City Sickness

Frank McDonald has been Irish Times Environment Correspondent for the last fourteen years. The Construction Of Dublin is the third in a series of books he has written about the metamorphosis of Ireland s capital city: this time, covering approximately the last decade, filling in the background of many of the issues he has covered in the Irish Times over the years. And while the book is not light beach-reading fare, so effortlessly digestible that it will become coffee-bar chat, in the current climate of overpriced accommodation, Tokyo-style traffic congestion and developers scrambling to make the next deal with cash in brown paper bags in hand, it probably should do.

One of the book s chief successes lies in its layout: there are some two hundred colour photos in the book, rendering it more than a mere ledger of the city s recent foibles, instead turning it into an open dialogue with the reader. Even when you disagree with a point McDonald is making, often via highly opinionated photo captions, there the photo is, for you to judge yourself.
This is perhaps The Construction Of Dublin s greatest value: aside from the vast and thorough documentation of a city in flux, probably the most important thing a book like this can offer us at this point in history is a way of seeing past our current situation and a way of realising that, perhaps, it doesn t have to be this way. Belatedly, the city s planners seem to be looking at the bigger picture too, as the author explains.
Dublin Corporation has been reorganised, and there are five or six separate, integrated, area plans for different parts of the city: proactive documents that provide a framework for development, he observes. It isn t just a question of the planners any longer sitting there waiting for developers to come into them saying, Would you mind awfully if we built a twenty storey tower block on this site? A lot of that still goes on, but at least the other stuff is going on too: a context is being laid down, by planners not developers, in relation to things like O Connell Street, for example. The corporation came up with the whole plan for O Connell St. It s a marvellous document. It will be great.
And that s why the so-called spike is so important, McDonald goes on, referring to the Monument of Light proposed for O Connell Street, perhaps better known to many as the Stiletto in the Ghetto. Whatever people may think of it, and I know there s been a lot of criticism of it, it is the fundamental thing that is going to change perceptions of O Connell Street. It is the grand gesture that needs to be made to underline the commitment of the public office to rejuvenating the street. Okay, it s very daring and, you know, rather startling and maybe a bit bizarre in a way, but on the other hand, when you look at some of the other entries, I mean, we re talking wacko stuff.
But regardless of what the other entries were like, surely the question is: is the spike good enough? Would Paris accept it?
Yes, it is good enough, McDonald says without hesitation. Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest. I think people will like it, grow to admire it enormously. Submissions will be taken for and against, now, and I ve no doubt that the majority of the submissions will be negative. It s a question of the minister gathering his balls together, as it were, to go ahead with it. In spite of what the public say.
The Eiffel Tower is the exact counterpoint, he says. Victor Hugo was so opposed to the Tower, and Guy de Maupassant they launched this ferocious campaign against it. It was an extraordinary thing to propose, I mean, this enormous structure. Hugo used to regularly go to have lunch on the first level, on the basis that this was the only place in Paris from which you could not see this monstrosity. Is there anybody who thinks the Eiffel Tower is a monstrosity now?
Parisians, and citizens of the world s other great cities , have a civic pride that is very much tied up in the iconography of the city. Do you think Dubliners feel anything like that?
Nope. Not at all. I think we treat the public realm like shit. Public space, the city: like absolute shit. Somebody got sick on the surface of the Millennium Bridge on the day it was open. Walk down there now and you will find the surface spattered with chewing-gum and other detritus. Walk down Henry Street and Mary Street, two million quid has been spent there it is so much nicer to walk on than Grafton Street ever was and look at it. Every second piece of granite expensive stone, real stone, they didn t skimp on it spattered with gum residue. And this is going to go on until people change their attitudes and view Dublin as their property: as the common, collective property of the people of this city. I mean, Meeting House Square has to be gated every evening, because of the fear that it will be trashed after hours.
Why do you think this happens?
Because we are a filthy, dirty people.
I smile, thinking he s joking: he isn t.
We really are. We are way behind in terms of civic awareness. It s one of the most depressing things about us. We are really, really bad at it, the worst in Europe. And not only in that sense.
There s a lot of people in Dublin who say, What about what s going on in the city? Do you not think that something essential is being sacrificed in some way? And, while we can t be in mourning for derelict Dublin, at the same time, there are a lot of things being lost, important things. There s this endless flux of change at the moment, and some of the change is gratuitous, it s not necessary at all.
In Paris for example, you can go in to places that James Joyce used to frequent, and sit in the same chairs that he sat in. I mean, they still have the same furniture about the place after 50 or 60 years. We don t have that kind of mentality in Dublin. We re into change for its own sake. And a lot of the stuff that s going on on that front is really, really regrettable and in ten years time were going to wake up and think, oh my god, look at what we ve done .

