There are patterns in things. Independent Ireland in its first forty years of life placed an emphasis on inwardness. The economics of self-sufficiency; the ban on ‘foreign games’; the literary censorship and the social control exercised by an authoritarian national church — which is what Catholicism was in all but name — were the product of a common sensibility.
Official Ireland placed premium value on things thought to be distinctively Irish. The three southern provinces that constituted the new state were the only substantial part of the British Isles almost completely untouched by the industrial revolution. It was perhaps inevitable that the governing class in the Free State/Republic should value agriculture over industry, rural over urban, tradition over modernity. All this reflected the social ascendancy of the farmer, that key vocational group in post-Famine Ireland, liberated into ownership of the land since the 1903 act. It was also a way of marking distance and difference: the Importance of Being Not British.
It dovetailed neatly with international Catholicism’s official denunciation of ‘modernism’, defined loosely as the attempt to reconcile church doctrine with post-Enlightenment philosophical developments, the scientific revolution and a theology that placed greater emphasis on reason than on authority. The Irish Catholic church was enthusiastic in its hostility to this modernism, not least because aspects of modernist theology converged on and were influenced by Protestantism.
There were other forms of modernism that had a cold reception in the new Ireland. The modern movement in fine art left the country almost untouched until the establishment of the White Stag Group and the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in the 1940s, a latter-day salon des refusés for artists rejected by the annual exhibitions of the Royal Hibernian Academy. Even then, abstraction did not move towards the mainstream until the 1960s.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Ireland was barely touched by the international modern style in architecture between the 1920s and the 1960s. When O’Connell Street in Dublin was being re-built after the destruction caused first by the 1916 rising and later by the civil war, it was done in a conservative commercial classicism typical of the first quarter of the new century. Although not adventurous, it gave Lower O’Connell Street, in particular, a pleasing and restrained architectural coherence. The old Georgian classicism was gone for good and the city architects — C.J. McCarthy and his successor, the wonderfully named Horace Tennyson O’Rourke — resisted any temptation to restore it as pastiche. In Upper O’Connell Street, the Gresham Hotel (1927) was designed by the English architect Robert Atkinson. Its discreet neo-classicism, with just a hint of Egyptian decorative themes then in vogue, is particularly successful. But it was safe. Modern architecture, on the other hand, was definitely not safe.
The year after the Gresham was rebuilt, a young architect called Michael Scott opened a practice in Dublin. He was to become the high priest of the modern movement in Irish architecture. Architectural modernism evolved from nineteenth-century engineering projects and the development of new materials like steel and reinforced concrete. It stressed function over ornament, preferring clean lines and eschewing fussy detail. Scott, as well as other young architects, designed hospitals and cinemas in the new style. These were functional buildings by their very nature, well suited to the plain practicality of modernism.
The outstanding example of early modernism was the terminal building at Dublin Airport, designed in a gentle curve and now a listed building surrounded by what is for the most part dreck. But for all its merits, it was an airport terminal and by definition out of town. Modernism would only announce itself definitively with the building of a great civic public building in the centre of one of the country’s cities.
This is why Busáras, Scott’s masterpiece, is important. Built between 1946 and 1953, it is the twentieth century’s first major contribution to the Dublin skyline. It is not tall, but it is monumental, a pair of rectangles — one slightly higher than the other — set at 90 degrees. It is not as chaste as modernist purists might wish: there is a considerable amount of decoration in mosaic and timber. But what struck the bemused viewers was the sheer amount of glass in the building compared to traditional architecture. In this it was typical of the modern style, although much restrained in that respect compared to buildings to come. Its primary function was as the city’s central bus station: the open ground floor serves that purpose. The upper floors are let as offices.
There was, predictably, public opposition. There always is, and modernism in all the arts possesses a shock value that can offend. Public taste often diverges from professional enthusiasm and is generally much more conservative. So it was with Busáras, with objections to the design itself, the scale, the appearance of the building and — always the sure refuge of the irate — the cost. At over £1 million, Busáras was expensive but it has since become so secure a part of the city’s public furniture that one wonders — as so often with these things — what all the fuss was about in the first place. Just as well there was no talk radio in 1953.
Whether the site was the ideal location for a central bus station is questionable, although its proximity to Connolly Station is an advantage. Access and egress for buses is awkward. What is undeniable is that this fine building has not weathered well, has grown shabby, and is in need of restoration. Plans for such a restoration are in hand at the time of writing.
Michael Scott contributed other buildings to the city, notably the Abbey Theatre (1966), which replaced the old building (see chapter 36) destroyed by fire in 1951. The new Abbey, set on a cramped and unsuitable site, has been less successful and has never won the consistent affection of Dubliners. Busáras is different, dividing opinions to this day but still drawing the praise and celebration of its partisans.
