Why Dublin is the real Ireland too

I was writing this book in my head for years. Since sometime in the late 1980s when I was standing outside O’Donoghue’s pub on Merrion Row, smoking a cigarette and drinking a pint one summer Sunday afternoon. A middle-aged couple – well dressed, tanned, so obviously foreign – asked me for directions. We got talking and when I asked where else they were going they replied Co Clare. Then I heard myself saying something that I did not believe, but was saying it anyway, because that’s what I had heard other people say. “Ah, that’s the real Ireland.”

That brief conversation troubled me and raised a number of issues that I was not easily able to resolve. Why had I trotted out a comment that I had heard so often repeated, but which I did not believe? And what role did Dublin play in Irish life anyway? And then I realised that if the tourists had asked me what I believed was so great about Dublin I would have been hard pressed to give them a satisfactory answer.

For years these and other questions about Ireland’s capital simmered away in my thoughts while I lived, studied, worked and socialised in the city.

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A mother with her children in St Stephen’s Green

It was not until 2005 when Dublin was experiencing its latest reinvention during the Celtic Tiger as a vibrant, prosperous and dynamic European city that I made the conscious decision to write a book on what I thought to be the city’s most interesting, and mostly ignored, part of its history, the period since independence.

You will note that there is an 11-year gap between decision and completion. The main reason for the delay was that I could not write the book until I had decided on its structure.

Dublin Since 1922 could have been written in an academic style, divided into chapters, subject by subject. However, that would certainly have limited the readership, missed out on the interconnectedness of the stories and also not accommodated what was becoming in my mind a key point of the book, how the city evolved and reinvented itself era by era.

Then around four years ago I found myself thinking of how one’s life is shaped by certain key days and moments. The day you get married, the days your children are born, when you start a new job, are diagnosed with a serious illness, the moment you hear a piece of music that moves you for the first time, or when a close friend or relation dies, or when a relationship breaks up, or when you win an important match, appreciate a sunset as if for the first time or read a book that changes your life. These are pockets of time that change us, that mould us. As the book on Dublin was never far from my mind I started to think of the days that did the same to the city of Dublin. The story grew from there.

In the end I included over 300 such instances, moments, days in Dublin Since 1922. Some were obvious such as the day Michael Collins going to Dublin Castle to meet the Lord Lieutenant and take over the reins of power, the day the Pope arrived in Ireland, the first publication of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem On Raglan Road, the running of the last tram from the city centre, the introduction of the first double decker bus, the first telephone box being erected, the first letter box painted green after independence, the introduction of clamping, the opening of Spike Island to help deal with the joyriding epidemic in the city in the 1980s, and so on.

Told in the present tense to give an immediacy and eye-witness feel to the narrative they may appear at first glance to be a series of independent entries, random dates and facts. However, thought it can be easily dipped into there is a definite narrative to the book.

A number of themes run through Dublin Since 1922. Planning is a key part of the book and among the entries are Abercrombie’s ambitious vision to transform Dublin in the same way that Hausmann transformed Paris, the much more basic Sketch plan of 1940 that led to the development of the working class areas of Finglas, Coolock and Ballyfermot, the Myles Wright Report of 1967 that gave us Tallaght, Lucan, Clondalkin as well the M50, the East Link and the Port Tunnel and the incentive schemes of the 1980s that led to the regeneration of the city centre that we take so much for granted today.

There is crime ranging from unsavoury murders to bicycle thefts to illegal abortions, from the emergence of a serious Juvenile Delinquent problem in the 1950s to the joyriding epidemic of the 1980s.

There are the changes of architecture including the first modernist houses in the 1930s, the opening Busarus in 1953 - a building I hated before writing the book, but have since come to love - the brutalist office buildings of the 1960s and 1970s and the significance of the new Croke Park stadium.

With a city as culturally important as Dublin there is of course theatre, literature and music. There is from Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds, Roddy Doyle’s Commitments, Paul Howard’s Ross O’Carroll Kelly and Maeve Binchy. There is Sean O’Casey, Maura Laverty’s Dublin play Tolka Row that was seen by 100,000 Dubliners in 1951, there is Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow. There is ‘Biddy Mulligan, the Pride of the Coombe’, ‘Rat Trap’ by the Boomtown Rats, there is Luke Kelly and Sinead O’Connor

And then there are the events in the city. There is the St Patrick’s Day parade and its evolution from a military parade celebrating the existence of the state, then to an industrial parade that promoted Irish jobs and from the late 1990s a vibrant cultural expression of modern Ireland. There is the Pope’s visit in 1979, the Eucharistic Congress that very much planted the Church centre stage in Irish life - shortly after the congress the Communist Party headquarters was ransacked and the Carrigan report into sexual activity and vice in the city was suppressed because it would give a poor representation of the city and the country, the collapse of slum buildings causing the deaths of five people in 1963 and the erection of the Spire on O’Connell Street.

An essential part of any city’s story is how people get from A to B. There are the trams, the introduction and expansion of the bus network to meet a sprawling suburban landscape, the Dart, the Luas but a constant refrain are the problems associated with the car – in many ways the problems of 1920s are the same as those of today.

And interspersed are quotes about the city that go some way towards capturing its essence. Among these are pen picture descriptions by Patrick Kavanagh of life in Dublin in the 1940s, a 1984 issue of In Dublin magazine that listed 200 reasons for people not to leave at a time of severe economic recession and Francis Bacon likening the smell of Dublin to that of a beautiful woman. These are entries that would never have found their way into an academic book but in a sense they define the city as much as any planning report, perhaps even better.

Finally there are over 200 illustrations. Many of these have rarely, and sometimes never, been previously published. There is a Luftwaffe aerial intelligence photograph of the South Circular Road during the second World War, a beautiful image of a mother with two children in St Stephen’s Green – you can almost smell the autumn leaves, the first female gardaí on duty in the city, the poster stall on the railings of the Bank of Ireland on College Green in the 1980s where people of my vintage found material for their bedroom walls and Dustin the Turkey – a real Dub as he is wont to describe himself – representing Ireland in the 2008 Eurovision (unbelievably, we actually thought he would win!).

What emerges as the years go past is a city that reinvented itself a number of times and yet managed to retain its essential characteristics and traits over the decades. It is also a city that becomes increasingly important in terms of bringing new ideas to Ireland – architecture, fashion, music, women’s liberation. And finally, to go back to that conversation outside O’Donoghue’s pub in the 1980s, the story of Dublin since 1922 becomes ever more central to the wider Irish experience. And, ultimately, the story of Dublin becomes one that is not just of the city, but also of the country as a whole.

Dublin Since 1922 by Tim Carey is published by Hachette Ireland