Authors: John Waters
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
B
allymun 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 final 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
W
hen, 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.
In fact,
The Late Late
was never any good except when you didn’t see it. You could sit week after week watching a monotonous parade of mediocrities and then, Lent over and your penance completed, the one week you skipped out to the pub you could be sure that nobody would talk about anything else except what had happened on
The Late Late
. This suggested that either you were unlucky to always go out on the wrong nights, or
The Late Late
was never as scintillating in reality as was subsequently ‘remembered’. It was afterwards, in the days following certain shows, rather than on the screen on Saturday or, later, Friday night, that the legend was created.
Of course, in the beginning nobody expected
The Late Late
to be anything other than a mildly diverting talk show. Its ‘importance’ was not an issue until the 1980s, when it was adapted as part of the apparatus of modernization employed to propel us forward from the ignorance of pre-television Ireland. It then became the main springboard used to catapult us out of a mythical and distorted version of our past, which had been caricatured to provide the maximum quality of propulsion. Since reality was much more complex than this caricature required, it was necessary for those who sought to bring about certain changes in Irish society to manipulate the evidence so as to increase our desire to ‘progress’ by making the past seem as revolting as possible.
It is even taken half seriously by some people, that, as the Fine Gael TD Oliver J. Flanagan once jokingly put it in a Dail speech, ‘there was no sex in Ireland until Teilifis Eireann went on the air’. In truth, there was far more sex in Ireland before
The Late Late
, if only because people had nothing else to do in the long evenings. Declining fertility rates in recent decades suggest that people started having less sex from about the time
The Late Late Show
went on the air.
A researcher on
The Late Late
once related how, when he compiled a selection of the programme’s greatest hits for some anniversary or other, he was afterwards assailed by people wondering why he had not included the episode known as ‘The Bishop and the Nightie’. He asked them if they knew precisely what this item entailed, and they responded with claims that this was one of the seminal moments in Irish television history. Yes, he said, but do you know that in the episode of ‘The Bishop and the Nightie’ there was no bishop and no nightie?
All that occurred on the screen on the night in February 1966, when this stirring tale of modern Ireland unfolded, was that a woman, taking part in a light-hearted party game based on a format ‘borrowed’ from another TV station, when asked what colour nightie she had been wearing on the night of her honeymoon, replied ‘none’, before quickly adding ‘white’.
It can hardly have been news, even in the most ‘traditional’ parts of Ireland, in 1966, that people sometimes took their clothes off before going to bed together, but this did not prevent the Bishop of Clonfert from immediately contacting the Sunday newspapers to inform them that he would be preaching a sermon in Loughrea on the following day in which he would denounce
The Late Late Show
as immoral and request his flock not to watch it again. The newspapers insisted on presenting the issue as a major moral confrontation, and the story was a front-page lead on Sunday and Monday. On the night of the programme, only three people rang the station to complain about the broadcast, and two of these were exercised because the idea had been ripped off from another TV network. Thus, only one person in the country felt sufficiently morally outraged by the item to pick up a telephone and complain, and this person was the secretary of the Bishop of Clonfert. Only through the intervention of the media did the event become one of the groundbreaking episodes in the creation of modern Ireland. Something banal would be said on the show, and some publicity-hungry cleric or county councillor would make it into a federal issue. A ‘national debate’ would ensue about the decline in moral values or some such nonsense. This suited the agenda of the modernizers because the impression was thus given that they were hard at work confronting the dark forces, when in reality nobody but a handful of lunatics was in the slightest bit bothered.
The Late Late
did not, as is suggested, ‘open up’ Irish society: what it ‘opened up’, more often than not, were the ample mouths of some of the more ridiculous of our public figures. If we are to judge from what we ‘remember’ about it, the alleged ‘influence’ of
The Late Late Show
was all over and done with within five years of first going on air.
Indeed, ‘The Bishop and the Nightie’ affair was regarded as such a seminal feature of Ireland’s socio-sexual development that, in the late 1970s, when RTE was spring-cleaning its vaults, that particular programme, along with virtually all other
Late Lates
over the previous two decades, was wiped. It is probably just as well for those seeking to elevate the importance of Gaybo and his show that nothing of these supposedly earth-shaking episodes is preserved: if it was, we would today be able to perceive their utter tedium and banality.
So, when we talk about the importance of Gay Byrne’s contribution to Irish society, we should be a little more specific. The change was not so much in the reality of Ireland as in the public perception of it. The change was that we began to say what was going on, in public, on live television, rather than simply thinking it or muttering about it among ourselves. The change was in the nature of talk, rather than in the nature of events. Those who celebrate the influence of
The Late Late
are celebrating themselves and the success of their particular agenda.