This came from an archive piece from RTE TV (1971-Ireland). It's probably better to view the archive piece before reading this for context.
I can understand the arguments on both sides. I'll digress, if I may. Back in the mid-1980s, I worked for Premier Dairies in Rathfarnham. Places like Old Bawn, Springfield and the new Jobstown were our delivery areas (the odd local school and shops). Barely off the Tallaght by-pass, going up into those new estates was like visiting a mountaintop, a last outpost of civilisation. Every month we watched new housing estates being built - hundreds of houses, then thousands - the isolation and lack of very basic amenities for the communities was utterly shocking considering the massive building expansion. It was a stark contrast for many young parents who had grown up close to the inner city, used to local amenities on their doorsteps.
In hindsight, so many of those new housing developments were sold/rented by the council on a wing and a prayer, and the promise of an idyllic lifestyle at the foot of the mountains. In reality, over months, we watched housing estates sprout up - quicker and more cheaply. The higher up you went, we could see the perceivable speed and lack of quality in the builds. How high and far can they go? - I'd often wonder. My workmate would often quip: ''They'll be building them at the foot of the Hellfire in six months at this rate!''
Little did I know ten years later I would be living in Jobstown and rearing my own family in a house on a grassy field I had once stood on during a bitterly cold and snowy December morning in 1986. Had you told me that then, I'd have said you were nuts - no way! Not a great deal had changed - just more houses. Love is a strong thing! We were lucky because we had one spartan local shop two minutes away for a litre of milk and loaf of bread. Anything more was a 15 minute walk to the 'Springfield' SuperValue or a 25-30 minute trek to 'The Square'. Buses? Forget it. The wait time was longer than the walking journey if you didn't have a car.
Local shops, the few there were, would change hands every six months. Despite the housing expansion, they couldn't compete with The Square - so most sales were sweets for kids, a litre of milk, loaf of bread or pack of cigarettes. These weren't places you did a weekly 'shop'. They reminded me a lot of the 'Blindman' kiosks you used to see in places like Crumlin and Drimnagh when I was a kid - opening 7 days a week, 9 till 9, just to survive, keep the roof on and dinner on the table for the owner. This was long before the days of shops opening after 6pm or god forbid, supermarket 24hr shopping! Prices were high but no arguments there. They weren't so much businesses - rather community salvations and the avoidance of buttoning up for a long hiking trek across wet fields in the dark in the middle of winter for 15-30 minutes for a six-pack of Dutch Gold and a 60 watt light bulb because the local shop didn't sell those.
A salt of the earth community filled with amazing people from a host of backgrounds - Dublin inner city, Birmingham to Barbados, Tyrone to Tipperary, loved-up to lived-up, fed-up to frustrated, drugged-up to deliriously happy, fruity to nutty, pleasant to unpleasant, friends and family: all the things we think we are and what we are no matter where the community is we live in.
Was there something missing and what did I see? Yes. It wasn't a lack of community. A community is its people as a whole. It was a lack of investment in the value of that new community as it grew. That simple bricks and mortar built on an idyllic construction at the foot of a mountainside creates a community - no, it doesn't. That a village survives without proper amenities and places to come together and celebrate that community - no, it can't. That you locate/relocate the most impoverished and disenfranchised people to the outer confines of a county - and then expect the most of them? That you build but don't plan or provide equal opportunity for that community - no, it can't. And the worst rub of it? Judging a community or village by what wasn't provided for it at its inception and then pointing at its people as an example of how to plan and do things badly?
I can't speak to the motives of the committee and residents in this case (RTE Seven Days) piece. I suspect many who resigned were long term residents in Old Bawn, Tallaght. In November 1971, OId Bawn and the wider Tallaght area were very different places. But 40 years later, I still see some of the same issues and motivations arising - development vs memory attachment vs change. I live here/lived there. It's *my* village and place. I don't want it changed and I want it to be *forever* the way it is/remember it. Okay. But, with memory, we also forget, and only place ourselves in the 'moment remembered' - the attachment.
