FROM THE ARCHIVES:A supplement in 1976 looking at Dublin included a piece by Eileen O'Brien on its current state, and past, of which this is an extract.– JOE JOYCE
THE LATE Senator Jimmy Dunne recalled his family’s move from a tenement house in the middle of Dublin to one of the early housing schemes; his father did not want to go, and clung to the banisters roaring until he was forcibly removed.
Mr Dunne Senior to me represents that city’s heart, now grown feeble. The Coombe, North King Street, City Quay are a wasteland; a hole replaced the minarets of Lincoln Place where Mr Bloom took his bath; derelict houses and office blocks make the streets on Sundays a spookerie peopled only by ghosts.
Rows of little houses spread further and further over the rich land of North Dublin and the Liffey Valley, where citizens could fairly recently go to enjoy fresh air through the keyhole of the Wren’s Nest, just as their grandfathers went to the Yellow House with half-a-crown and came home with change. The Rev Paul Freeney, who championed first the downtrodden people of Sheriff Street and then the newcomers of Leixlip, is disheartened and says in 10 years our problems will be ghastly.
Is there nothing but gloom? Are the changes all bad? If the ESB has led the destruction of elegant Dublin, if the green fields have vanished, so too have the Marshalsea Barracks where the people were outnumbered by the rats, the dismal flats of Benburb Street and the Cage, off Foley Street, where the people said they were caged in like wild animals and slogans on the walls proclaimed their disaffection. Keogh Square, the old Richmond Barracks where people were hidden away in refuse and filth and deathly cold, has been bulldozed. I remember the medical officer there saying that bulldozers were too slow – he wanted to be up in an aeroplane bombing it. Now that stinking rathole has been replaced by flats.
If the human warmth of the centre of Dublin has gone, so too is the idea once prevalent among the respectable classes – that there was no point in giving slum people bathrooms, that in Ballyfermot they would keep coal in the bath. Ballyfermot, with its street associations and community activity, became a model to the Bogside, Ballymun with its Irish school a model to the whole country.
A venerable man says that the greatest changes are the new licensing law, the coming of the iron lung and the terrible results of the five-day week. He sighs for the brand old Dublin lindub, the free, the froh, the frothy freshener, when drawing a pint was an art – he once followed a great artist of a barman from Loughlinstown to the Long Hall in George’s Street. “The pubs were plainer, quieter, more interesting, with no piped music, no young people (except myself) and no women.” [...] Denouncing the five-day week, he recalls that on Saturday morning Grafton Street was a wonderland. So Noel Purcell said in his song [...] but my friend’s thoughts were sterner: men hurrying to the pub for the weekend of serious drinking.
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