A new documentary charts the inspirational story of how schoolchldren in a deprived Dublin suburb followed their music dreams. Donal O’Donoghue spoke to the man at the top of the class, Ron Cooney.
Ron Cooney is a music teacher. He works in Alexandra College, a posh school on the southside of Dublin city, where he conducts the college’s orchestra and jazz band. But for 15 years or so he has also worked in one of Dubin’s more deprived neighbourhoods. Ballymun Lullaby, an award-winning documentary, tells of Cooney and his involvement with the Ballymun Music Programme. It chronicles how local children performed at the Helix Theatre with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and later recorded a CD of the performance. And the hour-long Ballymun Lullaby ends with a montage of those children singing of their homeplace. It’s their story and their song but it sings to us all.
Frank Berry’s inspirational film begins in history with the birth of the Ballymun towers. In grainy archive footage, we witness how a chronic shortage of housing in Dublin prompted the building of Ireland’s first high-rise housing estate on the northern fringe of the city. The promise of that enterprise quickly crumbled. With no shops or amenities the area became a byword for poverty and crime and the locals suffered. Since 2004, six of the seven towers have been demolished and the physical landscape of Ballymun has been redefined and regenerated. Less visible but just as significant have been the local community schemes and initiatives: like the Ballymun Music Programme.
Ron Cooney rides a 1971 Suzuki motorbike and wears a t-shirt sporting the Batman logo. A gregarious man, without a bad word for anyone, he is an unlikely but compelling teacher. He coaxes students through their classes – they start at the birdsong hour of 8am – and works with parents to co-ordinate the selling of the CD. But Cooney is wary of being portrayed in Ballymun Lullaby as a one-man gang. “I didn’t do this on my own”, he says. “We have an excellent team of music teachers and it was all run though the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) community links scheme. If it is not a partnership it won’t work. You need real commitment from the schools. For them it’s a whole lot of extra work but they do it splendidly.”
Ballymun Lullaby kicked off in 2008 when the Music Programme, in association with City Arts/Tower Songs, approached composer Daragh O’Toole to write an original suite for youth orchestra and choir. It was to be performed by schoolchildren from Ballymun. “I hadn’t met Daragh before and didn’t know anything about him at all”, says Cooney. “I asked him to write us a hit which he did. The good thing was that Daragh is not a music teacher – he is a composer who works in the world of commercial music. We were very lucky to fall across him.”
Interweaving the stories of the children and the music with contributions from such people as Ballymun resident, Fr Peter McVerry, Ballymun’s Oscar winner, Glen Hansard and the RTÉCO’s principal conductor, David Brophy, Ballymun Lullaby creates a vivid sense of the place and the people.
We walk the streets with local teenagers Darren Scully, Tara O’Brien and Wayne Brophy: impressive people with brains and bottle and talent. Darren (with Daire Ní Bhreoin) helped to write the lyrics for three of the four songs on the CD; Tara, a talented musician, talks of her love of music, and Wayne Brophy is a soloist on Ballymun Lullaby.
Working on Ballymun Lullaby, Ron Cooney had to be a politician, an administrator, a courier and a promoter, among other things. As he puts it in the documentary, he has a hard neck. He needed it. “If you don’t ask you won’t get it”, he says. “What we are doing in Ballymun is vital. Music education is such a necessary thing for the development of children and for the development of communities.” But the Ballymun Music Programme survives on a shoestring – and sometimes a prayer. “We never have enough to get from one end of the year to the other”, says Cooney. With the Ballymun Lullaby CD back on the shelves (and available on iTunes) he’s hopeful that the coffers will be boosted.
Last year, Ron Cooney was treated for cancer but following an operation he’s back in the saddle again. “I’m ready to run the marathon”, says the father of four with a chuckle. Even now, many months after the concert, CD and documentary, he seems happily mystified by how brilliantly it all went.
So what did he get from working on Ballymun Lullaby? “Joy I suppose would be the word for it”, he says after some deliberation. “I don’t go into work every day full of the joys of spring but when we finished recording the CD there was nothing that I felt we could improve. As a teacher, it’s very often a case of two steps forward and one step back and in a way it never ends. In this instance there was that feeling of having done something, that sense of achievement.”
Donal O'Donoghue
For further information go to: www.ballymunlullaby.com
