Baggotonia

Pretentious or stupid? Neither, says Eamon Delaney, I just love Dublin 4

I have just finished writing a novel that is set in the heart of Dublin 4 - an area known as Baggotonia, that village of lanes and gardens from the Grand Canal to Ballsbridge. Basically, the old Pembroke township. My book is about Dublin cliches, like the distinction between old money and new, northside and southside. Nowhere has spawned more myths and axioms about life in the city than Dublin 4. "Dublin 4" is said disdainfully, with elongated enunciation. It became a pejorative expression in the early 1980s, with the onset of the great liberal/conservative tussle in Irish life and politics. Dublin 4 was accused of harbouring an urban, liberal elite who were out of touch with the rest of the country, 'the plain people of Ireland.' The taunt was led by rural conservatives and backbench Fianna Failers, resisting divorce, contraception and the increasing secularisation of Irish society. (How long ago it all seems now, but this struggle was only settled in the mid 1990s).

That perception of Dublin 4 is what the country in general is moving towards. And wants. In An Accidental Diplomat, I described one senior official, very proud of his rural origins, who would taunt me with "You're real Southside." "But Ambassador," I replied, "is that not where you're going - fast? Your kids are at the poshest Dublin schools and will be more Southside than I could ever be." We often crave what we claim to loathe. Dublin 4 has been blamed for leading us down a trendy path to individualistic, liberal destruction. Distrust of a self-appointed, all-knowing elite is common; look at the beltway of Washington DC, the Islington of New Labour or the Hampstead Heath of old Labour, with its senile dons and young do-gooders who would lead us into the light. In the case of Dublin 4, it is even pointed out that Ireland's main university, TV station and hospital are all within a few hundred yards of each other, as if such geographical proximity contributes to the chemistry of deracinated secularism. The phrase "Dublin 4" was popularised by the late John Healy, the critic who also coined "Merks and Perks," for power-hungry politicians, and "National Handlers,"for an early Fine Gael version of the spin doctor culture. Healy extolled the virtues of rural Ireland, in a mythification of Irish life (he was a great Haughey supporter). His depiction of D4 was later challenged by one-time protege, John Waters, in Jiving at the Crossroads. Although Waters exaggerated the notion of an urban/rural gulf, he pointed out that Dublin 4 was actually home to large working class areas and a lot of dead office land.

That's true, of course - at least, in my own experience. For almost ten years, I went to Marian College on Lansdowne Road, with its mixture of local kids and those known as The Railway Children, posh or semi-posh kids coming in on the train from Dun Laoghaire, Monkstown and Dalkey. Thus they grew up beside kids from Ringsend, Irishtown and Pearse Street, which made for a healthy balance and prepared you for life, so you didn't become the pedantic asshole you might be if you'd studied at, say, Gonzaga or Castleknock. Even today, such class distinctions are not something people are comfortable talking about in Ireland. We'll return to them later.

Before we begin, let's acknowledge that much of this debate about zones of power is half a mile east of the truth. Dublin 6 is the real heart of the old liberal elite. Look at Ranelagh, Rathmines, Dartry and the 'gourmet stretch,' Dunville Avenue. Garret FitzGerald and Dessie O'Malley - those arch pluralists - both lived on Palmerstown Road. While Dublin 4 might have lumpy Marian, Dublin 6 has Gonzaga, Sandford Park, Alexandra College and one of the country's first Multi-denominational schools. Now that's progressive. It's also where you'll find real entrenched affluence, in the gravel-crunchy driveways, SUVs and redbrick Victorian houses of the barrister belt. Not for them the dilapidated Georgian piles of Dublin 4. I remember canvassing on the liberal side in Dublin 6 during the referenda of the 1980s. Everyone was supporting us - or so we thought, as we stumbled from one rhododendron-spotted doorstep to another. At a meeting in an organiser's house on Leinster Square, we sat on the floor and bemoaned the darkness of backward Ireland. These were Hot Press readers, now moving to the Irish Times and proper jobs. Their politics made nice slogans: Nuclear Power Nein Danke, Get to the Point at Carnsore and Get your Filthy Laws Off My Body.

With the exception of Sandymount, which is like a colony of Dublin 6, Dublin 4 seems almost apolitical. It is a creative demi-monde, and this is why I enjoyed writing about it. I live on Pembroke Road, which is home to actors, writers, singers, painters, stand-up comics and creative types who took the corporate shilling during the height of the Celtic Tiger and went into advertising or computers. Up the road I see the Apres Match gang writing their material in the window of Searsons (they look miserable).

