Sir, – Darragh McCausland’s article (“Dance scene ideals at odds with anti-social behaviour”Opinion, July 12th) suggests that some of the music’s followers simply did not get the message of community spirit, multiculturalism, and sexuality (undefined) inherent in the music. Though with regard to the latter perhaps some, at least, assumed that public demonstrations were an integral part of the “ideal”.
I went dancing in the Dublin of the late 1950s, early 1960s. In ballrooms all across the city, not one of which sold alcohol, and at what was easily hundreds of dances (at least two every week) I never once witnessed a single fight, inside or outside the venue.
Never having the money for a taxi I walked home in the early hours of the morning on each and every occasion, and from all quarters of the suburbs.
Never once did the thought enter my mind that I might meet trouble on the way; never once did I do so. Dublin in those days was the safest city in the western world. I write from my personal experience.
Much has changed since then; the prisons and the graveyards bear testimony to that change. There are those who would have you believe that the change has been for the better. I would dispute that.
Even in dance music, the songs I danced to spoke, for the most part, of love, requited and unrequited.
“Music has charms to soothe the savage breast”, as Congreve wrote. It also has power to inflame the passions. Hence the drums in the jungle, the bagpipes on the battlefield.
It would be foolish the blame the music of today for the brutalising of our times. I do not do so. The music is little more than “noises off”. No, something more profound has changed, has been lost.
In September 1979 half a million people attended a Papal Mass in the Phoenix Park. I was not there, but I do not remember reading of scenes such as those that were reported when the 45,000 young people attended a music concert in the same park in June of 2012. There is a lesson there for those who choose to learn it. – Yours, etc,