Letter from Leinster
Richard West
County Dublin In The Condition of the Working Classes, Friedrich Engels wrote of the Irishman in Manchester who loved his pig 'as the Arab his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. Otherwise he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, roll in the dirt with it, as one may see a thousand times repeated in all the great towns of England'. In modern Dublin, Engels would see that the Irishman's old affection had been transferred from the pig to the motor car. In no other country in the world are cars so loved and demanded. Even in small cities like Limerick one can be caught in traffic: jams of .20 minutes duration but here in Dublin the jams are comparable with Bangkok, Tokyo and Lagos, so that in late afternoon it may take 20 minutes to cross the city centre by bicycle, 30 minutes on foot but as much as an hour by car; and parking is often impossible.
Like the Americans whom they so much admire, the Irish prefer big, garish cars. When the government took off the tax from sma114fuel-saving models, it became a symbol of achievement to be one of the taxpayers. The office car is so important a badge of merit that I have heard of a 21 year old lad who turned down his first job because no vehicle was attached to the salary. The car is also a symbol of privilege over those without cars, or those with slow cars. Irish motorists never cease to complain of the flocks of cows and sheep that still hold precedence in the country roads; a recent article in the Irish Times spoke of the winding roads of the west and the 'woefully slow drivers' — not a complaint I would make after walking there and trying to dodge the vehicles of the vain-glorious drunks, as Yeats called John MacBride.
The more cars that cram into Dublin, the louder grows the demand to provide for space for car parks, ring roads and motorways by demolishing "what remains of this fine Georgian city. Last year, in the Spectator, I wrote of the plans to pull down much of the old Dublin described by Joyce in Ulysses and all of the Inner City tenements described by O'Casey. Television viewers may recall Christopher Booker's documentary City of Towers on the planned destruction of Britain during the last twenty years; similar, and even in some cases the same, property men are wrecking Dublin today. Here as in England one of their justifications is 'speedy access for traffic'.
It is rare to see adults walking to work or even around their suburb. The absurd but grimly ambitious Minister of Health, Charles Haughey has started a press and TV campaign (at tax-payers' expense) to promote walking, not as a means of getting around and saving fuel, so much as an aid to fitness; like Haughey's former campaigns to stop people smoking and drinking liquor. This 'walking' campaign is no doubt the Irish version of all those 'jogging' stunts in America, by which politicians get their hodible faces into the newspapers.
Public transport in Dublin has been allowed to deteriorate. The north to south trains are rare and do not run late in the evening; bus services are expensive and frequently stopped by strikes; they are still used by women shoppers but during the rush hours they slow to the level of all Dublin traffic. Horse traffic has almost died out. 'When I was a milkman,' a Dubliner told me, 'we went on strike when they took the horse-drawn vans away. It was so much more convenient. As you were delivering milk to one house, the horse would go on to the next. He knew the routine. But the dairy companies said the feed was too expensive and the stables, occupied valuable land.' A bicycle is the sensible means of getting about a flat, medium-sized city like Dublin; indeed at a cruising rate of 14 mph it is a good way of getting about the island. But you see few push-bikes in Dublin — fewer proportionally than in London — and most of those in the countryside are ridden by foreign tourists. An article in the Irish Times reported the two main reasons for this: the country is short of bicycle mechan , ics and people regard this vehicle as not consistent with Ireland's 'first world' image.
While the first is clearly absurd (there is no shortage of car mechanics) the other hits on the truth about transport in Ireland.
At the start of the century which was also the start of the 'auto age', the private motor car was a privilege of the largely Protestant, Anglo-Irish rich. Among the rebels who occupied Dublin Post Office on Easter Monday 1916, only one, Michael O'Rahilly, owned a car, thanks to a private income of £900 a year. According to Thomas M.coffey's book Agony at Easter, O'Rahilly 'used to take trips through the countryside, tossing pennies to small chil dren with admonitions in Gaelic to be good, gathering young people around the car in the evening to sing or tell jokes in Gaelic'.
The Easter rebels commandeered vehicles to pass supplies and messages although some of their drivers proved inexpert. One man, heading for Kerry, took the wrong turning at Killorglin, drove off the end of a pier on the River Laune and drowned all four of his Fenian passengers.
The motor car plays little or no part in the austere, pastoral Ireland conceived by Eamon De Valera. An economist with the Bank.of Ireland told me that recently, after a tour of the capitals of the Common Mar ket, he was asked to fill in a claim for expenses contained in a form printed in Irish during the Twenties, which asked among other things: 'State method of trans port employed: train/motor-car/bicycle?'. The condition of Ireland's economy in the Thirties and Forties did not allow for a great expansion of motor traffic, even if this had been deemed desirable; but the hankering for a car persisted. Then, still more than today, the Irish looked with yearning towards the United States, the land of Henry Ford, progress and motorways. Now Ireland at last is a car-owning democracy, just when that vision has faded in the United States. The fuel crisis this year and the prospect of a society without private motor cars, have not yet impinged on the Irish imagination. As I have seen and described in South Africa and Thailand, it is often the countries most at risk which refuse to see the danger of a reliance on finite fuel. The Irish are prepared to accept a• rise in the price of petrol and even occasional shortages but they insist on regarding these things as transient annoyances. The complacency of the Irish is beautifully caught by this editorial in the Irish Times of 6 August 1979: 'Certainly at the price of £1.22 for topgrade petrol, there should be some slight drop in usage as people reach the sensible conclusion that the shop or church a quarter of a mile away is still within walking distance. . But the car is an essential part, of modern life. President Giscard d'Estaing put the matter well during the month of June when he said that motoring today is more or less a basic right for Everyman . , . Motoring is here to stay'. Ever since the present crisis, the Irish government has persisted with its attempt to discourage public transport in favour of the motor car, hence the sign at O'Connell railway station: 'Due to increased number of passengers travelling on suburban trains during the peak period, accommodation cannot be provided for prams between 16.30 and 18,15 hours'. It would never occur to an Irish government to increase Public transport in order to save petrol. That would be conservation which, as every Irishman knows, is an English ruse to deprive Ireland of petrol. I offer the thought that the fuel crisis will make English-lrish relations worse than they have been for at least three centuries. The first signs of this came when Nigeria nationalised BP as a way of showing its opposition to Britain's policy on Zimbabwe. Soon the Dublin papers were full of headlines suggesting 'NIGERIAN OIL FOR IRELAND', and many reports on how the black gold was to be bartered for Irish food and technology. There are constant reports of oil strikes in 'Irish waters'. These islands may see one of the first of the coming oil wars.
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