LETTERS TO MY CHILDREN- 16th September 1992

Dear Jack & Clare,

I was sitting in my office mentally composing a shatteringly elegant and witty opening to this letter when the heavens erupted with one of the loudest thunderclaps I can recall ever hearing. It was followed toute suite by every car alarm in Northumberland Road shrieking in protest at being roused from their usual passive vigilance.

It was good fun though, watching young exec's scurrying out to their cars, hopping from one foot to the other in the downpour while they tried to locate the appropriate key, insert it and turn off their petulant possessions. Despite the fact that they were drowned by this time, they would sprint back to their offices in the faint hope of preserving some piece of apparel (the underside of their wristwatch perhaps?) from the oppressive sheets of water falling on them.

One poor soul had the galling experience, when he turned for the sprint back to the dry haven of his office, of watching a female colleague languidly extend her arm out a window and shut off her alarm by remote control. From a distance it looked like a sympathetic smile, or was she........................ ? Surely not.

I met an interesting pair during my lunchbreak at Sandymount Strand today. With the characteristic abruptness of the Summer version of the Irish weather front, the thunderous gloom disappeared and I took myself off to Sandymount Strand car park to enjoy a couple of sun soaked sandwiches. An elderly gentleman and a young lad of eighteen or so pulled up beside me and started to eat their lunch, staring fixedly out to sea. Occasionally, well - about every ten minutes or so, I would hear a brief phrase uttered by one, never answered by more than a monosyllable from the other.

"Are they workmates?" I pondered. "Friends, acquaintances, or related to each other, as say brothers, uncle and nephew or father and son?" On a subsequent visit I discovered that the last category applied. They were a father and son who worked together, lived in the one house and lunched together.

"We don't see that much of each other really" claimed the son, whose name was Padraig. "Only one person can work on any one piece at a time, so we don't really have any contact during working hours." They were engravers. "We live on different floors of the house. Me Ma is dead and Ivor, that's me Da, has his pals and I have mine. He eats at a friend's house all the time, neither of us would touch a breakfast, so lunch is the only time we spend together. It's kind of a tradition at this stage.

I asked if they talked much and did they always go to Sandymount for lunch? "On the talking front, I'd have to say not really a lot, no, and if we found ourselves saying a lot to each other about something, then we'd probably be having a row. Mind you, we don't row often," Padraig added.

"We went to Monkstown once, just after I started working with Ivor," he recalled. "It was my idea. I thought it would be nice for a change. But Ivor didn't like it, so we came back here."
I left him then, strolling along in the September sun on his own (apparently Ivor doesn't like going for walks either. "Can't see the point in them"), dreaming of the exotic climes of Monkstown's sea front car park.

All the best,

Dad

LETTERS TO MY CHILDREN - 15 September 1992

Dear Jack & Clare,

I'm renting offices in a lovely old redbrick house with beautiful high ceilings, embellished with intricate and flamboyant plasterwork, lots of original paintings and pictures and great, big, solid pine doors. I'll only be here for a short while longer and I think I'll miss it greatly. Sometimes I catch myself gazing around, lost in the elegance and grandeur of the recent past.

Well the present intruded on the past rather abruptly as I was greeted by an unusual sight when I arrived at the office this morning. We had been broken into. the thieves had an interesting modus operandi. They got into each room by using what seemed to be a bazooka (but was more likely a crowbar). The beautiful panelled pine doors and surrounds were shattered. In our office, files were strewn about, drawers opened but absolutely nothing taken. There were thousands of pounds worth of computer equipment in boxes ready for removal, portable printers and PC's, even a mobile phone with batteries and charger. All ignored.

And it was the same in each of the other offices in the building. Door blasted open, place ransacked, nothing taken. Even a cheque was left behind. One company was the exception in that they had some cash hidden up a chimney and that disappeared.

