Walking past the shuttered front of Independent House on Middle Abbey Street, Dublin, recently, I was prompted to think of ghosts and how, when you reach a certain age, the world can seem to be populated with them. Among the spirits that hover around you can be people you knew who are now deceased but also characters from history and literature who made an impression at some stage along the way. All this was summoned to mind by the shuttered front of the building that once housed “the Indo” and what were once the offices of the Freeman’s Journal.
I read James Joyce’s Ulysses when in my early twenties and the scenes that left an impression include the ones where Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are both in the Freeman’s Middle Abbey Street offices, Ireland’s main newspaper in June 1904, conducting their business while newsboys scamp about. Bloom, concerned with the placing of an ad, and Dedalus, concerned with the placing of a letter, neatly encapsulate the dual focuses of the newspaper industry. (Stephen’s father, Simon Dedalus, who heads off from the Freeman offices for a drink in a nearby pub, the Oval, encapsulates another aspect of the industry.)
Being on Abbey Street also summoned up thoughts of James Plunkett’s great Dublin novel, Strumpet City, set during the 1913 lockout, and of William Martin Murphy, the businessman and politician who owned the Irish Independent at the time and was such a passionate opponent of the trade union movement. His Indo went on to eclipse and subsume the Freeman as the dominant title on the island and he and it were passionately opposed not just to trade unions and the lockout but also to the Easter Rising, during which so much of the city centre was destroyed.
Independent House was built in 1924, in the wake of the Rising’s destruction of the former Independent premises, and so postdates the fictional events of Joyce’s novel (which took place a few doors’ down) and the historical backdrop to Plunkett’s. Nevertheless, it summoned both to memory, perhaps because of the continuance of function. Ghosts don’t have to comply with the laws of physics or reason.
Lord of the Ring – Tim Fanning on pioneering boxing writer Pierce Egan
Independent thinking – John Mulqueen on the power that Independent TDs can wield
Ghosts in the machine – Colm Keena on hovering spirits from the past
Spreading the News – Ray Burke on a play by Lady Gregory that resonates to this day
When I was starting out as a reporter in the 1980s, the Indo, publisher of the Irish and Sunday Independent, and the Evening Herald, still had its commercial and editorial offices in the 1924 building, and its printing press on the ground floor. I had the good fortune once of seeing the printing press in action in the 1980s. The metal used for the plates of a particular edition were melted down and used to make those of later editions. It was a real old-school, noisy, industrial production site, right there a few hundred yards from O’Connell Street.
As a freelance I was once commissioned by the then Indo features editor, the late Jim Farrelly, to go in search of two men in Tallaght then in the news (they had been dubbed the Tallaght Two). Myself and an attractive and talented young female photographer, whose name I forget, spent an afternoon in a taxi travelling around Tallaght, and eventually tracked down the people we wanted to interview. The powers that be in the Indo were impressed, and I was called to the office of a senior editorial figure who told me there was a desk waiting in Independent House if I kept up the good work. “None of that change the world sh*te now,” he shouted after me as I walked back down the corridor.
I ended up working in the Burgh Quay offices of the Press group, the three titles of which were in competition with those emanating from Abbey Street. The then Indo editor, the late Vinny Doyle, was infamous for “lifting” any scoops the Press produced and placing them in later editions of the Indo. The Press journalists tended to fall into Mulligan’s pub at the end of a shift, while the Indo journalists used the Oval as their watering hole, but once or twice I darkened the doors of our rival’s hostelry, and I can recall seeing Doyle having a no-doubt well-deserved drink after putting yet another edition to bed.
The Indo sold the Abbey Street building 20 years ago, and it has been lying empty ever since as the gods of property development play havoc with what some call our built environment. Joyce’s view that Ireland is a sow that eats its farrow is a bit too dystopian for my taste, but we really could do a better job of looking after the buildings that comprise the city in which we live. You could argue that we owe it not just to the living, but also the dead.