“I shall die young and be forgotten.” – The Little Museum of Dublin, July 2016.

This weekend a new exhibition opens at the Little Museum of Dublin, Churchill & The Irishman. It shines a light on a man who managed to live both on the main stage and in the shadows during his lifetime, being both a public figure and a deeply mysterious one.

Brendan Bracken (1901-1958) was a British Conservative Government Minister, an influential journalist and the man responsible for giving us The Financial Times newspaper among many other things. Denying and suppressing all evidence of his Irish roots, he burst onto the British public stage, but quickly became one of Winston Churchill’s most trusted allies.  Randolph Churchill, son of the Prime Minister, would joke of Bracken as “the fantasist whose fantasies had come true.”

Brendan Bracken was born in Tipperary in 1901, the son of Joseph Kevin Bracken, who was a founding member of the Gaelic Athletic Association and a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood to boot.An article on the excellent Hogan Stand notes that J.K Bracken wasn’t merely a spectator to the early endeavors of the GAA, but a very active participant He was one of five persons proposed by GAA founder Michael Cusack “to fill the vice-presidential positions at the third meeting of the GAA”,  and personally seconded the nomination of the Fenian radical John O’Leary to patron of the new body. Brendan’s father was closely aligned with these two important nationalist organisations, though the passing of his father in 1904 removed any such influence from his youth.

J.K Bracken’s GAA team in Tipperary carry the name of Brendan Bracken’s father today. (Source)

His mother, widowed in 1904, took the young family to Dublin, and Brendan attended the O’Connell School on North Richmond Street. Named in honour of  Daniel O’Connell, the school would later become synonymous with the 1916 Rising, with over 130 students and graduates in the ranks of the rebel forces. Among others Seán Heuston, Seán T. O’Kelly and the great republican adventurer Ernie O’Malley were educated there. If the Christian Brothers teachers made a profound nationalist impression on their students, there was no risk of such with Bracken. Charles Lysaght, author of a masterful biography of Bracken, notes that:

He mitched from school and organised a gang that vandalised neighbours’ gardens. He once threw another boy into the Royal Canal. When packed off to Mungret, a Jesuit boarding school in Limerick, he absconded.

Departing Ireland in 1916, he had nothing beyond the £14 his mother provided him with to try and settle in Australia. Lysaght writes that”for three years the adolescent Brendan led a peripatetic existence there, moving between Catholic religious communities, doing some teaching and reading incessantly to educate himself.”

The O’Connell School on Dublin’s North Richmond Street. Graduates include the executed 1916 leaders Seán Heuston and Eamonn Ceannt. Though he didn’t graduate,Bracken was educated here for a period (Image Credit: O’Connell’s)

He briefly talked his way into one of Sydney’s most exclusive Catholic schools, claiming that he had been educated in Clongowes in Ireland. Unfortunately for him, a priest who had just come out from Clongowes exposed him as a liar, and the traveling circus of his life continued. Having led a rather nomadic existence in Australia, working in odd jobs for brief periods, he would arrive on the doorstep of Sedbergh School in Cumbria, England, claiming to be a 15 year old in 1920, and that his parents had been orphaned in an Australian bushfire.

Acceptance into a high profile, private English school however was the foot on the ladder, a ladder he was, for once at least, content to stay on. The reputation of his school allowed him to advance in the upper-echelons of British society, becoming a magazine and newspaper editor in London, and retaining his Australian backstory.

The secret Tipp man was editing the Illustrated Review in London, and also commissioning articles from people like Winston Churchill, with whom he would form an incredible friendship and bond.  His magazine was politically conservative in outlook,  and became adored by Tories, never suspecting that the new found face at their dinner tables was the son of an IRB man, an organisation that had been bombing the very city he had made home a few decades earlier. Politicians and journalists moved in the same circles of course, one needs the other to survive. The Conservatives really took to Bracken, to such an extent that he was asked to stand for Parliament in 1929, for North Paddington.

They stood him for a marginal enough seat, which he won by over 500 votes, but on the campaign trail his political opponents began to publicly ask just who this man was, and how he had landed into British politics. The idea that he was a Polish Jew was spread by opponents to undermine him. He never really had a consistent story for his own background, but in every made up version of the past there was only one consistency – no reference to little old Ireland. In Parliament, he became fiercely right-wing, resisting any move towards granting Indian self-government for example. He remained a figure in Westminster for many years, but really shone in the World War Two years, when Churchill’s deep faith in him saw him take the role of Minister of Information.

Bracken and Churchill. (Image: the Little Museum of Dublin)

From 1941 to 45, Bracken served in that role. While he played the media well, having been an editor and journalist himself, he wasn’t always popular with the Ministry’s employees, including one named Eric Blair, better known to us today as George Orwell, the man who would write Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia and, most famously of all, the wonderful 1984. It’s been stated that Bracken’s ministry, and initials, were central inspiration for Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth in 1984, which was published in 1949.

The post war period brought about the total collapse of the Tories in Britain, and a leftward drift brought the Labour Party to power. Labour won a formidable victory, winning just under 50% of the vote with a majority of 159 seats, and Clement Attlee’s government went to work on a process of major nationalisation, taking control of major industries and utilities including the Bank of England, coal mining, the steel industry, electricity, gas, and inland transport. Bracken was totally opposed to all of this, condemning it as socialism, and  becoming a vocal opponent of what he saw as the ‘Retreat From Empire’ of the government.

He resigned his seat in the commons in 1952 and became Viscount Bracken of Christchurch in Hampshire, but never took his seat in the House of Lords, regarding it as a political graveyard. As a voice in the media he remained important,  giving us The Financial Times as we know it after merging two publications,  and becoming chairman of the Union Corporation mining house, with interests in South Africa, which he frequently visited. He also became a trustee to the British National Gallery, resisting any attempt to return to Hugh Lane paintings to Ireland. Hugh Lane, the art collector after whom the gallery in Dublin is named, died on board the Lusitania in 1915, and the question of whether his works would be displayed in London or Dublin was a never-ending row, in fact it wasn’t until 1993  that it was decided  31 of the 39 paintings would stay in Ireland.

When Bracken died of cancer in 1958, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered in Kent. On his instructions his papers were burnt by his chauffeur, which is one of the reasons we know so very little about the man, he may well have taken many mysteries with him.

There was just too much around Bracken that didn’t make sense, and which would later captivate the public, not least his relationship with Churchill and influence on Orwell. This new exhibition is a fine introduction to this man of mystery, and includes letters from Bracken himself along with other interesting source material. As ever, the exhibition is beautifully designed and will capture the imagination of visitors. It runs until 25 September.

Squash – like Cricket, Golf, Rowing, Rugby and Tennis – was an avidly middle-class sport in Ireland for most, if not all, of the twentieth century. These sports were reserved almost exclusively for middle-class men who had the leisure time and spare cash to fund such pastimes.

Squash evolved out of an older game called rackets and was first played at the prestigious Harrow School in England around 1830. The world’s first squash courts were built there in 1864. From the outset, the game was  “exclusive to the well-to-do and upper middle classes ; squash players either belonged to an athletic club or had private courts built on their estates” according to historian Robert Crego.

Squash court, c. early 20th century. Credit – Getty Science

Coombe Hospital, made up of employees in the hospital, had their own courts on the premises. As late as the mid 2000s, Coombe had a team in the Leinster Veterans League.

Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club had their own courts at Wilton Place where they were based from 1880. In 1969 they moved to a four and a half acre site bounded by Winton Road and Appian Way. The club is still active and is a member of the Leinster Squash league.

Squash court, Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Court in 1973. Photographed by John Donat (1933-2004). Credit – architecture.com.

Guinness, made up of employees of the Brewery, had their own courts at St. James Gate. Employers built a sports ground in front of the brewery providing a cricket pitch, bowls green, tennis courts and net ball facilities. Employees also had access to a swimming pool and a gym. Their squash club does not seem to be still active.

Leinster Cricket Club had their own court at their club in Rathmines. Founded in 1852, they also have tennis, squash, table tennis, bowls and cricket facilities. Their squash club is no longer a member of the Leinster league.

Mater Hospital, made up of employees of the hotel, had their own courts on the premises. The club is still an active member of the Leinster League.

Squash team. UCC, 1970s/1980s. Credit – http://squash.ucc.ie/

Old Belvedere Rugby Club had courts at their grounds on Anglesea Road. Founded in 1930 as an exclusive club for past pupils of Belvedere College, the club became ‘open’ to all players in 1976. The club is still an active member of the Leinster League.

The Freedom of the City is an honour that has been bestowed on a wide variety of political, civic and cultural leaders. From Ulysses S. Grant to local lad Johnny Giles, the honour has been granted to only eighty individuals to date.

On occasion, proposals for the honour have sparked protest.During the Second Boer War in South Africa, nationalists in Dublin Corporation attempted to have the Freedom of the City awarded to Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal who was at war with the Empire. Kruger’s name never made it to the roll, but a quick glance just throw up some unusual outsiders. How many Dubliners have heard of Margaret Sandhurst, the first woman to be awarded the honour in September 1889?

Lady Sandhurst (1829-1892)

The decision to honour Sandhurst was shaped by outside political affairs.  A suffragist from a middle class Norfolk background, Sandhurst (who had been married to an administrator of the British Raj before his death) was an active member of the Women’s Liberal Federation, and a committed philanthropist in the British society of the late nineteenth century.

In 1889, Sandhurst stood for election to the London County Council, at a time when women were still locked out of the British parliamentary system. Local government elections became a battlefield for suffragists, who believed that victory there could lead to further political reforms.  She was one of a number of Liberal female candidates to stand, and succeeded in taking a seat, defeating two Conservative opponents decisively.

Among the women who campaigned for Sandhurst was Constance Wilde, the wife of Oscar Wilde.Oscar was editor of The Woman’s World from 1887 to 1889, and had printed an address by Sandhurst in January 1889, in which she expressed sympathies for the Home Rule cause in Ireland, asking “have we, from first to last, ever made a persistent effort to govern Ireland for her good? Have we given up anything for her?….Can it be right to tyrannise over any nation committed to our charge?”

The masthead of The Woman’s World, edited by Oscar Wilde.Source.

Unfortunately, while Sandhurst was elected to the London County Council, her election was challenged by anti-suffragist Beresford Hope, with the Beresford Hope vs Sandhurst cage resulting in the judgement that the defeated male candidate should be given the seat. It was a scandalous decision, which rightly infuriated the women’s movement of the day.

The awarding of the Freedom of the City to Sandhurst received international press attention. It was reported that the honour was presented to her “in token of gratitude for the beneficent influences she has exercised in public life”, and Sandhurst spoke before the Lord Mayor and elected Councillors in Dublin. To loud cheers, she told an audience during her visit that “the women of England, the progressive and enlightened women of England, were with the Irish cause.” Her political sympathies with the Irish cause were perhaps the primary motivation in presenting the honour to her; her name was appearing in the Journal of the Home Rule Union long before her visit to Dublin.

Lady Sandhurst died in London on 7 January 1892.  The city which honoured the suffrage campaigner so publicly in 1889 would later elect the first woman to the British House of Commons, with Countess Markievicz taking a seat for Sinn Féin in the 1918 General Election. Yet, as Una Mullally recently observed in The Irish Times, only  four women have been presented with the Freedom of the City since Sandhurst’s time.

