Well, I’m in Dublin. And the first thing I want to write about is fashion. Not social exclusion, not violence, not prison reform, not the condition of the state’s children’s homes, not immigration or race, not the edginess of urban living, all of which concern me, but the clothes that men wear, in particular working-class men. It’s so gay of me, I know. But perhaps it’s not too queer of me to suggest that they might be linked in some way.

One of the central assumptions I had made about class was that Britain, and England in particular, was a class-ridden society, and Ireland wasn’t half as much, as we were all such a sociable lot (a very common conceit in the Irish middle classes, I now realise. We don’t even like to talk about class in Ireland, or when we do, it’s in scathing, wary terms, privileged people disparaging the underclass). Class affiliation in the psyche of the English is rigid and pervasive; it is, quite often, a pillar of identity. It works, on both ends of the spectrum, to inhibit, to repress, to be something that has to be overcome. I have worked as a therapist with really eloquent and well-educated people, masking a deep shame of their working-class roots, striving, with every enunciated word, to distance themselves from accents and attitudes that embarrass them: those of their own family.
Similarly, I have found a most extraordinary level of emotional strangulation in “mature” public schoolboys, a failure to master even the most basic grammar of feelings, steeped in a similar embarrassment/confusion about being born “privileged”. I worked with it as best I could when I came across it, as an Irish witness/observer, supposedly free of such strictures, and I learned a lot about the hierarchical nature of English society along the way. The old Corbett/Cleese/Barker joke about knowing one’s place is still true for many English people; and paradoxically, it can also bring rewards, a sense of community and place, of heritage. But the ‘80s in Britain served to smash the association between working-class culture and poverty; millionaire City traders could just as equally be wide-boy cockney lads as Etonians, university grants enabled the brightest to prosper, and Thatcher’s policy of enabling council houses to be bought by tenants meant that it was possible to be both working-class and have money and property for the kids to inherit, without necessarily moving to the suburbs and abandoning one’s roots.
There is a gleeful cocky pride in English working-class culture, epitomised by the raspberry-blowing Sun newspaper, and, for example, practically all the denizens of the Big Brother house: uninhibited preening metrosexual peacocks, displaying proudly for each other and for equally sexually confident and vocal women, Essex girls all. It is now the kids of Thatcher’s generation who dominate popular culture in Britain, or at least populate the reality TV shows (the same thing?) with a brashness and bling that is particularly English.
But looking around at the men I see in Dublin, as I cycle around trying to get the hang of it, something strikes me for the first time, that I’d never noticed before. This blindness is part of my problem, and perhaps part of a wider problem in Irish society, I don’t know. I look at the working-class men on the streets, in the inner city, in O’Connell Street, away from the trendy Temple Bar and Grafton St areas, and I notice something is missing. Pride in their appearance.
Bizarrely, just as I’m writing these words in a café, while watching the world go by, a group of exactly the sort of lads I’m talking about join my table on the pavement, and start showing each other their new trainers and track suits, and discuss shopping. But it only lasts for a maximum of two minutes. One guy’s tale about buying a tracksuit is not about how cool it is, or how well he looks in it; the guys around him weren’t complimenting him on it, or talking, as English lads do, about brands and image. He only talks about how well he did to wangle a discount. The new track suit another one of them is wearing is shown off, as he tells them it’s only €90. It is plain grey, brushed cotton, no insignia, and he’s pleased as punch with it. For the price alone.
Irish working-class style, in comparison to London’s, is anti-fashion; it quite deliberately involves demonstrating that you don’t have money to spend on clothes, it’s about avoiding getting looked at or admired. In Dublin, the sinister question, “Are you lookin’ at me?” addressed to another man is a threat, one of the most intimidating there is. Irish working-class men, I’m beginning to notice, don’t check each other out. The poncey English, with their slinky white football shirts and shiny trackies and Beckham hairdos and shades, seem suddenly, distinctly, foreign.
Class is signified in Ireland by fashion much more than in England, because class in Ireland is still linked to money, or the lack of it. In England, styles are borrowed from other classes, willy-nilly: witness posh Burberry being adopted by “chavs”, or joggers in Kensington Park wearing brands and logos that are prized in the estates of Dalston or Brixton. But an Irish working-class man doesn’t waste his money on that, or doesn’t choose to advertise that he has money by dressing well. Is it fear of envy? Fashion is language, it is communication. I got a bottle thrown at me by a group of lads, indistinguishable from each other in shapeless logoless navy blue cotton, when I was cycling through Tallaght on my first night on my new bike, (ironically in a misguided attempt to reach the mountains and get out of the city). I think it was because I was wearing jeans and a bicycle helmet and a yellow hi-viz bomber jacket. I’m afraid to say it: I was dressed properly. I was breaking the cardinal rule in the male dress code, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. I obviously didn’t belong; so I got a bottle bounced off my back, which smashed into the wall behind me. Because of what I was wearing. It could not have been anything else, I wasn’t close enough for it to be personal.
What’s weird about all this is that I never noticed any of it before, when I last lived in Dublin. Perhaps I have become used to the perverse but enjoyable English (Wildean?) pursuit of admiring handsome sexily dressed “bits of rough” on the street, and I miss the exchanges. Perhaps I never dared to look at Irish lads before, in the way I do now. Perhaps I’d better learn to stop.
Things are changing, though, and sport is leading the way. Two papers this week carry sporno features on hunky Irish sportsmen, showing off their six packs and turning the “ladies” on, GAA players Sean Óg Ó hAilpín and Ger Devine, the latter, a Dublin fireman, posing in his uniform for a forthcoming charity calendar.
But I wonder, if the disparity between the rich and poor in Ireland keeps on increasing as it is, will the Irish working class ever lose the association between poverty and identity, as has happened in England? It needs to happen, badly, because, among many other things, pride in one’s appearance is important to a man, of any class, race or culture.