The Billion
Euro HOuse

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Frank Buckley is Ireland's least well-known national treasure. The first time I met Frank was on an unseasonably sunny day in the Irish spring in 2014. I was awkwardly blocking the pavement outside the door of Mugs, a local coffee shop in Frank's adopted home of Dalkey in South County Dublin when the man himself sloped around the corner into view. He arrived wearing a battered baseball cap and a sour expression, with an old dog end of a fag hanging out of the corner of his mouth. Like most people, I had first heard of Frank due to the Billion Euro House, an unusual conceptual art project that he had constructed in 2011, which was covered by news media all over the world. "It was a simple concept really," Frank explained to me as he lit the first of the packet of fags he got through during the interview. "It was just about making people ask "what is money really?" I was hounded out of my house by the bank over the sake of just a couple of thousand Euros when I lost me job during the recession. Around the same time, a good friend of mine found himself in money trouble as well and he took the unfortunate step of ending his life. All that got me thinking. Every day of the week I saw old, (?) used notes being taken away from the Central Bank to be shredded. This was the same stuff that they'd been banging down my door for, only now their computer was telling them that, apparently, it wasn't worth anything anymore. Loads of people's lives were being ruined over this stuff, stuff that was basically just colourful paper. So I decided I was going to use it to make a statement."

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The House was constructed inside the guts of an abandoned office building in Dublin's Smithfield that had been made un-rentable by the collapse of the housing market. Frank had taken 1.4 billion worth of shredded Euro notes donated from a somewhat bemused Central Bank ("I filled up two trailers" he remembered aloud) and fashioned them into bricks, which he had used to construct new internal walls. He used the remaining bills to decorate objects around the house, furnishing it with money-coated chairs, tables, and even a Billion Euro toilet. Within a couple of weeks, the house was being featured in news media the world over. "It was mad" he drawled in his thick Dublin accent as he sipped on his froth in the sunshine. "A guy from Reuters came and knocked on me window and got the thing on camera. It ended up on TV and for the next few weeks people were calling me from all over the world; CNN, BBC, The New York Times. I was really afraid when I started building the house, I wasn't sure if people would get it. But all over the world people just got it. They could relate to it."

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The reason I had initially come to talk to Frank was to discuss the plight of impoverished artists in Ireland. Although I'd already been aware of the House when it had first been in the news, it wasn't until much later when I came across an online article that I'd learned about Frank's own circumstances. Frank was quoted in the article as saying "People assume that because I've had my work seen around the world that I've made loads of money from it, but I'm still drawing the dole." As a Millenial, a member of a generation that's often criticized by our elders for lacking direction, I've long wanted to identify what it is about certain creative pursuits (painting, music, acting, etc.) that fills some people with so much passion that they willingly defy common sense and choose to struggle financially, and sometimes even risk the disdain of polite society, in order to pursue their art. Given the nature of his own art, I was curious as to what Frank's insight would be on the subject. "Well, my main motivation has always been passion rather than money," Frank concurred, "but not just in terms of my art. Whatever I've been doing it was always passion that drove me the most.
And I've done a lot of different things in my life. Sometimes I look back on my life and I think to myself "Jaysus, did all that actually happen?" As he began recounting his entire life story, and I began to realize how much more there was to the extraordinary man sitting across from me than his fifteen minutes of fame had shown to the world, I found myself asking the same question.

 

Frank was born in the Dublin suburb of Drimnagh in 1960. He didn't sugar-coat his recollections of his youth. His father had held down a job working in the train depot in Inchicore, although he made it clear to me that his family had still been dirt poor. "It was a rough place. I was drinking from the age of 11" he told me as he lit another fag, "getting into fights, going into school hung-over when I actually did go into school. "Until I was an adult I never slept in a bed that had sheets or blankets. I used to sleep inside my dad's old overalls from work, they would stink of oil and I'd have to shove tissues up the sleeves to keep the draft out." "I find that very hard to believe Frank," I said, completely taken aback and not really knowing what else to say. "I told my daughter that recently" he responded "and she said the same thing. That was just Drimnagh. That was Dublin all over in them days."