Dear, Dirty Dublin is an on-going series on the blog. We’re eternally grateful to Luke Fallon for permission to reproduce some of his images of the city here from time to time. Previous editions of these posts can be seen here, anseo and also here.Dublin always looks good on film!

Liam Sutcliffe

Illustration for Rabble 12 (Thanks to Luke Fallon)

Our friends at Rabble have made it to Issue 12, an enormous achievement for any publication. Given that Rabble remains free, it is all the more impressive. As ever, the latest issue is a mix of culture, politics, acting-the-bollocks and more besides.

Particular highlights include an interview with investigative journalist Gemma O’Doherty, a look at the recent documentary Atlantic,and a feature on how creative spaces have been priced out of Stoneybatter and Smithfield in recent times by the new rental realities.

I am still occupying Page 5 of each issue, named Fallon’s Old Time Fables (that wasn’t my doing). It has provided a find outlet to collaborate with my brother (an illustrator) in recent years. This edition features a look at historic tram strikes in the city, with particular emphasis on 1913, 1935 and the recent Luas dispute.

You can pick Rabble up right across the city in cafes, shops, pubs, bookshops and more besides.

Some previous illustrations from page 5:

Lord Iveagh from Rabble 10 feature on co-operative housing.

‘They’re Looting the Town’ from Rabble 11.

Foundation stone of the Wolfe Tone Memorial, first unveiled at Stephen’s Green in 1898. Now on display at the Croppies’ Acre.

The reopening of the Croppies’ Acre memorial in recent weeks is a great development, returning to the public a space that was much neglected in recent years.

Dublin City Council have taken control of the management of the park, and one of the final acts of the excellent Ardmhéara Críona Ní Dhálaigh was cutting the ribbon. In recent years, the site became totally synonymous with anti-social behaviour, and for that reason it has been largely behind lock and key. Our own Luke Fallon jumped the wall for a look at the state of things in October 2013, and was shocked by the sight of used needles and more besides. In recent weeks, the sight of people in and out of the park has been great to see, as it is only through people using the park that the issues that plagued it in the past will vanish with time.

One feature of the park that can easily be missed is the foundation stone of the Wolfe Tone Memorial, first unveiled at St. Stephen’s Green in 1898 during the centenary commemorations of the United Irish rebellion, and photographed above. On that occasion, the veteran Fenian leader John O’Leary was given the honours, telling the huge crowd that “Tone’s failure is grander than many a success, for he fell gloriously in a great attempt.” Symbolically, the foundation stone came from Cave Hill in Belfast, the birthplace of the United Irish movement. The Fusiliers’ Arch memorial now stands in the location where Tone’s monument was envisioned, though Edward Delaney’s excellent 1964 tribute to Wolfe Tone eventually ensured the revolutionary leader was commemorated nearby.

The veteran Fenian John O’Leary, who unveiled the Wolfe Tone foundation stone in 1898.

The Croppies’ Acre memorial as is stands today dates largely to the bicentenary of the United Irish uprising in 1998. The memorial includes the beautiful words of Seamus Heaney’s Requiem for the Croppies, as well as words in French, Irish and English that encapsulate the radical vision of the United Irishmen. A movement in the spirit of the storming of the Bastille and the great Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, they were the Irish embodiment of an ‘Age of Revolution’.

This year has witnessed an enormous emphasis on commemoration and places of memory in Dublin, yet we should remember that the Republicanism and radicalism of those who rose in 1916 owed much to the inspiration of earlier generations. Be sure to visit the park, and may it remain open to the public for many years to come.

(Image credit: Luke Fallon)

This week, my ‘Hidden Histories’ slot on Newstalk Breakfast looked at the history of the Irish and tattoos. The last item on the show, time was tight but we covered quite a bit and I thought the slot worth sharing here. It was a chance to draw attention to the great research of Damian Shiels on the Irish in the American Civil War,  and I particularly enjoyed digging into the archives to look at some of the coverage of Dublin’s first professional tattooist,  Johnny Eagle, from Irish newspapers in decades long past.

John Larkin (1929-2015) was better known to generations of Dubliners as as Johnny Eagle. Born at the tail end of the 1920s, he opened his first studio at Frenchman’s Lane near Busaras, though in the years that followed he moved around the city (indeed, the name can still be seen at the top of Capel Street). When Michael Vincy of The Irish Times interviewed him in 1962, he wrote that “there are some 200 tattooists in Britain,one in Ulster, and Johnny as far as he knows has the Republic to himself.”  His obituary in the same newspaper last year noted that Larkin’s neighbours once believed he drove a van for a living. Certainly, Dublin today is a more inked city than in the early days of Johnny Eagle.

1962 feature on visiting Johnny Eagle’s tattoo shop.

In May of this year, the veteran Socialist activist Eamonn McCann was elected to the Stormont Assembly as MLA for the Foyle constituency. It was a remarkable achievement, all the more impressive given the election of his People Before Profit  colleague Gerry Carroll in West Belfast. At 29, Carroll’s political education came from campaigns like that against the Iraq War. For McCann, it was the Civil Rights movement that erupted in the North of Ireland in the late 1960s that would influence the course of his life to come.

On September 17 1970, there was widespread condemnation in the press for the actions of McCann at the Peacock Theatre (affiliated with and hosted by the Abbey), when he interrupted a performance he believed made a mockery of the worsening political situation in Ulster.  ‘A State of Chassis’, described in the press as a “satirical revue”, was the work of the Abbey’s artistic director, Tomás Mac Anna, and the Belfast journalist John D. Stewart. It was not the first production in the history of the Abbey to be interrupted,  but it was a reminder to many in the south of the tensions at play in northern society.

Irish Independent front page, 17 September 1970.

Before the performance, McCann distributed leaflets outside the theatre appealing for funds for the defence of Frank Roche, who had caused quite a stir by throwing C.S gas canisters into the House of Commons. As D.R O’Connor Lysaght noted in an article at the time of Frank’s passing in 1993, this act “caught people’s imagination, angered the Establishment and, without killing anyone, made its point, as Frank put it, that ‘that’s what it’s like, you bastards.'”

What irked McCann and others about the performance in the Peacock was the caricature of Bernadette Devlin. At only 21 years of age, Devlin had been elected to the House of Commons in 1969. In that same year, she published The Price of My Soul, a book that remains essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the emergence of the Civil Rights movement in Ulster. Devlin argued for a class-based approach, maintaining that “we refused to accept the politicians’ logic that the problem could be seen in terms of Catholic versus Protestant.” McCann, Devlin and those around them were young, yet their political ideas had developed well beyond the traditional camps in Ulster. They were internationalist in outlook, and saw events in Ulster in the context of an international movement for Civil Rights.

McCann with Máirín Keegan of the Young Socialists at the Peacock, with thanks to the Irish Republican & Marxist History Project.

As the actors re-emerged following the interval, McCann seized the moment and took to the stage. It wasn’t long before one of the ushers had dragged him from it, though he told the crowed “I object to this production.” Among other calls from the audience, “go to hell” and “throw him out!” were reported, but McCann succeeded in freeing himself and taking to the stage again. When a woman shouted that “the only solution is non-violence”, McCann retorted “non-violence my arse – tell that to the imperialists!” One of those with McCann on the night was Máirín Keegan, photographed above.  Keegan had been in Paris during the student revolt of 1968. and had participated in the Civil Rights demonstration march from Belfast to Derry in 1969. Organised by People’s Democracy, the march was viciously assaulted by loyalists at Burntollet. To her, as to McCann, the northern issue was a very real one.

In the lobby before he had taken to the stage, McCann told a journalist that:

This is on-going politics. This is not history. It is going on now and it is not possible to say that these are showy figures without relevance. There is no humour in it. They have made humorous statements, but what they are talking about should not be for laughter and delectation of the first-night people in Dublin.

McCann was not the only northern political figure in attendance. Paddy Devlin and John Hume, both elected MP’s, thought little of the work. Lelia Doolan, a former RTE employee who had recently resigned from the station, supported McCann and maintained that “the day we lampoon the North should be the day after we can adequately lampoon the South.”

The Irish Times, 17 September 1970.

Desmond Rushe, drama critic at the Independent,  attacked McCann for the “worst performance of the night”, writing that McCann “apparently holds that we should not laugh at Miss Devlin.” MacAnna, one of those behind the work, defended it on the basis that “when we laugh, we laugh that we may not weep.”

The protest of McCann and those with him in the Peacock made many uncomfortable, but that was the aim. They believed that the worsening situation in Ulster was not one to be ridiculed, and it opened up questions about how the arts in the South would and should respond to the events in the North.  Many would actively ignore developments mere hours away in the years ahead, while some galleries and theatres sought to shake people from what the artist Bobby Ballagh would call “self-protective apathy.” His response to the Bloody Sunday massacre of innocent protestors,  presented on the first night of The Exhibition of Living Art on 1972, demonstrated just how much had changed in Ireland in the short period of time between ‘A State of Chassis’ and then:

Robert Ballagh’s 1972 piece at The Exhibition of Living Art.

Plaque marking the office of The Nation, Middle Abbey Street.

The impressive Independent House on Middle Abbey Street still carries the names of the Evening Herald and Irish Independent upon it, though today they are mere ‘ghost signs’, as the Independent Media group have relocated in recent years to Talbot Street. Easier to miss than the names of these contemporary newspapers is a small plaque marking the fact that the site was once home to the offices of The Nation, an influential nationalist newspaper that began life in the 1840s.

Instigated by the Young Ireland movement, and spearheaded by radical nationalists like Thomas Davis, William Smith O’Brien and John Mitchel, The Nation provided a platform not only to nationalist political ideas but to cultural output too. It was within its pages that ‘A Nation Once Again’ first appeared, the work of Thomas Davis. Women could contribute to the newspaper, and one such contributor was Jane Wilde. Writing under the pen-name ‘Speranza’, Lady Wilde’s poetry was often seditious in nature, calling for armed revolt against British rule in Ireland.In particular, she attacked the British political establishment for creating the conditions that allowed famine to ravage rural Ireland, and called the peasantry to revolt:

Fainting forms, hunger-striken,

what see you in the offing?

Stately ships to bear our food away,

amid the stranger’s scoffing.

From ‘The Famine Year’

Jane Wilde, who contributed to The Nation under the name ‘Speranza’

As Christine Kinealy has written in her study Repeal and Revolution: 1848 in Ireland, Jane Wilde would come to be an inspiration to later generations of female nationalists, including Countess Markievicz and Alice Milligan, one of the leading-lights of the Irish Cultural Revival. At the time of  Jane Wilde’s passing in 1896, Milligan wrote of her “matchless spirit which in a time of doubt, danger and despair, she brought to the service of Ireland.”

The Young Irelanders would ultimately attempt insurrection in 1848, in a year synonymous with revolution and revolt on the European continent.  In a country ravaged by starvation and disease, any such rebellion was doomed. John Mitchel, one of the leaders of the movement, would later declare that “the Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.”

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in 1854 into a peculiar household, with a mother who was an unrepentant nationalist poet, and a father who had been knighted in the 1860s for pioneering work in his own field. Oscar would maintain that the best of his education came from his association with his parents and their remarkable friends, and their Merrion Square home was a hive of discussion and cultural activity.

