Small Town Writer

Dogs bark, girls scream and boys shout

After noon, men and women filter through doors of pharmacies, groceries, draperies, betting shops and bookshop. Schools have their exodus, several times. School exit hours are staggered to avoid traffic blocks but added to road repairs and traffic lights, the town is gridlocked. 

Dogs bark, girls scream and boys shout. 

Town planning is not a science. It is largely guesswork. Like government predictions they are usually wrong, miscalculated or not even considered in the light of decisions taken. Hard to believe that anyone has environmental concerns or worries about the future. The selfish gene is prevalent in all that people do.

The din you hear on main street is chaos

Mid morning, the main street is gridlocked for several minutes. An articulated truck, a double-deck bus, an empty airport bus and a refuse wagon vie for space. An octogenarian woman in a maroon, crocheted beret and blue anorak, leans on her walking stick as if dazed by the sudden arrival of police and the military toting automatic weapons. Helmeted soldiers clamber out of a jeep to take up strategic points of the street while Brinks delivers its load of paper cash and coin. The Angelus bell tolls midday. Thirty minutes later cafes begin to buzz. After lunch hammer blows ring. Buzz saws whine. Metal teeth grind into granite. Dust wafts around and spirals. Work on the narrowing of the artery outside the train station continues.

The questions will not go away. Are they building a bottleneck to throttle the main street?

Praise be the Credit Union

Pensioners and welfare seekers number large among those who stand in line outside the town’s public and private concerns dispensing riches. Thursdays, before opening time, there is a queue outside the Post Office for payouts. Recently the government decided to move our Post Office from the main thoroughfare to a dark corner of a modern piazza. Rumours flew around that the PO was being shut down. There were no denials. The shortage of good PR was such that even the staffers did not appear to know their fate.

The new office is small and a cheerless, as much for the clientele, as the civil servants parked behind its bullet proof glass.

Outside the main banks most days to the week, clusters of people block the sidewalks waiting for the countdown. Banks do not unbolt their doors until ten and sometimes 10:30 am; and if you are thirty seconds late at closing time, too bad. The bankers issued much ballyhoo in the past about how IT would provide more time for staff to spend with their customers. We would all cuddle up together and nothing would be much trouble.

Post Crunch, banks are not recruiting and those who leave are not being replaced. Unless they are big shots, that is.

The Credit Union remains the most humane of money dispensaries in our town.

Bells ring Changes in Our Town

Mornings, in our three churches—Catholic, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian—the faithful assemble each morning for Mass and prayer services. Though congregation numbers have dwindled considerably in the past fifty years, the zeal of their pastors has not. A metamorphosis within the parishes has occurred that continues. Christian dynastic monopolies of godliness may be in decline but in our town people have adjusted to the times.

It is easy to forget that without priests and nuns of all faiths in the mid nineteenth century, there were no great organisations to administer the welfare, education and spiritual needs to the sick and indigent. Gradually governments took over the responsibility, just as in microcosm, the laity now manage their own affairs.

Today’s parishes provide family meeting space for community endeavour; centres where groups may take exercise physically or intellectually, and find support and stimulus for their afflictions. You don’t have to be a member of a particular church to be a participant.

In our town, close on one hundred groups operate in that great nebulae democracy. They elect their own presidents, chairmen, and chairwomen to organise and run their own activities in many branches of the humanities and, perhaps the most amazing “religion” of all, sport.

Posted at 09:56 AM in Politics & philosophy, Religion, Small town life | Permalink

Technorati Tags: Catholic, church, education, Episcopalian, nuns, Presbyterian, religion, spiritual,sport

Child labour?

Morning sightings of children burdened by the weight of books labouring on foot to school bring to mind pictures of Victorian scenes of child labour. Parents complain publicly of the possibility that such physical toil may bring on physical deformities. The response from the teachers is that they need so many tomes in order to keep up with the broad curriculum. Capitalism, it seems, has found another way of bestowing hardship on children in a perfectly legal way and more arguments in favour of parents who deliver their children by automobile to the school’s front door.

uh-oh

(Right: Work outside
Greystones railway station,
January 2009. Photo McNiff)

DOUBTS ARISE AS TRAFFIC
PROJECT NEARS CLOSE

At the town’s busy commuter hub beside the train station, finely cut blocks of granite have been laid. Pavements have been expanded outwards, narrowing the road for vehicles. New parking bays for drivers and public transport have been zoned and carved out. But just as the €500,000 project nears the finishing line doubts have arisen among our elected representatives.

Passengers will be able to watch people drawing money from the local bank’s hole in the wall, one councillor said. Of course, it is for the bank to preserve the privacy of the bank's customers, not the Town Council.

The whole area is too narrow, traffic will be gridlocked, was another criticisms; and a bus driver’s representative voiced concerns about the bus bay being able to accommodate one bus at a time when there other private bus companies to be considered, each one arriving during rush hour periods.

The dissent will continue and the consultants who planned the scheme will be the target. What could they have been thinking of?

Well, one consideration might be that one day soon – say fity years from now – gas will be rationed for public transport only.  There may be none at all for private motorists.

Along the shore

Before the sun pushes over the rim of the sea walkers and joggers are out, beating tarmac along the shore, or walking dogs below the tide mark to avoid the task of cleaning up after them on public paths. On these dark mornings the riding lights of fishing boats may be seen trawling the Kish and India banks. 

At 6:00 am the gymnasiums open as the winding road over the hill to the city begins to hum with toil of automobiles and buses and they commuter trains whirr and hoots along the track. In the first golden rays, a flight of cormorants beats south while a colony of gulls rises listlessly from the shore, circles and descends to the slate and argillite rocks south of the harbour.  On the south shore the day’s first skinny dipper arrives to bathe. Others will follow, in their seventies and eighties, before breakfast while men from the bakeries fill our shops with daily bread. 

Papering over truth when facts run short

 Our town rises early. By the time the farmers relieve their herds of milk, yesterday’s yield is on our table with the dailies, breaking yesterday’s news. Postmen have pigeonholed several tons of mail, stacked vans with parcels and packed their sacks for deliveries.

TRUTH DID YE SAY?

On the screen before me there is evidence aplenty of activity in cyberspace: bloggers, spammers and hackers and updaters and e-mailers. It’s all graft. In the background, the radio blathers on about this and that, papering over the cracks with speculation whenever facts run out or truth breaks down. For good and ill, much has changed swiftly in fifty years of our small town life. Yet, the basic human requirements for the living in small urban towns remain. We all need shelter, a regular income, food and space to take our leisure.

BREAD AND BUTTER TIME

This place is deemed a dormer town, which means a routine of sleep here and toil elsewhere for the majority of students and working adults. Service and light industries are alive to the bust and competition but the boom is over. It is bread and butter time.

We were spared the pollution of factory development but, business parks better suited to the education of our population, elude us. House construction gathered momentum in the 1970s soared into the stratosphere of high prices in the ’90’s until its collapse in 2009. The rapid spread of concrete and asphalt over once green fields alarmed many. The redevelopment of an old and dilapidated Victorian harbour, well past its usefulness, angered others but its construction continues.

Scary stuff from RTE Radio commander

Clare Duignan, back in RTE Radio as managing director after a lousy record  in television continues to lead her charmed life. “Very real challenges now face RTÉ Radio,” she says announcing the  latest schedule.* Hey, it's a scary world out here away from the careworn corridors of RTE power. 

Greystones Harbour, Block 2000

IT TOOK TIME to get this far. It was a political football and still is. It cost two public inquiries. Put half a million bucks on the construction bill and saw one wannabe politician bite the dust at a personal cost of €38,000.