Category: Tradition

Sam Stephenson was a barbarian in an Ireland where the barbarian was a hero.

He was a thug who brutalised our cityscapes and a fraud who seduced our policy-makers in an age when any sharp-talking charlatan could schmooze his way into a lucrative public contract.

But the one thing Sam Stephenson was not is an architect.

Leave aside the fact that he had no qualifications.

Leave aside the fact that he had no talent.

Instead, focus on the fact that he had no soul.

This is the sort of man lionised by the Ireland of the 1970s and 1980s.  The neo-thug who embodied a vision of a new, modern Ireland unencumbered by notions of heritage, continuity or tradition.  Sam Stephenson, untrained self-titled architect was the perfect poster-boy for the Ireland that wished to cast off its old traditional image and replace itself with a new, flashy concrete-and-plastic pastiche.

In a painful, if unconscious, echo of Ireland a century before him, an Ireland that saw its Irish-speaking tradition as somehow emblematic of a shameful and outdated identity, Stephenson cast off the architectural language that had brought Dublin to the pinnacle of Georgian perfection and replaced that language with his own crude, unlettered gutter-speak.

Stephenson shouted down the measured Georgian architectural language of 18th century Dublin with two brutal and ignorant expletives in the form of the ESB offices at Fitzwilliam Street and the Dublin Corporation headquarters at Wood Quay.  By designing these two buildings, he leaned in and cursed at tradition in the most drunken spit-flecked way imaginable.  He destroyed a mile-long Georgian street to provide the ESB with their shabby pre-cast office block and he tore up Viking Dublin to build the bunkers in which the Corporation wished to hide from the public it served.

Never mind his later facile justification that he didn’t have a chance to complete his vision  on Wood Quay. The reality is that his vision was crass, illiterate and overbearing. This man had no business dictating the shape of any city, much less the capital of our country with official support and considerable financial reward.

He was, and remains, a charlatan.

Now. What are we to make of Fitzwilliam Street in 2015?

The ESB wishes to reconstruct its headquarters, having vandalised the finest Georgian street in existence.

Should they be forced to reinstate the original facades?

I don’t think so, since the interiors were torn out and destroyed by the barbarian thugs acting on Stephenson’s orders, in pursuit of his ignorant unlettered vision for a new Dublin.  Pastiche doesn’t work, as the ridiculous Ballast Office in Westmoreland Street  demonstrates, so what should we have instead?

In my opinion, we should accept that Fitzwilliam Street was irrevocably vandalised by the ESB and by Sam Stephenson, thus depriving us forever of an architectural treasure.   And we should move on.

We should demand that the ESB produce a design of internationally-acclaimed merit, no matter how much it costs them to make good their crime, but we should not insist that they reproduce the original Georgian streetscape.

Why?

Because it wouldn’t be the original Georgian streetscape and it would therefore be meaningless.  Instead, they need to address the street and its surroundings in a meaningful way, with sensitivity, which would make an interesting contrast with Georgian times when nobody cared how brutally or suddenly the streetscape changed.

Let us preserve all that remains of our Georgian heritage.  Let us lament what we have stupidly destroyed. But let’s not sink to idiocy and try to recreate what we cannot.

We should get rid of the abomination inflicted on us by Sam Stephenson and embrace thoughtful, sensitive replacements even if they don’t happen to be slavish reproductions of 18th-century Dublin.

It’s all about showing respect to our heritage, something not always evident in Ireland over the last century.

Last night I stepped outside my house to breathe in the sweet, clean, autumn air and instantly caught the aroma of Hallowe’en on the wind.  That  familiar acrid smell of burning plastic that still hangs over the city a full day later.

I went to visit a friend who’s unwell and unable to get out of bed.  The house was in darkness.  Why?

Maybe if they think there’s no-one home, they won’t throw eggs.

Is this what we’re reduced to?  Adults afraid of children?  So it seems, but you can hardly blame the children for running crazy if the parents allow it because after all, children do what children do.  No?

No.

Children do what their parents teach them, and these kids seem to have learned nothing because their parents have no values.

