The at-times-furious debate over the future of the huge plane trees in O'Connell Street seems to be predicated on the presumption that they have always been there, and it is the natural order of things that they should remain, writes Kevin Myers
No doubt Dublin Corporation could have handled the decision to remove the trees with a little more delicacy: but on the other hand, too much delicacy in Irish life, and as we have discovered too often, nothing gets done.
The plane trees in O'Connell Street were simply wrong. They were far too big, and they destroyed whatever sense of space is particular to a large boulevard. Merely because they are trees doesn't elevate them into some protected species immune to rational decisions. Yet, trees have been canonised in recent years, as if the answer to any urban problem is simply to plant a broadleaf.
As it happens, the London plane is a particularly ugly tree which gained its popularity simply because it was immune to the pollution endemic to coal-burning cities. Few passerine birds can find a purchase on the peculiar twig-structure of the plane, so it's not as if that particular kind of tree is good at encouraging wildlife. In other words, the Corpo got it right: chop the buggers down.
If you have any doubt about the rightness of felling the trees, any old photograph of O'Connell Street will show you how the sense of space, of light, of vitality, has been stolen by the big fat plain ugly plane trees: such as, for example, those in Ruth McManus's recent marvellous history of the development of the capital, Dublin 1910-1940: Shaping The City & Suburbs (Four Courts).
Vital years
Those 30 years were a vital time in the development of Dublin: this was the period when self-governing middle class townships were incorporated into the city proper, so the rates paid by the better off became available to the city authorities.
They also saw the emergence of an energetic, socially committed class of public administrator who was determined to make the new Ireland a better and happier place, by creating proper housing for the inhabitants of what had been the vilest slums in Europe.
Additionally, vast new suburbs were built, especially on the north side, changing the entire balance of the city: and though we tend to take those estates for granted, they represented real traditions of artistic and engineering integrity. The term "Strain" house still carries an irresistible cachet, which it is hard to imagine any modern house-builder could manage.
Alexander Strain was almost a caricature Protestant: hard-working, thrifty, of Northern stock. He was only thirty when he started building some of the finest houses in Dublin, on Iona and Lindsay Roads: though Ruth McManus points out that there was another builder, Thomas Connolly, also building in the same area, and to the same high specification - indeed, it was Connolly's claim that he built finer houses than Strain.
Of course, Connolly and Strain houses were for the relatively well-off. For the poor of Dublin, life was simply catastrophic: and made even more catastrophic by the insanity of the period 1916-1922, when government of any meaningful variety almost ceased. Many thousands of Dublin citizens made their homes in rat-infested basements of rotting old tenements.
Paradoxically, one of the reasons for the lack of housing stock in the capital was the high price of houses, and that in turn was due to the high price of labour: skilled tradesmen earned two shillings an hour, whereas in London they earned one shilling and eight pence, and in English country areas, they earned one shilling and four pence.
An attempt by builders to increase productivity by cutting wages to slightly above the London levels prompted a strike, which began as the Civil War was just getting underway. The builders allowed Michael Collins' funeral to take place, and then their strike began. Odd that history books don't mention this; but together, they are clear symptoms of a country going certifiably mad.
Still, some cool heads were still about the place. The Greater Dublin Reconstruction Movement had proposed a number of splendid improvements, and we can lament the failure to implement them at our leisure. They wanted the removal of the unspeakable Loop Line Bridge, and for the Customs House to be the new GPO, alongside a new central railway station. The courts would move to Dublin Castle, and the recently destroyed Four Courts - when restored - would be an art gallery. Best of all, the Oireachtas would meet in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.
RHK wasted
Not merely would Dublin have thus been refocused on the Liffey along its entire urban length - upon which it was to turn its back on for nearly 70 years - but the RHK would have been preserved from what it has now become: a stinking warehouse of modernistic junk, modish claptrap and voguish rubbish. And in order to provide a home for this garbage-heap of witless refuse, a magnificent 17th Century building had to be systematically raped, ravished, violated and vandalised, and at astronomic public expense.
The more discerning of you might have gathered I do not like what has been done to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. And this is correct. It is tragedy and a travesty, one of the worst decisions in public life in the past 50 years. The interesting truth is how many excellent decisions were made both publicly and privately over the years 1910-1940. Anyone remotely interested in the history of Dublin will be obliged to buy Ruth McManus's perfectly splendid book; an utter jewel.