Myles Away From Dublin (18 page)

This week I should like to venture a little comment on a subject which has many aspects and is much talked and written about, sometimes praised, sometimes
condemned
as a gross public scandal, occasionally denounced as a ripe example of the stage the country has come to.

No, I don’t mean hooliganism, the price of drink, dance halls, or even bingo. I mean navigation and fishing, and those two pursuits are much tied up with each other. I claim to know a bit about both, unlike most other people, who think they know
EVERYTHING
about them.

Ireland is a small island in which it is impossible to stand anywhere without being within 55 miles of the sea; and a glance at the map shows that, by reason of the profusion of great lakes and rivers, the country is internally waterlogged. Yet everywhere it is difficult – often impossible – to get fresh fish at a reasonable cost.

Poaching is rampant all over the country but any fish illegally taken (particularly the noble salmon) is intended exclusively for the black market. I find the situation is inexplicable, and made by no means the clearer by any babble from politicians, pisciculturists or those wisest of men, economists.

I am sure most readers will share a memory of my own very early youth. In those days one did not require a clear mind or a handy newspaper to know that a certain morning of the week was a Friday morning; lurid banshee shrieks from the street or road outside betokened that a woman was on her rounds with a basket selling fish, usually real fresh herrings, at possibly tuppence each. She is now as obsolete as men wearing wigs and swords.

Technical people say that our sea-going fishermen are lazy and incompetent and that the steam trawlers they
use are quite unsuitable – far too small and unfitted for proper cruises of 8 or 9 days. Well, their predecessors used sail, which made their trips far more unpredictable as to distance and duration, and yet they landed immeasurably more fish. The poor folk of the West lived on fish and potatoes, and it is true that the currach is the most primitive of vessesls.

If we are not to be forced to the conclusion it is the men who are different, we may fall back on the theory that the distribution system of the fish trade is ruinously inefficient. One hears of a big catch being landed in Donegal but having to be dumped in a fish-meal factory owing to the prohibitive cost of transporting the catch and marketing it in the cities and bigger towns. It is a comforting thought, even if the comfort is a bit perverse, but it does suggest that such chaos could be somehow remedied.

But another possibility, not lightly to be dismissed, is that Irish people as a whole do not like fish. Certainly where fish is to be had, the choice available to them is laughably limited: herring (perhaps), whiting and cod. Shellfish such as lobster or oyster is out of the question at the best of times owing to cost, and most people hold that mackerel is uneatable unless cooked within 12 hours of being landed. Plaice and sole are regarded as luxuries, sinful to buy.

I have personally done some sailing, mostly in Dublin Bay and thereabouts, and there is no more exhilarating way of passing the time if one has a good boat, the skill to sail it and a fair breeze. Mackerel hauled in from lines trailing at the stern taste indescribably wonderful if flung on the pan of a good primus stove almost before they are dead. But there are other fish, too.

What does the reader think of the following list? Sennit, Wall, Granny, Thief, Seizing, Diamond.

Would you fry, boil, stew or roast them? No, faith – for they are knots that are familiar to a good yachtsman, and you can’t eat ropes (which we
yachtsmen
always call ‘sheets’).

To the good landlocked folk of Carlow I would say this: never take out a sailing boat alone unless you have experience and know how to handle it, even on quite inland water. For then you might find yourself not only IN THE CART but, far worse, IN THE BARROW!

All of us every day make use of small items and services so constantly and casually that we usually become quite unaware of them. But if you happen to be walking across the Curragh of Kildare and, quite alone, decide to light a cigarette, the discovery that you haven’t got a match can be a calamitous shock.

It can be an occurrence that seems to darken the sun. And if you found you had a box of matches all right but not a solitary cigarette, you would probably conclude that earlier in the day you had taken leave of your senses.

The fact is that we take too much for granted.

That was the sentiment which came into my head at the start of the bus strike several weeks ago, when I was living just outside Dublin city. True, the strike was countrywide but the importance of public transport in a big city is far more vital than anywhere in rural Ireland.

In effect it is the city’s bloodstream, and the total absence of buses caused something not far from absolute paralysis. As in all big modern cities, very few people live in the inner warrens and hives of work; they live as far out as they can and daily commute to their offices, factories or shops.

