The bells of hell

Christchurch was chiming in the spring, AD 2001. On the freezing breeze, if you strained, you might’ve heard Behan’s hymn for the damned, drifting in from Crumblin:

“The bells of hell go ting a ling a ling

For you but not for me

Oh death where is thy sting a ling a ling

Or grave thy victory?”

Your correspondent was overcooking the allusions as usual, thinking about the capital as a kind of metropolitan incarnation of hell.

Holy God, even Christchurch Cathedral itself once hosted its own Hellfire Club. In the mid-16th century, part of the cathedral’s crypt was leased to entrepreneurs who turned it into a tavern, eliciting complaints from the Earl of Wentworth about the carousing going on below “whilst we above are serving the high God”. He then ordered the removal of the shop and issued an ordinance decreeing, “that no person presume to make urine against the walls of the said church”.

A number of law courts were also situated in the cathedral’s immediate proximity, the entrance to which was christened “hell”, and immortalised in verse by Robert Burns. This arched passage was presided over by a horned figure carved in black oak said to represent the devil, and was lined with taverns mostly frequented by those in the law profession. Above these bawdyhouses were lodgings suitable for single men, advertised thus:

“To be let, furnished apartments in hell. N.B. They are well suited to a lawyer.”

So maybe we could consider Christchurch, with its split history of sanctity and sin, as emblematic of Dublin’s moral flux, a kind of hell-on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven. The most interesting thing about the capital is the juxta-proximity of polar opposites: northside and southside, beauty spots and eyesores, ancient and post-modern, insider and interloper. Rough districts are shoved right up against well-to-do ones, rubbing off each other like embarrassed (but secretly stimulated) strangers on a packed five o’ clock DART.

When I first moved to Dublin ten years ago, I found the place illuminated by two unbearably beautiful poems, both written by blow-ins. The first was by Paddy Kavanagh:

“If ever you go to Dublin town

In a hundred years or so

Inquire for me on Baggot Street

And what was I like to know

O he was a queer one,

Fol dol the di do,

He was a queer one,

I tell you.

On Pembroke Road look out for my ghost,

Dishevelled with shoes untied,

Playing through the railings with little children

Whose children have long since died”

To me, those words bespeak the gentleness you rarely hear about Kavanagh, the loneliness of the long distance rhymer, the soul singer singing to his soul. This poem and ‘Canal Bank Walk’ describe the divine side of Dublin in a way that could make a dead man – or a lawyer, for that matter – swoon.

The second poem was ‘The Closing Album’ by Louis MacNeice.

“This was never my town,

I was not born nor bred

Nor schooled here and she will not

Have me alive or dead

But yet she holds my mind

With her seedy elegance,

With her gentle veils of rain

And all her ghosts that walk

And all that hide behind

Her Georgian facades –

The catcalls and the pain,

The glamour of her squalor,

The bravado of her talk.”

The times are rhyming. As I write, George Bush Jr. has just started bombing Iraq again, just like his old man did in 1991, regenerating that same vortical feeling which runs rampant through MacNeice’s pre-war masterpiece ‘Autumn Journal’.

As the Gulf War blew itself out, I settled in the capital, and by 1993 had gotten married and started a family, an odd thing to do for a fella in his 20s in the 90s, and a move that proved even more unfashionable as time passed and the city seemed to get hooked on sucking from the fountain of eternal youth in Temple Bar, a nu-pagan glorification of The Weekend. Soon, the superabundance of Sunday supplements and funday supplicants had amplified the chatter of downtown Babble-on and you could sense, in the words of Robert Lowell writing of 1950s spending-spree America, a savage servility sliding by on grease.

Walking towards Monkstown one day last summer with my three daughters in tow, I got stuck trying to find a space to cross the motorway. We stood there, choking on the fumes of the cars and lorries bombing past, swallowing these obscene gaseous emissions, the noxious farts of the city. It reminded me of lines written by Brendan Kennelly:

“Hell, beneath contempt, craves air. Air is scarce,

so scarce Hell gulps it from the politician’s arse.

Hell sickens, vomits in the shivering sun,

the politician’s arse and mouth are one.

When he shits, his language stinks the town

and can be heard and smelt for miles around.”

This is from Poetry My Arse, a book in which Kennelly conceived of Dublin as a theatre of cruelty and humour, scandal and rumour, truth and lies, often perpetuated by poets themselves, the most egomaniacal creatures of the lot, a theme which probably got the Kerry man’s poetic license revoked at more than one cheese and wine evening. But then, as that other Brendan said, “Good or bad, it’s better to be criticised than ignored”.

When I was about 12, a Christian Brother by the name of O’Connell, a decent salt explained to me what he saw as the difference between hell and heaven. In hell, he said, starving people were seated at a table with food in front of them, but were unable to fork it into their mouths. Heaven, on the other hand, was much the same, except each inmate fed his neighbour rather than himself.

Boomtown Dublin in the last decade has been like some macabre combination of the two, an everlasting supper where some of the guests invite themselves and some are brought by force. And at this dog’s dinner, Charlie Haughey sits next to Aine Ni Chonaill sitting next to Samantha Mumba sitting next to Liam Lawlor sitting next to John Ryan sitting next to Jean Butler sitting next to Valerie Roe sitting next to Eamon Dunphy sitting next to Claire McKeon, all feeding on or being force-fed the finest celebrity chef swill, except they can’t stop, they just keep shovelling and shovelling until they bloat into two-dimensional caricatures of what we think they are; fictional constructs, soap stars, voluntary and involuntary contestants in Celebrity Big Brother.

