Juno and the car-park
Richard West Dublin In last week's article I described how Dublin Corporation plans to demolish and make into a car-park most of the inner city immortalised by Sean O'Casey in Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, and The Shadow of a Gunman. Since there is small prospect of public good from the kind of develOpment that has proved a social disaster in cities in Britain, one has to ask why it is going ahead.
Any possibility of corruption must, of course, be ruled out. It is unthinkable that any Dublin councillor or official should take money or gifts from builders or developers as happened in Newcastle, Birmingham, Northampton and London to name but a few. Nor do I suggest that, whatever company gets a contract to run car-parks or build the start of a motorway on this site will have won the contract by anything but the most proper tender. The same goes for the builders and architects who will put up the Corporation flats to re-house the 4,000 people turned out of their Georgian tenements. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that such redevelopments, whatever unpleasantness they produce for the people removed, are very lucrative to a small number of businessmen.
A city centre development also provides work for private architects and justifies the existence of those employed by the col' poration. Moreover, when the evicted Pe°ple are rehoused in soulless, crime -ridden and unfriendly housing estates, their Per' sonal problems will justify the emploYnnt of scores of social workers to answer queries and to conduct questionnaireAlthough social workers abound in un's inner city, this kind of community wlw its strong family unities has always posed,: challenge to outsiders wanting to change restructure' society. And so the businessmen, the architects and the social engineers are all, in their v•ray' likely to favour this or any city-cenlr development; but there may also be certain specifically Irish emotions involved. Anfil these is a mania for the motor-car, to ,nnicff the Irish are ready to sacrifice any bauur however ancient or beautiful. Thousaans; people take their cars in to work althengP there is adequate public transport serval most of the suburbs, and parking is veil hard to find downtown. This is in contrast li°e London, for instance, where few Pent we would drive to work were it not fo i r nadequacy of the public transport. ut Some of the newspapers, writing ab°as the inner city, described the house! Georgian', using inverted commas, wine", think may be significant of a certain aali English feeling. Dublin grew as an Eaghs„ or Anglo-Irish city; the original inhabitant" lived in a small district by the sea still know; as Irish Town. There is, I think, a resichi.es feeling that Dublin's architectural beau„Itliv belong to an alien culture and are not rea'eic part of the national heritage. Typically, ° of the Anglo-Irish Guinness fanillY .00etY' the chairman of Ireland's Georgian Sc)el the main preservationists in the eilY: The left-liberal middle class, which in o'st tain or the United States provides the rnfie v a_,` vehement conservationists, has shown 11!, i , nterest in the inner city, perhaps from like of Sean O'Casey. Although Wilde Shaw are right back in favour, O'CaseYv'; out of fashion for reasons which MaY something to do with politics. The Dt1;ncl left-wing intellectuals, of the kind vvho, read the Irish Times, Hibernia and Mad equivalents of our Guardian and New Statesman) with h nw) ihavtebe North, been last nw) ihavtebe North, been last obsessed ten Yea."., movement, and recently the conon bloc' IRA criminals in the Maze Pthrieso‘ntr.7:iail:t unfair to call these people fellow-traveweo of the IRA but their attitude was ,ow, summed up by Magill's recent cover as"bove mg a gunman, set in a forest of green, rals' of a caption promising 'many more fulle the unfortunate British troops. . kind of Now, Sean O'Casey was not this Irish Republican. Born a Protestant and always an anti-cleric, he was execrated b. y Christians of all faiths; he was a Communist of the Stalinist order which makes him unPopular with the new trendy Trotskyists, moreover he spent his later years in England, which was considered un-Irish of him though not of Wilde and Shaw. Indeed, re-reading O'Casey's plays on the Troubles, one sees how savagely and effectively he debunked the Republican myth. Almost without exception, his Republicans are shown as fantasists, postillrers, dreamers of murderous dreams, or `Ike Donal Davoren, a poet who pretends to be 'on the run' because his girl-friend finds this glamorous: 'A gunman on the run!, he says to himself. 'Be careful, be careful, Donal Davoren. But.-Minnie is attracted to the idea, and I am attracted to Minnie. And what danger can there be in being the shadow of a gunman?'
