A Review of Lynn Connolly's "The Mun" (Part One)

Last night I dreamt I went to Ballymun again.

Well, not really. I can't remember what I dreamt about last night. But I often do dream I'm back in Ballymun. Not just in Ballymun, but in Ballymun as it used to be, the Ballymun I grew up in, back in the eighties and early nineties.

Although even that's not quite true. Generally, the Ballymun I dream about is an imaginative reworking of that "classic" Ballymun; sometimes a very imaginative reworking. I have a recurring dream about a sort of space-age Ballymun, when the flats have been transformed into gleaming white indoor cities with all sorts of amenities.

Other times I dream about trying to get back up the stairs to 62 Sillogue Road, the seventh-floor flat where I lived the first twenty-three years of my life. Sometimes the last flight of stairs are crumbling away, or have already crumbled away. Sometimes the journey up the fourteen flights is nerve-wracking, since there's all sorts of bedlam going on between me and my destination.

You get the point. Which is that memories, just like dreams, are subjective. Nobody experiences anything exactly the same way.

Bear this in mind as I write this review of The Mun: Growing up in Ballymun by Lynn Connolly (Gill & MacMillan, 2006). 

First things first: the book is excellent, a highly entertaining, touching, and frequently hilarious first-person account of life in this very distinctive suburb of Dublin. It's written without a hint of political correctness (thank God), and I zipped through it in one evening and one morning. (I'm not a fast reader.) I'll admit I did skim through one or two chapters which were of less interest to me, so forgive me if I haven't got the best fix on some of the details. (Which means, please don't correct me on them; I'm more interested in the general gist of the book.)

I've known about this book for ages (it's almost twenty years old), but I've avoided it. I thought it was going to be politically correct. And in some strange way, I didn't feel ready to read it until now.

And when I did finally read it, I felt a lot of conflicting emotions. There's much talk these days about FOMO: Fear of Missing Out. All my life I've suffered from a variation of this: I'll call it FOHMO (Fretting Over Having Missed Out).

My FOHMO complex was fully activated as I read The Mun. You see, Lynn Connolly grew up in Ballymun in the early seventies, whereas I was born in 1977. The Ballymun I knew was eighties and nineties Ballymun. And, as The Mun explains, they were very different experiences.

Ballymun was built in the mid-sixties and it was considered a model housing estate. It was clean, it had relatively good amenities (though not all it had been promised), and it was full of young families who were delighted to get out of the tenement housing many had been living in. As Connolly describes it, the tenants of the new Ballymun worked together to keep the common areas clean, watched over each others' children, and enjoyed a vibrant social life together-- in Ballymun itself, crucially, especially in its two pubs the Penthouse and the Towers.

Things changed in the eighties, as the book chronicles very vividly. Dublin Corporation (who don't come out this book at all well) began to use Ballymun as a destination for all of their "problem" tenants. The struggle to keep common areas clean became more difficult and people eventually gave up. Crime, vandalism, and-- worst of all-- the drugs epidemic took hold. Some people began to put iron bars in front of their windows and doors.

My family lived in Ballymun from the beginning, so I heard all about the good times. But, by the time I became aware of the world around me (which was later than with most kids), the bad days of Ballymun were well and truly underway.

I was very conscious of this decline, and I felt cheated to have come along at the wrong time. Being a kid, it wasn't (for me) so much about the open drug-dealing that I witnessed in the staircases, the constantly broken lifts, the indescribable vandalism (which I will try to describe), or the poverty. I was a kid and I took all that in my stride.

No, what got me was that I missed out on all the fun. I was constantly hearing stories of fun and festivity in the early days of the 'Mun. The whole atmosphere seems to have changed between the seventies and eighties. Even photographs bear this out. You can see how much cleaner Ballymun was in the old black and white photos. There's no evidence of vandalism, people are smiling and happy, and people are together. In colour photographs from the eighties, everything looks different; you can see the graffiti and grime, people generally look less happy, and they are literally standing further away from each other. Or so it always seemed to me.

My own experienced was coloured by two important facts, apart from coming along in the eighties.

First off, my father was a community activist, Peadar Kelly. (I use "Ó Ceallaigh" because "Maolsheachlann Kelly" just sounds weird.) He played a major role in the history of Ballymun. He edited the community newspaper/magazine The Ballymun News, he helped set up the Ballymun Workman's Club (fleetingly mentioned in Connolly's memoir), he helped found the Irish language school I attended (Scoil an tSeachtar Laoch, which sounds like it was way better from the English-language schools in Ballymun) and...well, a whole lot of other things.