As a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and Oxford, Oscar Wilde first burst into public consciousness as a poet (“The poet is Wilde, but his poetry’s tame” wrote Punch) and a hugely entertaining and engaging public speaker, a recognised figurehead of the aesthetic and decadent movements of the late 1870s and early 1880s. In 1882, Wilde departed for the United States on his first speaking tour there, quickly  discovering that in many circles Speranza was a more recognisable public name than Oscar Wilde. Promoters began including mention of her on advertisements for Wilde’s lectures, and the Arizona Weekly Citizen condemned Oscar as being “so low that he does not scruple to advertise himself for a dollar a ticket as the son of Lady Wilde (Speranza)”.

A mocking cartoon from the time of Wilde’s 1882 tour to the United States. (Image Credit: Oscar Wilde in America)

It was clear to Wilde that some in the US perhaps wished to hear of things other than the aesthetic movement. In San Francisco, he delivered a lecture in which he praised the ‘men of forty-eight’, and the Young Ireland movement in which his mother had played her own unique part:

As regards those men of forty-eight, I look on their work with peculiar reverence and love, for I was indeed trained by my mother to love and reverence them, as a catholic child is the saints of the cathedral. The earliest hero of my childhood was Smith O’Brien, whom I remember well – tall and stately with a dignity of one who had fought for a noble idea and the sadness of one who had failed … John Mitchel, too, on his return to Ireland I saw, at my father’s table with his eagle eye and impassioned manner.

He praised The Nation ,though he avoided reading the poetry of his mother on the basis that “of the quality of Speranza’s poems I, perhaps, should not speak, for criticism is disarmed before love”.

The greatest of them all, and one of the best poets of this century in Europe was, I need not say, Thomas Davis. Born in the year 1814 at Mallow in County Cork, before he was thirty years of age, he and the other young men of The Nation newspaper had, to use Father Burke’s eloquent words, created ‘by sheer power of the Irish intellect, by sheer strength of Irish genius, a national poetry and a national literature which no other nation can equal.’

Thomas Davis,warmly praised by Oscar Wilde during his 1882 lecture tour.

Oscar Wilde would rarely return to the subject of his mother and the Young Irelanders, indeed, it was perhaps an attempt by a new and emerging public figure (albeit one around which there was enormous fascination, what the Arizona Weekly Citizen termed “Wilde Mania”) to win audiences by speaking of a subject he knew held emotional pull among Irish America. Yet Wilde’s comments in the United States are important, as  is the broader context of Speranza’s nationalism and its influence on him. When her first collection of poetry was published, she dedicated it to Oscar and his brother Willie, boasting that “I made the indeed, speak plain the word COUNTRY. I thought them, no doubt, that a country’s a thing men should die for at need!”

As  Matthew Skwiat has noted, “many would argue that Wilde is more English than Irish, that none of his plays were set in Ireland, and that his success derived from his time spent in England.” Yet the strength of his mother, and her convictions, played no small part in molding Oscar Wilde long before he emerged as a household name on the neighbouring island and beyond. Today, Oscar Wilde’s Merrion Square home boasts a plaque in his honour and another dedicated to the memory of his father, Sir William Wilde. It is perhaps time Speranza was remembered there too.

Introduction

What links Captain William Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, Brendan Behan, Green Day and early morning techno gigs? One address – 1 George’s Quay, Dublin 2.

1 George’s Quay, 2016, Google Maps.

On the southside of the city between the new Rosie Hackett Bridge and Butt Bridge, this well-known and loved early-house pub closed in July of this year and re-opened a month later as a Starbucks.

The pub was situated on the corner of George’s Quay and Corn Exchange Place (formerly White’s Lane). Its address was 1 George’s Quay but the location was often mixed up for Burgh Quay.

As The White Horse, it was a popular haunt from the 1950s to the 1970s for the city’s journalist and literary set due mainly to its close proximity to the Irish Press building. In the 1980s and 1990s, its upstairs ‘Attic’ venue played an important role in Dublin’s rock and alternative music scenes. A relatively unknown Californian punk band called Green Day played there to less than 40 people in December 1991 at a gig organised by the pioneering Hope Collective.

Most people would probably say that the pub lost its true charm after a massive refurbishment job in 1998. However, up until recently as The Dark Horse, it played host to an array of techno, reggae and other ‘underground’ gigs. Its closure sees the city’s number of early houses drop to eleven.

19th century history:

Captain William Bligh, who was in command of the infamous HMS Bounty in 1789 when its crew famously rebelled, arrived in Dublin in September 1800 and stayed for about a year. A number of accounts have him staying in lodgings above the tavern at 1 George’s Quay. During his time here, he conducted a survey of Dublin Bay and recommended the construction of the Bull Wall. There was apparently a plaque outside the pub confirming the validity of this historical claim but it has long since disappeared.

In this wonderful scene from 1820, you can clearly make out 1 George’s Quay. It is the brown building in the mid right of the engraving with a prominent chimney. The neo-classical Custom House (opened 1791) is on the left and the Corn Exchange (opened 1816) with its distinct granite facade is on the right.

The Custom House viewed in 1820 from Burgh Quay showing the Corn Exchange on Burgh Quay and ships moored along the quays. Engraved by Henry Brocas.
Credit – magnoliasoft.net

In this version of the above drawing, published on the National Library of Ireland website, it is possible to zoom in and make out that the name above the building is ‘White’s Spirits Stores’:

Zoomed in version of the engraving from the NLI website.

This corresponds with William Phipps’ book The Vintner’s Guide (1825) which lists a Philip White at 1 George’s Quay:

White, Philip. 1 George’s Quay. The Vintner’s Guide (1825) by William Phipps

In a 1846 commercial directory, a vintner Eliza Fagan had taken over the business. In Thom’s Dublin Street Directory (1862), the premises was owned by a “wine & spirit dealer” by the name of William Bergin. Denis Bergin, presumably his son, sold the pub in 1880.

An Irish Times article (29 June 1880) described the premises as an “old – established wine and spirit concern” situated in this “great leading thoroughfare and commercial district, close by Corn Exchange, and the immediate shipping traffic, which … always leaves it one of the most desirable houses of its kind in the city”.

The public house had “recently undergone a complete change, having been taken down and rebuilt in its present modern form at an outlay of several thousand pounds.”

No detail was left out in the newspaper sale advertisement:

The exterior has a most substantial and appropriate appearance. The shop has three entrances, with folding doors to each, panelled with diamond-cut glass. There are six large-sized plate glass windows, with zinc blinds and bronze gas bars to each.

The interior is fitted up to modern style and in keeping with mercantile utility ; range of bar fixture the entire length of shop, in architectural form, with massive column supporters, surmounted by deep, concise,elaborately carved and finished, with eight-day clock in centre ; presses and lockers under for bottled wines, malt drinks and mineral waters : range of counters with return ends and four-fly partitions panelled to match doors and in keeping with the wainscoting round the shop : five large-sized oval spirit casks, in oak and gold : several five-light gasoliers in bronze, a very superior six-pull porter machine …

The upper portion of the house forms a most comfortable residence, 5 sitting and bedrooms, kitchen, 2 pantries, lavatory …

20th century history:

The 1901 census shows that James Ennis (50), a “Tea and Spirit Merchant” from County Meath, lived in the building with his sister Ellen (35). They employed two commercial assistants – William Byrne (30) and John Byrne (23). Both from County Carlow and possibly brothers. A servant Mary Monaghan (50) from Meath also worked for the Ennis siblings. All five individuals in the house were Roman Catholic and unmarried.

James Ennis died in 1905 and the pub was taken over by businessman John McGrath.

In the 1911 census, John McGrath (33), a Licensed Vintner from County Monaghan was living there with his wife Mary (23), from Dunishal, County Wicklow, and their two Dublin-born daughters  Lizzie (3) and Mary (11 months). They employed two shop/pub assistants James Fitzpatrick (18), from Ferns, County Wexford, and Robert Leggett (21), from Dublin. A domestic servant Kate Kavanagh (17), from Thurles, County Tipperary, also worked in the house.

As this wonderful photograph from May 1915 shows, the pub was only separated from the Tivoli cinema by a small laneway. The title ‘J. McGrath’ is clear above the door and on the top storey.

Tivoli Theatre with P. McGrath’s (later White Horse Inn) in background, 31 May 1915. Photographer: Robert French. Credit : National Library of Ireland

After the Easter 1916 Rising, John McGrath made two successful claims to the Property Losses (Ireland) Committee (PLIC). This body was established in June 1916 to assess claims for damages to buildings and property as a result of the destruction caused by the Rising.

McGrath’s first claim was for £7 11s 7d of stock including sugar, biscuits and cigarettes taken by Crown forces at his pub. A payment of £6 6s 7d was recommended by the Committee. The second was for £3 1s for damages to the building including broken bedroom windows. Full payment was recommended by the Committee.

John McGrath, File ref. no. PLIC/1/1263. Property Losses (Ireland) Committee

John McGrath emigrated to the Bronx, New York with his family in the late 1920s and died there in 1937.

The Irish Press connection:

The Tivoli cinema building beside the pub was originally known as The Conciliation Hall and was built as a meeting place for Daniel O’Connell’s ‘Loyal National Repeal Association’ in 1841. After his death six years laters, the building was used a grain store before re-opening as the Grand Lyric Hall in 1897. After a period of staging variety shows, it was relaunched in 1901 as the Tivoli cinema.

Closing in 1928, the imposing building was bought by the Irish Press and converted into the newspaper’s headquarters.

“A night shot of people gathered outside the Tivoli Theatre on Dublin’s Burgh Quay, circa 1920. The White Horse Inn can be seen in the background.
Credit – RTE

The White Horse’s heyday:

The pub was known as Galvin’s for a period in the 1930s before its owner Jerry Galvin died in June 1935.

It was bought by James P. Candon from Boyle, County Roscommon and J. Kerley and re-opened as The White Horse on Friday 26th September 1941.

A large advertisement published in the Irish Press on the day before its opening offered potential customers “the best drinks in town .. sandwiches and snacks … first-class service, civility and attention”.

A second advertisement announcing the opening of The White Horse (Evening Herald, 26 September, 1941)

At “Dublin’s newest and cosiest bar”, the owners were clear from the outset that men were welcome but the rule was – “ladies not served”.

Advertisement announcing the opening of The White Horse Bar. The Irish Press – 25 Sept 1941.

The ‘Ladies Not Served’ line really jumps out for the younger reader and while there’s no doubt that most pubs were men-only at this time, very few advertised to this degree. Judging by the newspaper archives anyway. An interesting Irishman’s Diary (20 July 1935) published six years before the above advertisement noted that the slogan was popularly used in the late 1920s and early 1930s but times were a-changing (albeit very slowly).

The Irish Times, 20 July 1935.

Back to The White Horse and later in the 1940s, the windows of the bar along with a number of nearby businesses were broken by a unemployed 21 year-old from Kerry called Denis Flanagan.

White Horse Bar windows smashed. The Irish Press – 13 June 1946.

In June 1948, James P. Candon sold his stake in The White Horse. A strong union man, he later went onto become president and then secretary of the Irish National Union of Vintners and Allied Trade Assistants. He passed away in 1969 at the age of 51.