The Dublin intellectuals who encourage he IRA without themselves risking a British bullet, are all in a way the shadows of
littlen, and no one has better expressed the basic dishonesty of the IRA than the haracter Seamas Shields, in the same play: I believe in the freedom of Ireland, and that flgland has no right to be here, but I draw Lot hue when I hear the gunmen blown.', about dying for the people, when it's the People that are dying' for the gunmen'. bl°'Casey's plays, like Irish history, are a ,end of tragedy and farce. They disturb not °WY the modern IRA but the new ruling class that wants to fit Ireland into the mod!III world of motorways, EEC growth progIanimes, sociological surveys and family Pla • „ Planning Progress, a favourite word, means :`anlying out the memory of old, tragiiarcical Ireland, of which O'Casey's works such an uncomfortable reminder. So woy not knock down the very buildings in which his plays were set? h°fcourse I do not suggest that any of c".uhlin's city planners wants to destroy the s fly centre wholly or even partly in order to Pite O'Casey's memory; rather that Irish P•eople appear to suffer particularly from 01 tae world-vvide passion that might be d.escribed as a hatred for the past. In a very ressing article (Spectator, 29 July) ulersnristopher Booker explained how the new :i of China had in the space of a arter-century destroyed Peking, removiifg not only the temples and palaces but the e of the old streets with their 'jugglers, u.rooksegers, storytellers, puppeteers, the rusands of craftsmen, the inns, the little 5h' the the antique dealers and calligraphy LOPS' (quoting Chinese Shadows by Simon ;"1:eY.$). Although Mr Booker is, I believe, r., alined to blame Marxism for too much of e world's ut present misery, he does point u, that 'the destruction of Peking and the liestruction of Birmingham have only difwoul
!eted in degree. Who, thirty years ago,
M. _d have thought it conceivable that the 1 u an. chester of Coronation Street back,..,1u-baeks or even the Glasgow of the old orbals slums Would one day be looked
back on as "human", "colourful", "alive", almost as objects of nostalgia?'
And who would have thought, even today, that the Irish with a history and a culture almost as old as China's would wish to do for their capital, if so far on a smaller scale, what has just been done to Peking? Capitalism, just as much as Communism, is fired by the false idea of 'progress'; indeed it was in the United States that the first plans were made for the 'cities of the future'. The first Soviet rulers, like Lenin, took their inspiration from Ford almost as much as from Marx. The Irish who in the words of Evelyn Waugh think that the only realities in the world are 'hell and the United States of America' cling to the concept of 'progress' long after most thoughtful Americans have abandoned it.
Indeed Communists have been responsible for some of the rare recent examples of city preservation. In Italy, a Communist local government has preserved Bologna, while a right-wing, largely Mafia regime has destroyed most of Palermo. Prague, although dilapidated, still largely stands; while in Warsaw in 1945, the otherwise dreadful tyrant Beirut insisted on rebuilding the ancient quarter exactly as it had been before. In Sydney, a plan to demolish a very attractive nineteenth-century suburb was stopped at the insistence of the Communist-run trade union of building workers.
The division between 'reactionaries' and 'progressives' cuts across the cliché categories of political 'right' and 'left'. The Communists of Bologna are 'reactionary leftists' while the city planners of Dublin are 'progressive rightists. I fear that everywhere the 'progressives' will get their way, fulfilling the prophecy of 'Captain' Boyle, when at the end of Juno and the Paycock drunk, broke, his son shot dead, his daughter pregnant he says to his boozing companion: 'I'm telling you . . . Joxer . . . the
whole worl's . in a terr. . ible state o'. . . chassis!'
Previous page
