Come Here To Me!

Yesterday Gardaí and the Dublin Fire Brigade were called to the headquarters of RTE where a man had scaled the mast with a number of protest banners. Sadly for him, he did it late at night when the area was in darkness and none of the news reports on the event seem to make mention to what his protest was in relation to. It seems from the Tweet Machine that his protest was about Ryanair. Perhaps there is a charge for protesting at O’Leary’s HQ.

The man came down and was arrested by Gardaí.

I rooted out this Indo report from June 14 1984, when a number of young republicans took to the mast in protest at RTE’s censorship of republican voices. Of course, RTE today is a completely impartial news source and I’m known to be a huge fan.

This is a great new venture, DublinCityGraffiti.com

It’s great to see stuff around the city worked into subcategories such as paste-ups, murals, stickers and stencils, with special sections for the ‘repeat offenders’.

I snapped the picture at the top of this piece months and months back on a sunny morning walking to work. Since then, the piece is long removed. It’s nice to see a site documenting what goes up on the walls of the capital. Some of it is good, some of it is not so good, some of is clever, some of it is not so clever. Knowing absolutely nothing about graffiti beyond the right way to hold a spraycan, I always see myself as the random punter someone was trying to get something across to.

It’s a great way to kill half an hour, give it a look.

There is a pretty worrying read in The Irish Times today regarding the future of the Light House Cinema in Smithfield.

THE BOARD of Dublin’s Light House cinema will meet today to discuss its future ahead of a High Court hearing of a petition to wind up the company.

John Flynn, the cinema’s landlord, has issued a wind-up petition against Light House Cinema Exhibition and Distribution Company Limited, following a dispute about the rent on the Smithfield premises. The petition will be heard on Monday.

The directors of the cinema have been in negotiations with Mr Flynn and his family in relation to the rent charged on the property, which houses four cinema screens in a basement building in Smithfield Market. It is understood the landlord doubled the annual rent from €100,000 to €200,000 last May. The directors have withheld a portion of the rent charged.

You can read the report here.

My visits to the Light House were few and far between, mainly owing to its location, but I did love it when I visited. At 4 screens it is, much like the IFI in Temple Bar, catered towards art house cinema and foreign film screenings that might not get a look-in at the likes of Cineworld.

It’s a sign of the times of course, and if one walks through Smithfield you can’t help but notice the amount of empty retail units in the area that never really took off in the way you’d suspect was expected.

It will be a great loss to cinema goers in Dublin if it is lost, as The Cobblestone is undoubtedly the best spot in the city for pre-cinema pints.

A Ballyfermot child discusses religion in The Rocky Road To Dublin

Rocky Road to Dublin indeed! The film is anticlerical, antigovernment, anti-G.A.A, anti-censor, anti-Abbey Theatre – anti EVERYTHING.

-Evening Herald,1968.

I was saddened today to hear that Peter Lennon has passed away. Lennon was a renowned journalist and the man behind the groundbreaking documentary The Rocky Road To Dublin, which blew many cobwebs off of what people thought Ireland was and showed what lay underneath in many regards. The documentary featured people as diverse as Seán Ó Faoláin and Conor Cruise O’Brien, and forced many to look at the role of the church in Irish society. At the time the documentary was produced, in the late 1960s, Lennon was based in Paris as a journalist for The Guardian and it was upon a return trip to Dublin that he decided to produce The Rocky Road… a critical analysis of Irish society at the time.

It was 2004 before the film was restored by the Irish Film Board. It had been the victim of a de-facto banning here in Ireland for years before that. Lennon and the team behind the work, like so many others who dared question the society of the period, found themselves effectively silenced.

Was there a revolution in Ireland? “A rebellion led by poets and socialists”, as Lennon described it, had led to a strange and conservative country, and Ó Faoláin goes further on film to call it “a country without moral courage” and a society “in constant alliance with a completely oppressive,regressive and uncultivated church.”

I’ve always loved the scenes in Ballyfermot, a corner of the city close to my heart and family. The young children shown are happier than any you’ll find today, despite living in a society defined by inequality.

We owe Peter Lennon so much for The Rocky Road To Dublin.

This excellent documentary is also worth a look, from Icarus Films:

This documentary reunites director Peter Lennon and cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who recount the making of their then controversial but now classic documentary on Ireland in the Sixties. Rocky Road to Dublin was screened for only a few weeks at a single Dublin theater and was critically condemned and accused of being Communist-funded. But as Lennon explains, while the Irish saw Rocky Road to Dublin as an insult, the French saw it as a film.

If so, please do get in touch with me at donal.ofalluin.2009(at)nuim.ie

The destruction of Wood Quay is something I’m fascinated by at the minute and hoping to do some study on in the future. I’d love to do a feature on the site here, as last year I undertook a college research project on viking homes in Dublin last year that really brought the magnitude of what happened at Wood Quay home.

Youtuber thachabre has uploaded this excellent footage from 1979, showing Historical Societies from all over Ireland and ordinary Dubliners marching in protest at the plans for the Civic Offices.