I was 65 yesterday. I feel the same as ever, but Ireland has changed
But, apart from that, and that I have to carry two pairs of glasses everywhere, I have no complaints. Good to go for a while yet. I’m not ready for the gold watch, not by a long chalk.
I’m only saying all this, because, if you’re a friend of mine on Facebook (I must get around to meeting all my Facebook friends some day) you’ll have noticed that I’m passing through one of those milestones that used to be significant. I’m starting the long (I hope) journey into old age.
But I’ve decided that 65 is the new 40. I still feel 28. I’m still ready to have a go at changing the world, every day I wake up. I’m still a success — at least in Churchill’s description of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
But, my goodness, isn’t it a different world? My wife and I were talking about it last night, when we went for a walk, about the changes we’ve lived through. We haven’t had to survive a world war or any of the great catastrophes, but if we tried to describe to our grandchildren (or even our children) the Ireland in which we grew up, they’d laugh at you.
My twin sister and I were born in Dublin on June 1, 1950 (Happy birthday, Finola). Apart from that singular event, June 1, 1950, may well have been the dullest day of the 20th century. Nothing else happened anywhere, as far as I know.
We share our birthday with the actress Gemma Craven, whom I remember fondly as the writer Polly Clarke, who had a terrible effect on Father Ted. We also share our birthday with the Dutch minister for traffic (whose name wouldn’t mean much to you). And some TV station began to broadcast for the first time in Kalamazoo, Michigan. That’s it. Nothing else to report.
If you wanted excitement that day, you wouldn’t have found it in Dáil Éireann. John A Costello was taoiseach the year I was born, and Eamon De Valera was languishing on the opposition benches. Mr Costello had created great excitement the previous year with his unilateral declaration of a republic. But politics had settled into a deeply moribund state by the time I had arrived (not that I arrived in politics just then, but you know what I mean).
The Dáil record for June 1, 1950, contains just nine parliamentary questions. The only one of them that occasioned any debate was whether or not Old IRA men should receive favourable treatment when workers were being made redundant.
The rest of the day was a long and meandering debate about the estimate for the department of industry and commerce. (You see how sad I am, when I tell you that I read it all.) There’s only one gem. The redoubtable Honor Crowley, Fianna Fáil TD for South Kerry, made a passionate speech about inflation — and used the following examples: “I will take two or three articles used in every household in rural Ireland. One of them is oatmeal. Oatmeal, to my mind, should be one of the cheap commodities, but, recently, it went up very much in price. If every child going to school in the winter, and every man going to work, could have a hot meal of porridge for his breakfast, it would stand him in good stead during the day, especially when you realise that many men depend on bread and tea, only, for their midday meal. Another thing that has gone up is sausages. The cost of bacon and meat is so high that the housewife has often to rely on sausages to fill the gap.”
They were the days when price and rent increases were recorded in our parliament in pennies and shillings. Days of innocence and stagnation, with never-changing values and morals.
But it was only a month later that Dr Noel Browne published his famous Mother and Child Scheme, by sending a paper to the Irish Medical Association. Free, universal GP and other health services were to be made available to every child in Ireland — at a cost of £2m. Slowly, the entire country started to go mad. Doctors saw it as communism, and, more ominously, the Catholic Church saw it as hostile to their moral teachings.
The Church won that battle and that government fell apart. It was the first battle here of Church and State, and, over the next 65 years, those tensions have surfaced again and again.
Nowadays, some of the attitudes adopted back then would be unthinkable — could you imagine a Taoiseach today solemnly telling the Dáil, as John A Costello did, “I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first, and I accept, without qualification, in all respects, the teaching of the hierarchy and the Church to which I belong”.
But we still don’t have free universal access to healthcare for every child in Ireland. It is, finally, on the way — 65 years later.
It’s not the only change, of course. The country into which I was born and grew up is unrecognisable. My father brought home a record player — it had a needle and an arm — when I was seven or eight. We had two records — The Mikado and Carmen Jones — and I can still sing ‘Three Little Maids’.
He didn’t buy a car — a Ford Anglia — until I was 10. He bought a television for JFK’s visit to Ireland, in the summer of 1963, and it was my job to keep adjusting the rabbit’s ears so we could watch the US president’s progress. I know it was June, but it seemed to be snowing on the telly.
I had left college when we got rid of the old money (not for euro, children, but for decimal coins). After we got married, we bought our first house, but it took three years to get a phone installed. Mind you, we had great television reception in that house — of RTÉ only — as long as we kept the telly in the window, where it had a good view of the Mullaghmore transmitter in Co Cork.
In my memory, the sun shone a lot back then. Ireland was good to grow up in, and later to raise children in. I remember long grass, and camping holidays, and coping with bangers of cars that kept breaking down. I remember TK lemonade and Angel Delight and sausage sandwiches. And it was grand.
Maybe I am getting old, after all.
