The last Dalkey tram from Dublin city centre in July 1949 was mobbed by crowds, delayed by a bonfire on the tracks in Ballsbridge, and stripped of almost every removable part by souvenir hunters. It took it two hours to get to Blackrock and arrived looking like a bombed-out wreck. Myles na Gopaleen wrote the following in his own disgusted report – JOE JOYCE
I WAS present (as an I-witness) at last Saturday night’s Gutter-tram-a-ring, a memorable page in the Hystery of IRAland. What a night it was!
The cars came in one by one piloted and mastered by men of the writer’s own generation, respectable men, some of them as old as myself.
There was nothing wrong with the Dalkey tram men, and it is no secret that there is hardly a man over twenty-one in this town but has been carried off the last car, and at the right stop, by one of these blue-liveried men, and left, decently propped against the railings to be called for. For four pence! Would one of these saintly pilgrims, the taxi-men, do as much – for four pound?
The drivers and conductors of the last trams were smiling as they got to the Pillar, because there was a large crowd, and each tram was greeted with a friendly roar. The tram men had done nothing to make them realise that this was the same noise as a cannibal makes when he sees a missionary. Each tram when it came to rest was infested with democ-rats.
They fused the lights, cut the trolley cords, broke out the glass, ripped out the route indicators, and removed the metal advertisements with the appropriate tools. They removed the tram men’s hats and went to work on the framework of the cars with hammers. To keep the thing right, their drunken mothers and sisters sang, danced and got sick.
The last tram was a sort of mobile pantheon of the nation’s liberties: bystanders reflected that there cannot be much wrong with our State when the public are free to behave in the streets as if they were in Croke Park. A public demonstration is the great safety-valve of democracy and the right of the sovereign people to destruction of its property must at all times be safeguarded if the State is not to be exposed to the pernicious doctrines of nineteenth-century libertarianism.
I would say that these old tram men were manhandled, but I do not know if it is accurate to refer to the canaille as men. It strikes me that Grand Canaille Street might be a better name for O’Connell Street now and again!
But the night was memorable for two other things. First, the talent of Radio Éireann for improvisation! Their capacity for doing the unexpected never shone brighter – they decided to abandon their plan to give a commentary on the robust ceremonies, apparently because the said ceremonies took place in the shadow of the G.P.O. and, therefore, that the thing was too easy! Unpredictable mentors, strange wayward aeragogues!
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