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A fond farewell to Bewley’s
By Joe Horgan
So Bewley’s has closed. Part of Irish history for some 140 years, it has closed with not a little fuss and with not a few tears.
I can’t say that, compared to those Dubliners who have thronged the place as word of its demise became apparent, it means very much to me. Yet, I did visit the one on Grafton Street on a good few occasions as a tourist, hoping to soak up some of the atmosphere, walk in the footsteps of all the writers and artists it is associated with and wander through the warren of rooms and corridors.
I found it an odd and slightly peculiar place and for that alone it was refreshing in times of bland franchising. It is easy to see how much it could mean to the citizens of a city that associate so much of their memories with it. No room for sentiment in this day and age though.
Now, admittedly, it is only a coffee shop, a café, a tourist trap that appeared to be staffed mainly by those souls who are referred to as non-nationals.
Whatever the emotions expressed this week, it seems that most Dubliners didn’t want to work there and if the economic reasons cited for closure are to be believed they didn’t really want to eat and drink there anymore either.
Still, people often ignore something or take it for granted until it looks as if they might lose it. It is very human behaviour.
Perhaps even walking past it was some reassurance for those living in a dizzying time of change and enough people have had a genuinely emotional response to its closure to suggest there were strong feelings about it, whatever its recent history.
Many people spoke up literally as the doors of the Grafton Street premises closed behind them. The Lord Mayor of Dublin described Bewley’s as the ‘front room of the city’ and said that “we cannot allow a non-regulated rental market to drive every vestige of heritage off the streets of Dublin.”
A member of the Bewley’s Theatre Group, whose name alone suggests it was more than just a coffee shop, said it was a choice between a “monument to mahogany, stained glass and 1920s workmanship or a monument to mammon in a soulless age.” Which is where we find what this is all really about. This is not really about an old coffee shop at all. It is about far more than that.
People want a city they feel part of. There has already been disquiet about Dublin and other Irish cities being lined with the same shops as everywhere else, a feeling that the free market and the rise of the multi-nationals removes every vestige of a city’s individuality.
Would a city full of shops, cafés and bars identifiable with Dublin be preferable or is a city that resembles every British high street better? Do food outlets that can be found in every American shopping mall improve the city?
When does being able to get the same things everywhere actually mean no choice rather than more? Would it be better to have a Starbucks than a Bewley’s?
Many Irish people seem to think that it wouldn’t be. Indeed, in lots of ways, the response to the closure of Bewley’s shows that Dublin is still a city that remembers itself.
Of course the political culture of Ireland has shown in recent times that it has little time for any sensibilities outside of the chequebook.
However much Bewley’s is a part of Irish history, the Hill of Tara and surrounding area has been part of Irish history for some 6,000 years and even a Fianna Fáil TD has admitted that the motorway plans for the area stop little short of vandalism.
Yet Bertie remains fairly unmoved. On the same day that Bewley’s closed he said that he was more sympathetic to concerns about this motorway compared to previous controversial decisions where, as he sneeringly put it, swans and snails were the problem.
With one ill-refined aside Bertie Ahern managed to convey just what little regard his party has for scientific and environmental concerns about development.
As scientific voices across the globe express worries about the damage being done to our environment, Bertie Ahern seems to think Ireland might be immune. It seems that there is only one globalisation that registers with this present crop of leaders.
Clearly, though, not all political decisions are made out of economic considerations. A mere Budget after deciding that the best way to counteract an economic slump was to cut back on welfare money given to those who have the littlest anyway, the government brought out another Budget.
The day after Bewley’s closed, this government was giving out its most generous Budget yet and the generosity this time was not confined to horse breeders or the already excessively wealthy.
Now giving back what you have in effect just taken might not in reality be the most generous of acts, but it is still a marked change for this government.
For the first time since taking power in 1997, this government delivered a budget that sought to aid pensioners, the disabled, the less well off, indeed all those who have been marginalized by its excessive indulging of those already most well off.
Either there has been a huge soul-searching swing in beliefs for socialist Bertie and his gang or the summer hammering in the local and European elections which saw them labelled as uncaring put the fear of God, or the fear of losing power, in to them. Take your pick. Either way it is clear that there is often a whole raft of reasons behind political decisions.
So Bewley’s is just a café. Tara is just a hill. Swans and rare snails are just in the way. But if nothing, not an old endearing café or an historically unique landscape, is deemed as having any civic, natural or intrinsic value beyond the euro or the dollar, just what in Ireland will we be left with?
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