An Irishman’s Diary on when sitting down meant paying up

People still complain about on-street car parking charges in Dublin. And, right enough, in the central areas like Merrion Square or Stephen’s Green, they can be prohibitive. But as I discovered recently, it’s not that long ago since you didn’t require a vehicle to incur such charges. On the contrary, in the aforementioned Green, you used to have to pay to park your backside.

Yes, there was free seating on benches, then as now. But if you wanted something more comfortable, you had to hire it from professional seating suppliers who were granted the concession by the Board of Works.

The basic model was an upright chair. Deckchairs and loungers cost extra. As with car parking today, you hired a space for a maximum of three hours. The only difference – an important one, I admit – is that there was no question of clamping if you sat too long.

There must be plenty of Dubliners who still remember paid seating in the Green. But I only learned about it while looking for something else on the Oireachtas website archive recently and finding a Dáil question about the issue in June 1964.

Chair-hire charges

The then minister for finance was asked if he realised that the St Stephen’s Green chair-hire charges had just gone up to an “exorbitant” five pence, and if he would consider increasing the supply of free seating “for the aged and those of limited means”.

To which Donogh O’Malley (parliamentary secretary, deputising for the minister) replied that, yes, he would look at adding to the 600 free spaces.

But he also protested that the hire of hard chairs was unchanged at tuppence, and explained that the minister had allowed the contractors add a penny for the soft ones – progressive taxation at its purest – because of “increases in wages and other costs”.

Never mind free seats in the park, O’Malley would go down in history a few years later as the man who introduced free education to Ireland. As for the hired deckchairs of St Stephen’s Green, they seem to have disappeared quietly sometime over the following decade.

But it wasn’t O’Malley, or the contemporary vogue for socialism, that did away with them. According to an unnamed Irishman’s Diarist in this paper, circa 1975, the official reason was vandalism, although he didn’t entirely believe this excuse himself and was calling for their reinstatement. The nostalgic diarist had been a regular user of the chairs during the 1950s and 60s – all in the line of duty no doubt.

Whenever the sun shone in Dublin, he would take time out to sit on them and smell the flowers, and never had any quibble with the cost.

In fact, he had seen the deckchair concession as a useful precedent for what he believed the Green sorely lacked – a “beer garden”.

This was probably a common view among journalists at the time, if their memoirs are to be believed. It must have been a major inconvenience to them that there was anywhere in the city – never mind a park covering several acres – where you couldn’t buy a drink.

Alas, the dream was not to be. The hired deckchairs disappeared and with them went the hope of an open-air beer.

Nowadays, short of a ban on people sitting on the grass, you’d hardly get away with charging for seats. It’s hard to believe it was ever the norm. But then it would have been equally unthinkable, circa 1964, that the city would one day offer free bicycle hire to all, and that even after 10 million trips (a milestone passed this week), vandalism would remain a non-issue.

It’s true that each of the Dublin bikes weighs about as much as a small car. If not indestructible, the design must be a challenge to the mindlessly destructive. On the other hand, I have seen their Paris equivalents cut in two, occasionally (which would require an angle grinder, or explosives), and the general damage to bikes there has been much higher. So maybe Dubliners can be allowed pat themselves on the backs for once.

As another summer looms, though, there’s still no sign of a related French innovation – the Paris Plage – being imported to the banks of the Liffey. Maybe Dublin is too near actual beaches to justify creating a pretend one. Or maybe it’s the weather. Even in August, the month for which the mayor of Paris supplies his people with free deckchairs, parasols, and sand, we couldn’t depend on it not to rain every day. And there’s only so far imagination will take you.

@FrankmcnallyIT