These days the Dublin suburb of Stillorgan is almost synonomous with traffic jams and the controversial new bus corridor, but as a teenager there in the 1950s, I was living "out in the sticks". Anywhere five miles from Nelson Pillar was "the country". Today, Stillorgan "village" has been swallowed up by the massive expansion of the city and Dublin is sliding down the coast to Wicklow like concrete lava.
When Dad moved to Stillorgan his colleagues, who preferred to rent accommodation within a quick bicycle ride of the office, thought he was crazy to be going so far from civilisation. They warned that he would regret it. How would he get in and out of town to work? Dad wasn't in the least bit deflated. He knew that the further out you went out the cheaper the houses were.
Quiet times
Years earlier, when Brendan Behan's family emigrated from Russell Street in the inner city to Crumlin, his shocked neighbours cautioned: "They eat their young out there."
Those were quiet times; nothing much ever happened. Emigration to Britain and the US was rampant. The only Celtic Tigers we knew were up in the Zoo or in Duffy's Circus.
While Dad showed great foresight to move, even he couldn't have imagined the city would expand as rapidly from those sleepy days. And they certainly were sleepy. For instance, I remember him teaching me to drive when I was 16. One day he there was going to be a really big lesson: I would have to drive the car into town on Sunday. The fateful morning arrived and we set off in the trusty green Morris Minor. Of course, I stalled on O'Connell Bridge because of a bad gear-change. Where else, but the State's main thoroughfare? Yet, it didn't matter in the least. There was no traffic on Sunday mornings: the Sabbath was literally a day of rest. Nor were there one-way streets, parking meters, single or double yellow lines, clampers. It was a motorists' paradise. When the 1960s arrived, things began to move forward. One day Dad was chuckling away to himself. "What's the joke?" I asked. He explained that there was "talk" that a dual-carriageway was going to be built from Donnybrook to Stillorgan. When he stopped laughing, he said: "I'll believe that when I see it: just a political gimmick, another white elephant." But come it most certainly did. It went through the fields I used to go bird-nesting in, by-passing Stillorgan village in a long carpet of tarmacadam.
Two large "advance factories" were built in Cornelscourt, a few miles away. They lay there for years but no rich industrialists jumped in to occupy them. Ben Dunne Senior eventually decided to buy them to get a foothold in south Co Dublin. Dad was astounded. "What's an intelligent man like Ben Dunne doing buying those sheds for? Who in the name of God would go out that far to buy groceries? He must have lost his marbles."
Barber's shop
But, as they say in the Bible, it all came to pass. That's why Dad and I were always just pen-pushing journalists with no business acumen and the Dunnes became one of the richest families in the State.
One sunny summer's morning I was getting a haircut in my local barber's shop, which was located in a small house in the village. I can remember my barber (they weren't called hairdressers or hair stylists in those days) almost in tears, saying: "It's a disgrace, it's a damn disgrace, people have no rights. I never thought I would live to see the day."
I didn't know what the man was raving about. "What's the problem?" I asked, worried about his anger, and afraid he would cut my ear off because he was so preoccupied. He said some wealthy consortium was buying up all the cottages and other properties in the village, including his, and they were going to build something called a shopping centre. It would be the first big shopping centre in the State. Wow.
The residents of Stillorgan looked on this revelation with deep scepticism. Dad was convinced it would never happen and, if by some remote chance it did get off the ground, it would be a flop.
Again, it all came to pass. Watching slumbering Ireland waking up to the world of commerce in the was becoming quite an experience. In the early 1960s we heard that some strange thing called a bowling alley was going to be built. Who had ever heard of bowling? If nobody knew how to play it, who would go into it? But it duly arrived and was a huge success. Everybody suddenly wanted to play bowls. We were dizzy watching all this "progress." Stillorgan was becoming like a town in the US, like in the movies. There was simply no stopping it. We were becoming the centre of the universe.
First pint
It was around this time I picked up the courage to creep into the adult world and have my first pint of Guinness in Cullen's. This little pub, down the hill from its better known rival, Bolands, was owned by a very elderly lady called "Ma" Cullen. She used to pull pints at a snail's pace and bring them out from behind the counter to the elderly clientele. Well, they were elderly to me, but they were probably only in their 40s or 50s. Many of these old people would have a dog lying beside them. They would clean their ashtrays and pour some Guinness for the grateful animals.
That pub is gone a long time, replaced by a big modern hostelry. And so is the old Stillorgan I knew. Nowadays, pubs don't admit dogs. In Dublin there are bouncers on the doorsteps of pubs. These big gentlemen, with their wide shoulders, dicky bows and dark suits, don't even let humans in. Yes, things have changed a lot. Wonder what Dad would have thought of it all.