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After dropping out of school while still in his early teens the dole beckoned. "I've been on and off the dole for all of my life. Being on the dole was what you did where I came from. You'd get up in the morning, you'd play football in the field in the daytime and you'd go drinking with your friends at night. That was our whole world. If I went into the city once a week it'd be to rob a car. But something inside me told me there was more to life, even though I had no idea what it was." Ironically, his first exposure to the wider world came from the same source that was threatening to take him about of it. "I got into heroin in 1978. By the time I was in my early 20's it had put me on the streets. I weighed seven stone; I was absolutely fucked, just waiting to die. There was hardly any rehab in Ireland in them days, certainly none that the ordinary person could afford. But I got very lucky; I got into the Rutland Centre for free. They had specialized in getting people off the drink and in the early 80's they wanted to expand into drug rehab. I was just in the right place at the right time, waiting in the Jervis Street clinic, where the fucking shopping centre is now, for a check-up when one of their scouts dropped in and told me that if I volunteered to go in there as a guinea pig that I'd get my whole treatment for free. If I'd had to have paid for the treatment it would have cost me eleven grand. When I got out and after I got clean I'd seen a different side of life and I knew I wanted more out of it. So in the mid 80's I was looking for something to do and when I got offered the chance to drive a van for a band from Terenure called Light a Big Fire down to Athlone for a gig I said yes, even though I hadn't a clue what I was doing. I didn't even know what a PA was then for Jaysus sake." He spat the phrase out with unforgiving indignation as if he was almost in disbelief that there was a time when he could have been so naive. "I went out on a tour with them supporting The Pogues in England the week after and went from making about 60 pounds a week on the dole to 100 pounds a night. From there I just kept going, I spent the money I'd made on me own van, and then when I made more money I ended up buying a fleet of vans that I'd rent out to other bands. That was my gig for the guts of a decade."

 

Frank spoke about his days on the road with such great affection that even though I didn't know where his story was going, I hazarded a guess was that he hadn't given it up voluntarily. I started to get the feeling that his was less of a rags to riches story than a rags to riches to rags again story. "Then I had a slip with drugs and lost everything in the space of six months" he went on, confirming my hunch "I was back on the bones of me arse selling The Big Issue door to door. The worst moment of my life came when I knocked on a door and Davey Spillane (for any non-Irish readers, a famous Irish folk musician) opened it. I'd only come off a tour with Davey less than a year before. I wanted the ground to swallow me up but thanks be to God at least he didn't recognize me, I'd lost that much weight. So after another year, I got myself clean again and I suppose I was looking around for something new."

 

The defining characteristic of Frank's life is his willingness to take his opportunities wherever he finds them. In 1995 a chance meeting with a friend lead him to become the coordinator of the Smithfield Horse Fair, the largest horse market in Ireland and a centuries-old Dublin institution that had fallen into disrepute by the '90s. "The council wanted to get rid of the fair," he told me. "They saw it as being something that didn't belong in modern Dublin, but I saw it as an issue of equality. There have been generations of ordinary people in Dublin who've grown up with horses being a big part of their lives, long before the high rises or the motorways were there. I'd grown up in Drimnagh with people who had kept ponies around like fucking pet dogs. So I didn't like to think that there were no allowances being made for people who belonged to that culture." As coordinator Frank organized meetings between the local council and the horse owners and introduced innovations such as setting up pony clubs around Dublin and bringing in micro-chipping for horses. Beginning to get used to the pattern, at last, I suspected that the rollercoaster that was Frank's life was due for another upward swing around about here and asked him if he'd ended up getting a new job out of his work with the fair. "Nah", he replied, "I never got paid for it; I ran the whole thing off a community employment scheme." I asked him why he'd felt such a strong impulse to help when there seemed to be little for him to gain from it. "Because I could" was his only answer.