The biggest threat to this great tradition was the boom, and that is the substance of my novel. At the turn of this century, it looked like we might lose the old atmosphere altogether. Crumbling ruins were rebuilt and what had once been a sleepy, twilight neighbourhood of overgrown gardens and bearded eccentrics was replaced by baseball caps and Subaru jeeps. Old sheds and stables got done up as fancy mews apartments and, on Baggot Lane, panel-beaters and lock-ups were selling out to PR and web site design companies, the latter staffed by virtual teenagers in t-shirts and baggy trousers. Then, in the space of a few months, we got High Street UK on Baggot Street, as Tesco took over Quinnsworth, Boots bought out Hayes Conyngham Robinson and an eccentric little place, Farm Produce, which had been there for years, became Oddbins. The Brits were back.

Alarmed at the new threat to their home and their lifestyle, the characters in my book plot a dastardly scheme to try and preserve them. It all goes horribly wrong but luckily, by 2002, the boom has peaked anyway and things are okay. The core of the old area remains, and they can stay in a place which - and this is the key to Dublin 4 - not only mixes residential with business but also high rents with low. And why not? My characters want a preservation order - or rent assistance at the very least - since they are the link to the area's former artistic glory. They are keeping alive the spirit of the 1980s and early 90s with their wooden floors and no central heating - a luxury happily sacrificed for the right to cheap rents and big rooms, rather than over-cooked yuppie shoeboxes with faux-English names like Willow Mews and endless car parking spaces. It is their house that should have the blue plaque outside it, not Elizabeth Bowen's or Patrick Kavanagh's. And there are many like them. Artists in basement bedsits or high-ceilinged rooms, sitting on torn armchairs around bubbling Supersers. At night, on Elgin or Raglan Roads, they can see where their fellow slackers are from the blood-red walls and a sheep's skull over the fireplace. Yuppies, for all their acquired taste, were not going to have a ram's head on the wall, picked up on some Wicklow walk. And the lights are on late into the night. Not having to get up in the morning means they can burn the midnight oil; painting, writing, skinning up. The negligence - or nostalgia - of certain landlords has saved much of this area from gentrification. Content with things as they were, they signed the Rent Allowance forms which other landlords baulked at. One cheerful slum-lord tells me that he's happy to have the same modest tenants he's always had: artists, musicans, civil servants. Although he lives in Foxrock, he spends most days knocking around the yard, fixing things - he was always fixing things - and popping in for cups of tea with his different tenants, animated sorts who give him an entertaining insight into other worlds. "I'd sooner have these," he says "than some of those snobby new types with their high standards."

Of course other landlords were all too aware of how much money could be made from a conversion. People were desperate for apartments and they would pay anything to get into D4. So landlords applied for planning permission to convert their roofs and gardens into more apartments. But, to the relief of existing tenants, many were refused. Baggotonia has a pair of ultra-vigilent Residents Associations. Their motive is protection - of the past itself, and the value of their homes.

So what of this mythical past? In the 1960s, Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh lived in the area, and walked its roads uneasily. Kavanagh is certainly well commemorated, with plaques on Raglan and Pembroke Roads, his canal-bank seat and a very realistic statue which gives people a start at night when they've had a few on. In the 1950s Elgin road was full of eccentric Jewish landlords, raffish theatrical types and RTE producers (incidentally, half of RTE has lived here at some time - convenience, not conspiracy). And in the 1930s and 40s, there was a smattering of dotty Anglo-Irish painters and sensitive young men who chose not to marry or enter the family business but sought instead to dally 'with the muse' in skylit lofts.