Candon sold the pub for £15,000 to Michael ‘Mick’ O’Connell (c. 1901-1970) a farmer turned publican from Croom in County Limerick. At the time, O’Connell lived at Ashbourne House in Howth.

It was during O’Connell’s stewardship that The White Horse became the favoured watering hole for journalists, authors and those working in the newspaper trade. He was known fondly as the “Boss O’Connell”.

White Horse advertisement in the Limerick Leader (21 August 1948)

It was related by Bill Kelly in his book ‘Me Darlin’ Dublin’s Dead and Gone‘ that writer Benedict Kiely often told the story about the time that fourteen different people invited him for a drink as he walked between O’Connell Bridge and the White Horse bar, a distance of less than 75 yards.

Brendan Behan was a regular during the 1950s and 1960s in the White Horse along with The Pearl, The Palace and other nearby spots. As was Brian O’Nolan (‘Flann O’Brien/ aka Myles na gCopaleen), Seamus de Faoite and many others.

While Behan’s drinking days have become more and more celebrated as time passes, it was often a very depressing affair. As illustrated by Tim Pat Coogan in his 2008 memoir in which he writes about his last time drinking in Behan’s company:

(It was) about a year before his death in 1964 … in the White Horse beside the Press building. I was acting as Terry O’Sullivan’s stand-in on ‘Dublin’s Diary’, and intended procuring a few Behanisms to enliven the column.

Instead I found myself consoling Beatrice, his wife, as she gazed miserably but helplessly at Brendan standing at the bar with two well-known Dublin soaks. Every so often he would tell the barman to give him a ten-shilling note from the till. Then he would roll up the note, suck it for a while like a lollipop, and then spit it out. There was a ring of ten-shilling notes around the trio’s feet.

I offered to get the barman to stop but Beatrice told me it was useless. All he would do was go to another pub and indulge in some similar caper, accompanied by the soaks, and probably there’d by more like them at the next venue.

The interior of the The White Horse on 1st March 1964.
Credit – Terence Spencer, The LIFE Images Collection.

Another regular patron was the late, great sports journalist, Con Houlihan. In conversation with Keith Duggan in The Irish Times (25 Oct 2003) he spoke about the importance of The White Horse and the surrounding area:

…  geographically, Burgh Quay was the focal point of Dublin. It was an intimate community with certain pubs for certain people

I suppose the Dublin I knew was bound by Mulligan’s pub and you had perhaps 10 more around it. All great meeting places.

First and foremost, you had The White Horse, it would open around half six in the morning if you wanted an early drink. It was unique in that (Brendan) Behan could drink there as long as he stayed in a certain corner and not go around bothering people too much. And you found all kinds of humanity there. Bowes on Fleet Street was another.

The Swan on Burgh Quay, or the Mucky Duck as we called it, was a journalists’ pub but the Butterlys sold the licence after the Stardust Fire in 1981. And The Pearl Bar was frequented by a coterie from The Irish Times, all good people but a niche group. You had Kennedys, a very respectable pub. It was like a village and I loved it. You felt safe at night. Change can come like a dam and in Dublin it burst overnight. And there is a great sense of loss about that now.”

A barman’s job was sometimes dangerous, especially if you were dealing with unruly youths who thought they were Dublin’s answer to The Beatles, as this 1966 story demonstrates:

Irish Independent, 20 June 1966.

Owner Michael O’Connell, then living at 68 Offington Park in Sutton, passed away at the age of 69 in March 1970.

Michael O’Connel obit. The Irish Press – 10 March 1970.

After his death GAA correspondent Pádraig Puirséal wrote about him affectionately in the Irish Press on 13 March 1970:

The “Boss” O’Connell, God rest him, was a big, patient, understanding man, who could cope with any emergency in the White Horse from an unexpected newspaper strike to Brendan Behan (and God rest him too) suddenly deciding to burst into “ar thaobh na greine Sliabh na mBan”, or especially if there happened to be a few G.A.A. characters in the neighborhood, the “Lament for Johnny Thompson”…
It was in a way, odd that Mick O’Connell with the massive frame from the limestone county of Limerick, should have been so much identified with so many sidelights of literary Dublin … for to me he always seemed a man of the open air as, on the too few occasions we had time for private chatter, he talked of his youthful days around Croom, of horse and points-to-points, of running dogs and hurling men.

Mick O’Connell’s son William (aka Bill) took over the reins of the Dark Horse after his death.

In the 1970s, the bar was a meeting spot for an array of organisations including the Irish Boxers’ Mutual Benefit Society. A newspaper advertisement in the Irish Press (29 October 1970) looking for a new barman specified that the individual must be a “union member”. Different times.

Former Irish Press journalist Hugh McFadden in an email to the author (9 August 2016) recalled his memories of the White Horse:

As far as I remember the O’Connell family still owned the ‘Horse’ in the early-to-mid 1970s. It was an ‘early house’, of course, meaning that it opened about 7.30 am in the morning, as it had a special licence to serve the dockers and shift workers on the quays.

The shift workers included staff of the adjacent Irish Press, especially those who worked on the Evening Press whose shifts started around 7.30 am. The downstairs bar would usually be quite busy around 8am-9am in the morning. There were very very few women to be seen in the downstairs bar at any time, just the occasional older woman (‘Dicey Riley’ type). The upstairs lounge was not busy during the day, although it had its own customers in the evening and later became a venue for music sessions.

The pub did have its literary associations, not alone the connection with the Press (the novelist and broadcaster Ben Kiely was one of the Press journalists who drank there, and so did the Kerry short-story writer Seamus de Faoite, among others. The novelists and Irish Times columnist Brian O’Nolan (‘Flann O’Brien/ aka Myles na gCopaleen) often drank there in the 1950s and 1960s. He also drank in the Scotch House. Several of the Irish Times Cruiskeen Lawn columns are set in the White Horse, especially ones about the early opening hours. It was a favourite watering hole for many of the Irish Press printers, as well as some of the journalists.

 

My late friend Shay McGonagle, the Press journalist and cartoonist, drank there frequently. See my chapter (‘Boogie on Burgh Quay’) in the book The Press Gang, edited by Dave Kenny (New Island Books) in which there is a photograph of Shay McGonagle and myself taken in the upstairs lounge of the White Horse around 1976.

1970 street scene – from right to left – Corn Exchange Building, the Irish Press Building and The White Horse.
Credit – dublincity.ie

Des Derwin remembers that The Socialist Workers Movement and New Liberty, a rank and file group in the ITGWU, met in the top room of the pub for a while around 1981.

Frank Hopkins has commented saying that he used to play Chess upstairs on a Monday night while Alan MacSimon also has informed us that the bar staff kept a set of dominos as well for anyone who wanted to play.

After the H-Blocks riot on Merrion Street on 18th July 1981, MacSimon calls to mind that

Groups of Gardai had chased protesters back to the city centre and were using their batons on anyone they thought might have been the march earlier. A few fleeing protesters arrived into the bar and told their, possibly exaggerated, stories. Staff decided to lock the doors. A few minutes later Gardai turned up, demanding to be let in. But the doors stayed closed for about an hour, until the Gardai had moved on.

In March 1984, the bar was put up for sale but the offer was withdrawn after receiving no bids.

White Horse Inn for sale. The Irish Press – 2 March 1984.

Allen Family and The Attic:

The pub was eventually sold in July 1987 to husband and wife team Len and Ger Allen.

Exterior of The White Horse, 11 May 1988.

[As a brief side note, an Irish bar manager Noel Grehan (35) from Ballinameen, near Boyle County Roscommon died of a heart attack in London in June 1989 less than 24 hours after he was beaten up by intruders. Grehan had worked for ten years at the White Horse in Dublin. He was found dead by staff at the Three Compasses pub in Queen Street, North London only hours after he had been beaten by two men and robbed of £400 as he was closing after Sunday night trading.]

From the late 1980s, the upstairs part of the bar became a gig spot known as The Attic. Music promoter Andrew Bass was brought in to book bands.

Robbie Foy later took over. He had previously managed Dublin group Light A Big Fire who were tipped for big things.

Stephen Rennicks in an article about 1980s Dublin band The Idiots described The Attic as a:

cheap to rent and very small venue (that) was an incredibly important place for certain bands of this generation to come together and share their music …

The Idiots were practically the house band at this time. They had a rehearsal room upstairs, drank and socialized downstairs and played live often at this midpoint between these two worlds. Their manager, Sinead, was also the house sound person for all the bands who played there as well.

Many people recall the floorboards that felt like they were going to give way at any second.

In an email to the author (10 August 2016), Niall McGuirk of the Hope Collective recalled:

Andrew Bass asked if I was interested in getting bands to play in the Attic (upstairs in the White Horse Inn). For £30 we’d get the room and a sound engineer. It sounded interesting to me but I didn’t want to become a local promoter. It has always puzzled me as to why music is so inaccessible to people who aren’t old enough to drink in pubs. Most folk start off in bands when they are under 18 but there is nowhere for them, legally, to play.

Back in the late 80s, Ireland’s bar owners had a strange interpretation of the licensing laws. They would allow “Minors” (Under 18’s) on their premises until 6.30 but only if accompanied by a legal guardian and, obviously, without serving them alcohol. The police drew a blind eye if minors were on the premises before that time. That “law” has since been rubbished but in 1990 the only way to have no age restrictions at a gig was to play it in the afternoon. So I asked if it could happen! The Attic’s manager, Lenny, agreed to try out Sunday gigs with no age restrictions, starting at 4pm. Again, licensing laws meant people weren’t legally allowed on the premises (even to set-up equipment) between 2.30 and 4 p.m. so sound checks had to be completed by 2.30. In response to Andrew’s suggestion to me, I thought the best thing to do was to have a series of afternoon benefit gigs leading up to Christmas.

They put on a host of cult Irish bands at the Attic including Therapy? and Whipping Boy in December 1990.

On a “wintry Sunday afternoon” in December 1991, an up-and-coming American punk band Green Day played in The Attic to about 40 people. Support came from Dog Day. Cover charge was £2 and the organisers lost £50 on the night.

Green Day, The Attic, December 1991.
Credit – Hot Press

Niall recalls in Please Feed Me: A Punk Vegan Cookbook (2004) that singer Billy Joe Armstrong and the rest of the band didn’t hang around in Dublin that evening:

Dublin wasn’t really the party city and Green Day left for Belfast straight after the gig, but not before getting some directions and food. They had enjoyed themselves so much in Belfast the previous night that they wanted to get back as quickly as possible.

One lucky gig goer was Pete Murphy who recalled in a 2015 article  in State Magazine:

I was in town doing some last minute Christmas shopping. I knew Niall was organising an afternoon gig for this band on Lookout Records, called Green Day. I knew their first couple of records, and I’d always support the Hope gigs when I could, so I took some time out to pop in and catch the show. Armed as ever with my trusty walkman recorder I headed in and, along with, I guess, 25 other people, caught a great gig. I still have that tape somewhere.

Thankfully those recordings eventually made it online to Youtube. As you can hear here, their setlist that day included an early version of crowd-favourite Welcome To Paradise.

