by John Waters
‘The Irish child,’ declared Cyril Daly in what at the time was a controversial assertion, ‘is a human being with human rights.’ He appealed to the Church to desist from damaging both itself and the Christian message. He wrote an open letter to the Archbishop of Dublin, accusing the Church and its ministers of a betrayal of trust: ‘The Irish child has been dishonoured. He is being given an example in violence. He responds to violence. He respects violence. Violent men use violence in the Catholic classroom and say this is the way of Christ. And I say it is blasphemy.’
What jumps out of the archive is how, no matter how irrefutable the facts, the establishment defended the indefensible to the bitter end. When Dr Daly denounced the Irish education system on American television in 1971, he was declared ‘anti-clerical’ and accused of letting Ireland down in the eyes of the world. In 1969, when he spoke at a Labour Party seminar, the event was picketed by members of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) defending its members’ right to beat children. Brian Lenihan said in the Dáil that corporal punishment should be retained as ‘the ultimate punishment’ for children aged eight and upwards. In 1974, the then education minister Richard Burke described corporal punishment as ‘a necessary sanction to protect the majority of pupils from an unruly minority’. In one of Dr Daly’s surveys canvassing the views of politicians, a majority ticked the box indicating their support for abolition, but one politician, surveying the options to ‘abolish’ or ‘retain’, crossed out both and inserted ‘phase out’. That politician was Dr Garret FitzGerald.
Given all that is ‘known’ about the history of violence in the name of education, it comes as a surprise to many Irish people to learn that the Christian Brothers were initially set up in opposition to the culture of violence in Irish schools.
The order was founded in 1802 by a retired businessman, Edmund Ignatius Rice, whose philosophy of teaching was, in fact, formulated as a reaction to what he perceived as the excessively violent nature of education at the time. Rice was profoundly opposed to the physical punishment of children. ‘Unless for some very serious fault, which rarely occurs,’ he wrote in 1810, ‘corporal punishment is not allowed.’ The Christian Brothers’ Manual of School Government, published in 1832, stressed the effectiveness of ‘mildness, affection and kindness’ as pedagogic instruments. ‘Blows,’ the Manual advised, ‘are a servile form of punishment and degrade the soul. They ordinarily harden rather than correct . . . and blunt those fine feelings which render a rational creature sensible to shame. If a master be silent, vigilant, even and reserved in his manner and conduct, he need seldom have recourse to this sort of correction.’
In 1825, the British Royal Commission on Education noted of the Christian Brothers-run schools that ‘the children are kept in good order and the masters seldom have recourse to corporal punishment’.
The crucial event in the shift away from this enlightened policy appears to have been the Famine of the 1840s. Simply by virtue of the Church’s existence and authority in a society with no other indigenous means of self-organization, the responsibility fell to the Church for creating cohesion and providing a moral and social framework to, in effect, ensure that Ireland could contrive to avoid such a calamity in the future.
The radical shift in the culture of the Christian Brothers can be traced to the immediate aftermath of that catastrophe, which followed hard on the death of Ignatius Rice in 1844. By 1851, the Christian Brothers’ Manual had begun to drop mentions of restrictions on corporal punishment. This trend was consolidated in the 1880s by the passing of the Intermediate Education (Ireland) Bill, which provided for a direct connection between examination results and the payment of funding for schools. In effect, schools were left with a straight choice: adopt tougher teaching methods to compete or risk being passed over in favour of schools with less scrupulous philosophies. Subsequently, the Christian Brothers became markedly more successful, but also more notorious for the brutality of their teaching methods.
8 Ben Dunne Snr
Once upon a time, Irish men dressed in dark suits and white shirts with dark ties. To set off the whole ensemble, they sported black or tan shoes or boots, assiduously polished, and capable of announcing their arrival by the sharp clack they essayed as they walked along. This mode of dress seemed to go well with the demeanour of the grown-up Irish male. He tended not to say much, but nevertheless seemed to be reasonably clear about his purpose in life and what he thought about things. He tended to walk, if not exactly confidently, at least in a way that inspired confidence in the beholder. In short, he looked reasonably dignified and carried himself fairly well.
But forty-odd years ago, all this began to change for the worse. The modern average Irish man, once he has moved beyond the point of thinking about how he looks for reasons related to mating, is now a sorry sight indeed. Nowadays he wears not suits and shirts, but jumpers and slacks in terrible, bland, matching colours, beige and grey, with similarly coloured slip-on shoes made of soft material, which make no sound as he walks. The Irish male may still wear a suit while conducting business, or attending funerals, but he is always a little apologetic about it. He can’t wait to get home and change into a cheap tracksuit.
This mode of dress appears to have been accompanied by something close to an existential shift in the psyche of the average Irish male. Once he tended to move about in public on his own, joining with other males at certain appointed places: the public house, the bookie shop, inside the main door of the church. Now, he tends to go out in public in the company of his wife or girlfriend, who, it is clear, is the architect of his physical appearance. Men have ceased to be men and have become instead mannequins who model not merely clothing but an entire idea of what Irish manhood has become. In this vision of manhood, the male is not an autonomous being but the property of his wife, who disports him for competitive purposes in order to demonstrate (a) his docility and (b) her capacity to control every aspect of his life. In Ireland, we have somehow developed a culture whereby men have come to be regarded, and – worse – regard themselves, as the appendages of their female companions. For a man who is in a committed relationship with a woman to indicate independence of mind or dress is culturally interpreted as a sign of actual or potential infidelity.
