TALKTIME: RON COONEY, Musical director, Ballymun Music Programme
First of all congratulations on the success of the ‘Ballymun Lullaby’ CD – it’s generating a fantastic response.
Thank you. Hallelujah! I’m lucky I haven’t been thrown out of the house, I’ve been playing it so much at home.
Ballymun is a place that had a lot of negative associations for people in the past. What were your impressions of the place before you came here?
Well, I live just down the road in Glasnevin. My dog would occasionally go for a little wander and I’d come to look for him around here. It was pretty grim in those days. There were no cars about the place. There were also a lot of open spaces which, of course, are nice during the day. But at night you’d feel very, very vulnerable. I suppose I used to look up at the towers and think “Mother of sweet divine . . . ”. The whole thing was very alien to me.
Nonetheless, you decided to come here and teach music.
Well, I had become curious. Also, a teacher in St Joseph’s kept asking if I knew someone who could teach recorder in the school. The kids here would have had no access to music education at the time, and we’d seen elsewhere that the recorder could be a very effective tool for getting them involved. I kept saying, yeah, I’d find someone. But I couldn’t. Eventually, in about 1995 or 1996, I was shamed into doing it myself.
The project developed pretty quickly from there.
In 2000, as part of the Breaking the Cycle programme, we bought some second-hand instruments. That was a very successful project that ended with a big hooley in the National Concert Hall, with kids from schools in Cork and Limerick also performing. Then Michael Woods, who was minister for education, gave us a grant, which we used to set up two wind bands, two string groups and a brass band.
What are the kids like to work with?
They’re very sweet. Some of them come from families where parents are drugs addicts. But equally, there are lots of kids from very stable backgrounds with great parents and great extended families to support them. It can be a challenging environment to teach in, sure. A large proportion of my time would be taken up attending to discipline issues. But I have great admiration for the kids and their teachers because they have to go at full pelt all day just to stand the pace.
How did the ‘Ballymun Lullaby’ CD come about?
CityArts had been running a long-term project called Tower Songs, which seeks to chronicle, through song, the regeneration of high-rise communities in Dolphin's Barn, Rialto and Ballymun. They had a commission for an orchestral work and knew about these kids playing fiddles and cellos and flutes in Ballymun. The first time I met [composer] Darragh O'Toole, I asked "Can you write us a hit?" I wanted something that would reach out, not just to the mothers and fathers of Ballymun, but the wider public too.
The kids also pitched in on the lyrics.
Three of the four tracks were written with Daire Ní Bhreoin and Darren Scully, two local teenagers. A New Dayhas a line that says: "I want to stand tall like the towers with all their strength and power." I love that. People forget that old Ballymun was home to these kids. And regardless of outsiders' perceptions, home is home. In the writing workshops, there was a great affection for the place, for the towers. The youngsters weren't prepared to say "Everything old was bad, throw it out". Ballymun Lullaby, meanwhile, is really just a love song to Ballymun and everything in it.
Did the children enjoy performing for Desmond Tutu?
Of course, Bishop Tutu had an instant connection with them. He talked to them about the butterfly emerging from the caterpillar. With a couple of words he really hit the nail on the head for these kids. They had spent weeks researching the history of South Africa and the World Cup and all of that – they thought he was a superstar. We were spoiled that day, to be honest. But everyone needs days like that, and Ballymun sure needs days like that.
You aren’t giving any CDs away for free, I understand.
No, and when we performed in the Helix we didn’t give away any free tickets either. That was a big thing for us. We sold all the tickets to the parents, at a tenner a head. The Music Room, too, is as much a part of the landscape now as the bookies and the boozer. If people pay for these things, that means they value them. And if they value them, that means they’ll encourage their kids to stick with it.
Ballymun Lullaby
by the Ballymun Music Programme, accompanied by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and Cór na nÓg, is out now
