Feckers

by John Waters

  Stirring stuff, but actually a load of horlicks. The most graphic communication in this particular article was of the arched condescension with which Dublin architects are wont to regard their fellow citizens. The tragedy is that such a fine journalist should join forces with such prigs against the citizens of a free republic, enabling the discussion about housing and planning policy to become monopolized by self-important Dublin 4 architects who imagined the countryside existing so that they might occasionally drive across it in their big cars. McDonald’s campaign sparked a one-sided, undemocratic debate, conducted on the basis of metropolitan bias, spurious aesthetics, snobbery, dinner party politics and a fundamental lack of perspective on the nature of Irish life. Thanks to the Bungalow Blight campaign, the very idea of a self-standing house in the countryside came to be associated with backwardness, sleveenism and poor taste.

  In fact, the figures quoted by Frank McDonald indicate that the increase in one-off housing was occurring within a sustainable model of development based on real human need. In the West of Ireland, certainly, the alleged ‘rural housing sprawl’ that developed from the 1970s onwards, was at last a hopeful sign that the region’s long history of decline and depopulation might be over. People were taking up opportunities to build houses in locations to which they had some family or emotional connection. For the most part, there was little or no speculative dimension, Ireland continued to have one of the lowest levels of population density in Europe, and what was wrong with people preferring the fresh air?

  Thus, a tiny elite of interested individuals, with agendas ranging from snobbery to social engineering, managed, by pooling their ambitions and influence, to create an unaccountable and largely invisible nucleus of official prejudice against something as completely harmless as a self-standing house in the countryside.

  Meanwhile, but by no means unconnectedly, the real cancer in the Irish planning process went unremarked upon until it was too late.

  By the middle of 2008, when the Irish economy finally went into meltdown mode, it began to be clear that the greatest problem facing the Irish planning environment was not one-off housing after all, but, lo and behold, the numbers of houses which had been built in towns and villages, usually as a result of tax incentives, for which there was no prospect of finding buyers or occupiers. Most of these developments had been favoured by planning authorities because of an ideological view that clusters of houses in towns and villages were a vast improvement on one-off housing. With the increasingly prohibitive nature of the planning climate, which in some areas gravitated towards an outright ban on one-off rural housing, people who would once have routinely obtained permission to build homes on their family farms, had ceased to bother asking. Instead, the focus shifted to developers who sought to promote housing schemes within towns and villages, and it was largely from this shift that the crisis developed.

  By 2010 it had become clear that the crystallization of the Irish economic disaster was to be located and observed in the phenomenon known as ‘ghost estates’. These were the unoccupied developments that now studded the landscape, usually attached like haemorrhoids to villages and small towns, amounting to some 300,000 housing units that could neither be sold nor rented. Gradually it became clear that the only solution to this problem was to raze all such developments to the ground.

  Frank McDonanld cannot be blamed for this situation. Nevertheless, it was what often seemed to be his relentless campaigning on one-off housing that led to the emergence of a culture of unreason in Irish planning circles, and this made the eventual catastrophe inevitable. If, instead of pursuing the ideological path laid down by McDonald, the Irish planning sector had pursued a policy of encouraging one-off housing, it is likely that much of this disaster might have been averted. The Dublin architectural community has been silent on this point.

  21 Desmond O’Malley

  In July 1989, following the successful coalition negotiations between the Progressive Democrats and Fianna Fáil, Desmond O’Malley got to his feet in Dáil Éireann and said: ‘I want to acknowledge the courage and skill exhibited, particularly by Deputy Haughey in recent weeks, courage and skill which I know he possesses in abundance, and which has been utilized in the national interest during this time.’ Once again, in adhering to the national interest, Mr O’Malley had managed to emerge with the outcome most congenial to himself. This man, who had once characterized Mr Haughey as unfit to hold power, was now suggesting that it was in accordance with the public interest that Mr Haughey hold the second highest office in the land.

  A number of people with long memories had the bad manners to remind Mr O’Malley of his previous emphatic position concerning Mr Haughey, articulated most memorably in the wake of his own expulsion from Fianna Fáil in 1985, when he said that Haughey’s role in the Arms Crisis of 1970 had rendered him unfit for positions of public power. Now, the Irish people could only gasp in admiration at how O’Malley and his Progressive Democrat colleagues were prepared to grub around the place in their ministerial cars, their bottoms shifting uneasily on the compromising upholstery, because the national interest required them to humble themselves in this disagreeable way.

  Back in 1985, when O’Malley founded the PDs, there had been much talk about the imminent realignment of Irish politics into a more orderly, ‘European’, configuration. It would be only a matter of a short time, we were assured, before the tribal divisions of Irish politics began to divide coherently into left- and right-wing elements, as had happened everywhere else.

  This was the PD pretext, or part of it. Another significant element was ethical, or at least nominally so. The PDs were to be the ‘party of integrity’, in contradistinction to Fianna Fáil, the party led by the great PD nemesis. Only when Charles Haughey was buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart, it was said, could the PDs be wound up. And so, eventually, it would come to pass, with the PDs surviving Haughey by just a couple of years.

