Noeleen McManus was born and reared in Little Bray, in the home which she has shared for the past three years with young people from different countries and cultures. A former freelance journalist, she uses their ongoing stories to describe a changing Ireland at http://www.ireland-stories.ie .

She is also passionately involved, through Little Bray’s community group – SWAP – in fighting plans to put high density building on the low-lying part of the old Bray Golf Club, which is a vital part of the Dargle Flood Plain, downriver from their homes. This story – with RTE footage of the area taken after the last flood in August, 1986 – is told at http://www.braywatch.com.

1. Your blog, Ireland-Stories, is entitled “Stories of Ireland and its changing cultures”. If you wanted to encourage someone you just met to read it, how would you describe it to them?

This is the story of our house, and the people who live in it. Right now that’s a Lithuanian girl, three young men - Polish, South Korean, and Latvian, respectively - and me. I was born and reared here, the youngest of eight children, and my paternal grandfather was the nearest thing we had to a foreigner: he came from Dublin. This is still the family home for our ‘clan’, but it is also home to the succession of young foreigners, from ten different countries to date, who have shared the house with me over the past three years. We form a different kind of ‘family’.

2. You truly have a unique perspective on the cultural change in Ireland as you share your home with many different nationalities. What have you learned about your own attitude to this change in culture and as a nation are we coping with the change?

In the ’70s, I lived with a family of eight in Ecuador (South America) for two years, working as a volunteer. I learned there the value of kindness and patience and acceptance in a land in which I was a foreigner, with a very poor command of their language at the beginning. I learned to love Ecuador, and I would like the young people who live here to love my country for the same reasons. I think, though, that many Irish people are threatened by people they can’t converse with. Sometimes I think that if they could imagine they were established American or English citizens talking to young Irish emigrants - some of them good people, some of them bad, some of them hardworking, some of them lazy, but all deserving a chance - in the England or United States of fifty years ago, they would know how to behave. We weren’t the only nation to get a raw deal - you should hear some of the history of other countries I learn in my kitchen… And body language works wonders, if it’s underpinned by goodwill.

3. John Lennon sang “Imagine there’s no countries”? - would we be better off without the concept of nation?

No. I am Irish through and through, and one of the things I love about sharing my home with these young people is their pride in their own nations.I try to reinforce that because I believe the world will be a poorer place if we ever lose our diversity of language and culture and colour. Respect for each other’s cultures is as much an unspoken part of our house ‘law’ as a clean kitchen. War is rooted in greed and injustice, not in diversity: fear of diversity is used, though, by people who want war for their own ends to get ordinary people to hate each other.

4. Some commentators have said that the culture in Ireland is one of greed.Do you agree or disagree?

I think the problem is more one of increasing loss of identity, rather than simple greed. Many people here - especially young people, right up into their thirties - have lost their accents, as well as their language. Many have lost their traditional religious beliefs, and haven’t thought out what was valuable and true in those beliefs and either re-asserted the essentials and abandoned the cancerous growths, or worked out a new belief system.Instead they try to build an identity based on possessions: “I’m not worth much, but take a look at my car, my home(s), my brand-label clothes…”The trouble with packaging is it needs good, individual content inside to make it worthwhile. And walking around like an empty package can’t be much fun…

5. You are involved with Braywatch which is a community group expressing concern at the effect the Bray Town Centre development will have on the lowlands of Little Bray. How is the campaign going and do you truly expect an outcome that will take account of your concerns?

Braywatch.com is the name of our website, but we call our group ‘SWAP’ because we are simply asking that the high density buildings proposed for the flood plain (which is defined as land over which a flooding sea or river flows) be ’swapped’ with the park and playing pitch planned for the high ground, where the flood waters cannot go… At present, we are appealing - to An Bord Pleanala - Bray Town Council planning department’s decision to grant permission to Pizarro. I haven’t the slightest doubt that we will eventually beat this application to build on a flood plain, because every flood expert world-wide - including our own OPW - advises against it, and recommends engineered flood protection works as a back-up to natural flood plains. This plan is, to put it crudely, a ‘no-brainer’, and a totally unnecessary one, as the development can still go ahead on the high ground. Our worries aren’t about the eventual outcome of this fight, they are about:-

a) the possibility of a flood while we fight because Labour and Fine Gael are letting the present Government, especially the Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, off the hook about providing flood protection works that our community has been promised now for twenty
years;

b) there is no Emergency Plan in place if the Dargle River flooded tonight, despite the fact that we’ve sent a suggested plan to the Council, and over 100 homes in our area are either one-storey or ground floor apartments, mostly inhabited by elderly or disabled people;

c) so far this fight has cost our working class community over 9,000 euro because we have had to employ professional town planners to deal with the enormous, detailed reports, drawings and plan that Pizarro have submitted. Unless Fianna Fail, Labour and Fine Gael councillors vote for a Variation on the Development Plan to return this land to its original safe zoning - which we have consistently pleaded with them to do - it will cost us a great deal more, because Pizarro can simply continue to submit application after application after application. They have set Little Bray up to fight a development that is alleged to be worth 2.2 billion. And the run-down state of the town, about which they complain, has happened under their stewardship.

6. Complete this entry to your diary. Dear Diary, today was just the perfect day…..

Building on the Florentine Centre, south of our river, is now underway. Building on Pizarro’s development, on the high ground north of the river, is under way. Our river has been cleaned and widened and deepened for us all to enjoy. And the Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, has shown his commitment to, and knowledge of, his brief by persuading his Government to provide the flood protection works which he fought for as a Senator, finally fulfilling a twenty year old promise to our vulnerable community. It’s a great day for Bray…

7. If you had to choose just one country of your current and previous house guests, where would you visit and why?

When I retire at 65, please God, I plan to make the kind of world trip that a lot of young people get to make in their early twenties, preferably with a rucksack on my back. I plan to include all of my house family’s countries. I would not choose one of them because I’d like to live long enough to
retire at 65…

8. Who are your heroes in life?

Mahatma Ghandi and Nelson Mandela and Rosa Parks - peaceful protest against injustice. And the Dunne’s Stores workers (for more information click here) who brought a very powerful employer to its knees, and educated Ireland about apartheid in the process, with their refusal to break the boycott against Sth. African goods.

9. Where did you get your love for languages and the written word?

I have always loved books. My parents loved books when they were younger, although they didn’t get much time to read by the time I came along. I’ve been a member of Bray Library since I was a small child, brought there by my older brother, and it has been one of the greatest resources in my life. Books open other worlds, and often I wasn’t too sure which one I lived in, when I was buried in a book. I was also blessed with two great English teachers at Bray Tech - Mr. Billy McCann and Miss Edie Fox. Ar dheis De go raibh a anam.

10. The best advice anyone ever gave to me was…..

Take your nose out of that book, and go and talk to people.