director of the Alfred Beit Foundation, which owns another great Palladian house, Russborough, in Co Wicklow, and president of Dublin Civic Trust, which is “doing great work, with lectures, conferences, street reports and restoring buildings. But there’s always a problem with funding.”
As a former professor and student at UCD (he graduated there in 1943, with a BA in history and political economy, before going on to Cambridge University), he regrets the move to Belfield because of “the disappearance of what could have become the Latin Quarter of Dublin, between Earlsfort Terrace and Trinity College”.
He has outlived many of his colleagues and collaborators, including Desmond FitzGerald, the last Knight of Glin and president of the Irish Georgian Society, who died last month aged 74. But Nowlan looks forward to carrying on their work, advancing projects such as the restoration of the City Assembly House on South William Street as the society’s headquarters. That, too, “will require a lot of funding”.
He is still active in the Upper Leeson Street Area Residents Assocation. “I do think people should take part in trying to protect their own area,” he says.
That, indeed, is a good way to start.