And when the carrying firm is in fact a State monopoly, a strike is an absolute thing. It could in many cases impose severe hardship, sometimes perhaps death, though this is not the place to argue out the wrongs and the rights of the occurrence. It is however worth noting that initially the men struck in defiance of the advice of their union leaders.

The worthwhile question is this: how did the Dublin people manage for those five weeks?

I am delighted to report that they managed very well, often achieving miracles of improvisation, and the
heroes who shone most brightly were the owners of private cars. To wait at a bus stop on a lonely suburban road was to be certain of a lift into town, and in a matter of minutes. Alas, the snag was getting a lift out again, for hanging about traffic-packed city streets gives no clue as to destination.

As is usual in most civil catastrophes, the situation had many diverting aspects. The eye was confronted with motor vehicles of unbelievable antiquity, bicycles which had probably not been on a public road since 1919, and a veritable swarm of scooters, tandems, motor-bikes and even bath chairs. There was no limit, provided the ‘yoke’ had wheels.

And there was, of course, always the horse, though I cannot imagine where one could park a horse. Finally, a great number of people were forced to acknowledge an astonishing conclusion: that is that they could still walk, and that this exercise did them no harm.

Not a few (call them eccentrics if you will) came to the conclusion that buses were a curse, devices to make the able-bodied into effete wastrels, and an insult to civilisation.

The British in wartime plugged the phrase IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY? It was a shrewd and effective question, for in those years overladen transport was being choked by people whose business was mainly to wander about and gaze at shop windows.

That question was much asked in Dublin of late, and in thousands of cases the short honest answer was NO. But that meant disastrous business for cinemas and theatres.

What was done by the Government, itself largely responsible for the crisis? Next to nothing at all. A small number of dirty Army lorries (I was in two) were run between selected suburban points and the city centre. Each Minister has a Mercedes-Benz to go about in.

It is not right, I think, to be frivolous about an affair of this kind. A city is a monstrously artificial invention, and its inhabitants are pathetically vulnerable from
every angle. My own form of personal solace was to meditate on what would happen if there was a countrywide strike of the staff of the Electricity Supply Board.

Think that one out. Tens of thousands of homes would have no heat or light. Many water and sewerage systems would collapse, since many have pumping installations. No telephone to call doctor or priest if you are suddenly very sick, and no prospects of the essential operation even if you do get to hospital.

I’ll pile on a final horror: no Teiefis Eireann!

In a long, holy and brilliant life I have done many things but this week let me mention just one little sortie of mine. Several years ago I was directed, in two succeeding years, to go to London as ‘observer’ rather than as a member to the annual congress of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.

My interest was motor traffic and road safety but that did not dilute my astonishment at the unbelievable awkwardness of that body’s title. The Society is still very much alive.

Its congress has to be seen to be believed. It is held in an enormous hall in the Westminster area and the delegates attending, nearly all representing some local authority, amounted to about 4,000. Not one of them was in the least bit shy in standing up and haranguing the multitude for five minutes, not infrequently on some irrelevant pet theme of his own. It was a startling spectacle of democracy in action.

Of course the Society takes cognisance of road accidents but I was moderately surprised to note that it did not permit this branch of disaster to be an obsession: far from it, indeed, for its records and experience showed that the great bulk of the accidents awaiting mankind lay elsewhere. And in the most surprising places.

Know where is the most dangerous place to be? At home! That is not a facetious sally like saying that since 90 per cent of the people die in their beds, being in bed is very dangerous. That being at home is danger – is a fact, statistically established beyond argument.

And the most accident-prone are the very young or those past middle age, with most of the accidents arising from the carelessness of people in the age-groups between.

By the hundred annually are measured the number of youngsters burnt to death from falling into unprotected open fires. A somewhat similar mortality arises from youngsters pulling down on top of themselves open saucepans of boiling water from the top of cookers or ranges.

The word ‘accident’ does not necessarily mean death, and thousands of domestic accidents merely leave the victim crippled or mutilated for life. Apart from the youngsters drowned in baths, a great number of others are severely scalded.

We all acknowledge the perils of the highway but it is fair enough to call the stairs a highway and, next to the kitchen, it is the most perilous part of an average small house. The young and the old are insecure of foot (the old often further endangered by failing sight) and the cases of people falling downstairs are nearly
uncountable
.