If you observe such a couple walking into a teashop on a Sunday afternoon, you will, in a single tableau, be able to observe the true nature of sexual politics in modern Ireland. The man, dressed in his beige pullover, fawn slacks and suede shoes, is uncertain of himself, perhaps because he is self-conscious on account of his ridiculous apparel. He glances around uncertainly, as though waiting to be told what to do. He jerks his head tentatively towards a vacant table in the corner, and then to his female companion. She, noting his unspoken proposal, chooses a different table near the door. She indicates her choice by dumping her handbag on one of the chairs and taking off her Prada coat. The man then makes for the counter, looking backwards for signs of what his beloved might desire. You would think that men and women who have been together for anything more than a one-night stand would know one another’s preferences in the matter of beverages and muffins, but Irish men in such situations never seem to be confident about doing the right thing and invariably, on reaching the counter, have to go back to consult with their companions in order, perhaps, to avoid a scolding in the end.
Contrast this with the behaviour of, say, Italian couples. On entering the teashop, it is the man who chooses the table, by the simple expedient of sitting down at it. He is dressed in an impeccable blue suit with a white shirt. He is tieless, but only because it is Sunday. His female companion goes to the counter. She knows what he likes and is not afraid of anyone knowing that she is interested in pleasing him.
All this, or most of it, is the fault of one man. His name was Ben Dunne. In 1944, Dunne opened his first department store in Cork. Within twenty years he had become the wealthiest and most influential businessman in Ireland. For Dunne, the customer was king, or, rather, queen. His
stores sold cheap clothes bearing the St Bernard label, usually simplified copies of garments produced at much higher prices by the larger international brand names. Dunne was an advocate of ‘self-selection’ retailing: he believed in piling the merchandise on the counter and letting people handle the produce before making a choice.
From modest beginnings Dunnes Stores grew rapidly through the 1950s and 1960s, bringing a semblance of international fashion within the grasp of the ordinary Irish housewife. In 1965, anticipating that shopping was turning into a recreational activity, Ben Dunne opened what would become his company’s flagship store at Cornelscourt in south Dublin, Ireland’s first drive-in shopping centre. It is said that, after his retirement, he and his wife would drive out there every Sunday to sit outside in the car park and watch the couples coming and going.
Until the arrival of Dunnes Stores, Irish men had tended to buy their own clothes. They went along to the tailor or outfitter, got measured up and went back a couple of weeks later to collect the new suit. But Dunnes changed all that, reducing the average Irish married male to a walking manifestation of his wife’s determination to define him.
Dunne, a gruff, conservative man, almost invariably declined requests for media interviews. Once, legend has it, he was approached to appear on the The Late Late Show. But when the programme’s researcher went to meet him, he answered every question with the Dunnes Stores slogan: ‘Dunnes Stores’ Better Value Beats Them All.’ He assured her that it was his intention to answer each of Mr Byrne’s questions in the same way.
Once, back in the 1960s, in an episode that was to have reverberations many years later, Ben Dunne was severely humiliated by one Charles Haughey, then a cabinet minister, who forced him to dismantle a stand he had erected at a trade fair in New York because Haughey felt it was conveying the wrong message about Ireland to the world. On this occasion Ben Dunne was showcasing a new product: the bri-nylon shirt, which could be drip-dried and required no ironing. When Haughey arrived and saw, on the St Bernard stand, a white bri-nylon shirt drip-drying in the air-conditioning, he was, by all accounts, horrified. He approached Dunne. ‘What do you think this is,’ he demanded, ‘the fucking Iveagh Market?’ Haughey instructed officials from the Irish trade board to dismantle Dunne’s stand.
It was a cruel and humiliating episode for Dunne, but Haughey could do no more than admonish the tide. Perhaps, with his usual perspicacity, Il Duce was able to see the future nadir of Irish manhood, dressed in clothes chosen by women to advertise the reality of the changed relations between Irish men and women in the dawning age of beige.
9 Neil Blaney
Ballymun Flats would become a faithful representation of a people set up by history, a people whose sense of themselves had been interrupted and diverted, a nation in retreat from itself and the stereotypes that had emerged in the national imagination as a result of condescension and interference. It was the product of a people infected by a craven desire to imitate and to conform to an idea of modernity deriving from elsewhere – a model already beginning to be re-evaluated wherever else it had been tried.
