BACK PAGES - December 31st, 1959:Fifty years ago, in An Irishman's Diary, Quidnunc, Séamus Kelly, looked back on the year and decade just ending.
On the eve of this New Year’s Eve I feel much more like the white-bearded old pessimist with the scythe than the starry-eyed infant with the optimism. Anyway, for good or ill, I’ve been casting an honest but unreliable memory back over, not only the past year, but the decade that it ended.
Whether it was one of the five joyful or one of the five sorrowful, only time and atomic developments, plus the sense (or lack of it) of the summiteers, will tell. I don’t think anybody could honestly claim that the decade between 1950 and 1960 could be classed among the five glorious.
I asked a good friend who concerns herself chiefly with horses, books and the gay life, if she remembered anything outstanding in the last 10 years. “Lots that you couldn’t print,” was the answer. “Apart from that, let’s see . . . yes – Hard Ridden won a derby and Ballymoss won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Hard Ridden was the first Irish horse to win a derby since Boss Croker’s Orby. Ballymoss was the first Irish horse ever to win the other thing. . .”
“That’s a great help,” I said bitterly. I’d just hung up when the phone rang again and an old globetrotting pal asked me out for a meal. Same question – what were the outstanding events of the past decade? Answer: “I think something important happened about 1953, but I’m blowed if I can remember what it was.”
In despair, I tried my own memory, to find that it had recorded mainly local and immediate happenings. The superb summer of last year brought back to mind the excellent summer of 1955.
But this was purely because I went to the Austrian mountains in July, 1955, to get away from the usual Irish summer, and found myself in the middle of the usual Irish summer in Austria, while the hated stay-at-homes fried themselves dark brown around the Dublin Riviera.
I remembered the Korean War, but could not remember the years. I remembered Suez and Hungary, and wished that they weren’t there to be remembered. It’s not easy to get off the high political altitudes, however, and Algeria crept in, bringing with it the de Gaulle renaissance.
Ireland, naturally, brought me to home politics. I seemed to remember that there were a lot of ups and downs and ins and outs at Leinster House in the last decade; but the only things that stuck were Dev’s elevation to the presidency, Mr Lemass’s succession as taoiseach, and Mr Dillon’s gracious acceptance of the orb and sceptre handed down from Gen Dick Mulcahy.
Mr Dillon brought me, in a reasonable sequence, to culture. There was Eamonn Andrews, Bridie Murphy, Sam Beckett, Oscar Wilde (who had a centenary), Margaret Barry, Paddy Kavanagh (in the most picturesque of all his libel actions) and the ineffable Brendan Behan.
The name Behan brought back to mind the row about Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure, and then I remembered, with a warm glow of gratitude, that tens of thousands of appreciative Irish art lovers will shortly be flocking to Charlemont House to see the Lane Pictures that they have missed so much over the years.
All the same, and however well Mr Montgomery Hyde and Mr Teeling may feel they deserve it, my award for Ireland’s Cultural Battlers of the Decade is to be shared between Mr B Behan of Borstal and Mr S Beckett of TCD. Nobody else – not even the Cultural Relations Committee – could have put this little island on the cultural maps of Sweden and Japan at the same time.
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