But keeping things as they are is not a reason to deny that the world around us is changing - at a rapid rate, now, more than ever. Sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. Change is good when it is planned properly and for the good of all - not for the 'one'. We have certainly moved to more of a 'one-world' whether you are a property developer or the old lady who lives in a quiet village at the bottom of the street with seven cats. I'm as much against the property developer running ramshackle over rules and legislation to make a fortune as I am the old lady deciding that she alone can stop 200 houses being built at the bottom of her village - perhaps, one for greed and wealth, the other because grandpa herded his cattle in those fields - and that's the end of that! Neither count because one is motivated by sheer profit and the other by sheer memory attachment.
When my parents bought their home in Walkinstown, Dublin, I'm pretty sure they would have wanted the area to stay the way it was in 1962 - a sleepy, quiet suburb with plenty of green fields, perfect for a young couple and family, and the mountains a short 25 minute drive away. But it didn't. It hosts the nation's busiest traffic roundabout, quarries, lakes and rivers have long disappeared, and a trip to the mountains would be the same time but only because of by-pass motorways!
I remember deaths in my locale due to increased traffic using the housing estates as rat-runs to the city. I remember the many resident protests. But my parents also remember picking blackberries from the side of the road where their house would eventually be built. They also remember the deaths of kids in local lakes in the 1960s before they were filled in as the area developed for housing. No one protested in Walkinstown when the blackberry bushes at the side of the road disappeared. No one protested when the lakes were filled in for more housing developments. Everyone wanted to come and live in this new burgeoning 'Walkinstown'. The best of every world - quiet and on the foothills of Dublin and the road to Wicklow. I've no doubt the residents of Old Bawn and the greater Tallaght were flogged the same idyllic promotion by countless estate agents.
However, at least for that 'idyllic' time of perhaps 10-15 years, they got that. Mam could push my sis and me around in a pram to the local shops. We had three schools within 10-15 minutes walk. We had two cinemas - the Apollo and the Star (Yeh, 1960s - the names!). We had three huge community playing fields to support football, GAA and Athletic clubs. We had a local swimming pool. We had two churches and two community halls. The religious locals still argue if you are an 'Agnes' or a 'Walko' church head! Dad had two hardware stops to visit and five pubs to choose from, although he wasn't much of a drinker with two jobs to hold down and 5am starts in the dairy and newspapers, but he'd give you a yarn or two the following day if 'yer man Gabriel from the RTE Riordans' or 'yer man from the Dubliners with the banjo and hair' was in the pub last night and we got chattin'!
Be it Old Bawn, Walkinstown, Rathfarnham or Tallaght; a community is of its people and their precious attachment to that place, whether by association or memory. But you have to be attached to it for the right reasons. A memory maybe a fixed place in your head but it cannot transfer to reality in the here and now, because that’s just the way you want it and to hell with everyone else in my community. By nature, communities grow – they expand. That’s the whole point! More people want to live there. Like people, they grow and change. Neighbours come and go. People die. Demand should meet people and purpose.
I have no right to say that the street and locale I grew up on should remain exactly as it was in the 1960s and 1970s because that’s the way my memories are and you can’t change it for the good of a developing community, even if you are still right here and now living it. Everything has a time and place. I can’t take some kid’s memories away in 40 years’ time because I say so and won’t be around to keep them in check! I can’t tell someone that my memories of childhood and the summers of the 1970s were soooo much better and hotter than their memories of times as a kid in the 1990s. Ask yourself: how often have you heard the phrase ‘life was so much better when we were young’ or telling your kids ‘you don’t know how good you have it now’ or the trigger one ‘kids were so much more innocent when I grew up’. Moreover, ask yourself: how often have you repeated those phrases and heard them from your own parents and they were also repeated to them by their parents (grandparents).
Time. Place. Memory.
If there is one consistent theme from the RTE piece in 1971, it is that we’re not doing a great job of building communities. We do great quickly building them, setting them up, but pretty poor on developing and supporting them. It’s as different as understanding the difference between a ‘house’ and a ‘home’. Councils, developers and builders talk about houses and apartments; as people, we talk about homes and communities – a community is not a collection of houses. It requires proper amenities, affordable quality, long-term security, and constructing homes in unison with local authorities as dedicated communities or part of an existing one, whether people want to rent or buy – not just building houses/apartments.
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