FROM THE ARCHIVES:Dublin Corporation decided in 1945 not to allow pubs on its new housing estates at Cabra and Crumlin. The Irish Timesapproved but suggested the Corporation should run inns like the Trust Houses in Britain which served food, tea and coffee as well as alcohol. Myles na Gopaleen did not agree.
I SEE where The Irish Times, official organ of the Incensed, sorry Licensed Trade has made editorial comment on the whole miserable business and appears to take the view that the Corporation is right in vetoing the erection in or on our vast dormitory hubburbs (stet) of public houses – "reason": possible increase in intemperance! (How on earth could present rates of intemperance increase?)
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 1,000 times – Corporation one-class plantations are a crime against the community. The notion that you can solve the housing problem by abstracting, not merely from such and such a slum, but actually from their place in society, all persons of the slave class, that is to say, all persons who by reason of poverty or ignorance are subjected to the incessant and gratuitous interference of our most venerable father, the State, by isolating them in the thronged and dreary desserts of dormitory estates, expressly and designedly devoid of those social amenities and characteristics which are elsewhere an accepted part of living – this without shadow of doubt is complacency and arrogance.
If then in monstrous sprawl of concrete and processed cardboard structures, minimally conceived and executed for the owners of this island, it is ordained that the plain people of Dublin must languish, as in the cells of an open-air penitentiary – if the unique reward for the toil and diligence of decent men is to [be] expelled from the city of which they are the mainstay and the prop – then, then gentlemen, I must move for papers for the re-enactment of the Union!
Meantime, obedient to the ukase of a cynical and abandoned municipality, the Dublin working man finds himself deprived of the sustenance and entertainment which he, far more than his wealthier and more influential brethren, so badly needs! On top of it all, from the lawless mountain fastness of Westmoreland Street comes a proposal that for heedlessness, lack of humanity and perverted humour, I have no hope upon this globe to see excelled. My secretary will quote, please:
There is comedy and pathos in that passage ; the aim to effect business efficiency in the drink traffic is ... interesting, not unlaughable the notion that alcoholic drink is supplied cheaply and willingly – the present writer would pay, and pay handsomely, for a list of addresses. Good also the strategy of having an establishment that is not a pub – how harmless then the long nightly visits by husbands!
My final word. Not less than 12 public houses per acre to be erected on all Corporation settlements before the summer! (Mind you, I am Dudley Soriass!)
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