Where the streets have no shame
We here in the Sunday Independent lead a charmed life. We work in a street in the centre of Dublin called Talbot Street. In some ways it's like the main street of a provincial town. There are lots of pubs and a cut-price Guineys store. There are pizza parlours and pyjama gangs and the methadone centres are scarcely a stone's throw away. And in the evenings, or indeed the mornings, we hear the full- throated city songbirds, roaring and aggressive, or glassy-eyed and weak, depending on the addiction.
It's arguably a great place for journalists to work. All modern Ireland is here. In your office of an afternoon you can hear the gunshots that leave a man dead in Lower Sheriff St. And, there is a marvellous sense of history. Little seems to have changed since its mean streets provided a cloak of darkness for Liam O'Flaherty's Informer. Or since Joyce immortalised the streets behind us, Monto, the red light district, in Ulysses.
It's thronged with tourists and for some it must seem like a home from home. Take the Muscovites. There will be nothing strange for them in the queues at the cash-for- gold shops. What a lot of gold we have collected down here in the north inner city. And the Russians will surely feel even more at home now that we have our very first State-owned department store, Arnotts.
Some philistines with no sense of the throb of a real city wanted to change all this. These arrogant people had a vision. They thought they would make the city centre into an attractive place. They robbed the idea from some place like Paris with its Left Bank or Latin Quarter. They imagined they could make the vista that is O'Connell Street into a Champs Elysees; that the area around the GPO, Middle Abbey St and O'Connell St would be a beacon of commerce and culture and cleanliness.
They would call it the Northern Quarter. Bertie waxed lyrical about how it would re-energise and kick- start our recovery. It would take the pejorative out of the phrase 'inner city.' But they were wrong. They thought they had a vision. What they had, according to last Thursday's Irish Times, was "hubris", grandiosity and the pride that comes before a fall. That, apparently, is what daring to dream was. But one man's vision is another man's hubris.
In my view, hubris is not listening to the agony of the biggest employer in the economy -- the retail sector. Hubris is not listening to the pain of the small property owner. Before Barack Obama took his holidays he launched a blitzkrieg of wooing on the women of America -- because they control the purse strings.
People who like to explain everything to their own satisfaction will say that all that collapsed was "unsustainable", that we over-extended ourselves. If you bring that to its ultimate conclusion, every expansion is folly.
Without the sunshine of expansion, you close up and die. Talbot Street, you are our sunshine.
Originally published in
