THIS IS IRELAND
Jun 19th, 2007 by Conor McCabe
I have always wondered why I’ve found myself drawn to expressions of English working-class childhoods, especially those of the 1960s and ’70s. For years I thought it was because I grew up in Dublin, and Dublin is such an English city - not really Irish at all when you think about it, at least, not Irish in the classical sense. So, maybe that was it. Dublin is English-lite, England with a howayea thrown in. And, looking back over my childhood photographs, there’s one thing for certain: Dublin childhoods certainly look like English ones.
Of course, there was the full, uninterrupted access to the BBC.
The programmes from which I glean my terms of reference, those that provide the shorthand for memory, are British ones. But, I had as much exposure to RTE as the BBC, so why the resonance with Bagpuss, and Jamie and his Magic torch, and not, for example, Bosco, or Wanderly Wagon? Again, it seems to play into the argument that Dublin is not really Irish. Bejaysus Brits where Bollicks is a constant consonant.
With regard to education, my schooling was part of the same system as the rest of the country - at least on paper anyway. Even with that, when I think about movies that resonate with growing up, with my school years, for me it’s stuff like KES that springs to mind, although, on the face of it, the story of a mining town in the North of England really has little to do with a council housing estate in Dublin. But, again, that’s where my memories feel most comfortable. The same holds with Gregory’s Girl, Boys from the Blackstuff, even Blue Remembered Hills, and Quadrophenia.
More recently, however, I have begun to look at items of Irish culture, and, indeed, items of British culture as well. The experience of Dublin seems to suggest that the city is a hybrid, caught between English layout and Irish inhabitants - the final expression, south of the border, of our former colonial status. We look to England and English working culture because it is ingrained in us. The Dubs, I mean. It is part of our make-up, part of our drinking, part of our expression - Irish heart, if you will, but English song.
But, of course, all of this is wrong.
The problem is that I grew up in a working class area, but one with virtually no expression in Irish mainstream culture. In order to find similarities, we had to look to British drama. This was for very simple reasons. British drama has a strong working class identity to it.
Whereas on RTE in the 1970s, the Irish working class were breaking out of Borstals or nicking TVs, living in slums and dying of poverty, on British TV and with British cinema, we had teenage boys obsessed with cornflakes passing under bridges, and trying to learn Italian so they could kiss the girl they fancied. On British TV, the working class lived…. On RTE they died with their (stolen) boots on.
For me, there is more cultural resonance in the Madness “Baggy Trousers” three minute video, than there is in three decades of RTE. It’s not that we look and act like the British - we look and act working class, in a culture were we have no presence whatsoever. We look to British working class culture for recognition, and explanation.
Even here, there are problems. For all of the working class tropes and resonance, Dublin is not England. The picture that opens this post - the one of my brother and myself c.1978 - is an Irish working class photo. It doesn’t have any resonance with any of the British dramas and movies I’ve already mentioned. Nor have I seen its contemporary in any British drama. My brother is wearing that suit because he is making his confirmation. It’s not just a working class image, it’s an Irish catholic working class image. And there are hundreds of thousands of these photos in Dublin, and across the island. That in itself is a unique cultural trope - more so than any Celtic mystic or farmer,or Edwardian ashplant, or Yeats’ poem.
There are potent expressions of Irish working class culture, and these belong to the North, to cities like Derry and Belfast. They tend to have strong political overtones - but not all, however, are political. One of the greatest expressions of Irish working class culture I saw as a child was when Feargal Sharkey walked out onto the stage of the Whistle Test wearing a Parker to announce that “this is the last decent song of the night.” It was wonderful.
Culture is such an important part of identity formation. In Ireland we really need to start looking at how we express ourselves - the ways and means - for otherwise we end up with such a truncated view of ourselves we start to believe that being in debt, and living fifty miles from our jobs, makes us middle class.
Some good points there; I think that the Irish portrayal of working-class life (in the cultural sphere, at least) owes a lot to the fossilised sentimentalism of O’Casey and, to a lesser extent, Behan, even though the intentions of both men were good.