Today I look out my window every morning and see one of the few remaining Regency coachhouses - now the garden and studio of Pat Scott, the artist. Or next door, the studio of Barry Flanagan, the English sculptor famous for his gigantic rabbits. On the street we see Micheal Kane, the painter, on his bike. A small, brightly attired woman called Frances Bunch Moran used to do watercolours of people's houses - then knock on their doors and convince them to buy. Sadly, she passed away last year; as have others, like Deirdre O'Connell of the Focus theatre or Michael Hartnett, the poet, whose tiny elfish figure was familiar along Baggot Street. The legendary American poet John Berryman used to live in Lansdowne Park. His photo hangs in the Beggar's Bush pub, where he spent a lot of time dreaming up Dreamsongs. And let us not refrain from naming more contemporary dreamers such as The Corrs or Jim Sheridan. Van the Man has left us (for naff Killiney, puh-leeze), as has actor and mystic Gabriel Byrne, who you'd see walking round, rather preciously pointing out broken fanlights to American visitors. In his ambitious and under-rated novel, In Guilt and in Glory, the broadcaster David Hanly - yes, he of the gravely voice on Morning Ireland - gives a fascinating portrait of the area in the 1970s, and of the country in general. In Hanly's book, a bitter diplomat from the Department of Foreign Affairs called Crossan (I have been that soldier) contemplates his lot by Baggot Street Bridge, thinking about the ghosts of Behan and Kavanagh, but also of other writers then living in the area, like Liam O'Flaherty, Mary Lavin and Benedict Kiely, "no doubt now covering a lined yellow sheet with generous longhand." How we love that present tense, that sense of ongoing creativity.

In his torpor, Crossan frequents the prostitutes on the Canal, especially by Huband bridge, "which grew whores as other bridges grew lichen, for as long as anyone can remember." One hooker, a "witch in mascara, her cigarettes and lighter in her hand and green knee boots on her legs" tells the complaining writer, "I don't give a fuck who you are are, mister. You're wasting my time." Very Baggotonia. Those red lights once lent the area a Pigalle-style decadence; the same rural conservatives who gave out about Dublin 4 came into the area 'looking for business.' Indeed the busiest time for hookers was always during the Fianna Fail Ard Fheis at the RDS. The following morning they would mount the party rostrum, to denounce the permissive society. Ah yes! But the vice game has changed. Many of today's prostitutes are addicted to heroin, and it all seems more squalid, both here and down on Benburb quay (street prostitution in Dublin moved from the Night town of the north city to Fitzwilliam Square, to Dublin 4, and now back to the quays). You can still see the strung-out street walkers by Mespil Place - near the Methadone Clinic - or in the 24-Hour Spar, along with taxi drivers, cops, beggars and clubbers on their way out from town. What a Hogarthian scene that is, and part of the Jekyll and Hyde quality that makes Baggotonia so special. The city's greatest chronicler, James Joyce, had little time for Dublin 4 and it barely features in Ulysses. For him, in 1904, it was posh and philistine, the heartland of the old imported ruling class. He even gets in a few chippy digs about "how you'll always find a policeman over on Pembroke Road, because it's where the rich live." He makes disparaging references to the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), playground of the ruling elite. (It was also here in 1995 that I finally saw the battle between liberals and conservative settled when the ballot boxes were opened and it was clear that south Dublin, and by extension the country itself, had gone for divorce.) Today the RDS is an institution in decline - just as Croke Park, that other HQ for rural Ireland, looks more splendid than ever (both are in Dublin, but a river, two cultures and a century divide). However, there is one part of Dublin 4 that still smacks of power; the square cushion that covers Shrewsbury and Ailesbury Roads. Within the Embassy belt - which, as Robert O'Byrne pointed out in these pages last month, was already quite naff enough - we have our new money, the robber baron classes and the apex of Tiger vulgarity. Monopoly's most expensive roads have the Albert factor; this is the kind of place a certain type of country-boy-made-good so wants to live. It is not the carefree Baggotonia Dublin 4 of Melrose Place meets Greenwich Village. This is the Dublin 4 of The Sopranos meets Dallas, with a Brown Thomas voucher in one hand and a Tribunal summons in the other.

All that shorthand - old mansions, new money - does not do justice to Dublin 4, which defies the easy death of cliche. One of the most enduring but undocumented aspects of life in the area is a working-class Protestant culture. The Schoolhouse Hotel on Northumberland Road was once St Stephen's primary school. It was opened for the children of former soldiers, stationed at the nearby British army barracks at Beggar's Bush - where power was handed over in 1922. Around the corner, the Pembroke Cottages were originally built for 'poor Prods' and are still administered by the Pembroke Estates in London. They are built around a triangle of green intended as a cricket pitch; an evocative throwback to Sean O'Casey's Dublin.

