Leave us with the only pillars of society we really love

Sunday Tribune, 4 April

It was the most boring day of my life. The memory of that school trip around Dublin Port and Docks is so watery, I keep expecting these words to slide off the page.
The best thing about it had been the anticipation. We gabbed for weeks about the messing we'd get up to. Our stomachs rumbled at the thought of the special packed lunch: ham sandwiches instead of Easi Singles, a bar of Dairy Milk, Tayto, a can of Club Orange. We prayed it wouldn't rain.
It rained. I've never seen rain like it. It ran into your mouth and up your nose, into your ears and under your anorak hood. It was like being water-boarded.
It was so wet we couldn't leave the bus and just drove around for hours, in almost zero-visibility, as the driver droned on about tonnage and fuel depots. Lunch was all gone by 11.30am. The fun of writing rude words on the fogged-up window soon wore thin. The bus stank of that wet-dog smell peculiar to classrooms and damp children.
Eventually, the rain eased and we were thrown off to look at a stack of palettes.
A man with an 'eff you' expression was leaning against them. He cupped his hand around his cigarette and sucked on it as if he was siphoning petrol from a garda car. He was a 'Real Dub'.
"D'youse know wha' dem lads are really for?" He nodded in the direction of the striped towers at the Pigeon House. We shook our heads.
"Day are, in fact, a pair of barber's poles belonging to my cousin, Mad Barry the Barber."
"He must be a big man, mister."
"Oh, he's big all right. And you should see his barber's razor. It done DIS to me…" Before we knew what was happening, Real Dub had ripped all the hair off his scalp and shot his bottom teeth out of his mouth.
"Arrrrrgggghh!" he roared and we scattered, screaming, back to the bus. A boy from Eden Villas wet himself. Another boy said it was just as well his "ma had made him wear his brown trousers".
The bus drove off to roars of gummy laughter from behind the palettes and someone saying: "Jaysus, Paddy, you're some bollix with that wig. Put your teeth back in."
The Pigeon House towers have dominated my mental landscape of Dublin since then.
As I grew up in the '80s, they became synonymous with Dublin's drabness, and emigration. They were the last thing you saw as you left the country by boat or plane. They were also the first thing you saw coming back. As time passed and life improved, they became a welcoming sight. They were as Dublin as eating Burdock's chips in the rain. They symbolised home.
Last Wednesday, the towers stopped puffing clouds out over Dublin. They will probably be demolished as the Corpo hasn't listed them.
The Mail ran a story on Thursday about a €1bn plan to turn them into giant windmills. It was a particularly good April Fool's joke and I nearly fell for it. After the week we've just had, you'd believe anything. We're bailing out Anglo for billions. Hahahaha! April Fool's? No, we're serious.
Our lives have been signed over to pay for the debts of developers who saw Ireland only as bricks and mortar. The Pigeon House towers are now being looked at in the same way – to maximise profit for the ESB.
They are more than bricks and mortar. They are rooted in our culture: featuring in our art, movies, music videos. When they were operating, they symbolised an elegant city which was rough around the edges. They were like two old hard chaws, smoking and working away, looking down disdainfully on the pretentious gits below.
The city's contrariness is stacked up in them. They say "welcome to this glorious kip – Dirty Dublin. What're you bleedin' lookin' ah?"
The depth of emotion over their destruction says a lot about how Dubliners view their city. It's hard to imagine the same reaction to the Spire being uprooted. Dubliners made the towers 'ironic iconic', unlike the Spire which came pre-packaged as a symbol.
You can't force a symbol on Dubliners: they will always choose their own – from the contrariest of places. Last month, 15,000 people signed up to a Facebook campaign to honour Dublin character 'Dancing' Mary Margaret Dunne who preached on O'Connell Street for 30 years. The city missed her. Dublin may have stopped producing characters, but it hasn't stopped loving them.
There was an outcry last year when it seemed another Dublin symbol was doomed – remember the spice-burger crisis? Characters, burgers, chimneys… these are the things Dubliners believe define them, not grand structures. They're the symbols of a city that can't take itself seriously. A city that gives direction by pubs rather than street. ("It's near Mulligan's.") That sees two grimy chimneys as being as symbolic as the Eiffel Tower.
Tearing them down will feel like another victory for the developers. They've taken enough from us. We need these high-rise towers to continue symbolising our modern city with its modest, low-rise attitude.
Last week, Nama began pulling down the former pillars of Irish society. As Ireland changes, these are two pillars of society that deserve to remain standing.

dkenny@tribune.ie

April 4, 2010