There is of course a cultural overhang of the colonial era that informs Dublin identity (for the bourgeoisie as much as for the working classes) and it extends to certain provincial towns too. Sligo is one of them, home to a former garrison, and though it was known as Little Belfast under British rule, no town in Ireland has ever struck me as being more like Dublin, in mannerisms, attitude, even down to a lowscale level of urban consciousness. Sligo townies despise the ‘buffs’ as they call those of us who live beyond Carraroe, a disdain that goes so far as to hate the County GAA team.
With regard to the Irish assessment of class, John Waters (in his lucid, pre-anti-feminist days) put it unwittingly well, in Jiving at the Crossroads when he said that ‘In Ireland there isn’t really a class system; everybody just knows their place’. A formula worthy of Swift even if it was unintentional. Interestingly, the rural petit bourgeoisie down our neck of the woods (and no doubt elsewhere too) describe themselves as ‘ordinary five-eighths’, which puts a wishful arithmetical patina on the non-existent class system.
I’m enjoying the working-class posts; keep them coming.
Cheers, Seanachie. I’m really curious at the moment as to what happens when you have an identity that’s not expressed in the wider society, and this is what I’m trying to work out here on the blog.
I think you’d be surprised how many rural dwellers relate to those British working class urban movies as well, for the reason that there was virtually no film industry in Ireland till a few years ago and RTE’s dramas generally lacked grit and vision and steered away from controversial subjects. The moral panic that Roddy Doyle’s Family drama created when it aired in the early 90s is a good indication of how lacking in bite RTE drama had been until then, and how reluctant Irish society is to face up to class issues.
Ireland’s image in film is generally recreated as a rural one, but its a sanitised version not many recognise. That is not to say they are not comfortable with the illusion.
thanks for the comment, Niall. I’m not from the country, so I’m loathe to comment on class structures in rural Ireland. Would you say that rural dwellers relate to the British working class dramas for the reasons I did? That they saw similarities that they didn’t see in Irish drama? My gut would think that’s the reason.
and I had forgotten about Roddy Doyle’s “Family.” As far as I remember, though, the main male character in “Family” is a thieving, armed bank-robbing, wife-beating, drunk who contemplates raping his daughter. Hardly KES, or Gregory’s Girl, is it? I think it’s fair to day that “Family” falls into the same category as the RTE dramas of the 1970s, which also saw urban working class life as defined by thieves, drunks, and unemployed. This is not to say that I do not recognise “Charlo”. there was more than one “Charlo” in Edenmore when I was growing up. Charlo is part of working class Dublin, but that’s just it, a part - and he’s working class Dublin at its most extreme. Nothing wrong with that, in terms of drama and cultural expression, but its disconcerting when an extreme becomes the mainstream, and not only the mainstream, but the only cultural trope available. In Ireland, if you’re working class in a drama, and male, more than likely you’ll be Charlo or Adam or Paul, and not Kes. When was that decided? I must have missed that meeting.
In 1980, of course, we get “Strumpet city”. Again, the positive image is pre-state formation, and linked to the trade union movement.
Thanks again for the comment, Niall, I’m trying to tease this out, and comments are just the best way of me finding out what works in my arguments, and what doesn’t. Please keep them coming!
Will do, Conor. Here’s some more.
Family portrayed a negative image, but I think it differed from those 70s dramas in that the creators really wanted to shock people out of their complacency, not reinforce it.
Roddy Doyle’s feature films provide a more positive take on working class Dublin and are perhaps the most enduring movies of 90s Ireland. The Commitments is probably the funniest Irish film, making full use of the renowned sharp Dublin wit, and is probably similar to the working class British films of the 70s you mentioned in that regard - showing the working class as real people.
Why did it take so long for working class people to be portrayed in a positive light? The problem relates not only to class but to cultural production; it could be just the usual case of Ireland being behind the UK in terms of popular culture, with RTE and Irish film makers playing catch-up to their counterparts across the water (probably not enough working class Dubs in RTE).
