Dunphy, women and the Joys of life

ONE of the most striking things about Eamon Dunphy’s upbringing in Drumcondra, on Dublin’s northside, was the love his parents had for each other.

Every evening when his father arrived home from his day’s work as a builder’s labourer, it was “a cause for rejoicing,” writes Dunphy in the first volume of his autobiography, The Rocky Road.

When his father lost his job and returned home having traipsed around for the day unsuccessfully looking for work, Dunphy’s mother Peg would embrace him gently: “Don’t worry love, we’re fine.”

Their “deep love” endured despite exhausting financial anxieties. They lived through the 1950s under the cloud of possible eviction. The family of four, including Dunphy’s younger brother Kevin, shared a single room with no electricity or running water. Dunphy slept on the floor, and went about his day in patched-up clothes.

His parents chose to live in Drumcondra as the only poor family in a lower middle class neighbourhood, forsaking the chance to move into more spacious digs in a local authority, inner-city flat complex.

“We weren’t all in it together as you are in a poor community,” he says. “We stuck out for various reasons — the accommodation, clothes, the fact that my father was a labourer, and was unemployed. Most of the people around were teachers, lower-grade civil servants, butchers. That’s what made me a kind of outsider by nature — that experience of growing up.

“We were around what my mother would call respectable people. She didn’t have any time for the real Dubs who ate tinned peas and fish ’n’ chips. She was a countrywoman and those were her values and maybe her prejudices.

“We stayed in a good school. That was very important for her, and the teacher there, Mr Hayden, was a terrific person for the five or six years that I was with him. He gave me confidence. He directed me towards the library. Those early 12 years were hugely important and formative. In a different school, in a different neighbourhood, it would have been very different indeed.”

Dunphy’s father was a gentle, principled man, who once refused to join Fianna Fáil when it would have saved him his job. Dunphy’s mother’s strength of character, and her defiance of the city’s merchant class, impressed him. She fell out with all five local butchers in Drumcondra because they tried to dupe her with poor cuts of meat. She was dismissive of her son’s rise as a media star.

“She thought all that was codology,” he says. “She wasn’t exactly thrilled when I joined the spoofing class. My parents didn’t really approve. They would have preferred if I was like my brother Kevin, who was a plumber and a terrific person, and an ordinary person, and not this national monster.”

His first wife, Sandra, is only mentioned by name once in the book. He married long-time partner, RTÉ drama commissioning editor Jane Gogan, in 2009.

“I don’t go into my personal life because I don’t think it belongs to me — my children, my wives. I don’t think I have the right to invade their privacy to sell books. It’s really about my professional life.”

He does, however, paint a vivid picture of Dublin’s nightlife in the 1980s, particularly of the carry-on in the Shelbourne Hotel’s Horseshoe Bar, and Joys nightclub on Baggot St, home to night-birds and middle-aged men wearing Marks & Spencer jumpers.

“Enda Kenny was a very nice guy,” he says. “He wasn’t a heavy drinker. He was a bit of a skirt-chaser when he was young, before he was married.

“But he was a good fella. It was always pleasant to meet him [in Joys].

“Brian Cowen would have been a big drinker. He would have been a regular as well.

“Austin Deasy, who was a renegade Fine Gael TD and a very nice man, and Desmond Fennell, a great philosopher, would be sitting in there having a glass of red wine and listening to The Hollies.

“I loved it. You’d always meet somebody in there — Paul McGuinness, Paul Tansey, PJ Mara — that you could have a laugh with, and forget about your woes for a few hours, and maybe get lucky.

“It was the last place open in town, a place where separated, divorced or people who couldn’t sleep, tended to go. It had that whiff of desperation and despair. Obviously the drink was an anaesthetic. I think very fondly of Joys. Most of us do.”

* Eamon Dunphy’s The Rocky Road is published by Penguin Ireland. It costs €22