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LAUNDERING HISTORY Deep in the heartland of Donnybrook, hidden in a crescent behind the fire station, surrounded by houses and leafiness there sits, intact, a building which embodied part of our cruel social history. Known locally as the Donnybrook laundry, but more widely known in subcultures and State reports as the Magdalene laundry of the Sisters of Charity. No mention is made in the Colliers’ brochure for sale of the site of its former use. No mention of the many women who toiled there, scrubbing shirts, washing socks, endlessly ironing, endlessly starching, endlessly washing. Nor of the clients that came from the affluent families in the surrounding areas, nor that Áras an Úachtaráin was a client too. The labelled basket that carried the laundry – pressed, starched, immaculate spotless – now lies discarded with a pile of others, rotting and abandoned. According to Dublin City Councillor, Mannix Flynn, who served time in an industrial school in Letterfrack which has been turned into a wood-turning school (to eradicate the memories he says), this is the real thing. If ever there was to be a memorial, a gesture, an acknowledgment – this is it. This is a place of anger and atonement. A place of loss and maybe a place to be found. “FAILURE”? So last month Villager predicted there’d be a hung Dáil: “Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will struggle to work out whether they should coalesce risking their exposure as ideological charlatans and the long-term growth of Sinn Féin. Another election within a year”. Village’s twitter account now features two dinosaurs, rutting. But what is the correct term for a coalition of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael? We’ve seen Fianna Gael and Fine Fail. We’ve seen Tweedlegael and Tweedlefail. Tweedle Dummer. And what about an election slogan for them? “Let’s keep the doing going”. FAMOUS Bargaintown is a faintly tacky furniture store on Queen’s Street Bridge on the quays in Dublin. The late Terry Wogan (much missed by the TV generation) once voiced an ad with the stage-Irish slogan, “the prices are only famous”. The tightarses in Bargaintown used his recording for a decade or more. Anyway Bargaintown which was once in fact a cinema, the Phoenix picture house, is now the name of a movie which showed at the Irish Film Centre before Christmas. It’s an evocation of Dublin in the 1980s, a meditation on urban decay made by then teenage German film-maker, David Jazay, in Dublin in 1988. Featuring interviews with antique dealers, barbers and barmen – it is a record of the lives and opinions of a vanished Dublin, before the Celtic Tiger overhauled its fabric and its atmosphere. Highlights include an animated auction at Tormey Brothers, a night of song and dance at the old Workingmen’s Club on Wellington Quay, and performances by out-of-key blues-man Frank Quigley. The highlight for Villager was the piece on Dick Tynan, featured playing jazz drums in a run-down building on Ormond Quay and bemoaning the fire in his building that precluded re-opening his Essex guest-house. There once was a famous picure on the gable wall of the Ormond Hotel with a picture of Tynan looking like a 1970s Elvis proclaiming “I can get it for you wholesale”. When the sign was removed in the 1990s it revealed a picture of Tynan delivering the same message, but this time as Elvis circa 1960. Villager’s interest was piqued because Tynan is shown playing the drums in what is now the Village office. The only difference is seems to have been in better shape in 1988. MISINFORMATION DRIP, DRIP The abolition of Irish Water by a new government would cost the State up to €7bn over the next five years, according to its own – unreliably inflated – internal estimates. Losses are envisaged under four heads: cash costs, sunk costs, benefits forgone and the lost possibility of getting its debts off the exchequer’s books. The actual cash costs, it says, would be around €100m, and largely involve paying off staff who would not be transferred to local authorities. It would also include the cost of breaking leases and contracts, and the costs of transferring back the property already put into Irish Water ownership. The concept of a one-stop shop for Water is a good one – it works in Scotland and, though Simon Coveney and the EU, among others, seem to have seen it as a vehicle that could be privatised that need not have been the case. It is also desirable to spread the tax base, to see what your lifestyle costs, and to pay the environmental and economic costs of water, partly on the basis of the polluter-pays principle. The Social Democrats unwisely proposed its abolition and stated it would cost nothing as the administrative costs were greater than the revenue from the charge. This failed to account for legal and logistical difficulties. Now as part of its hermaphrodite mating ritual it seems Fine Fáil may simply suspend payments for a few years. CLIMATE DEBATES An Taisce has complained to RTÉ and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland that the recent ‘Prime Time’ programme on climate change gave a voice to Ray Bates, a professor of meteorology whose expertise is weather – day-to-day climate events, not climate which deals with the long-term. An Taisce says it is aware of at least two academic specialists who were invited to participate in the panel, but who declined to do so citing concerns that the presence on the panel of Bates, who chairs the Royal Irish Academy’s climate committee, would very likely result in a “false balance”, so undermining public understanding and “promoting a perception of doubt around what are, in fact, extremely strongly established, robust, results from state-of-the-art climate science”. At the time of writing RTÉ was late in replying to the complaint. LABOUR LEADER Alan Kelly went ape went he won the last seat in Tipperary. Villager wonders how he’ve have taken it if he’d lost. PRESIDENTIAL Miriam O’Callaghan dodged dealing with her