As well as The Attic, The Hope Collective were also using Dublin venues like JJ Smyth’s on Aungier Street, the Underground on Dame Street (now Club Lapello strip club) McGonagles on South Anne Street (demolished) the New Inn on New Street, Charlie’s on Aungier Street (merged into Capitol Lounge) Fox & Pheasant on Capel Street (demolished) and Barnstormers on Capel Street (now The Black Sheep). A complete gig list is available here.

Around the same time, The Attic gig booker Robbie Foy was organising inventive Acid House nights around the city:

Robbie Foy/Acid House article. The Irish Independent – 28 October 1989.

Football and redevelopment:

The White Horse was a popular pub for football fans during this time as well. An array of soccer scarves from around the world was displayed in the bar downstairs. Shay Ryan, drummer with mid 1980s Dublin soul legends The Commotion, remembers the great atmosphere in the pub watching the Euro 1988 championship especially the England game.

Booker Robbie Foy was a diehard Shamrock Rovers fan as was owner Len Allen and barman Buzz O’Neill. Allen had played junior football as a goalkeeper for Baldoyle United and Oulton. As such it became a favoured spot for Rovers fans during this period particularly when the club played at the RDS from 1990 to 1996.

An etching of The White Horse, 1995.
Credit – Irish Independent, 13, June 1995.

ason Byrne and John Henderson organised the ‘Murphy’s Corduroy Comedy’ Club’ in the upstairs bar every Thursday night around 1997.

Stompin’ George, Dublin Rockabilly DJ institution, has informed me that:

J
Len and his wife moved to Wexford during the 90’s and took over a pub on the quays which he renamed ” An Capall Ban” beside the Talbot Hotel. It too became a great watering hole for both locals and us so called ” blow ins”.

Sadly signalling the end of an era, the Irish Press closed its doors in May 1995 with a loss of over 600 jobs.

The White Horse in its current incarnation soon followed.

No doubt spurred on by the growth of the so-called Celtic Tiger and the popularity of ‘modernizing’ pubs,  it was announced in the Irish Independent (7 May 1997) that the Allen family had lodged planning permission to “demolish and rebuild the well known early house and traditional music venue” . This refurbishment to the The White Horse cost well over £600,000. The plans were to reconstruct the premises to include a pub at ground floor level and apartments overhead. The author of that article noted that the knocking down of the 250 year-old building marks the loss “of yet another olde worde pub in the capital”.

The pub reopened around 1998 as a sleek, new modern bar and it was certainly noticed.

An unnamed journalist in The Irish Independent (27 April 1999) didn’t hold back on his opinions of the redeveloped pub:

Has any pub in history ever undergone a complete as transformation as the White Horse? It’s doubtful.

Short of turning into some sort of Episcopalian church it is hard to see how it could have moved further from what it used to be.

The old White Horse was described in terms such as, er, basic while the new version looks like it has sprung from the pages of a Habitat brochure.

(It used to be) dank and dingy, full of bibulous hacks from the doomed Irish Press – many of whom took advantage of the fact that it was an early house and started boozing at 7am – and housed upstairs a creaking venue for rock bands who couldn’t get a gig anywhere else.

The new incarnation is completely unrecognisable. It’s spacious and airy, full of immaculately polished wooden tables and shiny metal trimmings ; above all, it’s suffused with light, pouring through from every angle of its largely glazed exterior.

Back then, the White Horse had atmosphere. Can you say the same for the new place? The jury is out.

New decor, new clientele. Gone are the old men, the plastered journalists and the spotty, long-haired teenagers. In their place are smart folk , dressed in suits and designer leather jackets. Yuppies, though not of the strident variety.

Recent history:

It changed hands briefly in the early 2000s and was known as P. McCormack & Sons for a time. But the Allen family took back control and renamed it The Dark Horse around 2011. Len and Ger’s son Con Allen, a DJ, and daughter Lyn Allen, a fashion designer, put their own mark on the pub. Len Allen sadly passed away from cancer in 2007 and with the band Therapy? leading the tributes.

The Dark Horse was one of the very rare early-houses that encouraged partying and DJs. Promoter Bernard Kennedy started running early-morning dance gigs there around 2004.

Piece on the early-house DJ nights at the Dark Horse. The Irish Times, 17 August 2006.

From 2011 to 2015, Con Allen took up the mantle and ran an early-morning techno and house club called the Breakfast Club every Saturday. Doors would open at 7am and a mix of all-night ravers and early risers would come to dance to talented local and international DJs. Entrance was €10 and two bouncers on the door prevented any trouble. All the windows were covered with black curtains to provide punters with an artificial feeling that it was still Friday night. Sweaty clubbers were kicked out into the disconcerting sunshine and reality at 2pm. Some went home while the more wired would go around the corner to Ned Scanlon’s on Townsend Street.

From September 2011 to August 2012, our friend Freda at Poster Fish Promotions ran the Saturday night slot at the Dark Horse Inn. Some of the most memorable nights included DJ Mek of legendary Irish late 90’s Hip-Hop, Captain Moonlight, Irish Jungle DJ Welfare and reggae MC Cian Finn.

This period saw one of my favourite DJ gigs ever featuring one TD, two councillors and a host of great comrades and friends:

Punky Reggae Party (Vol. 11) – Benefit for the Campaign Against the Household Tax. Saturday March 31 2012.

Conclusion:

The Dark Horse’s last post on their Facebook page was in March 2016 and the pub closed its doors in July.

The closed Dark Horse Inn, July 2016.
Credit – Publin.

It has re-opened in the last few weeks as a Starbucks coffee shop.

Starbucks cafe at 1-2 George’s Quay, August 2016.
Credit – Paul Guinan

There are now forty plus Starbucks in Dublin with more than twenty in the city centre alone. They only make up a tiny percentage of the company’s 23,768 stores (2016 estimate) worldwide but twenty is a lot for a central part of the city which only stretches in each direction for a couple of kilometres. Is there really a need for two opposite each other on Westmoreland Street?

Starbucks has moved into an array of premises including the the old Bewley’s café on Westmoreland Street, the clothing shop Counter Propaganda on Liffey Street, Sawers fish mongers (estd. 1959) on Chatham Row off Grafton Street, the clothing store and coffee shop Raglan on Drury Street, Marco Pierre’s White Steakhouse and Grill on Dawson Street, Coopers Restaurant on Leeson Street and the Bia Cafe on O’Connell Street.

Starbucks in the surrounding area of O’Connell Street, 2016.

It would be disingenuous to simply portray this as a big, bad American multi-national ripping apart a historic pub and putting in a cloned version of their coffee shop. The historic heart of the White Horse was almost totally torn out during the demolition and expansion work in the late 1990s.

But I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels unsettled by the sheer amount of chain coffee shops, souvenir shops, clothing stores and fast food restaurants that are proliferating in the city often at the expense of independent establishments.

Especially if it means another space like the Dark Horse is taken out of circulation that was available for people who wanted to put on a reggae dub night or tech-house morning session. Something a bit out of the ordinary.

Dublin is fighting a uphill battle to preserve its independence and identity. Temple Bar, once known as an independent area with cheap rents in the 1980s and then a tourist magnet from the 1990s, seems to have completely lost that battle. It now has a McDonalds, a Starbucks and a Costa Coffee while its arts space Exchange Dublin, the bike shop Square Wheel Cycleworks and record shops like Borderline and Cosmic have closed their doors in the last few years.

Promoting progress while safeguarding heritage is a complex responsibility. You have to tread carefully. Nobody wants to sound like a cliched Sean Dempsey in the song ‘Dublin In The Rare Old Times‘ (1979) who I’m guessing would be that loud old drunk man who likes to remind people how Parnell Street and Moore Street are unrecognisable from his youth. But I also think it’s perfectly fine to be alarmed by the rapid spread of a coffeehouse chain like Starbucks in our city who are regularly criticised for violating labour laws, opening stores without planning permission and tax avoidance.

So goodbye to the White Horse and to the Dark Horse. Thanks for the memories.

[Thanks to the following people for help with this article : Eanna Brophy, Hugh McFadden, Dunster, Freda Hughes, Fearghal Whelan, Niall McGuirk, Alan MacSimon, Des Derwin, Stompin’ George,  and Shay Ryan]

Perspective Sketch from 1973. ‘Fire Brigade Headquarters suggested additional commercial development’. Submitted to Corporation of Dublin Planning Department. Click to expand.

Back in January, we had a post on the blog dealing with the theme of ‘Dublin Re-Imagined’.  It looked at some of the proposals for Dublin in decades and centuries gone by that fell by the scrapheap, including the Dublin Metropolitan Railway and the Merrion Square Cathedral that never was.

In some ways, this post is similar, though it deals with  a familiar Dublin landmark that could have been radically altered.The Tara Street Fire Station, opened in 1907 by Dublin Lord Mayor Joseph Nanetti, was the work of the celebrated City Architect C.J McCarthy.  He was responsible for a number of Dublin fire stations, and  it has been noted that his “renaissance-type brick buildings” in Dorset Street and Tara Street were the most “interesting and original”of these stations.

Photograph of the fire station from the year of its opening.

Postcard from 1907, following the opening of the station (Las Fallon)

This 1973 perspective sketch for the transformation of the station is interesting for a number of reasons. The vision of architect Alica Kelly and drawn by T.Durney, it presents a radical new vision for the site.

Firstly however, beyond the fire station itself, it is truly a product of its time. Notice the flared trousers of the passer-by, and the design of the cars in the streetscape! To the left of the historic tower, an advertisement for tobacco is visible in the larger image above.

This plan would have kept the historic tower, which rises to a height of almost 40m, but almost all around it was to be transformed with modern development replacing McCarthy’s site. The curve in the building would have been lost, along with much of McCarthy’s vision, though it should be noted the very function of the building had changed much in almost seven decades. No longer where there ‘married quarters’ within the station, where firefighters wives and children once lived. With that in mind perhaps, the architects here sought to use such space for commercial purposes. In truth, CJ McCarthy’s own vision for the station wasn’t quite ever realised, with his much more ornate tower rejected for a simpler design among other revisions.

My thanks to Mark Leddy for providing the Perspective Sketch for this piece.

‘Patrick Ireland 1972 -2008’, in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham (Irish Museum of Modern Art), (Image: CHTM)

The recent passing of Bishop Edward Daly was a reminder for many people of the horrors of 30 January 1972, when British paratroopers opened fire on a Civil Rights demonstration in Derry.

While there had been earlier atrocities against the civilian population in Ulster, such as that at Ballymurphy,the manner in which the carnage and mayhem in Derry was captured on film ensured international outrage. In particular, images of Bishop Daly with his blood-soaked white handkerchief trying to escort  young Jackie Duddy to safety were reproduced in the press, along with the faces of the dead. In 2010, David Cameron would apologise in Westminster for the actions of British troops on the day. In Derry, it brought some closure but no justice. The city corner, a former British Army major, had correctly called the events out for what they were in August 1973:

This Sunday became known as Bloody Sunday and bloody it was. It was quite unnecessary. It strikes me that the Army ran amok that day and shot without thinking what they were doing. They were shooting innocent people. These people may have been taking part in a march that was banned but that does not justify the troops coming in and firing live rounds indiscriminately. I would say without hesitation that it was sheer, unadulterated murder. It was murder.

