Review: The Mount Street Club, Dublin’s Unique Response to Unemployment

The Mount Street Club: Dublin’s Unique Response to Unemployment 1934-present

Author: Peter Somerville-Large, Mary E Daly & Colin Murphy

ISBN-13: 978-1781171721

Publisher: Mercier

Guideline Price: €14.99

In 1951 Seamus O'Flanagan stayed a year at Larkfield Farm, which was part of the Mount Street Club. Although he later emigrated he got vital breathing space there, practised his tailoring trade, learned other skills, and made friends in a pleasant, peaceful environment. Some years earlier, in inner-city Dublin, Anna Geraghty's discouraged and depressed father was glad of the work and camaraderie of the club, but his family had an additional reason to be grateful: "Without the Mount Street Club, we would have starved."

These two stories illustrate both the bread and the roses, in the gift of a year out, supplied in abundance by the club, which was founded 80 years ago, the brainchild of James Waller and Paddy Somerville-Large. An architect and an engineer, they set up the Mount Street Club as a co-operative scheme for the unemployed men of Dublin.

Members did certain craft and maintenance jobs to earn tallies – one tally per hour’s work – to spend on goods and services. A stone of potatoes cost one tally; a shave cost half a tally; a kitchen dresser, to order, 25 tallies. Members’ families could avail of the goods and services too.

So artisans and tradesmen kept their hands in, semi-skilled and unskilled men had plenty of jobs to do, too, and all had somewhere to go and a way of getting their dinner – one tally – every day.

Taking the men out of the family pot was a great relief to women stretching slender resources to feed families. Also, tenement living could work only – insofar as it worked at all – if nearly all the adults were out for most of every day, and the club saw to this. It was not entirely self-supporting – fundraising was constant and vigorous – but its self-sufficiency was enhanced by the purchase of Larkfield Farm and the acquisition of bogland, for turf, in Co Kildare.

Needs changed in the late 1940s and 1950s. The club moved to Fenian Street, stopped using tallies and, as employment improved in the late 1950s, changed its focus. By the 1970s and 1980s it was involved in a variety of services, often liaising with other voluntary organisations. It established, among other things, Dublin Nautical Trust, a community regeneration scheme around Ringsend. (This was where the former Galway-Aran ferry Naomh Eanna ended up.)

The club's founders put their foot in it a few times in the early days, by calling their journal Tally-ho!, for example, and by some tactless musings, as when Paddy Somerville-Large, in 1939, said that Protestants were the "natural leaven" in Irish society. But this caused nothing more than a ripple of indignation. The club had many Catholic supporters and well-wishers, and its ordinary members were overwhelmingly Catholic. (Friday dinner was always fish, or eggs.) Fr John Hayes, of Muintir na Tíre, came to speak at a conference there in 1941, and a quotation from Bishop Michael Browne of Galway was used on publicity material the following year.

The club’s emphasis on co-operation fitted in well with the philosophy of vocationalism espoused by many Catholics. Archbishop McQuaid disliked the Mount Street Club, but although he set up rival organisations to other non-Catholic bodies that he distrusted he never acted against Mount Street.

But this is barely mentioned; the authors of these articles have more interesting stories to tell than those of dreary denominational rivalry. Sarah Campbell contributes a fluent and flawlessly researched article on social conditions in Dublin in the 1930s, and Mary E Daly takes up this story for the later decades with her usual authority. Peter Somerville-Large and Colin Murphy provide lively narratives of the club’s early days, including personal histories of some members and their families.

Sarah Perrem traces with admirable clarity the complicated story of the club since the early 1950s. The former lord mayor of Dublin Oisín Quinn contributes a foreword.

Some articles are of more interest to the general reader than others, but this is a book can be dipped into, and it manages to be both scholarly (all the articles are fully footnoted) and suitable for the coffee table. There are many beautifully reproduced extracts from the Mount Street Journal (as Tally-ho! was more soberly retitled), weekly club menus, regulations, playbills, tallies and other material. Photographs trace the club's evolution from the sepia Kildare turfcutting to the dazzling colour of the modern Fettercairn allotments.

The Mount Street Club could not alter the social structures that produced the bitter poverty of mid-20th-century Dublin, but it gave purpose and space to men who were belittled by society and, through no fault of their own, were surplus to daily requirements in the overcrowded dwellings they called home.

Caitriona Clear teaches history at NUI Galway