 

Two years later his commitment to helping others set him on the road towards his next adventure.  "In 1997 when I was still working with the Horse Fair a friend of mine, who was a local community activist," Frank remembered, "came into me and said that he was worried that there was going to be trouble with all the foreign people that were coming into Dublin for the first time. There was a public tennis court on Sherriff Street that a load of Chinese lads were going into regularly and playing basketball on and the locals were coming down and hurling abuse at them. So we got the idea to set up a charity organization and called it SARI; Sport Against Racism Ireland. We decided that instead of having sport be a thing that divided people we could use it as the thing that could bring people together. I always loved Nelson Mandela's quote "Sport has the power to change the world", that's always been something I've believed in too." As with many noble undertakings, SARI had humble beginnings "I started it up when I was still working in the FAS office in Smithfield" Frank said, as the frothy bubbles at the bottom of his drained cup began to spontaneously burst in the sunlight "Back then there were literally only a couple of hundred non-white people in Dublin, so whenever I saw a black lad walking past the office window I'd go out to him and ask if he was able to play football. We got together eight teams in different local Dublin leagues and the Law Society of Ireland gave us the loan of their pitch for our home ground. We'd go and play games against local teams. It was a way of getting people to know each other, breaking down any walls of resentment that might have been going up. From there it grew into something I couldn't have imagined at the start. In 2004, I won the Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award and I got enough of a grant that I was able to make SARI a full-time job. By then we were right in the middle of the Celtic Tiger and funding just kept rolling in from all over the place. We ran all sorts of events in Ireland; athletics meets, beach cricket, football festivals in the Phoenix Park. Then we started holding events all around Europe and I got to travel because of it. The opportunities it brought to my life were endless." Even years on his genuine gratitude was still apparent and extremely contagious. "I think the thing that I'm proudest of was when we went into Bosnia, it wasn't that long after the war, and we organized a street football tournament, an attempt to get all the different factions to come together by playing matches, like what we did at the start in Dublin."

 

I was astonished. The minimal research I had done before arranging to meet Frank hadn't prepared me for any of this. It was hard to credit the heights that Frank had soared to, particularly given the background he had painted for himself. But as I knew the situation he'd been in at the time that he'd been working on the Billion Euro House it was inevitable that we had to be coming up to the point in the story where Frank was going to find himself tumbling out of the sky again. "But then da boom" (as in the economic boom, for anyone who didn't get it) went bang," Frank declared, spreading his hands for emphasis. "All my funding was gone overnight. I ended up back on the dole, trying to pay for a house that I wasn't able to afford any more. One by one everything was taken away from me: my marriage, my house, me car, me motorbike and then even me push bike. I dealt with my problems the same way I'd always dealt with problems before; I went back to the needle again. Then, for the third time, I had to get clean. This time I had to do more than to deal with the physical addictions" he reflects. "I had to get to the root of what was causing it in the first place and do a lot of work on myself."

 

"I started to meditate for the first time" he continued. "I slowed down my mind. I looked inside myself. I had so much anger, so much resentment. I was finding it hard to deal with all that I'd lost. I kept saying to myself, "I used to have a big house, a big car, I had loads of money, I had this and that and the other and now it's all gone". Most of my pain was coming from a refusal to accept. But through meditation, I was able to come to terms with where I was in my life at that very moment, in the here and now. From there I could move forward. My life started again from there and, in a lot of ways, it was better than before. I had been using the drugs to fill holes in my life but I'd been doing the exact same thing with money during the Celtic Tiger, buying into all this shite that I was being told I should buy into that I didn't need. And what good had it really done for me? When I set up SARI I set up with the intention of helping people and I know that I achieved that and that was all that mattered. That was the point of the Billion Euro House too. I knew in my heart that I really wanted to create this work of art; I had something that I wanted to express. At the start, I was worried if other people would take the piss out of me. So I meditated on it and asked whether or not I should do it and got an answer from deep inside my being. It told me that if that was something that I really wanted to do for myself then that was a good enough reason. From there I just went with it; I set out to create my art for myself. I decided that I wasn't going to worry about life anymore. I was just going to accept whatever happened to me. I'd put meself out there and go wherever was next for me and my creativity. And everything just fell into place."