One of the more shocking points in the book a fact which perhaps hasn t gotten as many column inches as the Flood tribunal, but which still speaks volumes about how Dublin sees and values itself compared to other cities is the fact that Ireland has been taken to court by the EU for not protecting its own architectural heritage.
It was a case taken by Lancefort, An Taisce and people like Friends of the Irish Environment and so on, McDonald explains, who are, of course, regarded almost like traitors for having exposed the country to these potential sanctions, massive fines and everything. But this has been going on for years. And part of it derived from the fact that this city was seen traditionally as a quarry for the construction industry. The fact that it was full of historic buildings was neither here nor there. You could get rid of anything, anything at one stage.
That isn t the case anymore, at last. The words listed building were never mentioned once in any of the planning acts until last year. It didn t even arise. They weren t even mentioned. It s bizarre. What has saved us, I think, is that we couldn t afford to do any of the really really damaging things we wanted to do.
But now we can, I suggest.
I quoted an English architect in The Destruction of Dublin in 1985 [McDonald s previous book] who said, The only reason that Dublin remained for so long the beautiful 18th-century city that the English built, was that the Irish were too poor to pull it down. Sadly, this is no longer the case. We mistakenly assume that this architectural legacy was created by foreigners. It was not. Whoever the houses were built for, they were built by Irish bricklayers, Irish craftsmen, Irish carpenters, Irish joiners. Georgian Dublin is part of what we are.
Can you imagine what might have happened if the first government of the Irish Free State when the Custom House was burnt by the IRA in 1921 and glowed for a week, the temperatures reached 900 degrees they could have cleared that building into a skip. But they didn t. They restored the Custom House. They restored the Four Courts. O Connell Street was devastated by the 1916 Rising and the civil war, and it was rebuilt in this grand neoclassical style under the then city architect, at a time when we hadn t got a brass farthing. This was amazing stuff for a small, newly independent and totally impoverished country.
McDonald s book, it must be made clear, is not a book about heritage and conservationism. But these issues come up in the greater argument about making Dublin into a sustainable, beautiful city with a high quality of life which, in Dublin at present, seems to be something people think you have to be able to afford, rather than something everyone deserves naturally.
Why should that be so? McDonald says. In the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Finland almost every European country there is a commitment to creating really good living environments for people, it s par for the course. Because that s what it s all about at the end of the day. Unfortunately, in this country we are married to preconceived notions about what suburban housing should be. Everybody seems to have this notion of the two-story house with the front and back garden. That is just a nonsense.
He also goes on to remind me, rightly, that what Dubliners now think of as apartments monstrously expensive and so cramped that you must turn sideways to go round the bed are not something Europeans would put up with. He means proper apartments, built with high quality-of-life standards in place.
The book also addresses the need to refocus on building up areas closer to the city centre, rather than carrying on with the current problem of urban sprawl.
One of the more tragic things about Dublin in a way is that only one of twelve Dubliners lives between the canals. A lot of people in Dublin cannot afford to buy houses, or flats, or anything, in their own city, because the property prices are so ridiculous. So you have these little bits of Dublin being tacked onto every provincial town within an 80 km radius of the city. Okay, you may be able to get houses cheaper, in Wicklow or whatever, but look at the life you re condemning yourself to: sitting behind the wheel of a car driving to Intel in Leixlip. It s an appalling prospect.
Is Dublin running out of land?
No, not at all, he says emphatically. Then he brings up one of the book s most controversial proposals. There s a whole lot of areas I m quoting economist Colm McCarthy if you look at a map of Dublin, there s an awful lot of green blobs on it. The question is, whether all of these green blobs are really very useful to have, or whether if it comes down to a choice between, say, building housing in Milltown on a piece of land owned by a religious order, or building housing in Carpenterstown in the arse end of nowhere, then you build the housing in Milltown, because it s closer in and people can have access to good public transport. I think it really needs to be looked at.
Like St Anne s Park on the north side: it s the size of a suburb. I m not saying that St Anne s should be built on as such, but McCarthy s saying that what should be examined is how many people use the place, could we fit in some housing there? If you think of what s been done in Ballsbridge, where you have that serpentine apartment building overlooking Herbert Park, it actually enhances the park rather than detracts from it. I don t think that anything should be regarded as sacrosanct anymore. We have to beef up the density of the city. Green spaces some of them have to go.
That notion is going to horrify a lot of people.
But it isn t horrifying. Look at the alternative: the alternative is massive and sustained urban sprawl, so that Dublin stretches from Drogheda at least, possibly from Dundalk, all the way to Arklow, and inland from Kinnegad. Do we want that? Because that is the direction we are going, willy-nilly, because nobody has sat down to think about it in any kind of a rational way, it seems to me. And we re going to have to.

