Seventies Dublin had inner-city slums, few foreigners, and socialites aping Anglo-Irish attitudes. Now the city has slums in the suburbs, pockets of immigrants, and socialites ape Anglo-American views
The 1970s Dublin of beige buses, horror hairstyles and sunny summers unexpectedly reappeared on television last week. It was, among other facets, the city of Heffo's army, Phil Lynott and protest politics generated by violence in the North. For most Dubs, it was a poor, though not poverty-stricken place, albeit peculiarly prone to industrial-strength nostalgia. Certainly, Eamonn Mac Thomais, who died earlier this month, sentimentalised that Dublin. A late night bout of channel-surfing found him doing so.
As a tribute to Mac Thomais (though given its midnight transmission time, a suspiciously buried one) RTÉ re-screened his 1978 eulogy to Ringsend. For James Joyce, that very name bespoke Irish stagnation. For Mac Thomais however, Ringsend was simply another Dublin village to be uncritically celebrated. Twenty-four years ago RTÉ cameras could still muster an excited but respectful and even slightly awed crowd. There was cynicism about TV then too, of course, but not as we know it, Jim.
So, as Mac Thomais sauntered around Dublin talking animatedly about history, the camera was dispassionately and casually recording it. Amiable, ardent and anecdotal, the spiel was strangely engaging despite the relentlessly upbeat yarn-spinning and sugar-coating. It sounded, at times, like the Rare Oul' Times on acid - as though Brendan Behan had been crossed with Enid Blyton - but the people he met, though clearly conscious of the camera, and the city recorded, were real and rooted.
Seeing the people and that version of the city again, almost a quarter of a century later, the cliché that has consigned them and it to "another country" is practically undeniable. The following year, the Pope would visit and soon after, the hard 1980s would unfold. The economic boom of the 1990s and the increasingly unlivable-in city of today, with its many detached houses and its even more detached housing wastelands, was neither predicted nor predictable in the 1970s.
The Dublin of Mac Thomais's eulogy was down-at-heel. It still had inner-city slums, few foreigners and a sad crowd of rude socialites aping Anglo-Irish attitudes. Now the slums are, for the most part, in the outer-city. There are pockets of immigrants and enough people with loot to constitute a social scene that apes Anglo-American attitudes. The material improvements are undeniable, yet problems - hard drugs, the traffic, routine violence - have multiplied too.
The Ringsend eulogy sought to celebrate continuity. Mac Thomais told viewers about Cromwell landing there in 1649, adding that cabbage was a staple of his army's diet. He spoke about the building of the Pigeon House, the Poolbeg lighthouse and the Great South Wall. Sure, much of his script was underminingly jaunty but now it is not continuity, but breaks with the past, that are routinely celebrated even though the Dublin of today is built upon the versions of yesteryear.
The Dublin of the 1970s was also recorded by Mary Manning. She wrote a feature for Boston's upmarket Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1973. Titled 'The Dublin Social Scene', it was, in subject matter, utterly unlike a Mac Thomais eulogy.
Manning's Dublin was the city of the Kildare Street Club, Abbey Theatre first nights and art-exhibition openings. It was a place where "red wine was served in paper cups", dinner parties were few and "Conor Cruise O'Brien ran like a recurring theme through Dublin life".
AT one art exhibition, punters, she reported, "had to wade through pools of blood - brought down every evening in a bucket from the abattoir - meant to remind us of Bloody Sunday". At the bash "the girls were either dressed as Russian cavalry officers or Fanny Hill and the fellas were covered with hair and flaunting their body odour".
Nonetheless, she recorded, the one subject which must never be dragged into the open was "the North".
How such avoidance could be achieved with Conor Cruise O'Brien as a running theme was unclear. Still, her account, though often critical and sometimes mocking, spun yarns with the gusto of Mac Thomais. Old money and new money were lampooned.
"Dublin society," she wrote, "is now swarming with got-rich quick parvenus. Most of the money is made in land speculation, chain market stores, chain pubs, manure and one thing and another". Loot from computers, drugs and "financial services" was then in the future.
In contrast, the Kildare Street Club admitted "nobody in trade, dear!". She reported that "the nouveaus" couldn't get in "because 'that sort of money' wasn't liked" by the club, where voices that had been "barking out orders in Norman castles, Jacobean dwellings and Georgian mansions" continued to be uncouthly loud.
Nonetheless, Manning copped how the new money people aped Anglo-Irish attitudes and assiduously cultivated "the very people whose houses their rebel fathers had burned" 45 years earlier.
Charlie Haughey, of course, became the archetype of the seemingly schizoid new money "horsey republican": living in a mansion, acting as a patron of the arts and keeping a mistress. Yet, his party was far more likely to get votes from the people of Eamonn Mac Thomais's Ringsend than from the crowd in the Kildare Street Club. Little wonder, given that Haughey and his Anglo-Irish posturing was the dominant model of success and achievement, that Dublin and, by extension, Ireland, could only be an economic backwater.
So, despite prevailing propaganda that (excepting such external-to-the-state forces as the international oil crisis and spillover from the Northern conflict) "bolshie" trade unions of the 1970s were primarily to blame, stagnation was assured by "republicans" - and Fine Gaelers too! - absurdly aping Tory contempt for mere "trade". Such attitudes have died now, of course, and "entrepreneurs" - the good ones and the chancers alike - are lionised as ideal Irish role models.
American attitudes towards business, not those of a parasitic British aristocracy, have become the norm here. That, at least, is more republican and in keeping with the nominal ethos of this State. Eamonn Mac Thomais, an Irish republican of the old school, who edited An Phoblacht and did time for his politics, lived long enough to see this transformation in attitudes and the ways in which this has transformed his sentimentalised "darlin" Dublin too.
The problem is that the transformation, while it has helped to generate new money, has also regenerated some of the more objectionable and poisonous "old money" attitudes. We have braying bullies among our entrepreneurs and business leaders now.
Unused perhaps to barking out orders in Norman castles, Jacobean dwellings and Georgian mansions, they nonetheless bark out orders - to workers, henchmen and even the Government - like 21st-century feudal lords.
Still, supplanting an outdated British model with an up-to-date American one has brought material benefits. Mind you, Dublin has not really coped with the transformation and the American model itself is already unnervingly corrupt and degenerate.
In time, the crookery of the 1970s may come to be seen as small beer beside the crookery of the 1990s and today. We'll see. Anyway, while Conor Cruise O'Brien may have run like a recurring theme through 1970s Dublin life, so too did the late Eamonn Mac Thomais and those bizarre beige buses. May he rest in peace in the city he eulogised.