RTE may have been responsible for heavy-handed stereotyping, but this owes something to a lack of writing talent as well as class prejudice. The State broadcaster’s dismal record in producing engaging challenging comedy (in a country world renowned for humour) is typical of the ‘play it safe’ mentality that has dogged many facets of RTE’s remit.
For real expressions of working class culture you’ re probably better off looking at literature and music, modes of communication not straightjacketed by high production costs and official bureaucracy. The image, still or moving, has never been our cultural watermark.
Enjoying the posts by the way.
Just on the country towns/ Dublin thing; I grew up all over - dad a soldier - and one thing Dubliners don’t get is the urban consciousness in some towns anyway, mirrors their own. In Galway, buffs was used, as in Sligo to deprecate anyone from outside the city, and - while I’m sure its not the case now - we consciously set up an opposition between Football and Gah and Pop/ Rock and Trad, with us city folk liking the first part of each pair and the Buffers the latter part.
….Which brings me to another point; the decline of Irish domestic football pretty clearly mirrors the decline in class consciousness, and the kind of town that was a football town - Sligo, Athlone, Dubndalk, Limerick, Waterford -was also precisely the kind of town that had an indiginous and consciously urban working class, one which felt no kinship with its rural hinterland.
The Committments, of course, directed by an Englishman, as was The Snapper.
Recently, though, we’ve had “Intermission” and “I went down” which are not specifically working class, but use working class as a backdrop - which is what I’m really calling for here. not so much a move away from “issue” based drama, but more a call for more drama that takes place within a specific cultural spot, with cultural terms of reference, instead of “issues” as the terms of reference. you know, shopping in TESCOs instead of robbing it.
One recent drama that really did this was “Pure Mule”. I thought it was excellent. Has there ever been a more genuine portrayal of small-town Ireland? I hung around Carlow for years, and I recognised so much in Pure Mule.
but i think you’re completely right with the “cultural production.” That’s really what I’m getting at with these posts. Cultural production in Ireland has been regressive to an insane degree, that we had to look to English drama just to even get a glimpse of our cultural terms of reference.
The urban working class experience outside of Dublin - now that’s something screaming out for coverage!
Very true, and this links back to a post you made on another site
which shall remain nameless regarding rural social housing developments.
I noted in response to another post of yours that I felt little common ground, as it were, with the Doyle view of urban working class life. I went to school in Greendale, lived in Raheny but I always thought there was a dislocation between the texts and the life I or my friends and peers lived. Something about the celebratory aspect of it left me cold, and what was remarkable to me was how depoliticised it was when my experience of the working class was actually of a considerable level of political activity albeit spread largely between FF and the left in all its forms.
I also think it’s important to note the hegemonic nature of UK media in this state. RTÉ isn’t so bad. But in contrast to x number of highly produced TV stations using the same language arguably there was no contest and whatever the local offerings were they would appear dowdy and old-fashioned, particularly when you factor in the remarkably different societal contexts (i.e. relative social liberalism in the UK as against a much more oppressive, if not repressive, small c conservatism. in this state). On that note, something that amuses me no end these days is how poor the Guardian is compared to the past, and that in part is because the Irish edition is printed IIRC correctly north of the border in an edition where the ink almost refuses to meet the paper…
But on that note, and regarding cultural production, I think part of the problem is that the Donnybrook media centre simply didn’t know, and perhaps still doesn’t, how to represent the working class in anything other than the broadest terms. For example I was listening to Radio 1 the other day and it had a snippet of a play about a Garda who is related to a gang. It may well have been a great play, clearly Garda and gang were meant to be working class Dublin, but the wavery tones of the actors was such that they used accents a long way from any I’ve ever heard and you could hear their more middle class tones coming through loud and clear. Not, in itself, the worlds greatest evil, but it just makes the process seem artificial and condescending.
I think the point I’m trying to get at here is in relation to how the working class are accessed by media / cultural producers. I believe the irish media and cultural producers access the working class the same way historians do - through its problems, through where working class life breaks down. also, not coming from the culture, they have no idea of the nuances, and so, as you say, they go on to portray working class in broad strokes.