Symbolic coffins left outside the British Embassy at Merrion Square following Bloody Sunday. The building was later set on fire by protestors. (Image Credit: Scannal, RTE)

Walking in the grounds of the Royal Hospital recently, I went looking for the small memorial stone to ‘Patrick Ireland’ in the grounds, a small reminder of the impact of the events of Bloody Sunday on one Irish man. Born in Roscommon in 1928, the artist and critic Brian O’Doherty was already well-established in the United States at the time of the massacre. In the 1960s, he had been art critic for the New York Times, as well as an on-air contributor to NBC television. Deeply troubled by the events at home, O’Doherty decided to adopt the name ‘Patrick Ireland’, later telling a journalist that “the name at least became a reminder. Every work I did after that gained a political context for me and for anyone who may have wondered who Patrick Ireland was.” The symbolic changing of name happened in a performance piece in the Project Arts Centre, entitled Name Change, with the artist Robert Ballagh serving as witness. O’Doherty vowed to sign his art as Patrick Ireland, “until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights.”

As Whitney Rugg has noted, O’Doherty was a significant figure in the American arts community at the time, “serving as editor-in-chief of Art in America, perhaps the broadest and most mainstream journal for American art at that time.” His protest was widely commented upon in the arts world, where the response to his actions was mostly positive.

(Image: CHTM)

By 2008, O’Doherty felt that his own criteria had been met, with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the continuing Peace Process. Symbolically, an effigy (complete with death mask) was buried in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in May 2008, with several hundred people in attendance. Michael Rush, a former Jesuit priest who became a Museum director, facilitated a short service during which a number of poems celebrating peace were read.

The Custom House (illustration by by James Malton)

The architect James Gandon (1743-1843) is today synonymous with Dublin. While he worked in other cities, and was born in London’s New Bond Street, his most celebrated works are to be found here. From the Four Courts to parts of the historic Parliament building on College Green, and from Kings Inns to the Rotunda Assembly Rooms, his work is a reminder of the style of the Georgian period that transformed Dublin.

His first project in Dublin was undoubtedly his most controversial. While the Custom House is today recognised as a Dublin landmark building, the very prospect of its construction infuriated Dubliners who believed it would shift the entire axis of the city and negatively effect their own incomes. So controversial was the development, that Dublin workers (dismissed in contemporary accounts as ‘rabble’) would force their way onto the site of the development, led by the firebrand “populist patriot” James Napper Tandy.

Moving the Custom House:

The earlier Custom House at Essex (now Wellington) Quay.

Before Gandon’s Custom House, an earlier one could be found at Essex Quay, more or less at the site of Bono’s Clarence Hotel. Constructed in 1707, it was plagued by numerous problems, including the fact large vessels had difficulty reaching it thanks to the presence of  a large reef known as Standfast Dick that proved a nightmare for anyone navigating the Liffey! As Maurice Curtis discusses in his recent history of Temple Bar, other problems included the fact that large vessels often had to use smaller craft , known as ‘lighters’, to unload cargo owing to difficulties in navigating up the Liffey, and the building itself was problematic, with its upper floors discovered to be structurally unsound in the early 1770s.

By 1773, plans were afoot to address the problem, with the powerful Revenue Commissioner John Beresford leading the campaign for a new Custom House to be constructed further eastwards.  He proposed a new and enlarged development, though almost immediately the proposals were met by protest.  As Joseph Robins notes in his history of the Custom House, “the proposal was opposed by a variety of individuals who feared their interests would be damaged by any shift in the location of commercial activity. Petitions against the project were presented by the merchants, brewers and manufacturers of Dublin, and by the city Corporation, but the government decided in 1774 to go ahead with the move.”

James Gandon arrives in Dublin:

The architect selected for this development was the Londoner James Gandon, grandson of French Huguenot refugees who had fled religious persecution. Gandon had already been awarded the Gold medal for architecture by the Royal Academy in London, and was in considerable demand beyond these shores; the Romanov family had attempted to lure him to St Petersburg around the same time as the Custom House controversy in Dublin.

When Gandon arrived in Dublin, he was kept a virtual prisoner by Beresford. His biographer Hugo Duffy has written of the real fear that gripped Beresford, writing that Gandon’s suspicion of the whole project “must have been heightened when he realised the opposition was so violent as to keep Beresford in a state of anxiety lest it became known that the architect had arrived.”

The primary figure that stood between Gandon and the new Custom House was James Napper Tandy, one of the great characters of the Dublin of his day. An ironmonger by trade, Tandy was elected to the City Assembly in 1777 and was a champion of the Dublin poor, not to mention a vocal campaigner against corruption in local politics. Later a founding member of the United Irishmen, many were unkind towards his appearance, with one observer of a political meeting he addressed remembering:

He was the ugliest man I ever gazed on. He had a dark, yellow, truculent-looking countenance, a long drooping nose, rather sharpened at the point, and the muscles of his face formed two cords at each side of it.

Memorial plaque to Napper Tandy, in the park at St Audeon’s, Cornmarket (Image: CHTM)

The poor regarded Tandy as a hero, not least when he denounced the police of the day as “a ruffianly and licentious rabble”, or when he campaigned for rights for the Catholic majority. His life would take some remarkable turns, and indeed he arguably came to owe his life to Napoleon Bonaparte, who intervened vigorously on his behalf after the disastrous 1798 rebellion and his capture. Still, ’98 was far away at the time of Gandon’s arrival, and Tandy’s aim was to ensure that the unhappiness of Dublin merchants and workers who he represented was clear to Gandon and Beresford.  Gandon was warned that labourers in Dublin were “frequently turbulent, and in the habit of combining together for increase of wages, when works required quickness of execution.” Certainly, Tandy contributed to that.

The ‘rabble’ storming the site:

Gandon was more than aware of the unpopularity of the project. As Robins notes, he received threatening letters on more than one occasion and even carried a cane sword, “which he believed he could still wield to some purpose if forced to defend himself.”

On a September day in 1781, the protestors arrived. Gandon had been warned that Tandy and his followers constituted “the most desperate of the mob” opposed to the project, and the press delighted in reporting of his arrival on the construction site, “followed by numerous rabble with adzes, saws, shovels, etc.” Tandy’s men “came in a body onto the grounds and leveled that portion of the fence, which had been thrown up, adjoining the North Wall and River Liffey.” Beresford would encourage Gandon in the aftermath of this to “laugh at the extreme folly of the people”, but certainly Tandy had made his point. Tandy has been described as a “real force in the municipal and street politics of the capital”, and this was neither the first or the last time he would infuriate the authorities.

A panorama shot of Gandon’s masterpiece as she stands today (Image Credit: Wiki Commons, CC)

Gandon’s masterpiece was eventually completed,  though the project took a decade in total and cost an extraordinary sum of money at the time, with the bills running to a sum in excess of £200,000. Napper Tandy wouldn’t be the last radical to storm the site; on 25 May 1921, the men of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA, assisted in their task by sympathetic members of the Dublin Fire Brigade, ensured that the building burnt. The centre of Local Government administration in British-occupied Ireland, the buildings interior was gutted on that occasion. Despite drastic changing inside, much of the magnificent exterior today reminds us of the fine talents of James Gandon. Today he is buried in Drumcondra, having died on Christmas Eve, 1823.

In recent months, the faces of the 1916 Generation have been starring down on Dubliners from above The Ivy  on the corner of Parliament Street in a glorious Andy Warhol style, along with the Starry Plough of the Citizen Army flying from the premises. It is visually striking, and thankfully has remained up after the main centenary celebrations have passed. Readers may remember these same faces gazing down from what was then Thomas Read’s in 2006. The work is that of the artist and councillor Mannix Flynn, entitled ‘Something To Live For’.

While this fine piece of art is one reminder of the Rising, the building opposite it carries its own reminders, albeit not as immediately obvious. The next time you’re passing, have a close look at the old Evening Mail offices.

The old Evening Mail offices, on the corner of Parliament Street and Lord Edward Street. Photographed from City Hall.

Repair work to the Evening Mail offices.

The first shots of the Rising in Dublin were fired in the vicinity of Dublin Castle, where a small band of Citizen Army men and women were deployed under the command of Seán Connolly, a talented Abbey Theatre actor from a family deeply rooted in the trade union movement. His brother Matthew remembered that as they marched up Dame Street, a voice from the footpath called out “Here’s the Citizen Army with their pop guns!”, while another joked “there goes Ireland’s only hope!”. Connolly remembered that “they laughed at their own jokes. Little did they know!” Seán ordered the men and women under his command to seize a number of outposts in the vicinity, including the Mail offices.

Shots rang out at the gates of the Castle on Cork Hill early in the Rising, resulting in the death of DMP Constable James O’Brien. O’Brien had attempted to close the Castle gates, leading Seán Connolly to shoot him. While the ICA succeeded in taking the guard room of the Castle, the closure of the second set of gates prevented them from seizing the Castle outright. This was not the first Irish insurrection to fail in its ambition of seizing Dublin Castle.

Having seized the nearby City Hall and surrounding buildings, the rebels came under intense fire from within the Castle. A sniper in the Bedford Tower caused great difficulty for ICA members on the rooftop of City Hall, and it was here that Seán was fatally shot. His brother recalled the view from the rooftop of City Hall, looking across at other occupied buildings:

 From this elevated position, I had a commanding view over a good portion of the city; the air was clear, and the visibility good. Across the street from where I was, men were taking up positions on the roof of the Henry and James’ building.at the corner of Parliament Street, and on the roof of the  Evening Mail offices. These were members of our own company.

Evening Mail offices today.

In the aftermath of the Rising, sections of the city were damaged beyond repair. In other places, there were quick-fix solutions to the damage. At the Mail offices, bullet marks were filled with crushed brick and mortar. The years have weathered this finish, and today the filled sections can be clearly seen.

Thanks to Las Fallon for these images. Las is the curator of an exhibition on Dublin Fire Brigade and the 1916 Rising, currently running in City Hall.

I’m currently reading John Cooney’s  biography of John Charles McQuaid, a figure who loomed large over every aspect of Irish life in his time. The much-feared Archbishop of Dublin intervened in everything from Association Football to issues of cinema, but one of the strangest tales in the book concerns the visit of Orson Welles to Dublin in December 1951, when placards denounced him as “Stalin’s Star” on the pavement outside the Gate Theatre.

Orson Welles (1915-1985)

Orson Welles was no stranger to the Gate Theatre. As previously examined on this blog, we made his professional theatrical debut there at the age of sixteen. Irish theatre legend Micheál Mac Liammóir recalled that he put on “an astonishing performance, wrong from beginning to end but with all the qualities of fine acting tearing their way through a chaos of inexperience.”

By the early 1950s, Welles was an international sensation. He had directed, co-wrote, produced and performed the lead role in the critically acclaimed Citizen Kane (1941), following it up with a number of other successful pictures, including 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons. Despite his remarkable talents in all aspects of broadcasting, acting and performance, he was a controversial figure in the United States owing to his progressive political inclinations, enough to ensure his condemnation in the damning 1950 report Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.  The work has been described as the “Bible of the Blacklist” which swept 1950s Hollywood. The dossier identified Welles as a dinner sponsor for the ‘Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee’ and a contributor towards the Daily Worker newspaper, as well as a benefit patron for the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy. Support for the Spanish Republic, which had been overthrown by Franco’s Fascist Junta with the help of Hitler and Mussolini, was enough to secure the inclusion of many celebrities in the list of suspected ‘Reds’.