  No matter how they tried to dress it up, Haughey was the sole reason for the existence of the PDs. Haughey attracted a deep-set loathing among the emerging elites of the new Ireland who mistrusted the swash of his buckle and despised the hair on his nouveau riche head. Haughey’s arrogance, pride, pretensions, rudeness, sulphuric aura and, above all, formidable political ability, created tremors across a whole swathe of the modern Irish mind. The PDs eventually became the personification of this resentment, which has retrospectively claimed justification on the basis of what the McCracken and Moriarty tribunals managed to dig out – but they had nothing to go on in the beginning except envy and spite.

  Everything else was pretext, elaborate self-justification to camouflage the banding together of individuals and cultural interests with no grander purpose than the defeat and destruction of a pretender so exceptional that his existence assured all mediocrities with pretensions and ambitions that they had been born at the wrong time. In a sense, the PDs began not in 1985, but at the moment, some two decades before, when certain members of an aspirant political generation took one look at the swarthily preposterous figure of Charles J. Haughey and realized they were going nowhere while this guy remained on the pitch. The unfolding story of Irish politics in the coming half-century was defined by this encounter, which shaped the evolution of Haughey’s own personality as much as it shaped the reaction to him.

  When Desmond O’Malley first entered the Dáil in 1968, on the sudden death of his legendary uncle, Donogh, Charles Haughey had already presided, as Minister for Finance, over one economic boom. Two decades later, he was as Taoiseach to pave the way for a second. In between, he spent most of his time and energy fighting for his political life, as the pygmies around sought to dispatch him to the political locker room. When you filter out the moralistic soundtrack, these are the important features of the Irish political topography of the past half-century.

  There are two kinds of iconoclast: the kind who wants to tear down the establishment because of pure idealism and the kind who threatens to pull down t
he establishment so the establishment will move over and invite him to join it. Des O’Malley, as evidenced by his subsequent willingness to get into bed with his nemesis (in ‘the national interest’ or otherwise), was the latter kind.

  He was, to begin with, an unlikely politician, and especially an unlikely Fianna Fáil politician. At college he had been a bit of a leftie, and, despite his later nodding towards the right, this seems to have fitted his personality better than anything he subsequently tried. At one time he was a traditionalist fulminating against fornication and Anglo-American culture, and then was reborn as the defender of authentic republican values. He was comfortable in the role of minister, of apparatchik, of ideologue, but never as politician. He was dogged but uncharismatic. He was unprepossessing of appearance and brittle of manner. His voice grated on your nerves. The terrible truth, however, was that, no matter what he claimed to stand for, Dessie just looked plain wrong. Once, in an effort at a makeover, he emerged with a new haircut. Everyone gasped. Some observers laughed out loud. But in no time at all, everything came to naught. All the king’s hairdressers were unable to stop that demon tuft of hair on the back of his head from sticking up like Liberty Hall no matter what they did.

  Similar conditions of philosophical incoherence and flawed aesthetic seemed to dog the party he founded. No matter what the PDs tried, it all came to very little, because really there was nothing much behind the party but ambition and resentment. Of the twenty-three-year history of the PDs, nearly fifteen were spent in government with Fianna Fáil, the party they set out to destroy. This relationship both enabled the PDs to exist long after they might otherwise have become irrelevant and also, paradoxically, killed them off with the kind of kindness that Fianna Fáil and man-eating cobras do well.

  The type of voter who voted PD was fickle and self-interested, the antithesis of the FF mujahideen. By getting into bed with the enemy, the PDs cut off their own lifeline, believing that their achievements while in office would speak for themselves. They were too arrogant to anticipate that Fianna Fáil would steal their clothes and suck their veins dry, adapting anything remotely usable among their ideas to the culture that FF understands as no PD could ever do.

  Although Desmond O’Malley struck many poses on different issues in his long career at the top of Irish politics, he seemed always to be more concerned about sounding principled than in actually achieving anything that might genuinely be for the good of the country. Even his principled image was mainly for effect.

  In 1986, shortly after he founded the PDs, he and his party colleague, Bobby Molloy, announced that they were giving up their ministerial pensions because there was ‘no moral justification’ for still-serving politicians receiving such payments. Less than a decade later, both men began accepting their pensions again, and Dessie explained that it was because they had got ‘no thanks’ for their earlier gesture. Gone was the question of moral justification. Gone were the values. Gone was the national interest. All that remained was the pragmatism of a man whose view of morality related purely to the behaviour of others.

  The lesson of the final demise of the PDs was that Irish politics has never been, and never will be, ideological. There has not emerged, and will never emerge, a left–right divide. Fianna Fáil has always known this, and in the end the PDs came to know it too. Their sole enduring contribution to Irish politics was the imposition of a form of priggishness in the public arena that causes principle to read instantly as hypocrisy. They were the Pharisees to the tax-collectors of Fianna Fáil, the stern federal marshal riding shotgun on the James Gang.