Well later on that day, much later, the Guardians of the Peace arrived or at least one plainclothes detective showed up who looked like he was heading for the golf course in his Pringle sweater and slacks, casually fiddling with his walkie talkie like it was a portable phone or a driver (he wished). He was taken around by our very efficient Receptionist cum Office Manager. Did he suggest fingerprinting? No. Mind you, he did agree with her, although none too enthusiastically, that it might be worth interviewing the next door neighbours.

His casually delivered parting remarks constituted a careful and considered summation of the situation. "Dem doors are shagged. I know a lad down the Merrion Road who's good at fixing Georgian doors like dem wans". I wondered how much work his friend down the Merrion Road got out of the cases that this "Columbo" investigated.

What interested me most about the whole affair was the almost casual acceptance of the crime by all those affected. Beyond mild annoyance at having to re-file some paperwork, people just continued on. Just one of those things. C'est la vie.

Ten or twenty years ago we would have been shocked at this trespass. All of our friends would have heard about it. Now it's no longer a rarity. It's commonplace. A sad reminder of the excesses that those standing on the wrong side of the widening gulf between rich and poor are driven to.

Democracy and the Market Economy can only work properly if those "have-nots" can feel that this gap, as it were, can be bridged and they can see others from their side of the divide attempting this feat and succeeding. I guess that this process is more likely to occur if they arrive at adulthood well equipped, i.e. with a good/broad education and that prized product of such an education, a lively, enquiring yet disciplined mind. We must ensure that the quality of all resources devoted to the education of the less well off in this Society are maintained to the highest standard and improved upon if at all possible. Otherwise we are putting people in a social cage and taking away any possibility of release or escape.

The frustration that this would cause could pave the way for an upwardly spiralling crime rate and social disenfranchisement. Every penny invested in education now is a pound less that we'll have to spend in policing our streets, in repairing our property and possibly our lives in years to come. Sounds a bit simplistic? Sometimes the most complex problems have the simplest solutions.

All the best,

Dad

LETTERS TO MY CHILDREN - 14 September 1992

Dear Jack & Clare,

Sitting in the back of the cab from the airport, listening to the driver's umpteenth "knoworrimeyan", I surprised my self and began to feel good. I began to feel a sense of achievement. I had come home. So often when I returned from lunch to my office in Kilburn I would be saddened by the sight of big, strong men, men that belonged at home in Ireland, sitting, sipping their lives away in dark and dirty pubs.

I consoled myself with thoughts that they were an older, different generation to mine, less educated and less prepared to benefit from the opportunities to be had in the more prosperous countries we had all been forced to emigrate to. However, even my generation of graduates, the "Puppies" or Paddy Yuppies of London would complain about the "quality of life" in London and how much better it would be if one could "get back". I have to laugh, sure we wouldn't know what "quality of life" actually meant if it jumped up and bit us in the face! Mind you, this slip, this chink in the armor we had all adopted on arrival in London, would immediaely be covered over with coments on the "terrible unemployment that forced us to leave", "the fact that the Irish Welfare State is non-existent" and "the cruelly high levels of taxation. Sure yer disposable income would be slashed by two thirds and you left with the small bit!"

I had done it though. I had returned. Now all that remained was to find a home for you and your Mum and to get you both over here as quickly as possible.

I was surprised at the amount of building that was going on. Ambitious projects with elegant facades in long-dormant, run down parts of the city. Even the quality of the houses in the numerous new developments that I viewed was high, much higher than I remembered in the late seventies and early eighties prior to my leaving.

There was a lot of bikes on the roads still, but maybe that was just the fine summer weather. When I drove along the coast roads, out around Malahide or along Sandymount Strand, I noticed lots of people out walking. Some strolling along as though on a casual promenade around a small Mediterranean town and some getting in some seriously brisk exercise.

There seemed to be more restaurants too. More reasonably priced, offering better quality food, better service and a wider variety of cuisines.

I know that this is starting to read like a bit of a Bord Failte Handout, Jack, and maybe your old Dad is looking at his native land through rose coloured glasses but it's how I see it all right now. Maybe it'll change as time goes on. We'll see.

All the best,

Dad