You could argue that the advent of an Irish tabloid kiss-and-tell culture embodied by – but not exclusive to – publications like VIP magazine is just a bit of fun, a bit of glitter to brighten up the day, and that anyone who gets into showbiz has to learn to take the kicks with the pricks: It’s all fish ‘n’ chip wrapping by tomorrow, and sure famous people don’t read the papers anyway.

Except the reduction of any public figure, no matter how privileged, to the status of a headline – a body part for the meat-grinder, be it Bono’s bare arse or Samantha’s popped-out tit or Andrea’s eardrum – is a process of dehumanisation.

You can’t go to hell unless you die first, but there are many degrees of death: spiritual and physical, actual and metaphorical. In the latter category, the 1990s marked the death of the wild colonial boy. Until then, you could always rely on pig-necked Paddies to supply the rebel sensibility, the voice of dissent. Even, especially, our pop stars were rabble-rousers: Bob and Bono, Shane and Sinead, Gavin and the Golden Horde, Cathal and Mary Coughlan, a lineage that goes all the way back to that original mad bastard, the blind harpist Turlough O’ Carolan, recently reanimated in prose by Brian Keenan.

But as the decade progressed, any of these shit-stirrers seemed to slink away, subjected to a more refined kind of the same disdain directed towards the boys in the GPO in 1916. Our latter day Ned Kelly, the multicultured rake of Shane’s ‘Sick Bed Of Cu Chulainn’ who sang “a song of liberty for blacks and Paks and jocks” and “decked some fucking Blackshirt who was cursing all the yids” got shunted to the sidelines by an insipid clique of grin-and-bare-it gladhandlers and networkers. You know the usual suspects; pap groups, champagne socialites, us shower of meejits. Shane Lynch swearing at a crowd of pre-pubescents at the Childline concert was hardly Sinead ripping up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live.

And in the absence of any new balladeers who appeared concerned about the country’s neon heart rotting in its chest cavity – except maybe Ding Dong Denny O’ Reilly – it was the ghostsongs of poets past and present that resounded through the nooks and crannies of conscience and collective memory, the lonesome agitators and solo operatives; poets, playwrights and prose merchants, plyers of (for the most part) unprofitable trades: Behan and Brown, Kavanagh and Kennelly, MacNiece and McCabe, Durcan and Doyle.

Cut to a Sunday morning in November of 1998, when I was scheduled to interview Shane MacGowan. After abandoning one of those too-bright too-loud hotel-hells in favour of that fabled literary watering hole The Palace Bar, we finally got to talking. In the course of our conversation, Shane vented his ire at “all the fuckin’ bastards that drink trendy Irish beers” immortalised in his song ‘Back In The County Hell’.

The first time I heard the phrase C****c T***r was halfway through the decade, in late 1995. I was prising the barnacles off mussels in the kitchen of a Blackrock restaurant. The manager and I were staving off the early shift boredom when he made some reference to the country being in the middle of a drastic and dramatic economic recovery. It was news to me. I took a draught of tea and went back to pulling the barnacles off mussels.

Of course, we heard more and more about that godblasted Tiger over the next few years. Soon it got so bloated that it started behaving like any overfed beast – it excreted everywhere, mostly on the streets, where the bums and the immigrants had to make a bed in its stink.

The sound of people drowning in that excrement could be heard in Patrick Hodgins’ Townlands programme Home, aired on RTE last September. Less a documentary than a televisual still life portrait of three homeless men in Dublin, this short film offered an unflinching study of misery, using Gavin Bryars’ melancholic ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’ as a recurring musical motif over long, hangdog shots of hostels, Styrofoam cups and cigarette butts; of men rolling up their bedding in preparation for another long day of – in the Beckett-like words of one lost soul – “not being”.

Hodgins resisted almost all the standard devices demanded by his subject matter, including the contrasting of the rich/poor dichotomy (affluent young haymakers stepping over shapeless humps in doorways) an image as old as Time. But it made the heart sick to hear tales of men and boys being urinated on by weekend revellers or having lit cigarettes tossed on their sleeping bags. One scarecrow’s verdict on the plight of the homeless in present day Dublin was blunt but all too articulate:

“You’re a piece of shit.”

But then, there were times you could think the screenwriters and film-makers had somehow replaced the balladeers as the conscience of this new culture: Gerry Stembridge graduated from Scrap Saturday to Blackrock to About Adam, Roddy Doyle wrote himself out of Barrytown, into the savagery of Family, and back to the light of When Brendan Met Trudy; Sheridan and Jordan rewrote history as told by the losers with In The Name Of The Father, Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy.

All the same, to the jaundiced observer, Dublin could’ve seemed like it went from begging bowl to empirical burlesque, hinterland to Funderland. Here was a vision of the city as a tacky colony of the Disney Corporation and Planet Hollywood, suggesting Italian-American writer Nick Tosches description of another city in a parched place:

“Dante did not write in the age of malls, but he would have recognised Las Vegas, in any age, for what it is: a religion, a disease, a nightmare, a paradise for the misbegotten. It is a place where fat old ladies in wheelchairs, like wretched, disfigured supplicants at Lourdes, roll and heave in ghastly faith toward the cold, gleaming maws of slot machines.”

Anyone for the last few scratch cards?

Of course, it were all green fields around here when I were a lad, and you could still cop a five spot off a Dame Street drug dealer for two-and-sixpence. And you have to admit, hell is more exciting than limbo, the Sunday afternoon ghost town of olde Ireland. Besides, they’re all in some kind of cosmic balance. The centre cannot hold, so a galvanising energy is now surging away from the heart of town and into the arteries, animating suburbs that were always thought to be culturally barren.

Here in 21st century Paddyland, God’s not dead, although fatalists might say faith is. I don’t believe it myself.

But there’s always the bells of hell, Esmeralda.

I have a hunch about the bells.