They could’ve built flats in the centre of the town for us and kept reservations like this for them that come in from the country. Home from home it would have been. But us! And the only grass we ever saw we were asked to keep off it. – Dominic Behan
Passing Kildare Road in Crumlin, you couldn’t miss the plaque on no.70. It shows a very familiar face, that of the writer and poet Brendan Behan.
Behan and his family were moved to Crumlin from a tenement in Russell Street. As Ulick O’Connor noted in his biography of the great writer, his childhood in Russell Street would greatly shape Behan, as ‘besides the cultural advantages Brendan inherited from his parents, the indigenous tradition of Dublin played a major part in his development’. To many inner-city Dubliners, Crumlin and the like represented the countryside.
O’Connor notes that the general impression in Russell Street towards the new suburbs where the working class of the city were sent was that they were a place where they ‘ate their young’. Behan himself would refer to the area as the ‘Wild West’. In Behan’s play Moving Out, these new suburbs are referred to as Siberia!
Andrew Kincaid wrote of the emergence of Crumlin, Cabra and the like in his excellent Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies and the Built Environment. The corporation planned Crumlin at first for 3,000 houses, but by 1938 had zoned 2,400 more at Crumlin North.
The Behan’s arrived in the area in 1937, and Brendan himself would soon after be active in republican campaigns in Britain. Still, returns to the house were frequent for the writer. His brother Dominic, a celebrated writer in his own right, would join Na Fianna at the time the family moved to Crumlin.
It was 1977 before the home would be marked by a plaque.
We parked our car by the Clogher Road Allotments nearby, a credit to the local community in the grounds of Pearse College. Walking through them, you find this great tribute to the local lad Brendan. A local lad, but not by choice. What would he think of being honoured in Siberia today?
He’d probably wonder why he was lookin’ at a farm..
And now a crowd of culchies are doing the Quare Fellow in The Mill Theatre in Dundrum. But sure that is in the country too. What’s worse it is a good show.
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