Culture Shock:The Dublin school where Roddy Doyle taught and Enda Walsh learned is to close, writes Fintan O'Toole. Does this signal the end of the dynamism in Irish education that the school embodied?
We tend to think of artistic creativity as an individual trait, an aspect of personality like physical beauty or sporting prowess. It is undoubtedly true that art has, at its core, an individual, even solitary, dimension. But like everything else that is human, it also arises from circumstances. Mozart's godlike inventiveness, his apparent ability to speak music as a native language, clearly reflected an extraordinary talent. But that talent emerged from the context of a musically-obsessed family and a hard, rigorous training from early childhood. Conversely, talent can be unfulfilled, inspiration can go a-begging and the desire to express oneself can be stunted by unpropitious circumstances. Women, for example, have produced less great art than men have, not because they are less talented but because the opportunities, expectations and circumstances have seldom been as supportive.
One of the most striking examples in Irish culture of the effects of a creative environment has been Greendale Community School in the north Dublin suburb of Kilbarrack. It was established in 1974 to accommodate the hundreds of families moving into the new housing estates of what was then a rapidly-growing area. One of my own contemporaries at UCD, Roddy Doyle, came from Kilbarrack, wanted to be a teacher, and got a job in Greendale. Two of his college friends, Paul Mercier and John Sutton, followed him into a school whose growth made jobs available. It happened that the school acquired among its cohort of young teachers Ireland's best young novelist, its most dynamic young playwright and in Sutton, who went on to manage Paul Mercier's Passion Machine and the SFX centre that became its base, a brilliant cultural entrepreneur.
It would probably be an exaggeration to say that being in Greendale shaped the artistic careers of Roddy Doyle and Paul Mercier. Doyle was already writing before he went there, and anyone who knew him in UCD would have little doubt that he was going to be a novelist. Mercier, likewise, was writing and directing highly accomplished shows in the Irish language for An Cumann Drámaíochta at UCD. Both would probably have been writers wherever they had gone. But Greendale certainly influenced the kind of writers they became. The language, the humour, and the deep sympathy that marked Doyle's Barrytown trilogy and, in particular, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, owed their depth in some measure to daily contact with the kids in the school. Equally, Mercier's extraordinary confidence with the worlds and words of working-class suburban youth in his Passion Machine plays reflected a real involvement in their lives.
More importantly, however, the presence of writers begat writers. No one thinks it odd that having the legendary Dublin midfielder Brian Mullins as principal helped to account for Greendale's development of a successful sporting culture. But we are reluctant to acknowledge that something similar can happen with literature, and that example can be a powerful force in artistic creativity. It is not coincidental, surely, that Mercier and Doyle's colleague Catherine Dunne was encouraged to write the novels that are so famous in Italy that Silvio Berlusconi's wife could refer to herself without further explanation as "like the Catherine Dunne character". Or that Dunne's path into intelligent popular fiction has been followed by former Greendale pupil Tara Heavey. Or that Greendale alumnus Enda Walsh went on to explore Mercier's theatrical territory of young lives shaped by the dreams of popular culture.
This isn't simply about direct influence, of course. The prominence of writers at Greendale both defined and reflected a wider ethos. The school was established in the backwash of Donogh O'Malley's great leap forward into free secondary education and it caught a wave of optimism about what schools could do. There was a notion that second-level education could be a catalyst for a fairer, more open, more dynamic society. Wrapped up in the ethos of community schools in particular was a faith in education as a tool for social and personal development. That faith always had to struggle within the narrower, more mechanical view of schools as feeders for the exam system. But it was strong enough to inspire a real attempt not to be confined to narrow curricular goals. Schools such as Greendale believed that their job was to allow all kinds of pupils to develop their varied potentials and were prepared, in doing so, to value achievements in every field.
Greendale is closing at the end of this term, and that fact says a lot about the loss of faith in the idea of a school as a broad cultural and social force. Demographic shifts in Kilbarrack mean that there are too many schools for too few pupils, but it is significant that the first to go is the one that's most ambitious, innovative and culturally significant. We are reverting to a system in which art and literature are add-ons available in fee-paying schools, rather than core aspects of individual and social development. There will be plenty of very talented writers to write Greendale's epitaph and deliver the funeral orations, but it would be much better for the future of Irish culture if such obsequies were unthinkable.