Feckers (11 page)

Nobody had ever heard of ‘Donal Whelan’ before. A few people who used to hang around the pubs on Merrion Row, close to where the
Magill
offices were situated in Dublin, were aware that ‘Donal’ was actually a well-known journalist with aspirations to becoming a novelist. They also noted that, when Mike Murphy started to present an evening arts progamme, ‘Donal’ became a regular panellist and was getting along famously with Mike.

It was only a matter of time. Someone told Mike who Donal was. One evening in the foyer of the Abbey Theatre, Mike approached this aspiring novelist and berated him loudly for his cowardice and duplicity. It was, by all accounts, savage.

Perhaps it was this episode that caused Mike finally to abandon his duty to keep the Irish people in a good mood. Years later, when the aspiring novelist had become a very great novelist indeed, and someone made a passing reference to the episode, Mike wrote a letter to the
Irish Times
saying that he was reading the latest novel by the artist formerly known as Donal Whelan and was enjoying it hugely. But this made the Irish people even sadder than before, because it merely confirmed the extent of their loss. They had always known that Mike Murphy was a good egg, but now their grief knew no bounds. Mike had forgiven Donal Whelan but he still wasn’t coming back.

19
Conor Cruise O’Brien

I
t is not necessary to have agreed with Conor Cruise O’Brien about everything – or even about anything – to be able to recognize his importance in Irish life and culture. In our time his name has become a byword for a certain deeply unyielding mindset in relation to the so-called Irish Question. Perhaps because his view of Irish history was inordinately skewed by a desire to effect changes in the present, the Cruiser seemed to believe that the past could be re-entered and altered almost in the manner of a Harry Potter storyline. From the 1970s, he became the High Priest of revisionists who set out to deconstruct the alleged myths of Irish nationalism so as to pursue a reconciliation with unionism. Many Irish people, though agreeing that the Provos were an abomination, never came to accept that in order to isolate armed republicanism, it was necessary for southern Irish society to distance itself from all sense of moral grievance concerning its own history. When the revisionist blueprint extended to excoriations of the 1916 leadership and calls to downplay the gravity of the Great Famine, many found themselves having to excuse themselves from the anti-Provo express.

While many nationalists in the Republic agreed that the Provos had been able to take advantage of a legitimate historical grievance to justify acts of the most appalling barbarism, they had difficulty with the idea of dismantling their entire sense of history. Many supporters-in-principle of Cruise O’Brien’s position, while recognizing that there was a paradoxical validity to the idea that a change of heart among nationalists offered the best, perhaps the only, possibility of forward movement, would have liked him to at least hint that his motivation was pragmatism rather than principle.

There are those who say that the Cruiser, by his promotion of censorship measures that for years kept the ‘men of violence’ off the airwaves, did much to prolong the ‘Troubles’ by contributing to the isolationism of the republican movement and precluding an open public discussion that might have served to end the conflict sooner. This is an unknowable quantity now, although the degree of progress achieved after the dismantling of censorship in the 1990s suggests that the gagging of the gunmen might have been a mistake.

There are those, too, who hold the diametrically opposite view: that only because of the Cruiser’s insistent repudiation of armed republicanism, and the logic of censorship that emanated from it, did southern society become ‘honest’ enough to edge towards an accommodation with the other tradition. It may not be an exaggeration to say that, without Dr Cruise O’Brien’s moral leadership, we would never have achieved the resolution of the Good Friday Agreement.

Wars are not fought solely by men bearing guns. Behind the troops in the trench or the sniper in the undergrowth is the moral authority supplied by the unwritten mandate of the many who tacitly support the cause being pursued through violence. Wars cannot last long without such energy behind them. It follows, therefore, that settlements do not come about merely by negotiation between the active combatants, but also through a process in the hearts and minds of those who supply the active combatants with the moral authority to carry on the war. This suggests a cultural problem, which can be dealt with only by a delicate snipping of the atavistic wires that carry the signals and impulses that, down the line, lead to bombs going off in the street.

In this process there was a need for a special kind of leadership, from people with a special capacity for collective empathy with their own tribe. There has always been a great deal of pious nodding towards the Cruiser’s intellectual capacities, and undoubtedly he was one smart cookie. But really he was a type of tribal shaman, who depended as much on instinct as on reason of the conventional kind. During the years of conflict, he turned his own name into a byword for something that really did not emanate from him at all, but was rather an element of the culture he belonged to. Because of his enormous gifts of understanding, he has tuned into a strain of our collective emotional life and gave it words.

As a writer, he engaged deeply with the issues he wrote about. His 1972 book,
States of Ireland
, remains one of the most compelling and elegant chronicles of the roots of Irish tribal conflict. Even if you disagree with its conclusions, it is impossible to be unaffected by the quality of the writing.

States of Ireland
had been written, he stressed, from the Catholic, ‘specifically Southern Catholic’, side of the fence. He had tried to understand some of the feelings shared by most Ulster Protestants and to communicate some notion of these feelings to Catholics in the Republic. As a result, he had been ‘accused of being hyper-sensitive about the Protestants, and caring little about the Catholics’. In fact, he insisted, the reverse accusation would be more true. ‘It is to the Catholic community that I belong. This is my ‘‘little platoon”, to love which, according to Edmund Burke (whose family were in that same platoon), ‘‘is the first, the germ, as it were, of publick affections’’. I am motivated by affection for that platoon, identification with it, and fear that it may destroy itself, including me, through infatuation with its own mythology.’

It is interesting to note how this passage is dominated by the concepts of ‘feeling’ and ‘affection’, rather than by intellectual or conceptual thought. With this book, Dr Cruise O’Brien was attempting the expression of something deep within the soul of his own people. We can choose to describe this as the self-hating neurosis arising from the colonial experience, or as the voice of our collective conscience, awakening to the new responsibilities of a post-victimhood Ireland. Perhaps it does not matter how we describe these feelings, so long as we recognize their existence. For this clarity about ourselves, we owe Conor Cruise O’Brien a significant debt.

