Access few areas

Fancy buying the DVD of Run, Lola, Run, or the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou, or tickets for Air’s Halloween-night gig in the Olympia? Fine, mosey along to Grafton or Henry streets, pop in to your favourite record shop, and – whoops, you can’t have them, sorry, because you use a wheelchair and pretty much all you can get to on the ground floor – the only floor you’ll be seeing if there isn’t a lift – is the regular CD department, the basic audio-video accessories, the sale specials and the Top 30.

That’s provided you can get into the shop at all; provided there’s an incline or flat surface rather than steps at the entrance; provided the aisles are wide enough, and provided you aren’t already too knackered to go shopping after navigating over cobblestone and kerb to get there. A grand day out, eh?

Here in the year 2001, in the period of unprecedented wealth in which we find ourselves, several of the largest record, entertainment and multi-media shops in the capital are still not fully accessible to shoppers with mobility issues.

Now, it’s relevant to mention here that, first, inadequate accessibility is by no means only a record-shop problem, but unfortunately extends to shopping of every kind; and second, that most music shops located in regional cities and suburban shopping centres are better equipped for people who use wheelchairs – mainly because such shops are relatively new and thus were built in accordance with newer laws governing accessibility. But this is of little comfort to those music and film fans who prefer to shop, reasonably enough, in the capital’s city centre.

Readers of hotpress would probably concur that there’s no pleasure so fine as coming upon a new artist or filmmaker through following your own interests, letting one discovery lead to the next, getting into things by chance and by word of mouth.

If you are any kind of ‘specialist’ consumer however – if you prefer, let’s say, Miles Davis over Myleene out of Hear’say – you are, as a wheelchair user, frequently rewarded for your curiosity with not only departments, but on occasion, entire shops that are out of reach. Indeed it is perhaps inevitable that in a Georgian city like Dublin, some of the capital’s finest specialist shops are located in tiny upstairs rooms or down flights of stairs.

But of those music and film fans hotpress interviewed, not one is anything but (quite remarkably) sympathetic about shops like these; they understand the structural and financial impossibilities of making them fully accessible. They’re rather less patient with the multinationals, however.

“HMV on Grafton St for example,” argues teenager Peter Finn, avid collector of late ’60s rock and cult movies, “they make enough money to [install a lift]. Places like Big Brother [hip hop offshoot in Road Records’ basement], don’t. And you don’t expect places like Big Brother to expand. But when the larger places don’t, you get really, really pissed off.”

It does make you think: in cases where a record shop is owned by a huge multinational, isn’t there a system in place whereby the price of a lift – for a city-centre flagship store in a capital city – can quickly be found?

“You would have expected it, certainly,” agrees Andy Jones, manager of Tower Records in Wicklow St, a note of frustration creeping down the phone line. (hotpress should mention that the shops we spoke to are not being singled out, but are the ones who were able to speak to us at the time of going to press.) “We’re desperately looking at ways to improve this, as we speak,” says Jones. “We’re being looked at as a prime candidate for a refit.” He points out the current stairwell area, leading up to soundtracks, classical, films and jazz, as the most likely place a lift might go.

Tower’s O’Connell St branch, downstairs in Eason’s, was cited repeatedly to hotpress, by everyone we interviewed, as a favourite, fully accessible city-centre shop; but their flagship in Wicklow St. is only serviced by a small, unsignposted utility lift in a back room, which it shares with the rest of the building.

However, Jones is encouragingly on-message about accessibility; since taking the post earlier this year, he says, “you become sort of aware of these things. You look at the steps, and you think, ‘Hang on a second’…”

He mentions alterations he would like to see to the main doorway as well as the need for ramped areas in and outside the shop.

“We have a great relationship with the customers who shop here who use wheelchairs, we spend as much time as necessary assisting them,” he says. “But being an American-owned company, we have to apply for capital expenditure: [a refit] is not something we can afford on a local level. And it can take quite some time – and it’s almost 100 percent out of my hands. All I can do is highlight the problem, raise the questions and try to get the funds made available to us. We’ve applied for it, and we do expect to get it in the not too distant future.”