So I heard a lot about Ballymun and the history of Ballymun in my home. Did I ever!

Secondly, I was a very shy and withdrawn kid. I didn't "mix" (to use a word I came to hate) for a long time. So I wasn't in the thick of things in Ballymun even in the eighties. In the nineties, I was a bit more outgoing, and played soccer (just kickarounds) with local kids, getting to know them fairly well. This definitely coloured my view of things.

Connolly's view of kids in Ballymun, even in the eighties, is that they were mostly good-natured, but got into mischief out of a desire for fun and excitement. To me, Ballymun often seemed more like Lord of the Flies. A lot of kids (mostly boys, but some girls) were feral. I got beaten up twice, once pretty badly. The humiliation was worse than the experience itself. Now, not all kids were like that, but quite a lot of them were.

I said I would try to describe the vandalism in Ballymun as I was growing up. It was breathtaking. The omnipresent graffiti was the least of it (I rather liked that). People would frequently urinate in the lifts, burn rubbish in the rubbish chutes, and tear down trees. It seemed to me that everything that could be smashed, pretty much, was smashed.

For instance: Connolly describes how the entry to the fifteen-storey flats originally had thick wooden doors, which were one-by-one ripped from their hinges. (She says she knew somebody who made and sold coffee-tables from them, which is at least better than pointless destruction.) I never knew of their existence. I remember the ground floor landing of my own block of flats had a sort of soft plaster ceiling. Literally overnight, this became punctured all over, when it became a craze for kids to throw L-shaped metal brackets up into it. I remember this very vividly.

And yet, and yet...

And yet, for all the feral kids, and the vandalism, and the sense of being a Johnny-come-lately, I have many golden memories, memories of Ballymun, as well.

First off: it was a place. That might be a strange thing to say. But it seems to me that we are all increasingly living in a sort of no-place ("he's a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land"). The suburbs are extending over the world, and look increasingly samey. Countries themselves look increasingly samey.

Ballymun had a very strong sense of identity. Kids on school trips used to sing: "We're from Ballymun, Bally-ally-allymun." Well, maybe kids everywhere sung their own equivalent of that, but everybody had heard about Ballymun. Even when it appeared on TV, it was instantly recognizable. You could see it from the planes landing and taking off at Dublin airport (my father actually thought that was the idea-- the Powers That Be wanted to show off how modern we were to international visitors.)

Ballymun was even more distinctive than I realised at the time. As Connolly explains at one point: "In the early 1980s there were around twelve thousand under-eighteens living in Ballymun; a vastly greater saturation of teens than in any other area of Ireland". In fact, I think she might be understating it; I read somewhere that Ballymun had the youngest population in the whole EEC (precursor of the EU) at this time.

As well as taking pride in a strong sense of identity, I had happy particular memories, many of which find echoes in Connolly's memoir.

About Halloween, she says: "Hallowe'en was a magical time in Ballymun. All the kids would get dressed up and go trick-or-treating. Then there would be the parties for the kids with apple-bopping, etc. And no Hallowe'en would be complete without a barmbrack. At Hallowe'en in Ballymun you would find things in your barmbrack that the EU have probably since prohibited as a choking risk. Wrapped in greaseproof paper there would be several items that told your fortune... A stick-- meaning you would grow up to be either a wife-beater or a beaten wife; a ring (always popular with the girls) which meant you would marry; a dry pea-- you would never go hungry... I can't imagine for a moment these prophecies were ever taken seriously, kids would just laugh and gently tease the friend who was growing up to be beaten."

Halloween in Ballymun! There was nothing like it. I remember the stockpiling of woods, for the various different bonfires, would go on for weeks. As far as I remember, these were entirely organised by kids, though I think adults stepped in at the building stage. The fire would begin to be built in the afternoon and would be reminiscent of The Wicker Man by the time it was lit. As mentioned before, we lived on the seventh floor (which was actually the eighth floor, since there was a ground floor). The bonfire was built, year after year, in the field directly in front of our block of flats, and the sparks would fly up to our windows. I'm even told the windows themselves would be warm to the touch, though I don't remember that.

I'm surprised Connolly uses the term "trick or treat". It was "Help the Halloween party!" that kids would say when they came knocking on Halloween.

As for the fireworks...it was like a warzone, without the fatalities. I've been in America on the Fourth of July. It's impressive, but it still falls short of a Ballymun Halloween in my childhood-- not in quality, of course, but in sheer quantity.

It's plain that this review is going to take more than one blog post. I expect it's going to be a whole series. Watch this space.