I would argue that British TV was able to produce decent working class drama - including drama that DOES deal with its problems - because there is a class awareness in British culture that is sadly lacking in ours, (an insight I’ve nicked from sonofstan).
The problem is not RTE as such - it’s the fact that the middle class get to write the hymns. Now, RTE is a reflection of that, but the problem is across Irish society, including education, culture, and, especially, Irish historiography.
I dunno. I’ve been watching Shane Meadows’ “Dead Mans Shoes” and also “This is England” (where i nicked the title of the post) and God, what I would give for an Irish Shane Meadows - someone who understands completely working class culture, and can deal with its problems without recourse to “ahh Sharon you’re bleedin’ wha” caricatures.
Although, RTE and accents, man. Jesus!
one word sums up the difference between British telly and ours when it comes to portrayal of the working class; ‘Shameless’. Can you imagine anything on RTE able to simultaneously pull the piss out of the stereotypes that fuel outsiders view of life on an estate, and to undermine those stereotypes precisely through overstatement - Frank Gallagher is an awful irresponsible pisshead and is, in a way, as far from the norm of working class males as Charlo in ‘the Family’, but the difference is that he’s not made to stand for his class; he’s a character, and a familiar one in working class communities, but his family redeem him, and, instead of standing for ‘virtue’ or ‘vice’ , even he is allowed to be rounded, to have an inner life, to have conflicts and emotional crises the way middle class people do……. which is not to say that the Galleghers - or the Royles - are ‘just like’ real people underneath; what both show is that actually, in the face of the ‘everyone’s middle class now’ New Labour (and FF/ FG/ Labour here) message, some people remain defiantly unassimilated.
Oh but that’s it, isn’t it? There’s such a MORAL element to official Ireland’s forays into working class areas. Not always explicit, but it’s there. Just couldn’t do shameless at all. I go back to the Irish Times covering the Stardust, where they just couldn’t resist mentioning the unemployment, the crime, the vandalism, and “de buying of de houses on de Dole”, with taxpayer’s money of course - and in the same breath saying that those who died actually worked for a living.
It’s like, I remember hearing the comedian Margaret Cho talk about growing up in America as the child of Korean parents, and the only role models in mainstream culture for her were the whores in Vietnam movies, or the nurses in MASH. There’s a touch of the whore/nurses about Irish middle class cultural production about the Irish working class, with “Charlo” and “Adam and Paul” as the whores, the labour movement as the nurses, and not fucking much else in between.
[…] Conor’s post on Dublin Opinion about representations of the Irish working class brought back […]
Conor, too tired to put a comment with any proper thought in it (have just suffered 2 hrs of the annual torture that is the Fête de la musique in Agen - which is a town full of, what I now realise are ‘buffs’).
Just thought I’d be facetious and ask if ye’re getting a kickback off McAloon’s for that 1st photo (that clobber is part of a product placement deal - no ??)
Of course! Who do you think’s funding my porn habit?
[…]Conor’s probably quite correct that the Irish working classes haven’t had been sufficiently represented in the national story (which is really centered on a romantic vision of small-town morality), but I think he’s mistaken in his view of what’s going on in England. What he’s pretty much missing, in short, is politics.[…]
Great post, Conor, although I’m not qualified to judge from personal experience. However, on a tangential note, your family photograph is NOT entirely out of place in an account of British working-class life of the period. Growing up in Birmingham in the 60s and 70s, I used to play league soccer every Sunday morning, and sometimes we’d get picked up opposite the Catholic church in Sparkhill just as everyone was leaving Mass and heading either home for lunch or into the pub next door. The haricuts and lapels and flares in your photograph took me straight back to those Sunday mornings.
The Irish community wasn’t exactly ghettoised back then (my class at [grammar] school was arranged alphabetically, and I still remember the names of the lads sat around me: Clarke, Duffy, Gannon, GREEN, Harkin, Hearne) but there was undoubtedly an Irish working-class home life that was unique in some of its features that was never as far as i can recall dramatized in the U.K., at least not in the 70s and 80s. Since then, there’s been Ken Loach’s Raining Stones, of course, but there was no great inclination to treat the Irish working-class experience in England as something worth examining.
