The Thing is…. Bono
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husband, Mick, was the chief groundsman there. RTÉ – there was actually no ‘T’ in it at the time, as Ireland still didn’t have television – was moving from Henry Street in the centre of Dublin to its current location and the masts were going up ready for the launch of TV. It’s ironic that I spent so much time there when I was young, given how interwoven my life has since been with RTÉ.
My mum was a very religious woman. While, like most others, I was a good little Catholic boy, by the time I reached my later teens I had actively decided against the Church, but she never made it an issue between us. She just followed her own lights, which in her case meant walking to Mass every single morning for thirty-seven years. I guess it must have rubbed off on me a little in my impressionable early youth, because I spent a number of years as an altar boy in Mount Merrion Church.
I will never forget the trauma of my first day at school. It was such an intimidating experience. I remember standing inside the door of Mount Merrion National School, holding my mother’s hand, and staring in horror at scenes of bedlam. There were so many kids running around and screaming and throwing things, and I just wanted to turn around and run away back home.
Your first school day is extraordinary. I don’t remember one thing about being in the classroom, but I will never forget the chaos of the playground and cloakroom, with all the coats chucked on top of each other. I grew to not mind the school but it’s all a bit of a blur now, except for a couple of the teachers: Mrs O’Callaghan, who lived on our road, and Mrs Hughes. She was all about joined-up writing and I never took to her: she just seemed so very, very old and, more pertinently, old-fashioned.
I rubbed along OK at Mount Merrion School until the age of seven, then the next year it became girls-only, so I had to move on to Kilmacud National School, which was a mile further down the road. Again, what I remember most was the first day – or rather the first week, which must have been once of the worst weeks of my life.
After Mount Merrion, Kilmacud seemed pretty rough. It also looked it. As we waited for a new school to be built at the corner of the Upper and Lower Kilmacud Roads, the classes were held in makeshift prefabs where the Stillorgan Bowling Alley now stands. Soon after they built a shopping centre across the road from it, the first mall in Ireland, and it was considered such a big deal that we were all given a day off to celebrate.
I had thought break times at Mount Merrion School were mad; at Kilmacud it was Armageddon. At lunch break there would be hundreds of kids charging around the yard playing football, smashing into walls or lamping the ball as hard as they could and not caring who it hit or who they hit. Or there would be piggyback fights where you threw punches and tried to push the other guy off his mate’s back. This all happened on concrete: Health & Safety wasn’t such a major concern in those days.
There would always be two teachers patrolling the ground with their hands behind their backs, talking to each other, and every now and then shouting someone’s surname to make it look as if they were in charge. I don’t think I was a particularly delicate child but I really wasn’t into the massive rough-and-tumble and horseplay, so mainly I just tried to stay out of the way.
After the first week, as I grew used to the daily casual violence of the playground, I did OK at Kilmacud. That was the story of my whole academic career: OK. I wasn’t particularly good, bad or indifferent. The only subject I really did well in was English. A typical exercise came when our English teacher asked us to write a four-page essay and I wrote nine pages, which I ended up reading in front of the class. I was mad for James Bond, so my story was all about me being a spy and escaping the enemy by having a bomb hidden in a button in my coat, and pulling it off and throwing it at them. Stupid stuff, really, but it’s still amazing to me how, two generations on, 9-year-old boys still love James Bond.
In terms of discipline, I was fine in school: I never gave teachers a hard time and I always did my homework. This didn’t always protect you though. There was a definite downside to being in school in Ireland in the 1960s and 70s; while I didn’t suffer anything like the horrors of the poor kids who got abused or beaten in Church and industrial schools, there were some bad moments. Children being hit and caned in class was accepted – that was just how it was back then.
As I said, I was never great at Maths but I always did my best. In one lesson though, I dropped a howler. The teacher – and I don’t think I’ll shame him by saying his name, although it’s a close decision – had given us all a textbook with about a hundred pages in it, and on every page there were ten or twenty mental arithmetic questions. Every day he would give us a page of the book as homework, then the next day we had to tell him the answers we had worked out.
One day in class, the teacher started examining us on the sums we should have done the night before and said, ‘OK, let’s hear your answers to page 78.’ Disaster! I had done page 79. I must have had a brainstorm and written down the wrong page number. I thought I might as well come clean so I put my hand up and said, ‘Sorry, sir, but I did the wrong page.’
The teacher just lost it. He went absolutely mad. He pulled me out of my seat and got physical with me, shoving me around the room and screaming in my face, ‘Fanning! I TOLD you it was page bloody 78!’ Everybody in the class went quiet, because they knew it could just as easily be them the next time – this probably happened about three times per week.
Even today, thinking back, I’m staggered at the madness and inhumanity of it all. This grown man, a trained professional, was belittling and ridiculing me, psychologically and physically bullying me for no reason at all other than I had made an innocent mistake! How could a teacher think it was OK to treat a basically blameless child in this way, and did he really think it was educative?
For weeks afterwards, I relived that scene in my mind and fantasised over what I would have liked to do to him. In my imagination, I answered him with a string of cutting, Oscar Wilde-style bon mots and told him to take out his frustrations on some other poor victim, not on me. I picked up his cane, snapped it over my knee, told him, ‘If you need this to be a teacher, then get another job,’ picked up my bag, and strode manfully out of the classroom. Of course, the reality was I did what any other terrified 10-year-old would have done: cowered, stayed silent and then slunk back to my seat.
Another time, I was caned for mixing up two words when I recited the Catechism – a question-and-answer book with simple illustrations that we had to learn off by heart. There were no ambiguities, no grey areas: you either knew the answers word-perfect or you were in big trouble. The Catechism started off:
Who made the world? God made the world. Who is God? God is our Father in Heaven, the creator of all things.
Then there was some pretty odd stuff about God the Father, God the Son and the third member of the Holy Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, at which point it got really weird. When I accidentally said two words the wrong way round, the meaning of what I had said was 100 per cent the same, yet still I was caned for my mistake.
I never told my mum and dad about incidents like these, and to be honest, although they were loving parents, I think they would have just shrugged if I had. That was how things were back then. You had no choice but to deal with it.
Television had launched in Ireland in the early 1960s and one of the big programmes was Tolka Row, our weekly soap opera. An early series ended with a cliff-hanger as Sean, the decent but rebellious son played by Jim Bartley, crashed his car and sat motionless in the driver’s seat as the credits rolled. They filmed the scene at the top of Foster Avenue, about a hundred yards from my house, and hordes of us excited kids swarmed over the set all day.
On another occasion, they filmed an ad for crisps at the 64A bus stop by our house. A man crunched into a crisp and suddenly a bowler hat-wearing, brolly-carrying businessman who had been walking past him was clinging to the top of the bus stop. The idea was that the crisps were that crispy the noise had frightened the guy and propelled him skywards, but nobody making the ad seemed to be having fun and the actor spat the crisps out as soon as he heard the word ‘Cut!’ I saw the ad on TV months later. It looked really stupid.
When I turned 11, it came time to leave Kilmacud and start secondary