I’d be very slow to start talking about the old days, considering the amount of darkness we have in our past, not just here in Ireland but in every single country you can think of.  The old days weren’t so great.  After all, it was in the old days that National Socialism sprang up, and we know where that took us.  It was in the old days that we had the Industrial Schools,  so let’s not have too much nostalgia for the old days, but why is there so much random thuggery knocking around these days?  Or more to the point, so much boorishness?

I’m not imagining it.  As every week goes by, I can see the behaviour getting worse, and I can see an appalling underclass becoming stronger and stronger, people who care nothing for the ordinary citizen.  Just this evening, I was in the queue at the Aldi checkout and a young couple were in front of me.  They had all the marks of what I’d consider skobies and I said to myself, No.  Don’t jump to conclusions just because he has a pudding-bowl haircut and his woman is spray-tanned from head to toe.  Ignore those giant earrings and that black-dyed hair.

So I did.  I ignored everything about them, and after I paid for my groceries and went outside, I tried to ignore the fact that their fucking Passat was parked across three disabled spaces in the middle of the road while the fat, orange spray-tanned fuckers blocked the entire car-park with no consideration at all for anyone else.  And I waited until they were ready, without blowing the horn, but not because I’m a placid soul.  No indeed.  It was because I didn’t want the pumped-up, steroid-inflated numpty with the pudding-bowl haircut to kill me.

I have to wonder what causes this.

Why are people so disconnected from the world around them?  Why, for instance, was Dublin fire brigade  called out to something in the order of 1,500 incidents, including cases where cars were stolen and driven into bonfires?  Why can I still smell poisonous fumes in the air a full day after Hallowe’en?

When I was a kid, Hallowe’en wasn’t an excuse to get drunk.   It was an opportunity for children to have fun.

LIkewise, at New Year, all the local brass and reed bands used to march to the city centre for the New Year.  They’d play in the street as people counted down to midnight, and then all the church bells would ring, and the ships in the docks would blow their foghorns.  After that the bands would play some more until eventually everyone went home, but it was a huge thing for children to stay up that late.

And then, as years went by, the bands had to stop playing in the street because the thugs had taken over.   It was no longer safe.

At Christmas, people used to go to Midnight Mass, but that had to stop because of people fighting and puking at the back of the church.

There’s been a change and we tolerated this, and there’s no point blaming the authorities.  We, as a society, accepted the rule of thuggery and it’s up to us to resist it.

I wonder if all this insane, boorish behaviour is because people have no anchor any more?  Maybe they don’t understand that the city belongs to all of us and that we’re all equally responsible for maintaining a decent civilised life together.

I fully sympathise with those who say we should have snipers on the rooftops.  It’s a feeling I often have myself, but that isn’t going to solve anything in the end.  We need a much more nuanced solution to the thing that has overtaken us and it has to come in stages.  Stage One is to make sure we’re safe from the lunatics roaming our streets, and that involves a far more robust security presence while we develop Stage Two: teaching these fools how to behave like civilised human beings.

Stage Three?  For fools who can’t learn to behave, keep them out of harm’s way for as long as it takes.

Meanwhile, start teaching the children about the place they come from.  Show them that this is a place we all inhabit together with a shared history and a shared outlook on life.

Most of all, let’s start teaching them about respect, because that’s where it all stems from: respect for ourselves and respect for others.  Without those two things, it’s not possible to have a functioning society.

It’s very simple.  This is how I’d rearrange things.  If you choose to be part of our society, welcome, no matter where you come from.  If you choose to reject our  society, you’re not entitled to our protection.  You have no rights here.  It’s up to you.

Candles are the most evocative things in the world, the closest thing to life in the sphere of the inanimate.

When I was a child, the old people used to light a candle on the eve of All Souls, in remembrance of those who had gone before, and I’d like to try and revive that tradition. It doesn’t have to be religious. The tradition is ancient, long pre-dating Christianity, and it’s something we need to bring back, because we are a people who have forgotten our dead.

If we are to heal our society, we must recover our lost traditions, and regain a respect for things that are not simply material.

That’s why, tonight, I’m putting a candle in the window.

It isn’t for the dead. It’s for me, for those who pass my door, and for those I hold dear, because the continuity of life is all we have, and in this small way we can keep our departed friends uppermost in our hearts.

If we can do this for one night, maybe we can begin to make it part of what we are, as it once was, before we lost our way.

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* This post first appeared on the 1st November last year.  I have nothing to add to it.