The Loneliest Number

The Problem with Dublin 1 by Quentin Fottrell

Just before I moved to Dublin 1, where I set up house for five years, an urban folklorist called Terry Fagan gave me a tour of the area. Fagan revealed the pub on Foley Street that was a meeting place for Michael Collins, and he showed me where the newsboys kept a watchful eye on the British Army. He also showed me the notorious St Joseph’s Mansions. As we wandered around this urban holocaust, I had no idea that this would be an introduction to my new life, inner-city style. Tip-toeing around the dirty, oppressive cobweb of corrugated iron, syringes and broken glass, I was surprised that some people were still actually living here. I climbed the cement steps to the top floor and crept into an abandoned flat, now used as a shooting gallery for addicts. It had patches of flowery wallpaper peeling off the walls.

Discarded medical swabs were scattered on the lino of the flat, which had clearly once housed a family. Standing on the top floor amid boarded-up windows, there it was: Dublin 1 and the IFSC – as I will always remember it – the impenetrable emerald city, a steely green monument shimmering like a beautiful mirage in the late evening sun. St Joseph’s was on Sean McDermott Street, where a generation had been wiped out by heroin and a monument now stands in their memory. Aside from a dash of colour from graffiti and towels blowing on the washing lines of the last remaining tenants, it was a real-life Gothic nightmare; and it would leave a lasting impression.

A few months later, I moved to the Irish Life Centre, supposedly the second-oldest apartment block in the country. It was different from St Joseph’s. It was secure, and while the odd sniffy neighbour smirked out of the side of their mouth – or failed to bid you good morning in the lift – you didn’t face the threat of violent crime, or death thereof.

I was so conscious of my personal security that, looking back, I now realise that I was that sniffy neighbour. I had my guard up: against thugs, against my preconceptions of thugs, against the drunken louts who never shut the fuck up at night, against my over-inquisitive neighbour who would say, “I haven’t seen you around lately! Have you been away?”

A postcode-hopping problem child, I had arrived in this most deprived of regions from Dublin 4 – our most privileged postcode, where even the drinking water is noticeably better. So why choose Dublin 1 if I had so many reservations, real or imagined? What was I doing there? And why did I stay for five years? With my snotty-nosed urban plunge, I intended to carve out an existence to support my journalism, shed my increasingly scary mid-Atlantic South Dublin twang, and, with knowledge of local watering holes, earn my stripes as a “real” Dub. (And one other thing: it was cheap.)

Five years later, I still write, but the accent is getting progressively worse, with taxi drivers regularly asking me if I am here on holidays. And I never want to live in Dublin 1 again.

Yesterday, as I sat in traffic on O’Connell Street – that boulevard of city planners’ broken dreams – looking down Earl Street North, gazing benignly at the James Joyce statue between Clery’s and Kylemore Café, I was struck by my lack of nostalgia for the place I once called home… and the sizeable piece of ice in my heart. You see, for years I’d also pass my old house on Waterloo Road and fondly recall my carefree twenty-something pre-mortgage days. I remember marching down the hallway like the lamb in A Fly Went By, with one foot lodged in a cake tin and a cocktail in hand to open the door to a disgruntled neighbour: I promised to turn the music down, then she hugged me.

In Dublin 1, the neighbours just called the cops or security, or both. I’d wonder who dobbed me in. The Australians next door? Forget my parties. They lived in a studio, so everyone could hear them having sex.

“Do we play our TV too loud?” they once asked me.

“It’s not the goddamn television that’s too loud,” I longed to reply.

The Irish Life Centre, which has a secret garden and duck pond in the middle, certainly has its share of characters. It is home to an ever-changing collection of foreign residents, Abbey actresses (old and new), some warm-hearted lawyers and academics. Camouflaged as office buildings, most people don’t know that anyone lives there. But, like a long-distance plane journey, I got to know them in our final moments together.