Unwanted publicity: Detail from the front of Red Channels.

Opposition to Welles in Dublin was organised by the Catholic Cinema and Theatre Patron’s Association, who had been distributing a pamphlet entitled ‘Red Star over Hollywood’ in Dublin. Michael O Tuathaill, the Hon. Secretary of the Association, was quoted as saying the body were interested in keeping the cinema “pure.” Throughout the 1930s, the cinema had been routinely denounced in Lenten Pastorals and religious publications as a corrupting influence, yet by the 1950s it was evidently clear the cinema was here to say. Welles was collected at the airport by Hilton Edwards of the Gate Theatre, who drove him to the theatre, and was furious at the sight of demonstrators; he told journalists that “my only consolation is that I believe this to be a manifestation of irresponsibility backed up by fanaticism and I refuse to believe it represents the opinion of the Irish race. If I might quote W. B Yeats, this crowd has disgraced itself again.” Welles recalled that the protestors were led by “some insane priest”, though he would have been very little of them as he was rushed into the theatre.

Welles was not performing on the night, but was an audience member to Tolka Row, a play by Maura Laverty. The actors had to contend with repeated heckling from the small band of demonstrators. A crowd of the generally curious began to assemble, with newspapers reporting something in the region of a thousand people were ultimately outside the theatre. Some carried placards, with slogans including telling Welles to visit Moscow and not Dublin, and condemning him as “Stalin’s Star”. From the stage, the famous visitor denounced the crowd outside for interrupting such a fine work, to tremendous applause from the audience. Welles made his exit via a side-door of the Gate, but it was certainly not a night he would remember as fondly as his performance upon the stage of the same venue as a younger man.

The Gate Theatre. This was not the first anti-communist demonstration witnessed outside its premises, as the raising of a red flag over the premises by protestors in 1922 had also incited protest.

Following the events, a war of words played out in the press. O Tuathaill attempted to justify the demonstration in the letters pages of The Irish Times, maintaining that Welles was a supporter of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (the American contingent of the International Brigades who fought in Spain)  among other bodies. Others condemned the “wholly unthinking rabble of witch-hunters”, believing the demonstration had brought shame on the city.

In the aftermath of the protests, Edwards approached Archbishop McQuaid directly to complain, though McQuaid did nothing, informing him that the Association was an adult group, “responsible for its own activities.” John Cooney argues in his biography of McQuaid that it was something of a “puzzling aspect of McQuaid’s civic record…that he did not denounce the excesses of the Maria Duce-sponsored Catholic Cinema and Theatre Patrons’ Association”. It, and organisations like it, brought little but negative press.

The great Orson Welles was destined to return to Dublin later in the 1950s, though thankfully without scenes of protest.

If you’re attending this years Electric Picnic festival, which runs from tomorrow to Sunday, consider dropping into the Mindfield area on Saturday at 1pm (if you can get yourself out of the tent) where I’m taking part in a History Ireland Hedge School discussion on the history of the Irish festival. We’ll be looking at O’Connell’s Monster Rallies (‘REPEAL’ was the slogan then too), the chaos of the Donnybrook Fair and the youthful enthusiasm of Carnsore Point among other talking points.

1964 press on the Fleadh Cheoil.

The discussion is, as ever, chaired by History Ireland editor Tommy Graham. The other panelists are Tonie Walsh (of the Irish Queer Archive), Naoise Nunn (the man behind the always interesting Mindfield area of EP), Carole Holohan (author of a forthcoming study of youth in 1960s Ireland) and musician and broadcaster Philip King.

It also seems fitting to highlight the fact several friends of the blog are performing at this years festival. Lynched, Skipper’s Alley, Costello and Stephen James Smith,  all of whom have performed at CHTM nights in The Sugar Club and elsewhere, will be performing across the weekend. Be sure to see some local talent along with the global superstars!

Torn posters and stickers in Dublin, August 2016. (Image: Luke Fallon)

The 8th Amendment is something we are likely to hear a lot more about in the months and years ahead, as a grassroots movement for its repeal continues to grow. While the issue of Ireland’s abortion legislation will go before a Citizen’s Convention in the near future, many campaigners will be hoping for a referendum and a chance to take the issue to the doorsteps.

The title for this blog post comes from a 1983 Irish Times article, reporting from a Dublin count centre the day after the referendum on the insertion of the 8th Amendment into the Irish constitution. A  dejected young campaigner told a journalist that the referendum had been won “with a Carmelite in one hand and a ballot box in the other”, a clever play on Sinn Féin activist Danny Morrison’s suggestion that independence could be achieved with one hand clutching an Armalite and the other a ballot box. Beyond this moment of humour captured by the national press, the ’83 campaign is more remembered as an incredibly embittered one. Thomas Bartlett contents in his masterful history of Ireland that the referendum can be seen as “the most divisive and bad-tempered debate in Irish public life since the campaign over acceptance of the Treaty in 1922.”

“Silent protest against poll” – women protesting in Dublin Airport, highlighting the fact 10 Irish women a day had to leave the country in search of terminations in Britain (The Irish Times, August 1983)

Putting the referendum in context:

Just what is the 8th Amendment?  In short, the Irish public were asked in 1983 to vote on the inclusion of the following words into the Irish constitution:

The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.

This Amendment passed on 7 September 1983, endorsed by 67% of those who voted. Turnout was low, at under 54%. The referendum was not designed to outlaw abortion in Ireland, as that was already the case. Under the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, abortion was already illegal here. Rather, anti-abortion campaigners feared that there was a possibility of a judicial ruling which could change the law, and sought to solidify the illegal status of abortion through inserting this new 8thAmendment in the constitution.

Advertisements like this one for ‘Irish Pregnancy Counselling’ appeared in some publications in 1980s Ireland. This 1982 ad comes from Gralton Magazine, digitsed by the Irish Left Archive.

As Diarmaid Ferriter notes in his overview of twentieth century Ireland, The Transformation of Ireland, abortion remained one of the most divisive subjects in the Ireland of the 1980s. He points towards an infamous 1982 poster as proof of the “intensity, extremism and gratuitousness that existed” around the subject. Proclaiming that “the abortion mills of England grind Irish babies into blood that cries out to heaven for vengeance”, the posters were a cynical attempt to play on some kind of nationalist sentiment, with intellectuals on the Catholic right claiming that “those looking to liberalise the laws were attempting to turn the Republic back into a mere province of the UK.” In a similar vein, the ever-controversial T.D Oliver J. Flanagan  declared in the Dáil a decade earlier that while it was popular in Europe “to talk of sex, divorce and drugs, these things are foreign in Ireland and to Ireland and we want them kept foreign.”

The belief that sinister outside forces were seeking to attack an Irish way of life can be found also in publications like the 1983 booklet Abortion Now, which, despite its title, was rabidly against the introduction of even the most limited abortion legislation in Ireland.  Looking beyond the Brits or the drug-obsessed EU, it blamed the push for abortion on a long-dead philosopher:

We must recognise the modus operandi of the anti-life lobby. It can truly be said that capitalism and Marxism are united in the fight for abortion on demand; the one for money, the other for ideological reasons.

Chains or Change? A 1970s poster from the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, digitised by Trinity College Dublin.

The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed some remarkable change in Irish society. The decriminalisation of contraception in 1979, at the behest of the Supreme Court, represented a significant milestone victory for the women’s movement in Ireland (even if obtaining contraception remained difficult for many people), but also served as the catalyst for the emergence of new bodies on the religious right, such as the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) in June 1980. While a vibrant women’s movement had emerged in Ireland long before 1983,  abortion was not an issue it tended to push to the fore; In Linda Connolly’s excellent study The Irish Women’s Movement: From Revolution to Devolution, it’s noted  that “abortion on demand was discussed and researched within IWU [Irishwomen United] initially but strategically not campaigned for” for example.

To the misfortune of the women’s movement and the anti-amendment movement more broadly, much of the discourse around abortion in the early 1980s was shaped by the other side of the debate. Evelyn Mahon has noted that:

The initial dissemination of information on abortion in Ireland was shaped by SPUC in a campaign that spanned more than two years between April 1981 and September 1983….Though formal sex education at that time had not been introduced  in schools, SPUC exhibited human embryos in schools and waged philosophical battles in the media over when human life began. Initially, it acted like any other interest group. But a sense of urgency, agency and possibility pervaded their activities and mobilised them into a social movement with a political agenda.

Women’s rights activist Caroline McCamley, in a 2013 interview with Rabble magazine, also expressed the belief that it was the other side of the debate who pushed the issue into public consciousness, remembering that “the pro-life movement put it on the agenda with the campaign leading to the 1983 referendum. I’m not sure when it would have got there if they hadn’t have done that. But they politicised a lot of us with the extreme nature of the 1983 campaign.”

SPUC formed the backbone of the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC), an umbrella group of 14 associations seeking to amend the constitution. This body succeeded in winning per-election pledges from both Garrett Fitzgerald and Charles Haughey to support a referendum for the amendment to the constitution. While PLAC was capable of raising significant sums of money and coverage for its aims and objectives, it did face political opposition.

The Anti-Amendment Campaign:

In an insightful 2013 contribution to History Ireland magazine, historian Mary Muldowney drew on oral history testimonies of those who participated in the Anti-Amendment Campaign. One activist recalled that while there had been individuals seeking legalislative changes on abortion in Ireland, organised campaigns were another matter. This changed in 1980 with the birth of the Women’s Right to Choose Group in Dublin:

Prior to that there had been individuals, most notably Noel Browne, the Labour and subsequently the Socialist Labour Party TD, who did on several occasions call for what he described as therapeutic abortion to be available in Ireland but no, essentially it wasn’t an issue that was talked about and didn’t really figure on anybody’s radar until 1980 when a small group formed in Dublin, the Women’s Right to Choose Group, with the intention of beginning to break the silence and force the issue into the public domain.

The Women’s Right To Choose campaign, reported in Women’s View (Autumn 1980). Digitised by the Irish Left Archive.

Some of the tactics of the AAC are still utilised today by the Pro Choice movement, for example highlighting the number of women who were daily traveling to the UK for the purpose of obtaining an abortion. The campaign frequently found itself entangled in bitter wars-of-words with the Catholic Hierarchy, who proclaimed in March 1982 that “surely the most defenceless and voiceless in our midst are entitled to the fullest Constitutional protection?” The AAC attacked such statements, but so did others in more unlikely corners; the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh went as far as to say that “this is the Mother and Child Act all over again. Can you force a moral theology on a whole people which is symptomatic of only one church?” In a similar vein, the Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral announced his belief that “where there is conflict, the rights of the mother to life and health must take precedence over the unborn child.”

Being such an emotionally charged subject, there was much internal discussion in all political parties, across the spectrum. Sinn Féin would oppose the amendment to the constitution, though the party had earlier described itself as “totally opposed to abortion.” A 1981 policy paper noted that:

There is a need to face up to the problem of abortion no matter what individual opinions are. We do not judge women who have had abortion but recognise that it is an indictment of society that so many women should feel the need to avail of abortion. We are opposed to the attitudes and forces in society that impel women to have abortions. We are totally opposed to abortion.