When?

“I would hazard a guess and say a year, maybe 18 months.”

Surely things in general have improved for wheelchair users in recent times, in these years of the Tiger?

“No, I can’t really say that they have,” says Eileen Daly, another huge music fan (“the only thing I don’t like is Irish trad. And techno, argh!”) and compulsive DVD buyer. “I have brought it to several shops’ attention, the fact that I can’t get upstairs. And they say, ‘Well, it isn’t our fault’. And I say, ‘Yes it is, I’m a customer like everybody else’. And they say, ‘We don’t have the money for a lift’. And I’m like, ‘You can find the money somewhere’.”

Kevin Murray of the (also not fully accessible) Virgin Megastore in Aston Quay also speaks emphatically of the need for full accessibility in all Virgin shops. He also assures hotpress that a letter they received from the Irish Wheelchair Association outlining such issues has been duly passed on to their head office in the UK (within whose remit making the required structural changes would fall). But why doesn’t a shop the size and high-design-standard of the Megastore already have a lift?

“We’ve traded on this site for 14 years now, and at the time when we moved into this building,” Murray tells me, “it wasn’t a consideration. I wasn’t here myself, so I can’t tell you what the thought-process was. But I can tell you, in all new Virgin stores, as a minimum, we have a lift if there’s more than one floor, and any multi-layered areas on individual floors, have ramps. And all our listening posts are usable from a wheelchair. In any new stores, and in any future redevelopment, disabled access, access for all sectors of the community, is very high priority. Every time we open a store, it has minimum requirements,” says Murray. “And, I think, some of those requirements are legal, and some are moral.”

Record shops are meant to be about browsing, about going in to buy one thing and coming out with something else, about having a look and a read and a mooch and a listen.

Peter Finn, in contrast, usually sends a brother or a mate anyplace he can’t go, with a shopping list – but as a knowledgeable cineaste with over 250 titles at home (“the ’70s era of American cinema was the best,” he considers sagely) this really isn’t ideal.

“You can’t mooch at all, you can’t just browse around the shop,” he says of his own two years of wheelchair use. “And that’s the thing I really miss.”

Aileen, who has used a wheelchair all her life, also sends her mates to destinations unknown on shopping missions.

“What bothers me the most is the lack of privacy,” she complains. “Everybody knows what records you’re going to buy. Everybody knows what concerts you’re going to. It’s very intrusive. That might sound stupid, but it is.”

If nothing else, the international popularity of internet shopping – where browsing is all – speaks volumes not only about the way we shop, but also indicates that there’s frankly pots of money to be made once every retail area is available to every potential buyer. Claire Barry of the Irish Wheelchair Association is hopeful that in future, disabled shoppers will be taken as seriously as a potential market as the gay and lesbian population have finally become (remember the commercial world waking up to the possibilities of the ‘pink pound’ in the early ’90s?).

In the meantime, Peter, who has travelled extensively round Europe, feels that Dublin is depressingly behind in terms of accessibility. “In Europe, they have ramps, they have lifts,” he says. “It’s perfectly normal.” And indeed this writer finds it hard to imagine a flagship shop in a major American city like New York or Boston daring to trade without full accessibility.

Claire Barry is, to coin a phrase, cautiously optimistic that several recent developments surrounding disability issues may help to change things. First, there’s the Equal Status Act, brought in January of this year, which includes disabled people as one of several minority groups whose interests and freedoms must be protected, thus clarifying to society at large that disability is not a health issue, as many still perceive it to be, but a human rights and equality issue.

Second, the mobilisation of two newish organisations, the National Disability Authority (a government appointed body whose remit is to assist in formulating policy on disability, who launched their Strategic Plan last month) and People with Disabilities in Ireland Ltd (a lobbying and representation group with members from each county, and who had their first official meeting on 25 June) means that issues faced by disabled people are now being brought to a higher level of visibility and priority nationwide. And that’s something we can all get into. b