  22 Big Tom

  If music is prophetic – as Jacques Attali persuasively argued – then the mood of present-day Ireland was best anticipated not by the nation’s ancient tradition of folk music, nor by the folk boom of the 1960s, and not even by the latter-day rock giants like Sinéad O’Connor and U2, but by the maudlin, self-pitying oeuvre of Big Tom and the Mainliners. The connection, of course, is not so much with the content of lost lovers and dead mothers, as the tone depicting what was approximately an emotion: a deeply, inconsolably felt condition of self-pity, expressed in the most direct and inarticulate way.

  What is absent today is irony, a quality of ‘Country ’n’ Irish’ that most people – not excluding Big Tom himself – seemed to miss. And yet, in the 1960s and 1970s, Big Tom unselfconsciously brought irony to parts of Ireland that other purveyors of cultural content could not reach. Until his audience dwindled away around the end of the 1980s, he enabled a whole generation of youngsters to see the same thing simultaneously in two different ways. This was partly because of an unacknowledged cultural divide between town and country, and partly because of the absence of choice for young people in those days. At least half of Big Tom’s audience comprised the newly minted pop kids of post-Lemass Ireland, who had grown up listening to Radio Luxembourg and John Peel. Very often, the ‘country’ showband was the only show in town, so if you wanted to go out, that’s where you had to go.

  There were mixed feelings about this. At the one extreme there was the committed and uncritical fan; at the other was the refusenik epitomized by the character Tom in Tom Murphy’s play, Conversations on a Homecoming: ‘The real enemy – the big one! – that we shall overcome, is the country-and-western system itself. Unyielding, uncompromising in its drive for total sentimentality. A sentimentality I say that would have us all an unholy herd of Sierra Sues, sad-eyed inquisitors, sentimental Nazis, fascists, sectarianists, black– and blue-shirted nationalists with spurs a janglin’, all ridin’ down the trail to Oranmore.’

  Like it or not, Big Tom was a central element in the cultural formation of a majority of Irish people born between the Emergency and the Mary Robinson presidency. Some of those affected or afflicted were volunteers, but most were conscripts. Some people went to his gigs to ‘square’ a member of the opposite sex. Some, although claiming to hate the music, went because they liked to jive. Many truly loathed the music, while others regarded it with an arched eyebrow. But, no matter how you heard it, the music seeped into your soul.

  It was difficult to tell if Big Tom was for real or not. He was a strange phenomenon to look at – a mountain of a man with blond hair, dressed in incongruously colourful clothes, who sang a succession of odd songs without saying much besides, rarely communicating at all other than by means of the occasional theatrical wink. Apart from the clothes and the guitar, he looked as if he would have much happier behind the wheel of a Massey Ferguson.

  But there was, too, a sense of mystery about it all, a suggestion of a ritualistic celebration of something felt at a very slightly deeper level. The mood was always carefree, even raucous, but the songs were all about pain and loss – so much so that it became funny. He called himself once ‘a singer of sad songs’. He said: ‘We’re a sentimental race of people . . . We’ve had a lot of trouble down the years, so maybe we have reason for it.’

  Big Tom had been born plain Tom McBride, in Castleblaney, County Monaghan, probably early in the 1930s. He left school at 14, got his first job working on a neighbouring farm for five shillings a week. He spent a decade or so going between Monaghan, Scotland and London, eventually settling down to a mix of farming, steel-erecting and music. In the early 1960s, Tom began playing with a local group called the Fincairn Ceili Band, performing mostly at dinner dances and weddings. He was the rhythm guitarist, singing the odd song, but eventually became the lead singer, singing a range of songs about love and exile that he’d picked up on his travels. His first hit was ‘Gentle Mother’, a country dirge about a dead mother. Tom had first heard it sung in London a decade before.

  Country music Irish-style was to acquire a specific context as the folk music of a generation traumatized by involuntary emigration, and without any other means of expressing itself. Through the 1960s and 1970s, pop co-existed alongside this odd Irish hybrid, seeming to articulate the dichotomy of fear and hope that characterized the Lemass era and its messy aftermath. Pop became the voice of
optimism and forgetting; ‘Country ’n’ Irish’ that of apprehension and remembering.

  The problem with Big Tom was not so much that he was shite, although he was in a way. The problem was that, underneath what he did there was the shadow of something else, something that might have been great if he had had the vision to excavate it and his audience had the intuition to demand it. The ironic response the music engendered was not without basis: there was the makings of something good rattling just below the surface. Had there been a Shane MacGowan happening along, capable of giving the music a root in the arse, who knows what might have come of it?

  It would be a mistake to overlook the fact that it was in the 1980s, when emigration started up once again, that Daniel O’Donnell emerged to become an international star. His oeuvre owed something to ‘Country ’n’ Irish’, but it lacked roughage and Daniel thought irony was a pill you took with your breakfast.

  A few years after the ballroom boom died down, an American country singer called Garth Brooks started coming to Ireland for occasional performances. Brooks sang of a pain that was manageable and shallow. His voice did not penetrate like Bono’s or Sinéad’s. He allowed a little of the pain to show itself, but also enabled it to be covered over in a coat of sugary syrup. Within no time at all he had sold 500,000 albums in Ireland alone, a level of sales unequalled in any other market.