Diarmuid Gavin is back with a second season of Dirty Old Towns and tells John Byrne about it – and his latest audacious plans for the Chelsea Garden Show.
Nice fella, Diarmuid Gavin. And the guy you see on the TV is exactly the same in real life. He's not one of those telly heads who adopts a persona on-camera that's dropped as soon as filming is over.
A bundle of energy, the 47-year-old garden designer can't wait to start talking about this year's Dirty Old Towns.
Taking in a variety of places – Portarlington in Laois, Dublin's Summerhill, Ballinacurra Weston in Limerick, Cahersiveen in Kerry, Fort Meagher Camden in Cork and Ballynonty in Tipperary – Diarmuid's been working away on the various projects for the popular series while also getting himself ready for the Chelsea Flower Show.
More of Chelsea later, as first up there's a bit of Dirty talk. "The first season was great," he recalls. "It was difficult marching into people's towns and asking them the question: 'Is your town a dirty old town?' That got people's backs up, but once people saw what we were at, trying to motivate change, and once people realised we were only there because we thought their town had great promise and great community spirit, it all went well."
So now the nation's well up for round two. One of the most intriguing areas covered in the new season is Summerhill. A long-neglected area of inner city Dublin, just east of O'Connell Street, this area was once a very posh address, until the rich moved to the suburbs and the old Georgian houses became tenements.
The tenements are long gone, but Summerhill remains home to many working-class Dubs, and Diarmuid Gavin grins at the thought of it all. "They were great," he says, of the locals who got involved in the Dirty Old Towns project. Summerhill, he acknowledges, "has been ravaged by social inequality and whatever down through the years, so it was very poignant in a way.
"A lad called Trevor Nugent had found this yard bedside an old school, just off Rutland Place. It was just a concrete yard and it was a dumping ground, about the size of a football pitch, and he got permission from the Corporation to try and do something with it. There is a good community garden in the area and I think that gave him a bit of confidence and he was just doggedly determined to bring the community on board to create this garden.
"That was a great project, because Trevor was so amazing, and that's been the real joy of this: meeting individuals who are committed on behalf of the community and, I think, completely without ego, all the main people that we've come across have been amazing characters. They want to make their place a better place to live. And when you see it happening in Summerhill, it's very special."
The most challenging town, for Diarmuid, was Ballynonty in Tipperary, where a local woman wanted to build a memorial garden.
"It's a tiny community, this little village, and there have been 30-40 road deaths over the last few decades," he explains. "Everybody had lost somebody. But the community got together in a matter of seven or eight weeks and built this amazing park. It was just remarkable for the emotion involved, but it was endearing because of the humour and the craic and the way they got it together. It was a bit like Father Ted, all running around, hilarious in all the best ways. And the piles of sandwiches and cakes were great, as was all this positivity coming out of a community... And if it creates some awareness of road safety, and it makes young people especially, think, it'll be great."
This project also had a personal connection for Diarmuid, who describes the discussion of road deaths as "a big taboo". As he notes, "I lost a brother on the road when I was six and he was five and it's a big taboo in Ireland. We don't really like to talk about it; you don't know how to approach it. So to bring a whole community out and talk about it, and to celebrate these lives in such a beautiful way with this lovely garden, it was just great."
It's self-evident that projects such as those on Dirty Old Towns can have a very positive effect on a community, especially in these hard times. Diarmuid smiles and agrees. "You really see the best of people, and I find them an inspiration. And you just hope, along the way, that good things will happen."
As Diarmuid points out, a lot of the people who were involved with various projects on Dirty Old Towns are unemployed and with bleak prospects, given the current state of the Irish economy. But he has enlisted a couple of Ballynonty natives to get involved in his next project. "Two of the lads are coming over for Chelsea to help us build this garden," he explains.
Given last year's Flower Show, when his ingenious Irish Sky Garden won a Gold Medal, is there anything spectacular planned for Chelsea? "Yes," he acknowledges. "We're planning something huge. Something, I hope, is brilliant. Something I hope is beautiful, but it's a huge challenge. I don't see the point in doing a something like Chelsea if you don't do something different. I think we are a bit of an adventurous young nation and I think we should bring a bit of that over to England and fly the flag."
Dirty Old Towns airs on RTÉ One on Wednesdays at 8.00pm.
