IRELAND A PARADISE FOR TOURISTS—BUT IT’S GRIM

NATIONALIZATION OF BANKS IS LOGIC OF This article and a subsequent one are travel notes, together with some reflections on Irish working-class history, made by Brian Behan during a recent journey to Ireland.

To the tourist Ireland is a paradise. Here petrol, beer and fags are cheap. Hotel workers, conditioned by fear of the sack, dance attendance on the lucky traveller.

In the week that I was in Dublin a bevy of English debs— both male and female—descended on the place for their annual shindy. The scenes that followed seem unbelievable, but Press and television reporters solemnly recorded the highspirited junketings.

The debs began by clearing the tables with their feet, kicking every scrap of delf into a heap of smashed china.

They proceeded to organize a war between the blues and the whites, each side armed with soda siphons and bags of rolls dipped in wine, and began a ferocious onslaught to see who was to carry off the prize—the head waiter’s trousers.

Waiter after waiter was captured, debagged and dunked. To be debagged is to have your trousers torn off, and to be dunked is to be thrown into a pool of water.

Champagne through the keyhole One newspaper reported that a team of bright young sparks, unable to get at one of their mates because he had locked his bedroom door, poured champagne through the keyhole to flood him out.

When interviewed on television the young things admitted that they had come over ‘to let off a bit of steam’. Neither the management nor the police thought it worth while to do anything to protect the waiters from assault.

* * * One hundred yards from the hotel in which the affair went on are some of the worst slums in Europe. Despite a very big drive on new housing since the end of the war there are still thousands of Dubliners jam-packed into houses built 300:

years ago.

I walked through some of the worst of the slums. In some: