Just before the presidential inauguration on television, they showed clips of previous ceremonies. Archbishop McCabe with a huge, long, flowing cape trailing behind him, gliding past the crowd. It looked extraordinarily old-fashioned, like something from the Middle Ages, and yet it was well within my own memory. They had close-ups of people's faces that you would have loved to have lingered on, to know if you could recognise anyone. The interesting thing was that they were almost all men.
An American tourist asked an elderly woman to recommend a good place for lunch and, in front of my eyes, the elderly woman said that a public house was definitely the best bet. They wouldn't force a set lunch on you and there was something about a pub that was nice and comforting. A woman would feel at ease there with a
sandwich or a salad or glass of wine. She was the kind of woman who would have said to myself and my friends three or four decades ago, as we were about to set out for Nearys, that since no decent man's mother or sister would ever enter a public house you could hardly expect him to respect any kind of girl he might meet in one.
The woman taxi driver who took us into town the other night said that nobody nowadays asks her if it's a dangerous job for a female, and if her husband minds her doing such a traditionally male job. Twenty years ago, when her aunt started driving a cab, the woman was demented with such questions and never felt that her answers satisfied the passengers at all, as they remained restless throughout the journey. "But that was the Good Old Days," she said with a laugh.
My friend who lived in the west of Ireland said that she and her sister used to visit two old men, who lived in a broken-down cottage. They didn't do much farming, they had a few hens and a cow, and they just loved looking at flowers. So, whole fields grew wild with daffodils and bluebells and cowslips and the hedges were full of wild roses. The two old men loved little girls to come and pick flowers and the years of her childhood were spent playing around their cottage. The old men would give them glasses of milk and doorsteps of bread and they would laugh and clap their hands at the sight of nine- and 10-year-old girls with their arms full of wild flowers.
Would anyone let children go to visit such men now? She wouldn't allow her own children within half a mile of them. But those were the Good Old Days when nobody thought of what could happen.
When I was a schoolgirl only one pupil I knew had a mother who went out to work. It was a matter of huge interest to us all. Who minded the house all day? Did the fire go out? How did the shopping get done? Who let delivery men in? Were they very rich with two salaries coming in? Shouldn't her mother really give up the job so that a man could do it and provide for a family? Maybe someone was getting the emigrant boat from Dun Laoghaire who could have been doing the job that this girl's mother was doing. The unfortunate girl was uneasy and unsettled about it all.
Today in a Dublin classroom someone discovered that two of the children's mothers were not going out to work. They were very interested. What did these women do all day? Had they been sacked from jobs? Did they go to the job centre? How did their households manage? Maybe the fathers' jobs were very well paid altogether?
The children of the mothers who stayed at home were defensive and uneasy. There seemed to be an awful lot to do, running a house, they said, but they were unsettled all the same.
In l959 Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash near Mason City, Iowa. He was 22, just a few years older than all of us who loved Rave On and That'll Be The Day. He wasn't a heart-throb but he was great and we were all very depressed that winter day, going home on the train from UCD.
There was a woman in Dalkey crying in the rain by the railway station. She told me she wanted to get her crying over before she went into the house. The most terrible thing had happened; her son was going to America. It was as bad, she said, as if he had been killed near Mason City, Iowa. She would never see him again. She must dry her eyes now and go back and pretend to be pleased for him and his bright future. He was 25. He would never come back home.
And, as it happened, he didn't - apart from maybe a couple of vacations. That was in February 1959. This year, in a house near that one, there was jubilation. One of the sons had a got a visa. He had been an illegal in the US, off and on, for five years. He was 25 and his mother said it was now time for him to get his act together. All her sons had been working abroad for years, in this and that. Lonely? Her? Not at all. They were back before they were gone. Any kind of a match and they were all in the kitchen again as if they had never left. The life was too good in Ireland for them to be away for too long.
The young woman was doing very well at the interview. The job would involve a fair amount of travel. She told them she enjoyed travel and meeting new people. They did not mention the fact that she wore an engagement ring. They would not have questioned a male about whether this job would fit in with his future marriage plans. They could not ask a woman. She decided to put them out of their misery.
"Naturally we have talked about it. If I get the position, it will affect our lifestyle but nothing we can't handle."
She was 20; most of the people conducting the interview were over 50. None of them said that she must have an understanding fiance, but several of them thought it. "It's not as if it were the Old Days," she said, reading their minds.
I walked past the school I used to go to in Dun Laoghaire 50 years ago. In those days we brought a little bottle of milk with a cork in it and two Marietta biscuits. We had ribbons, tied in bows on the top of our heads; we wore our cousins' clothes. We walked, because nobody had cars and sometimes lucky six-year-olds were ferried home on the carrier of a mother's bike. People talked then about de Valera as they had done since the State began.
If you had told anyone in those days that there would be four women candidates for the Presidency, that schoolboys would have Manchester United written on their schoolbags, that religious vocations would be so drastically reduced that the Mass would be in English, that the mailboat would be full of people coming here for long weekends rather than us going there for long lifetimes of unskilled labour. Who would have believed it? Any more than they would have believed that young mothers would get housing and support to look after the children they once had to hide and deny, that those without money could ask for a medical card and not have to get a handout from a private house before buying a cough bottle. That the old would have a bus pick them up and take them to a day centre, rather than face years of staying in a room because there was no way of getting out of it.
It's not perfect, but to me on balance Right Now is a lot better than the Good Old Days.