 

It might seem like I'm just groping for superlatives but as I sat their bright spring sunlight, noticing people over Frank's shoulder as they milled up and down the street across from us, I was absolutely floored by all of this. It seemed to me as though my guest, whom I was hoping at best might have some funny anecdotes about having to rummage around the back of the couch to gather enough coins together to buy some new brushes or something, had experienced as much in his one lifetime as any ten random pedestrians I could grab from the other side of the road. I felt as though I'd fallen into the right place, and the right time, and was very grateful to be hearing this remarkably strange story. As I mentioned earlier, my preparation before my meeting with Frank hadn't been overly thorough, mostly just involving me reading the blurb on the Billion Euro House's official website. I hadn't remembered seeing whether or not the house was still standing and at something of a loss for words I decided on that as my next question. "Nah, the house has been gone for the last few years now" Frank informed me as he lit up again. "I lived in it for a year and then I knew it was just time to move on. I didn't really know what was coming next but I got another bit of good fortune, although it came from a very sad source. Another friend of mine had ended up in massive debt when the property bubble burst and he also committed suicide. I got to look after his estate here on the Vico Road in Dalkey for a while. I've moved out of that house since but his family have been letting me stay in the boathouse in his drive. Dalkey is my home now" he affirmed with a wry grin as if he hadn't fully come to terms with it yet himself. "It's a long way from where I came from. Some days when I wake up and I feel crappy about being broke I say to myself "look at this another way Frank; you live on the most expensive road in the country for free and your view every morning is of the sea. I try to look at everything like that now. I wake up and I have a smoke, then I do me meditation and let the day come to me."

 

It was a simple philosophy, but there was a lot of wisdom in it. Many spiritual traditions talk about the value of acceptance. However, rather contrarily, I also suspected that even if he had achieved inner peace, the Frank that lived with the rest of us in the external world was unlikely to be the type who was happy to rest of his laurels for long. A touch cheekily, I inquired as to what the days were bringing to him at the moment "I'm taking it easy" he replied languidly, between puffs. "I'm working on a book, it's a semi-fictionalized version of my life. Also, I'm planning on going back over to the monastery in Thailand in a few weeks. I still have some work to do in the rehab centre I'm setting up over there." The word "what!?" managed to fell out of my mouth in one piece as my jaw made its way down to the table. I began wondering where he was hiding the kitchen sink. Apparently not noticing my surprise, Frank took a long loving drag before elaborating. "When I needed to get clean the last time I had to get out of Ireland, there were too many distractions here. There was a guy that I knew, from here in Dalkey, Gary was his name, who was working in a monastery in Thailand so I went over to join him. The monastery is run by a sect of monks that broke away from mainstream Buddhism and have dedicated themselves to serving people with addictions. My mentor, there was a Zen master; he was the one who taught me how to meditate. And when I was over there, cleaning myself up, Gary went for a night out in Bangkok. He was an ex-addict himself and that night he took heroin for the first time in five years and he OD'd. Before he died, he was setting up an after-care facility in the monastery, a place to let people know what to expect after they'd gotten clean, when they were ready to go back and rejoin the world. I felt a great debt to Gary; I decided I wanted to complete his work so I took over the facility in his memory. I call it the Haven Retreat". I managed to hide a blush as I remembered the email address I had gotten from the Billion Euro House website had been  frank@havenretreat.com and I'd never thought to ask myself what the unusual name might have been referring to. "When I came back and I was working on the House I kept in contact with the monastery. I started acting as a liaison; I would send people their way whom I knew needed their help. I went over and back a few times myself, but considering the cost of the flight, I could only go over whenever I came across the odd patient who had a bit of money. That's something that doesn't happen very often, the majority of people who go over they're fucked and they have nowhere else left to turn."