Another theme within the book is the need for the growth of Dublin to go hand-in-hand with the development of a public transport system, in order to wean Dublin away from being a car-orientated city. This is also very much based on the European idea of leaving cars outside city limits, in favour of trams or the metro.
But is any amount of good public transport going to stop people, when they become successful and grown-up, from buying their own car.
Where are you living? he asks me.
Rathmines, I reply.
There s no excuse for not using a bicycle.
But, come on. The Celtic Tiger generation grew up on bicycles, they never want to get on one again, now they can afford cars.
A lot of people are wedded to their cars. But if everybody drives around the place, nobody will get around. People are trapped in their cars, for hours, every day. The promise of freedom is a myth. There is no future for cars in this city. People have got to start recognising that.
We are caught in the adolescent phase of car ownership, he continues. It s kind of about being a showoff, it s a status symbol. It s a psychosis. We haven t yet made the distinction between car ownership and car use. When people talk about restraining car use, people who drive cars assume they re talking about somebody else to restrain their car use, but not them. The Netherlands has a population of 15 million people, and there are over 6 million cars in the Netherlands, which is the size of Munster and yet, you walk around Amsterdam and tell me if you think it s a car-dominated city.
What have they done right?
They don t use their cars for trips to work. There s an excellent public transport system, so they use that to get around. That s the thing that makes sense. It works. And it s based on not just a good suburban network but also trams that run on the street, over the bridges and the canals.
Probably the book s most striking image is the Tube-style map drawing of a possible transport system as McDonald sees it. More than any number of theoretical pieces about LUAS could have done, it gives the reader a vivid, evocative picture of what Dublin could become. Looking at this map, as a pedestrian, all sorts of easy, cheap, safe journeys to places in Dublin you never used before suddenly become possible. Two-hour bus journeys where you have to change twice would be a thing of the past.
This is the kind of thing that could be done, McDonald agrees. And in the city centre: I mean, to have a tram run down Dawson Street, around into Nassau Street, down the traffic end of Grafton Street, around into College Green, down Westmoreland Street into O Connell Street it would be absolutely brilliant.
In the 1940s, he continues, it was the trend to take tram systems out they were perceived as being outdated, every British city was getting rid of them. So, despite all our flagwaving, we followed the example of the old colonial masters: we got rid of them. But every European city kept them. In Zurich for example, there is effectively no car parking available in the city centre, full stop. Everybody in Zurich uses the trams, they re there on time, and they think nothing of it. That s what we ve got to get to, and it s not impossible, because it s been done in other places.
We think of ourselves as being uniquely different to everybody else, the wild untameable Irish, where, all these solutions that work everywhere else, we think: That s all very well over there, but it would never work in Dublin. Well, it s going to have to work in Dublin, I m sorry. And if that involves people changing, it will have to be done. I mean: do we want a city that functions, or not? That s what it boils down to.
The book is also full of extensive accounts of some of the greater kerfuffles in recent Irish planning, from the now-notorious Spencer Dock, to the ever-unfolding bloodbath of the Flood Tribunal, to the somewhat bittersweet success of Temple Bar. A shocking revelation to most people will be that Group 91, the consortium behind the planning of Temple Bar, had the power to stop the |ber-pub trend from happening the whole time, and did nothing. Why?
They didn t stop it because they were afraid of bursting the bubble, says McDonald. There was all this state-led and private sector investment coming into the area, and there was a perception that we can t do anything to rock the boat even though they were mandated to ensure that there would be a balanced mix of uses in the area, and that one would not overwhelm the others.
And unfortunately, that didn t happen, out of pure gutlessness on the part of the state authorities. Gutless, gutless, gutless. Basically having an inability to say no, fuck off, we are not giving you tax incentives for some mega-pub boozerama that may have been on the agenda.
I mean, Temple Bar was a great success in many ways. But the fact remains that an extra half acre, or whatever the figure is, of drinking space was added to the area in the few years after 1991. And OK, they ve changed their policies, the tax incentives have expired anyway. But I mean, really, they should have known. What s the point in closing the stable door after the horse has bolted down the street with a six pack under its arm?
Why did you write this book? I ask McDonald finally.
Because it had to be done. I think that people really need to get their heads around the fact that this city is at the most crucial turning point in its history, and that this only happens every 200 years, or more. What we do in the next ten years is going to determine the future shape of Dublin and of Ireland and if we get it wrong, we won t be forgiven by future generations. They will say: they really fucked up.
All photos from The Construction Of Dublin by Frank McDonald published by Gandon Editions