So there is a strong working class ethos in Dublin 4, far away from the cigar-wielding ostentation of Shrewsbury Road. D4 is also the the original home of Ringsend dockers, the Waxies Dargle, Shelbourne football club and Donnybrook tram workers. In my novel, one character, a bitter screenwriter makes harsh comments on the class differences within Dublin, and Dublin 4, as he walks through Herbert Park. Dara, my screenwriter, concludes that the Boom did not close the income gap and things are still just as they were. Let us not kid ourselves, he tells the reader. Although there was the quaint reversal of us slackers living in the Big House while the posh people lived in the mews and former coach houses, the poor still came into the area to clean the big houses and offices, or to work in the shops and pubs, alongside the foreign gasterbeiters. Thus, along Bath Avenue Dara sees the girls from Tesco coming up from Ringsend or Irishtown. He gets the discreet nod; we serve you during the day. In other words, it was exactly as it used to be. The servants came up from the other Dublin 4 to serve the quality. They called it Irishtown; it was for the natives. That's an unflattering picture. In the shiny, happy self-portrait of Ireland today, it is not polite to point out such differences. Thus we have stereotypes like "Dublin 4" to mask more uncomfortable realities. Gentrification may have altered a few areas, but people are still confined by class. Even within Herbert Park itself there is a subtle class divide, with a playground full of Bennetton-clad brats from the Embassy belt at the Ballsbridge end, while at the other end, near Donnybrook, there are sullen gangs in tracksuits. Yes, Donnybrook - alleged bastion of well-heeled, political liberalism, home of the Donnybrook set, but also home to labourers' cottages and the Beech Hill flats. Remember how Padraig Flynn got into trouble for sniping about flood relief going to people in "trendy cottages in Donnybrook," only for the TV pictures to reveal little old grannies who had lived by the Dodder for generations, being hauled out of their homes.

Even within Donnybrook itself there is a discreet divide: between sun-dried gourmet shops and graffiti-scrawled Spar. For years, Kiely's was the holy grail of the rugby school Southside, full of high-pitched Valley girls and their square-jawed boyfriends ('Hey Nigel, loike, it's cool, man !'). Next door, Longs was a smoky formica den with ould fellas watching the racing - the bus conductors' pub, as it used to be known.

Let's go back, for a moment, to Marian College, where I went to school. Alarmed at the lack of Catholic secondary schools in the area, Archbishop McQuaid, that great liberal, urged the Marists to open a school right next to Sandymount High, a new non-denominational experiment, which didn't require uniforms and had boys mixed with girls (how we envied them). And so Marian was built, with a Berlin-style wall between the two schools. The Marists wanted to call it Waterside College - in honour of the Dodder, of all things, with its clutter of sunken shopping trolleys and swollen rats. But McQuaid said no, it's 1954, the Marian Year and you'll call it Marian College. And don't forget to put a statue of the Blessed Virgin at the front door.

In that school where boys played both rugby and GAA, I was introduced to common concerns and a myriad of types. We had posh gits, bootboys, jocks, nerds and stoners from Dalkey (the stoners always came from Dalkey). It was the universe in one school yard ­ and the image of Dublin 4.

Published in the April 2003 edition of The Dubliner magazine

Comments

[Derek Mulholland]

What a spot on article which captures the atmosphere and describes what the area was all about. It’s brilliant to see someone who appreciates that the area had/s a large urban working class population. As a now 40 something living in the UK since '89, who grew up in (the working class end of) Donnybrook, went to Sandymount High (over the wall and now alas gone), taught Art by the same Francis 'Bunch' Moran, partied well and hard in the old Longs - it gives credence to what I've thought for a long time (ok nostalgia perhaps prevails) - it was a privilege to grow up in such a unique place. Fantastic piece of writing, thanks for the memories.

[David Hannigan]

Enjoyed the article. Will check out the book. This brings back the memories. I lived in pembroke cottages and went to marian college, as did my younger brother Sean Hannigan. My elder brother, Paul Hannigan, went to Sandymount High. You capture what so many miss, Dublin 4 is a place of contradictions with its own complexities. Something I see everyday in the city of Jakarta, Indonesia where I now live.

It is often worth paying for qualtiy and service when it comes to clothes.

[Kath Prince]

I lived at 106 Pembroke Rd in the early 70's and was actually a friend of Bunch Moran. She actually painted a portrait of me sat in the garden at 106 as a birthday gift for my 21st. When I returned to the UK in 1972, I sadly lost touch with her although I still have the painting. I recently saw a photo of her in a book called One Day For Life In Ireland and hence this interest. I was saddened to hear of her death as she was such a colourful character of that time in the city of Dublin.I would love to hear more of her later life if anyone has any information