9 Neil Blaney

Ballymun Flats would become a faithful representation of a people set up by history, a people whose sense of themselves had been interrupted and diverted, a nation in retreat from itself and the stereotypes that had emerged in the national imagination as a result of condescension and interference. It was the product of a people infected by a craven desire to imitate and to conform to an idea of modernity deriving from elsewhere – a model already beginning to be re-evaluated wherever else it had been tried.

From the early 1960s onwards, the national mood became preoccupied by a search for things that would dramatize Ireland’s coming-of-age as a re-created society. There was a sense of movement away from the previously held vision of the country in an attempt to escape dark elements of its past. The 1943 St Patrick’s Day radio address by Eamon de Valera had acquired in the national imagination a kind of negative motivating stimulus, simultaneously defining what we had been and wished to escape, and unwittingly staking out a new destination. By the early 1960s, fed by the complex interaction of post-colonial uncertainty and desire, it had been decided somewhere deep in the unconscious of the nation that the new destination would be as far in the opposite direction from Dev’s vision. Ballymun was to become a totem of this new thinking.

There were to be more ghettoes in Dublin and in other cities, which, back in the 1960s and 1970s, when most of them were created, were likewise intended as declarations that we were moving inexorably away from poverty and darkness. Darndale, Neilstown, Tallaght, South Hill – massive estates on the fringes of our cities – had been intended to showcase the new urban, industrialized Ireland, to bear witness to the extent to which we were becoming ‘like other modern societies’. Conceived to a blueprint based on Hollywood B-movie notions of what modern living should be like, they were designed for the future blue-collar generations that would man the factories of the new country. Within a few years they had become like the dirt under the carpet of a new fangled, spick-and-span Ireland lacking any sense of its own intrinsic absurdity.

Ballymun was, among such estates, a unique folly, an icon of the failed project of modernization, a symbol of the depth and density of official incoherence, the Mother of all Ghettoes. The seven fifteen-storey, low-density tower blocks were to be Ireland’s first high-rise apartment blocks. One of the core absurdities of Ballymun was that its high-rise element was utterly, insanely superfluous, given that the towers and flat complexes ate up enough ground to house an equivalent number of people in conventional estates. Ballymun was created as an urban utopia by a generation in exile from its roots in the land. The fact that, being constructed around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising, the seven towers were each given the name of a different revolutionary leader, was merely the tin-hat on this living, ironic representation of the pathology of post-colonial confusion. Ballymun captured our helpless predilection for imitation in the form of an ironic monument to those who had died for what they hoped would be a complete and complex form of independence. Here, as a monument to our incoherence, were our seven Towers of Babel in the heart of a wasteland of imitation.

When the 3,000-unit Ballymun project went to tender in 1964, the government specification required it to be constructed ‘as speedily as possible, consistent with a high standard of layout, design and construction and to acceptable costs’. The towers and other apartment complexes were constructed from prefabricated concrete panels cast in an on-site factory. Demand was brisk and prospective residents were subjected to assiduous interview. Problems soon began to manifest themselves, however, with poor maintenance leading to perennial tenant disgruntlement. The inefficient heating system, which could be regulated only by the opening of windows, was a prime focus of complaints, being both costly and inefficient, with poor insulation causing severe heat-loss though the walls of the towers. The lifts were another source of ongoing grievance. The cumulative effect of these difficulties was the phenomenon of transient occupancy, which nurtured instability and fed an emerging drug culture.

Many of the people who ended up in Ballymun were only one or two generations removed from the land. In this, yes, reservation, a new type of Irish person emerged – urban but without strong urban roots, Irish but disconnected from the essentially natural identity of Ireland. It was as though these people had been put out there while we waited for modernity to take. The dominant motif was of a taming of the wilderness, combined with the imposition of something unmistakably alien that, in a country endowed with both space and beauty, could have arisen only from some deep sense of self-doubt and hatred of our natural inheritance.

Ballymun will forever be associated with the then Fianna Fáil Minister for Local Government, Neil Blaney, from Donegal, and mythology had it that the towers had been strategically placed so that politicians, with a wave of the hand in the back of the state car, could indicate them to visiting dignitaries on the way in from the airport.

But as the Lemass boom of the early 1970s rapidly dissolved into a reprise of pessimism that persisted into the 1990s, unemployment and the absence of even the most basic infrastructure ensured that this intended showcase of modern living turned into a nightmare ghetto, with none of the advantages and all the disadvantages of urban living.

Ballymun came to function as a cautionary example of something to be regarded as an unavoidable element of state-driven social intervention. In the final decades of the twentieth century, it became useful for journalists as a source for illustrations of poverty with its pram-pushing teenage girls or freckled boys on horseback. But somehow these never led anywhere, as though the existence of such places was something unavoidable and perhaps even remained, in some backhanded way, a tribute to the modernity of Irish society.

It may seem unfair to place all the blame for this on the shoulders of one man, but had the project been a success, Neil Blaney would have basked in any glory that might have arisen. He must therefore be conferred, if only symbolically, with the blame. The ultimate irony is that Blaney was one of the most unapologetic republicans to emerge in Irish politics in the second half of the twentieth century.