Many Sinn Féin activists, and in particular female members of the party, were prominently involved in the campaign against the amendment. Within the Workers’ Party,  there was some similar ambiguity. The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IR A and the Workers’ Party, describes the manner in which the “WP’s refusal to become actively involved with the Anti-Amendment Campaign drew criticism from within the party”, though party leader Tomás Mac Giolla did condemn politicians for bowing to “ultra-Catholic” pressure, and suggested that the State was “moving back towards a Catholic Constitution for  a Catholic people.”

Nationwide newspaper advertisement before the referendum.

Trouble in Montrose:

As 1983 progressed, the referendum only became a more divisive issue. This was reflected in the emerging rows at RTE, where the national broadcaster struggled with the issue. RTE producers condemned the RTE Authority for banning a Late Late Show referendum debate, arguing that “the essential function of a public service in a democracy must be to provide a principal forum for public debate on matters of public concern.” Yet RTE were also under fire from SPUC,  who insisted that “an Anti Amendment bias can be easily detected in many programmes”, blaming this on the fact many RTE employees were members of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, which was opposed to the amendment.  The RTE Authority Chairman, Fred O’Donovan, came under fire for stating his view that the referendum was essentially a question of “death on demand.”

Debate did come, with RTE’s popular Today Tonight hosting two teams (each consisting of two men and one woman) in February.  The papers seemed dejected to report, as the Irish Independent did, that there was no “aggro” in the “low-key debate.”  Further debates followed on the same programme,including this clash between William Binchy and Mary Robinson:

While there was panic in Montrose, some remarkable television was produced in the UK on the subject of the referendum. Channel 4 screened a programme which followed the tales “the life of a deserted wife and a mother of four in Clondalkin”, both of whom had sought abortions in the UK.

Irish Press, February 1983.

The Pro Life Amendment Campaign enjoyed the support of Fianna Fáil,and Charles Haughey was heavily criticised by the journalist and feminist campaigner Nell McCafferty for his television broadcast in support of the amendment, with McCafferty telling a press conference “if anyone doubted that the amendment was anti-woman, they had only to watch the performance on television of Mr Charles Haughey, who could not bring himself to mention women, or pregnancy or mothers in the course of his broadcast.” Yet other politicians became caught up in the debate too; Documenting Irish Feminists: The Second Wave notes:

Political opposition to the proposed amendment…intensified only at a very late stage of the campaign. The final three weeks of the campaign started with the Minister for Finance, Alan Dukes, stating his opposition to the amendment, and he was followed by Ministerial colleagues Gemma Hussey and Nuala Fennell….In September 1983, the Tánaiste and Leader of the Labour Party, Dick spring, said that a concerted campaign was being waged with the support of the Hierarchy to “roll back the tide on social issues.”

Beyond politicians, political activists of all stripes sometimes grabbed the most headlines. One activist interrupted a meeting in the Mansion House to denounce RTE  journalist Anne Daly as “the tramp who presents Women Today”, and Mary Robinson as a woman “with the morals of a tom cat”. As noted in Diarmuid Ferriter’s study Occasions of Sin: Sex and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, the protestor  went as far as to proclaim that “pregnancy never ensues from rape”.

The Amendment passes, but Dublin is divided:

The 8th Amendment was passed by the Irish public on 7 September 1983. With a turnout of 53.67%, 841,233 votes were cast in favour of the Amendment, comfortably defeating the 416,136 votes cast against it. Jason Kelleher’s Irish Political Maps website has mapped the voting of the country, presenting some interesting findings:

Produced by Jason Kelleher of Irish Political Maps.

The amendment was defeated only in five constituencies in the capital, passing in every constituency outside Dublin. This led to a huge amount of analysis of rural/urban divisions. Aengus Fanning described the results as proof “that the gap in social attitudes between the major cities and towns, on the one hand, and rural areas is continuing to widen.” The Independent described it as the “backlash of the middle class”,  pointing to the particularly high ‘No’ in areas such as Dun Laoghaire. Certainly, it was clear from the results in Dublin that there was a base there to rebuild, and in the weeks and months that followed the referendum public meetings and rallies saw the re-emergence of a movement. A Repeal the Eight Amendment Campaign (REAC) would be formed in March 1992, but there was plenty of activism between 1983 and then.

Yet for others, the stress and tensions of 1983 had proven enough. One activist recalled that:

After the abortion referendum I reckon I had made up my mind that I was living in a society where I was absolutely and utterly alienated and that I wasn’t going to do anything about it…I was just going to retreat back into the house. If I had been younger I might have fought it but I just thought – this society has nothing to say to me.

Project Arts Theatre, August 2016 (Image:Luke Fallon, context)

The 1930s anti-jazz movement has been well-documented in recent years, with Cathal Brennan’s 2011 Irish Story article a particularly good read. The movement against jazz was by no means merely a Dublin phenomenon, indeed it was often strongest in rural Ireland. Brennan’s article notes:

On New Year’s Day 1934 over three thousand people from South Leitrim and surrounding areas marched through Mohill to begin the Anti – Jazz campaign. The procession was accompanied by five bands and the demonstrators carried banners inscribed with slogans such as ‘Down with Jazz’ and ‘Out with Paganism.’

Only in the last few weeks, the Evening Herald has joined the long list of newspapers digitsed by the excellent and very important Irish Newspaper Archives. Being a tabloid publication, it is of a very difficult style to many of the previously digitised broadsheet newspapers, and throws up some real gems on cultural issues and moral panics. While there is much condemnation of jazz music and the danger of the dance halls, there are also some wonderful advertisements for jazz bands, including ‘The Yankee Jazz Maniacs’, described on more than one occasion as the “hottest band in Ireland.”From time to time, these advertisements could appear on or opposite pages denouncing jazz music!

Much of the discourse in the Ireland of the time around music, dance halls and jazz was shaped by the Public Dance Halls Act of 1935, introduced under the first Fianna Fáil government. That Act can only be viewed in the context of the moral panic against dance halls of the time, which was encouraged by the Catholic Hierarchy, cultural nationalists and some in the press. The Act sought to make provision for the licensing, control, and supervision of places used for public dancing. It was bad news for dance halls in the cities, but also for communal traditions like crossroads dances in rural Ireland. It could only have been introduced in a country where it was acceptable to peddle the kind of nonsense that “one of the immediate and chief causes of the immorality of recent times, involving particularly the unmarried mother, is the commercialised dance halls.”

The fear of jazz ‘infiltrating’ the dance halls of Dublin was present even at meetings of Dublin Corporation, with Lord Mayor Alfie Byrne on record in February 1934 as stating:

The Citizens of Dublin are not following the dances of negroes. I challenge you to go into any hotel or ballroom in the city and point out anything that could be described as following the negroes or indecent.It is a slander on the people of Dublin to say they are following the negroes, and nobody has any right to make that charge.

It was clear those condemning jazz and jazz dancing knew nothing about it, with the claim that the music was “borrowed from Central Africa by a gang of wealthy international Bolshevists in America, their aim being to strike at Christian civilisation throughout the world” even making its way into the papers.

The raiding of dance halls under the terms of the ludicrous 1935 Act took up plenty of column inches; the Herald reported of a raid in January 1936 which resulted in the closing down of a dance involving 150 young men and women. Unsurprisingly, young people were more than willing to violate the terms of the Act and to seek something other than rigidly controlled social spaces:

Evening Herald, 27 January 1936.

A rare moment of sense in the debate around dance halls came from a letter writer to the paper in October 1940:

As a parent, may I be permitted to give my views on the dance problem? Dancing is one of the oldest of human pleasures…and telling young people that dancing is wrong is just inviting trouble. If you go further and prevent them from attending dances, you have only yourself to blame if they kick over the traces. I have never opposed my children going to dances. I trust to their good sense and it works out alright.

My thanks to @bigmonsterlove on Twitter for sending something my way recently, in the form of some brilliant archival footage just posted online by the Irish Film Institute.

A hugely important and much-loved institution in Temple Bar, the IFI are now bringing some of their archival holdings to the general public online with their new IFI Player. To start with, we have 1,200 minutes of material from the vaults (thankfully only about a minute of this involves Bob Geldof), including some footage from Gael Linn’s Amharc Éireann series.

Amharc Éireann: Eagrán 126, Dublin Students Protest, available to view here, captures a 1961 anti-nuclear protest in Dublin city centre, led by students from Trinity College Dublin. The demonstration is small, but the footage is telling of its time, in terms of politics and fashion! Some students carry the now-iconic peace symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which had been born in 1958 in England, while others carry placards which reference the tragedy of Hiroshima. One student carries the image of Yuri Gugarin, a hero of the Soviet Union and the first man in space.

The march was a bit of a disaster, with The Irish Times reporting the next day that:

A peace march by some 200 placard-carrying members of the Irish students’ Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Dublin yesterday turned out to be anything but peaceful. The “ban the bomb” marchers were heckled by a rival group of students shouting “we want the bomb!”. Scuffles broke out between rival students and  were broken up by civic guards, and over-ripe tomatoes and bags of flour were showered on students and guards alike.

Still from footage: Science For Peace, placard shows Yuri Gagarin.

Still from footage: Students march at Stephen’s Green, carrying the CND symbol.

Still from footage: Passing over the O’Connell Bridge, the Nelson Pillar in background.

The CND logo, so prominent in the footage, was designed  in 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a professional designer and artist. In explaining what the symbol means, Holtom recalled:

I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it.

As the CND themselves note, “the symbol continues to be used as shorthand for peace”.

A 1985 edition of Inner City Magazine containing two advertisements, one photograph and two reviews of Dublin pubs.

Front cover of Inner City Magazine (Vol. 3 / No. 19, 1985)

The first advertisement is for The Sunset House at 1 Summerhill Parade in Ballybough. It shows two older woman named Ellen and Carmel enjoying a glass of Guinness. The pub was the scene of a fatal shooting in April 2016 and closed down. It was recently taken over by Paul Gannon, the brother of Social Democrats councillor Gary, and re-opened as The Brendan Behan.

Advertisement for The Sunset House

The second advertisement is for the Hill 16 bar at 28 Gardiner Street.  Offering “best drinks – pub grub”, it shows a barman pulling pints behind the counter.

Advertisement for the Hill 16 Bar

A photograph in the magazine shows a burnt out property immediately next door to the Hill 16.

Photograph of Hill 16 beside burn out property.

The issue also includes reviews by Tony Ivory of Patrick Conway’s at 70 Parnell Street, closed since February 2008, and J. J. Whelan’s at 69 Summerhill, which is currently known as ‘Cuchulainn’s at Croke Park‘.

Ivory described Conway’s as one of the “best known and most popular haunts” in the city centre. There is no television and the Guinness (£1.33 pint) is “usually good”. However, the writer did complain that the toilets were not sufficient for the amount of punters and the cigarette machine didn’t stock his favoured brands.

The review of J. J. Whelan’s focused on the high standard of the Guinness (£1.27 pint) which Ivory called “one of the best that can be had anywhere in Dublin”.

Reviews of Conways, Parnell Street and J. J. Whelan’s in Summerhill