Cheers John!
Jean Paul Sartre spoke vehemently about the violence built into daily life, seeing and describing the systematic violence of capitalism and colonialism. Any analysis of working class life, whether it be in Ireland or England or anywhere else for that matter, in the city or in the country, is incomplete without mention of it.
I think back to my childhood, growing up in an Irish working class family in Birmingham during the late 1960’s and 1970’s. While I wasn’t aware of it at the time, the violence was everywhere: in the heated arguments between my parents (always about money, or the lack of it); the wallpaper which covered my bedroom (two pirates fighting over a pot of gold); in the news reports on telly (including the latest atrocities in Northern Ireland); the massive lay-offs in car plants across the country and the many strikes that ensued; history class at school, where I learned about the Kings and Queens of England and of the great war heroes (oh how the British love their war heroes!), all taught by a man by the name of Moran - I love the irony of it now; the adverts on telly that fooled me into believing I could have anything, be anything I wanted; the teachers who said I’d be nothing; the neighbours who hammered on the walls whenever we had a ‘hooley’ in the house; the constant bullying at school by class mates and teachers; the phoney ‘wars’ we had with kids from neighbouring estates; and in the playground ‘who wants to play, cowboys and indians?’; the life-size statue of the Jesus on the cross which hung in the church (for years, I thought it was real!); the IRA bombing campaign, in particular the Birmingham bombings of November 1974; and the policemen who came to the house, not once but twice to question my Dad – because he was Irish, and every Irishman was a terrorist (‘Is Dad going to jail, Mum?’).
My conscientisation began proper in my early teens. Punk had a lot to do with it. I was 14 when I bought my first LP – ‘All Mod Cons’ by The Jam. On it is a song called ‘Mr Clean.’ It goes: ‘please don’t forget me, or any of my kind / …when I stick your face in the grime.’ Around this time, I went out on my first date with Delma Hudson, a girl from my class at school. We went to the cinema (can’t remember the film we saw). Her Mum insisted on accompanying us. On the way home, she asked: ‘where do you live?’ I told her I lived in a Council house. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you’re only renting. We’re buying our house.’ The fuse was lit, and it’s been burning ever since.
Being Catholic meant having to go to Mass, every week. After Mass, you met all your aunties and uncles and cousins outside the church. They are happy memories. Not so happy was when Dad told me I couldn’t join the Boys Brigade. All my friends were in it. Oh, the innocence of childhood – I wish I had it all over again. I see it in my ten year old son, and envy him.
By the way, have you read ‘Tarry Flynn’ by Patrick Kavanagh? It’s set in rural Ireland. There was alot in the main character that I could recognise in myself, me a city dweller all my life. It’s one book by an Irish author that has really affected me.
Cheers Conor - and thanks.
What a powerful comment. Thanks Martin.
Martin’s comment above got me thinking about something that has always intrigued me; a fair number of the important figures in Punk and post Punk music making in Britain were 2nd generation Irish working class - John Lydon, Kevin Rowlands, All of the Smiths, George O’Dowd, er, Oasis - whereas successful musicians from Ireland (26 counties, anyway) during the same period were almost exclusively middle class; form U2 downwards. Bands that did express a consciously working class perspective - preeminently The Blades - found themselves entirely at odds with what the domestic music business expected and suffered accordingly.
[…] it to under threat from anyone apart from ourselves. For a start, there’s the whole realm of Irish working class identity, something that we’ve only ever touched upon in the briefest of ways. There’s the Irish […]
[…] production of culture in Ireland is rarely, if ever, analyzed. Irish blogging has, at least, begun to tackle this topic, but outside of its world and more serious academic discourse, the story is a dead parrot. Picture […]
[…] course, Irish media is not just journalism. Again, this topic has been brought up elsewhere, and here at other times. It’s an ongoing debate, and one with a lot of scope with regard to blogging. […]