A whole new image of the Ôghost townÕ crops up

I’m from a generation which tended to spend an enormous amount of time of its youth in the local cinemas – television didn’t come to the West of Ireland until the 1960s, and it wasn’t unusual for gangs of maybe 10 youngsters to head off to ‘the pictures’ a few times a week. 

There was a ritual involved. Just about everybody seemed to ‘call’ for everybody else and, before you knew it, groups of 10 or more from one street were traipsing the town to the local flea pit to see the likes of Mickey Rooney, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in the latest movie.

Of course, the ritual also involved forbidden things like buying a few cigarettes among the lot of us and gaily puffing away in ‘the fourpennies’. Those were the times when not alone could you smoke in public, and in a cinema, but having the odd fag was regarded as part and parcel of the macho business of going to the pictures, and a rite of passage in growing up.

Among our particular favourites were ‘the westerns’ involving mega stars like Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck . . . and the reason the whole genre came to mind this week was all that talk in the newspapers and on radio and television of ‘ghost estates’.

The idea of the ‘ghost town’ was central to many of the westerns of my youth. This would be a town made up of clapboard buildings which was slowly dry-cooking somewhere out on the edge of the desert . . . the perfect unoccupied town preserved forever in the frying heat of the desert, the signs creaking in the wind, and a tumbleweed blowing down the utterly deserted main street.

It’s not going to take such a change of image for me to picture as a ‘ghost town’ the many estates which were half-completed, or only just started, in the Celtic Tiger years and which now sit there like modern deserted villages. I might find it hard to imagine Gary Cooper walking down the street.

Of course, there are other key differences - because they are subjected to the vagaries of the Irish weather, they won’t stand perfectly preserved for years to come. If the vandals don’t get at them and smash, daub and burn them, they will slowly fall apart from dampness, and the sheer neglect of not being heated and maintained.

One of my recurring images of these reproachful ruins surely is the giant hotel which overlooks Waterford and which was once the pride and joy of the town. The curtains are flapping from the windows, the walls have been daubed, and it all stands like some rebuke to a lunacy which gripped the country.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.