The sunny blonde I met in the lift was a regular Anne of Green Gables, yet even now I don’t know her name. My inquisitive neighbour offered to help with my carry-out baggage as I moved out. I declined. Then, realising my error, I gratefully accepted. What surprised me about my neighbours, aside from all the wasted time, was how many of them vowed they would never leave this building. In fact, if you came and went by car, no-one would need to see you. (Useful if you were on a witness protection programme, as one neighbour was.) They all knew each other’s business, including mine.

Even when there was a fire and alarms went off, I tossed-and-turned and slept through it, rather than hurrying down to the lobby in my Snoopy jim-jams with the rest of them. An elderly gentleman died in that fire. He always smiled warmly in the lift. He always wore a posy, dandily clipped to the lapel of his blazer. After a few years, I did make progress. Sheries on Abbey Street – in the same family for four generations – became my inner-city retroworld. When the Isherwoods modernised it for the first time since 1947, tearing out the low-slung formica counters, I peered through the window, and the sight of the carnage melted a layer of that aforementioned ice. I had, to my surprise, become territorial. That also explained my irritation at the ever-changing cast of Stags, swaggering down Gardiner Street in half-dozen-strong packs in their Ben Sherman shirts, and Hens, padding by with their fluffy antennae. Orange-skinned aliens with Mancunian accents.

Eventually, I started to trot around with my imaginary wicker basket like the best of small-town Belle Eire. I became a regular at the Abbey and Gate, drank smoothies every day from Juicy Bagel in the Irish Life Mall, bought my meat from FX Buckley on Earl Street North and my sandwiches – white bread on Fridays as a special treat! – in Tea Time Express.

What took me so long to acclimatise? Truthfully, I was unused to living in an apartment building, and lived behind a Berlin Wall of my own construction. Also, outside the IFSC (I thought) wasn’t as safe as inside: to the east of Connolly Station lay the manicured lawns, fake-looking streets brought to a virtual life by a Spar, Mace and the spanking new Docklands.

Leaving the IFSC and going toward East Wall is like stepping off a film set, and returning to reality: litter, scrubland itching for architects and forklifts, narrow red-bricked council houses, loud-mouthed boys in search of excitement and precocious little girls coming back from the shops in their pyjamas singing pop songs loudly, as if hoping to be discovered.

On the other side, through Connolly Station to Amiens Street, is the grey cityscape of Kansas from the unreal world of Oz. My Dublin 1, the Strumpet City of James Plunkett. I like to think he would have been amazed by Dublin accents being drowned out by the baritones of milky-skinned Polish.

When I moved into Dublin 1, I wrote a short and flippant piece about it for this magazine: the amount of smokers, lack of green space, children’s junk food diets (Iceland has since thankfully closed) and the perils of sharing a building with a creepy Boris Karloff character. (He has since been evicted and his apartment was recently fumigated by men in white space suits.)

Imposing my middle-class sensibilities didn’t go down well. If I complain about social ills, I’m a snob. If a local does, commentators perk up – before going back to blowing on their double espressos. The aggressiveness on the streets I got used to and, as I found out, it could also be contagious. This is my experience, my city… but they are our problems.

There are, of course, things I won’t forget; good things. I did a free cookery course in a community centre on Rutland Street with a great class of local head-the-balls; I was a dash from the Luas, Dart, Cineworld, Abbey, Gate, Savoy, Easons, Expresso Café and practically every hardware, restaurant and department store in the city. And it was certainly an eventful time. I nearly ran over Brian Friel on my bike outside the Abbey. I came off the damn thing on the north quays. I smiled smugly as Independent hacks voiced their fears of being stalked by syringe-wielding drug addicts when they moved to their new offices on Talbot Street. Before its final lap-dance, I often side-stepped Stringfellows protesters – who weren’t fussy about whether they preached to club patrons or baffled passers-by. And I had to endure the bellowing of Jesus-style apostles on Saturday mornings. (Oh, how I longed for them to take their sandwich boards and megaphones and go clean up the suburbs instead.)