From the early 1960s onwards, the national mood became preoccupied by a search for things that would dramatize Ireland’s coming-of-age as a re-created society. There was a sense of movement away from the previously held vision of the country in an attempt to escape dark elements of its past. The 1943 St Patrick’s Day radio address by Eamon de Valera had acquired in the national imagination a kind of negative motivating stimulus, simultaneously defining what we had been and wished to escape, and unwittingly staking out a new destination. By the early 1960s, fed by the complex interaction of post-colonial uncertainty and desire, it had been decided somewhere deep in the unconscious of the nation that the new destination would be as far in the opposite direction from Dev’s vision. Ballymun was to become a totem of this new thinking.
There were to be more ghettoes in Dublin and in other cities, which, back in the 1960s and 1970s, when most of them were created, were likewise intended as declarations that we were moving inexorably away from poverty and darkness. Darndale, Neilstown, Tallaght, South Hill – massive estates on the fringes of our cities – had been intended to showcase the new urban, industrialized Ireland, to bear witness to the extent to which we were becoming ‘like other modern societies’. Conceived to a blueprint based on Hollywood B-movie notions of what modern living should be like, they were designed for the future blue-collar generations that would man the factories of the new country. Within a few years they had become like the dirt under the carpet of a new fangled, spick-and-span Ireland lacking any sense of its own intrinsic absurdity.
Ballymun was, among such estates, a unique folly, an icon of the failed project of modernization, a symbol of the depth and density of official incoherence, the Mother of all Ghettoes. The seven fifteen-storey, low-density tower blocks were to be Ireland’s first high-rise apartment blocks. One of the core absurdities of Ballymun was that its high-rise element was utterly, insanely superfluous, given that the towers and flat complexes ate up enough ground to house an equivalent number of people in conventional estates. Ballymun was created as an urban utopia by a generation in exile from its roots in the land. The fact that, being constructed around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising, the seven towers were each given the name of a different revolutionary leader, was merely the tin-hat on this living, ironic representation of the pathology of post-colonial confusion. Ballymun captured our helpless predilection for imitation in the form of an ironic monument to those who had died for what they hoped would be a complete and complex form of independence. Here, as a monument to our incoherence, were our seven Towers of Babel in the heart of a wasteland of imitation.
When the 3,000-unit Ballymun project went to tender in 1964, the government specification required it to be constructed ‘as speedily as possible, consistent with a high standard of layout, design and construction and to acceptable costs’. The towers and other apartment complexes were constructed from prefabricated concrete panels cast in an on-site factory. Demand was brisk and prospective residents were subjected to assiduous interview. Problems soon began to manifest themselves, however, with poor maintenance leading to perennial tenant disgruntlement. The inefficient heating system, which could be regulated only by the opening of windows, was a prime focus of complaints, being both costly and inefficient, with poor insulation causing severe heat-loss though the walls of the towers. The lifts were another source of ongoing grievance. The cumulative effect of these difficulties was the phenomenon of transient occupancy, which nurtured instability and fed an emerging drug culture.
Many of the people who ended up in Ballymun were only one or two generations removed from the land. In this, yes, reservation, a new type of Irish person emerged – urban but without strong urban roots, Irish but disconnected from the essentially natural identity of Ireland. It was as though these people had been put out there while we waited for modernity to take. The dominant motif was of a taming of the wilderness, combined with the imposition of something unmistakably alien that, in a country endowed with both space and beauty, could have arisen only from some deep sense of self-doubt and hatred of our natural inheritance.
Ballymun will forever be associated with the then Fianna Fáil Minister for Local Government, Neil Blaney, from Donegal, and mythology had it that the towers had been strategically placed so that politicians, with a wave of the hand in the back of the state car, could indicate them to visiting dignitaries on the way in from the airport.
But as the Lemass boom of the early 1970s rapidly dissolved into a reprise of pessimism that persisted into the 1990s, unemployment and the absence of even the most basic infrastructure ensured that this intended showcase of modern living turned into a nightmare ghetto, with none of the advantages and all the disadvantages of urban living.
Ballymun came to function as a cautionary example of something to be regarded as an unavoidable element of state-driven social intervention. In the fin
al decades of the twentieth century, it became useful for journalists as a source for illustrations of poverty with its pram-pushing teenage girls or freckled boys on horseback. But somehow these never led anywhere, as though the existence of such places was something unavoidable and perhaps even remained, in some backhanded way, a tribute to the modernity of Irish society.
It may seem unfair to place all the blame for this on the shoulders of one man, but had the project been a success, Neil Blaney would have basked in any glory that might have arisen. He must therefore be conferred, if only symbolically, with the blame. The ultimate irony is that Blaney was one of the most unapologetic republicans to emerge in Irish politics in the second half of the twentieth century.
10 Gay Byrne
When, at the end of the twentieth century, Gay Byrne retired as host of The Late Late Show, his departure was attended by a predictable avalanche of commentary focused on his contribution to the ‘modernization’ of Irish society. Reading account after account of how Gay Byrne had led Ireland out of the depths of Stygian blackness, it was difficult to keep stifling the yawns. For anyone reading such treatises would have been driven to the conclusion that, were it not for Gaybo and his Late Late, the people of Ireland would have been incapable of boiling an egg or operating a flush toilet. And not merely was The Late Late essential to our ability to stand unaided on our hind legs, but it was always unmissable.