Even if one fall or several in the same house can be traced directly to a tear in the carpet or an ill-fitting stair-rod, the defect is hardly ever put right; this is probably on the same baseless principle that lightning cannot strike twice in the same place. Stairs have another hazard, and I confess I have personally had more than one painful encounter with it.

I mean falling upstairs; in this case it is your head which is bound to have the worst of things, and a fractured knee-cap is a commonplace.

A shockingly large number of deaths occur in the home due to electrocution, with a somewhat lower number in towns due to gas poisoning. Poisoning in many other forms abounds, such as sheer carelessness in mistaking a bottle of some lethal cleaning fluid for medicine the doctor ordered, or unthinkingly using some genuine foodstuff which has been so long in the house that it has become putrid. Nor are you safe in bed; hundreds are roasted annually through falling asleep with a cigarette alight, and occasionally the whole house becomes a flaming tomb for everybody in it.

I mentioned electrocution. Apart from defective appliances, this often arises from wiring being carried out by the man-of-the-house himself, either to save money or to show he knows as much about the subject as any damn electrician. And that pinpoints my main point – that homes are ever becoming more dangerous by reason of the modern Do It Yourself mania.

Nothing easier than to build a concrete wall in your garden, of course, but when a gust of wind blows it down on top of your little daughter, I suppose doubt begins to creep in.

Any man who is rational and has a decent pair of hands can himself instal a heavy chandelier in the
living-room
, but there is always a good chance that it will fall down and kill somebody. Which of us is not smart enough to make his own shoes, radio and even TV sets?

From advertisements I notice that this lunacy is taking a new direction. Several firms (but mostly Japanese) are offering such articles as bicycles, scooters and even small cars in the ordinary intact form cheaply, but far more cheaply in what they call Kit form.

The theory is that anybody but an imbecile can assemble such things himself – ‘at home, in his spare time’. One American firm is offering a tiny aeroplane on this basis. Soon we’ll all be assembling our own rockets, possibly with nuclear warheads.

It would be better for most of us to assemble our thoughts, and stop this dangerous fooling.

Strange thing that with all the opportunities offered by TV, no decent hack has given us a piece on Tom Moore. I will probably have to do it myself. Moore, man of intellect, superb at adulation, prince of leg pullers, had the strangest of careers.

For a quarter of a century he had £500 a year for writing words to supplied music. When Longman’s thought they would like a long poem ‘on an Eastern subject’ they paid Moore 3,000 guineas in advance, and eventually he came up with
Lalla
Rookh.
I too have had dealings with Longman’s and can testify that their treatment of me was similarly generous.

The beauty of the old airs which form his ‘Melodies’ tends to mask the fact that his verse was shocking doggerel.

All right. Let’s look at that.

The
scene
is
the
austere
office
of
the
Commanding
Officer.
The
Minstrel
Boy
has
been
frogmarched
in
by
two
guards.

C.O.: Ah, Private Rafferty. I noticed you
particularly
on parade this morning. What is that damned weepan you have there?

M.B.: A sword, sor.

C.O.: How dare you call that weepan a sword! Where in hell did you get it?

M.B.: It’s me father’s, sor, yer honour.

C.O.: I should have you court-martialled for
disgracing
your uniform with such a weepan. Your father’s? I suppose he used it at the battle of Clontarf?

M.B.: No sor. Th’oul fella lives at Booterstown, not Clontarf.

C.O.: Hand that weepan to the quarter-master, get a real one, and then do a term of fourteen days C.B. Dismiss!

C.O. (
as
detachment
reaches
door
):
Halt! About turn! Rafferty!

M.B.: Yessor.

C.O.: What’s that damned thing on your back?

M.B.: My wild harp, sor.

C.O.:
Your
what?

M.B.: It’s me wild harp slung behind me.

C.O.: Well it’s the first time I ever heard of a harp as an item of combat equipment. Can you play it?

M.B.: Yes, sor. I can play ‘Kitty of Coleraine’ and ‘The Lanty Girl.’

C.O.: Ah, an interest in the fair sex, Rafferty? How many strings are on it?

M.B.: Thirty five, sor.

C.O.: Very well. Hand that apparatus in to the quarter-master. In addition to fourteen days C.B. I sentence you to thirty five lashes. Dismiss!