It takes but a moment to traverse the two worlds inside and outside the IFSC, but it’s quite a trip. At weekends, it’s a ghost town. The women in uniform black skirts and white sneakers are gone, as are the impossibly tanned and groomed Italian, Spanish and French financiers. Its empty streets are, in fact, perfect for a gangland shooting. (In fairness, Loretta Lambkin of Dublin Docklands says, “We recognise that the area has focused primarily on business and services,” but says this dynamic is changing and the IFSC was the first phase of the Docklands project, with Spencer Dock, the Point Village and Grand Canal Dock all yet to come, including the new CHQ building this year.)

Elsewhere in Dublin 1, much more needs to change. On one of my first nights in the hood, I passed a drunk/drugged-up couple in tracksuits, getting hot and heavy on a stone bench. Gangs would often descend on that same bench, moving en masse like the Keystone Cops in a drugged-out netherworld, waking the dead.

The regeneration of O’Connell Street did many things: it got rid of the trees, made more room for pedestrians and also erased most, if not all, public seating. This didn’t deal with the social problem, but relegated it to the backstreets of Malborough Street, where addicts now congregate outside a homeless centre. A place, in short, where tourists can’t find them.

We are now so resigned to our inner-city drug culture that addicts’ zombie-like alter-egos are captured in ‘comedies’ like Adam & Paul. They are billed as tragicomic figures, perfected with macabre choreography in Paul Mercier’s Homeland at our national theatre. Irish writers have embraced junkies… like irascible pets who do the funniest things.

While the Abbey will soon move to the Docklands, it will stay within the postcode. This is surely good news, although Ireland’s glitterati will surely continue to avoid our disenfranchised.

It’s too early to tell who will benefit most from the regeneration of Dublin 1: the residents or developers. The swanky new apartments opposite my building play host to trendy Europeans who party loudly on their balconies into the early hours while their inner-city neighbours in the (clearly demarcated) social housing hurl four-letter-words to shut them up.

The retail side is busy too. Arnotts on Henry Street, Clerys and the Carlton Cinema site on O’Connell Street are being redeveloped, while flat complexes like Sean Tracey House and Liberty House are being rebuilt. St Joseph’s has been renovated, partially replaced and renamed. And there is more upmarket social housing, with over 100 homes by the Cluid Housing Association, which screened prospective residents. “Every apartment is different,” one woman told me, as she punched in her security code. “It’s lovely.”

Lovely indeed. But Dublin 1 is only about halfway through its revamp; not enough has been done to reverse decades of government neglect. And heroin remains a massive problem. Store Street Garda Station recently made yet another large seizure. Every time you think the pushers are on their way out and you turn your back on them, they spring back to life like the Michael Myers character in Halloween with the really bad skin. They refuse to go away.

On my last day, I had coffee in Sheries, got some pillow cases in Guineys, bought a religious booklet from a Polish Hare Krishna on Moore Street, tasted my final smoothie, cancelled my gym membership in the Clarion – never used it anyway – and bought a pair of 100% polyester underpants in Boyer’s. (Okay, I made that last one up.)

When I do revisit to collect stray post, I’m amazed that I lived in the thick of all this craziness: a fume-filled street where most people come not to live, but to work. Time and again people told me, “I didn’t know there were apartments in this building.” As if my home was invisible.

And that’s why I could never again live in Dublin 1. It’s the loneliest of numbers. A neighbourhood is a place where you feel at home, gossip on the street corner, buy a loaf of bread in your curlers, become embroiled in local issues and leave your mark with a plant pot or some ill-judged cladding. It is not a place where you should go to disappear.

Quentin Fottrell lives in Dublin 8

Published in the March 2007 edition of The Dubliner Magazine

Comments

[zaklady bukmacherskie]

Nice work, your awsome content have forced me to to leave some positive feedback

[darla]

I live in dublin 8 and you certainly wont be able to disappear there.The numbers are very observant even when they only vaguely know you.I coloured my hair a while back and a total stranger living down the road wanted to know what brand i used because she liked it;0).

[niamh gormley]

Can you tell me who was the last remaining resident of O' Connell street please and when they vacated? and whether they were Dublin born and bred???

:)