Feckers by John Waters Read Free Book Online

to define him.
    Dunne, a gruff, conservative man, almost invariably declined requests for media interviews. Once, legend has it, he was approached to appear on the The Late Late Show . But when the programme’s researcher went to meet him, he answered every question with the Dunnes Stores slogan: ‘Dunnes Stores’ Better Value Beats Them All.’ He assured her that it was his intention to answer each of Mr Byrne’s questions in the same way.
    Once, back in the 1960s, in an episode that was to have reverberations many years later, Ben Dunne was severely humiliated by one Charles Haughey, then a cabinet minister, who forced him to dismantle a stand he had erected at a trade fair in New York because Haughey felt it was conveying the wrong message about Ireland to the world. On this occasion Ben Dunne was showcasing a new product: the bri-nylon shirt, which could be drip-dried and required no ironing. When Haughey arrived and saw, on the St Bernard stand, a white bri-nylon shirt drip-drying in the air-conditioning, he was, by all accounts, horrified. He approached Dunne. ‘What do you think this is,’ he demanded, ‘the fucking Iveagh Market?’ Haughey instructed officials from the Irish trade board to dismantle Dunne’s stand.
    It was a cruel and humiliating episode for Dunne, but Haughey could do no more than admonish the tide. Perhaps, with his usual perspicacity, Il Duce was able to see the future nadir of Irish manhood, dressed in clothes chosen by women to advertise the reality of the changed relations between Irish men and women in the dawning age of beige.

9 Neil Blaney
    B allymun 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