 

While Frank fiddled with his lighter to get the very last fag in the packet going I asked him if he'd tried to put into practice anything that he'd learned in the monastery back here in Ireland.  "I have, but on a much smaller scale." He put his hand in his pocket and produced a cardboard business card. It was white with light blue lettering and on the top letters in a warm, rounded font spelled out the anagram: CALMM. The additional blurb at the bottom offered to "unlock your past, live now & look forward." "It stands for Creative Art Linking Mind through Meditation" Frank explained. "The master who looked after me in the monastery was an artist himself and he encouraged me to explore my creativity. He told me it's a great way to get out of your head, so to speak." He grinned at the irony in the expression. "I don't have the resources here to set up a proper treatment centre so I've just started giving these small classes. I do them in groups of about a dozen. The method is simple. I set up a row of sandwich boards around the room. Everybody goes over to a sandwich board and takes up a paintbrush and I encourage them to draw something. Now, there's an awful lot of people that when you hand them a brush, they'll say to themselves, "ah sure I can't draw". But that isn't the point. You don't have to make art to anybody's standards except your own." He paused here and proudly plonked a thin book that he seemed to have magiced out thin air onto the table. It was a hardback copy of a university student's PhD. It was bound in black leather, and on its front cover gold lettering informed me that the thesis was entitled "Studying the work of self-taught artists; focusing on the work of Vincent Van Gough, Frieda Kahlo and Frank Buckley." "Look, they're writing about me already" he beamed. "You see everyone has creativity inside them and they can express it in any way that's meaningful to them," he continued after he'd put the book aside. "But a great deal of the time our minds are nagging us, telling us that whatever we produce isn't good enough. So in CALMM we begin our sessions with a little meditation, maybe five minutes, just to bring everybody down. After that everyone goes to a sandwich board and gets to work, they draw away for maybe 20 minutes, working on whatever comes to them. When that session ends we stop and meditate again; this time everyone is instructed to focus on whatever they're drawing and to keep that image in their minds. I tell everyone to swap positions and pick another sandwich board. You stand in front of another board, with nothing in your mind except the image of your own drawing that you've been concentrating on, only to find that what's in front of you now is something else entirely. From there you go back to work, continuing on with somebody else's drawing." I nodded intently to demonstrate I was paying attention but had to admit to Frank only moments later that I was struggling to understand the significance of the method. "It's a way of tricking your mind. It forces you into letting go. So much of the time we are focused on what we have, or what we think we need to have, the things we think we need to control. Through CALMM you put all your focus on something that is in your control only to see it taken away from you without realizing it. You begin to lessen that control that your mind has over you. For people with an addiction, their mind is constantly at them; reminding them all the time about their craving. The same is true of so many people who live with terrible stress in the modern world for loads of reasons; money, status, family trouble, whatever. This is a way of turning your brain off and getting a break from all that."

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A year after our first meeting I returned to meet Frank again, this time with my friend Andreas in tow to carry out the photoshoot which was responsible for the images you can see decorating this page. The second meeting was almost identical to the first; I was standing awkwardly on the pavement outside the front door of Mugs when Frank swung around the corner before only for my heart to jump into my mouth with nerves when I saw the sullen expression had returned to his face. "Oh God," I thought, "what if he's in a bad mood this time?"
A cup of coffee and a couple of fags later and Frank was just as affable as he had been a year earlier, seemingly oblivious to the bright weather as he was wrapped in a multi-coloured fur coat with a timely "Yes - Equality" badge pinned onto it. Andreas was just as bowled over by Frank and his world as well. Later that evening, as we were driving home he commented "it's hard to believe a man of that ability is where he is. I think if it hadn't been for the drugs he'd have been a millionaire. Frank's a doer." During our catch-up over the coffee I had put a similar question to Frank; "now that you have CALMM up and running, are you hoping to start making a decent income for yourself again?" "I don't do it as a money-spinner" he replied "like I told you, a lot was revealed to me through the Billion Euro House. I go and I do what I want to do. And whatever comes from it comes from it. I've no great expectations anymore. I've been on a lot of roads in my life. I have no degree but I know that I can share my experience with people, 'cause I've been to the edge. There aren't many people who've been there and who've come back." How fitting I thought. Frank's life appeared to have come full circle; all that he'd learned through his varied experiences, from all the battles that he's fought, even given how hard so much of it has been, were what he needed to give him the tools to help people who are now fighting the greatest battle of their own lives. And he's in a place where's he understands that and he's at peace with it. And maybe that's enough to have made it all worthwhile.

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