CORNERBOYS

    From our drawing room windows we could see the cornerboys who stood against the New Ireland Assurance building at the corner of Cornmarket facing up the Main Street. This ‘stand’ gave them a view straight ahead as far as the end of Rowe Street or beyond and to their left they could keep the Bull Ring under surveillance. They were seasoned observers of the passing scene and had their finger on the pulse of the town itself. Like work, rain and cold are inimical to the vocation of cornerboy, so in bad weather they simply weren’t there and were indistinguishable from the rest of the population. In moderately cold weather they might stick it out for a while, keeping warm as best they could, by moving from one foot to the other and by the occasional strenuous bout of flinging their arms around themselves. In warm sunny weather they came into their own. They were relaxed and conversation flowed. We could hear them from the open window. Flowed is not quite the word, for a subject never really got going before one of them would make a definitive statement designed to be the last word on the subject and to establish the speaker as the world authority on the matter. In really warm weather they would decamp to sit at the foot of ‘The Man’ and with their backsides contribute further to the polishing of the limestone base.

    These cornerboys were all of an age, unemployed and wore hats or caps. There were no young men. It seemed that to be part of this elite club a man had to be of mature years. Occasionally a younger person or maybe a child would arrive bringing a message from home to one of the members who would leave to fulfil some family responsibility. On dole day there was a notable air of affluence about them: they smoked full length cigarettes out of a packet and there was much more coming and going than usual; trips to Con Macken’s bar on the corner or down Common Quay Street to Corcoran’s bookies on the quay.

    In those days men, apart from trawler men, were almost never seen in public wearing just a sweater. Men always wore a jacket, and often a waistcoat or maybe a pullover; so too for these gentlemen of leisure. Neither did they appear in public without a hat or cap, which they lifted, not for a passing lady, but for the Angelus or for a passing funeral. They were nothing if not religious.    As soon as the sound of the first strike of the Angelus came from Rowe Street, off came the hats and caps to reveal a variety of hairstyles and lack of them. Bobby Hughes, a hunchback, was a surprise: he was as bald as a coot and his pate was snow white, having minimal exposure to the sun. Bobby looked much the better with his cap on. Another had a surprisingly thick shock of grey hair and all of them looked different with their heads uncovered. They also removed hats and caps for a funeral passing through the Bull Ring from Bride Street or Rowe Street on its way to the cemetery at Crosstown. There was also the occasional funeral from the Church of Ireland church, St Iberius or the Methodist or Presbyterian church. When these passed, I have wondered since, did they think: ‘another poor Protestant on his way to eternal damnation.’

    At election time political parties used the Bull Ring for election meetings in the evenings. They positioned a lorry where Lizzy Meyler sold her herrings on Fridays and erected loudspeakers on lampposts.    This preparation was all done early on in the evening after the shops had closed and everything was in place ready. The politicians outlined, in their own modest way, what they had achieved in the past and listed all the marvellous things they would achieve for Ireland and her people, and particularly for the people of Wexford, when they were elected.

    The speeches didn’t start before nine o’clock and even then not until there was a reasonable number of people standing around. The corner boys stood on their usual corner as though these places were reserved. I have no doubt they were more comfortable during the day when people passed by and resented this invasion of their territory. The noise from the loudspeakers attracted more people and in due course the complement was made up when the pubs closed. When the politicians started to speak they seemed to suffer from the delusion that the louder they shouted the more likely it was that their audience would believe them, and the longer they went on the more credible they would become.    Even at the back of our house with doors and windows closed we were assailed until well after children’s bedtime by political spiel and invective. On the following day when the lorry and loudspeakers had gone the litter on the street left nobody in any doubt that there had been a meeting there the night before.