But there is another side. Few objective observers could have disagreed with the Cruiser’s description of the Provos as ‘haters’. But he seemed to forget that there was hatred also on the other side, that hatred begets hatred and that, in the end, it can be difficult to tell the angels from the devils for all the hate clogging up the system. Perhaps his point was that it was not our responsibility to critique the other side. But from the nationalist viewpoint, it sometimes looked as though he’d simply changed tribes.

Perhaps his greatest flaw was that he was unable to see other than the dark side of his own people, and this, tragically, caused him to become an undeservedly marginalized figure. His pessimism affected his judgement and led him eventually to a profound error about the chances of reconciliation. In an address delivered at Queen’s University Belfast in 1978, he said that the reason many people could not see that Irish nationalism and unionism were incapable of reconciliation was because this idea was ‘so desolatingly devoid of all comfort’. We all, he said, ‘find it hard to accept bad news even when it is true’. For many years he predicted an outright descent into civil war, and, even after the settlement of 1998, continued to preach gloomily about the prospects of a lasting peace. His apocalyptic predictions have been shown to be largely mistaken. The truth may, however, be more complex: perhaps even his overstatements contributed to the eventual outcome.

But perhaps, too, he had become so certain that collective ambivalence was the problem with Irish history that he refused to adjust his opinions in a changing landscape. Having convinced himself and others that the problem in the North was a particular interpretation of the nationalist narrative, he became focussed on pursuing and permanently imposing this argument, rather than looking squarely at the prevailing conditions. The ultimate tragedy, for him and Ireland, was that his pessimism resonated too harmoniously with the despair of his times, opening up the appalling possibility that, in spite of the moral integrity of his leadership, his main influence was to delay the peace for a generation.

20
Frank McDonald

T
here is a possibly apocryphal story about a stranger who goes into a West of Ireland bar and, spying a man in the corner in a state of some melancholia, clearly determined upon drinking himself to death, asks of the barman what the matter is with this troubled soul. The barman explains that the man is a carpenter by trade and, once upon a time, was the area’s foremost expert in the construction of stairs. No matter how awkward the job, how confined the quarters, how complicated the configuration, he was called in to advise and implement. He was The Man Who Could Figure Out Stairs. ‘What happened to him at all?’ the stranger enquires. ‘Some bastard,’ replies the barman, ‘invented bungalows.’

One could be forgiven for thinking that many of those who commentate upon the nature of housing and planning in today’s Ireland are secretly related to this unfortunate individual, such is the zeal with which they have taken to condemning the bungalow and all who reside in it. For twenty-five years, until the very recent past, the public conversation seemed to take it for granted that the most significant planning problem facing Irish society was something called ‘bungalow blight’ or ‘one-off housing’, a phenomenon not entirely unique to Ireland but somehow seeming to provoke here a uniquely sanctimonious response. Hardly a week seemed to pass without some architect or planner making an intervention in which the phenomenon of one-off housing was designated the most serious crisis facing the Irish environment, or calling for a commission to be appointed to investigate rural housing. In one such
Irish Times
article, ‘How We Wrecked Rural Ireland’, one former planner lamented the ‘nests of bungalows’ which he complained were to be found ‘all over the place’. He lambasted Irish people for their lack of appreciation of ‘urban values’ which, he said, might have served to convince people that more beautiful houses could be built in towns and villages. He described bungalows as ‘uniformly awful’ and condemned the trend whereby farmers were able to sell off land as sites, allowing outsiders to come into an area and build more bungalows. He called for a prohibition on the sub-division of family farms for this purpose.

This nonsense all began in the 1980s with a series of articles written in the
Irish Times
by that newspaper’s otherwise excellent environmental correspondent, Frank McDonald. It was Frank who coined the term ‘bungalow blight’, a play on the title of a book of simple house designs,
Bungalow Bliss
, which he blamed for the spread of one-off housing in rural areas. He characterized the development as a cancer infecting every part of the country. ‘Throughout the length and breadth of the country,’ he wrote, ‘rural areas are being destroyed relentlessly by this structural litter on the landscape – litter than can never be removed. And this cancer is so pervasive that for every private house built on a suburban housing estate, at least one other house is built in the middle of the countryside.

‘If this was Eamon de Valera’s dream of a country “bright with cosy homesteads”, it has turned into a nightmare. Because what is happening, in effect, is that we are abandoning our towns and villages in favour of colonizing the countryside.’

Frank cited some statistics that, he said, illustrated the ‘frightening’ spread of this bungalow ‘blight’. These indicated that the output of one-off houses in rural areas had doubled, from 5,530 to 11,050, between 1976 and 1983, and was now accounting for more than 53 per cent of all newly built private houses, compared to just 35 per cent ten years before. In County Monaghan, he claimed, one-offs accounted for a ‘staggering’ 80 per cent of all private house completions.

Frank also bemoaned the fact that much of this housing seemed to be ‘urban-generated’ – built for people with no functional connection with agriculture. ‘Most of them work in the nearest city or town, but they choose to live in a rural environment for status reasons or because they simply like the fresh air. In short, they are in the countryside, but not of the countryside. The doctor, the solicitor, even the butcher and the dancehall owner, used to be quite happy with homes in town; now they have fantasies about Southfork-style ranch-houses. Indeed, one of the phenomena of modern Ireland is the proliferation of vast mansions faking
Dallas
or
Dynasty
on the outskirts of so many provincial towns – the palazzi gombeeni, as one Dublin architect has scathingly described them.’