Ross O'Carroll-Kelly

People from Terenure are not and never will be People Like Us, Dahling

THOSE OF YOU who’ve ever had the misfortune to meet my old dear may know that she has this word that she likes to occasionally use. Pluds. It’s basically, like, initials? Stands for People Like Us, Dahling.

It’s always been hord to put your finger on exactly who are Pluds because the old dear only ever mentions them in reference to who they’re not? For instance, people who use public transport, do the National Lottery or know their way around the frozen food aisle in the supermorket aren’t Pluds.

Ditto, people who drink wine from screwcap bottles, drive cors that are more than four years old and stand up for the national anthem. People with tattoos, people with the word “Close” in their addresses and people who name their children after dead dudes mortyred in the cause of Irish freedom – same shit.

And the people of Terenure – and, in fairness to her, she’s always been consistent on this point, even though she dresses like a scarecrow and has a face like a half-dissolved Berocca tablet – are not and never will be Pluds.

I’m only mentioning it as background to the story of the Occupy Terenure Road East protest that you may have seen on the Six One news during the week. Four hundred residents from areas as diverse as Sandymount, Ballsbridge, Merrion and Donnybrook – and from backgrounds as varied as family law barristers, commercial law barristers, land law barristers and intellectual property law barristers – took to the streets of Terenure to protest at the campaign to have the area moved into the Dublin South East electoral constituency.

(I was quoting directly from the RTÉ website there).

The old dear – who’s lived in Dublin 4 for all of seven months, remember – is convinced that this is an attempt by the people of Terenure to get themselves a piece of her postcode. And, as I heard her shouting at Lucinda Creighton coming out of Donnybrook Fair on Christmas Eve, “I’m not paying €14 million for a house on Shrewsbury Road, only for some PAYE worker to be permitted to call himself my neighbour! Seasons bloody greetings!”

There’s clearly quite a few people in her neck of the woods who feel the same way, because by the middle of Thursday afternoon, they’d responded to her call in a major way. You literally couldn’t get porking anywhere near the Rathgor end of Terenure. It was, like, Touaregs and Kompressors and Volvos and BMW Five Serieses as far as the eye could pretty much see.

And she was in her element, of course, having organised the whole thing with Delma and Angela, two veterans of some of her other campaigns going way, way back into the basic past.

I only went along to watch her make a fool of herself and to possibly flirt with Samantha Libreri, who always smiles at my filthy one-liners, even though she thinks I’m an actual dick.

Anyway, like I said, there were, like, hundreds of people taking port in the protest and it was all very civilised, as you can imagine. The Dame Street crowd could learn a lot from them. They were all just standing around, sharing their picnics from Avoca and the Butler’s Pantry, the men chatting about Ireland’s chances in the Six Nations, the women about how property prices in Dublin 4 have plummeted to unacceptable levels and how wonderfully versatile arugula is.

Delma, I noticed, was serving – get this! – cocktails from a portable drinks cabinet in the boot of her Mercedes GL Class.

That’s where I spotted the old dear – no surprise there – wrapping her big bee-stung lips around a vodka martini that was probably her fifth or sixth of the day.

“Terenure,” she was going, loving the sound of her own voice, “is from the Irish, Tir an Luir, which apparently means Land of the Yew. I’m trying to think of a snappy soundbite for the news. I was thinking of, ‘Land of the Yew Can Stay Where The Hell You Are!’” Delma and Angela cracked up laughing, any excuse to flash the orthodontics.

“I just don’t understand,” Angela went, “why these people can’t just accept their station and, well, take pride in who they are. You know Terenure is mentioned in Ulysses?” “Well,” the old dear went, looking at them over the top of her cocktail glass, “it’s a very big book, Dahling!” And of course they all thought this was hilarious too.

“Look at the state of you,” I went. “Three o’clock in the afternoon and you’re half-mullered”, which was a bit rich, I know, coming from me. “You better not make a fool of yourself on the news again. Some of us still have a rep in this town.”

“Ross,” she went, “I don’t have time for your nastiness. I have people to inspire.” And with that she handed Delma her empty glass, picked up her loudhailer and made what Miriam Lord referred to in Friday morning’s Times as her “Rivers of Blood” speech.

“We are decent, ordinary people who fear that Dublin 4 – and what it means to live there – is about to be denigrated with the stroke of a cartographer’s pen,” she just went. “It is our responsibility – nay, it is our duty – to make ensure, for the sake of generations yet unborn, that it does. Not. Happen.” There’s, like, a humungous cheer and a fair bit of applause as well. I’d forgotten what a good speaker she was from her time as chairperson of the Move Funderland to the Northside advocacy group and also the campaign to have the part of Foxrock where George Hook lives re-designated Deansgrange West. For whatever reason, people seem to like her.

“We would have to be mad – literally mad! – to permit the influx of these tens of thousands of people, who are – let us be honest – not like us, who are not members, by birth or otherwise, of our special and privileged class – these arrivistes who want to undermine our way of life. I want to say this today. Dublin 4 will not – will not! – engage in heaping up its own funeral pyre!”

And standing there, listening to the crowd respond to my seriously mashed mother, I can’t help but think what a total and utter miracle it is that I turned out to be the lovely, lovely goy that I am.