The Invisible Republic

Take a walk on the northside. Loiter awhile behind the Ilac Centre, one part of Dublin city where graffiti culture is still writ large on the brickwork. On an increasingly multicultural Moore St, with its Nigerian cafe, black boys on mobiles and exiles on main street, a female Jesus freak hymns her head off, parading a placard which reads BELIEVE ON (sic) THE LORD JESUS CHRIST AND THOU SHALT BE SAVED ACTS 16-31. Every third car is a cab. Put the right music on the Walkman and turn 360 degrees you could be in that Crosstown Traffic jeans ad shot in pre-zero tolerance New York.

And that s not where the Big Apple connotations end. Looking up at the monument to Charles Stuart Parnell at the top of O Connell Street, thinking on the government s bungling of the refugee issue, you can almost hear Lou Reed drawling, Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I ll piss on em/That s what the Statue of Bigotry says/Your poor huddled masses, let s club em to death and get it over with/And just dump em on the boulevard . . .
The boulevard in question is Parnell Street, specifically the cluster of black-run businesses nicknamed Little Africa. Except these aren t the poor huddled masses of Lou s tune, nor the famous floods of refugees , nor the new criminal class cooked by the tabloids. Mostly these are ordinary people trying to trade, socialise, raise families and preserve their own culture while adjusting to a foreign one. Indeed, if you believe one street corner sage, a substantial percentage of the black community here are not refugees or asylum seekers but Nigerians with British passports and an abundance of venture capital.
But if at first the idea of a few Nigerian premises going under the Little Africa banner smacks of a typical Irish tendency towards exaggeration for the sake of effect, then take a peek into a shop like The Tropical Superstore or Infinity Ventures or the hairdressing salon Blades. Here s strange turf camouflaged by familiar surroundings. Arriving on spec into a backroom thronged with young black men sitting around talking and smoking, or women having their hair done, the Caucasian interloper might be forgiven for feeling stared at, or to be more accurate, feeling as if folk are making an effort not to stare. There s no sense of antipathy, only mild curiosity, but for anyone reared in an homogenous society, the feeling of dislocation is a new one. You immediately become Dylan s quintessential straight man, Mr Jones, disappearing through a North Dublin doorway and materialising in this other world, part unisex salon, part convenience store, with its scent of grain, its exotic-looking cosmetics products, Afro-Caribbean foods, shelves stocked with pounded yam, maize, flour, goat meat, ground rice, coal black bananas; the braids, wigs and hairpieces hanging from the wall; the glass displays filed with ethnic videos, titles like Panumo, Exodus, Gazula and Ayefele; the poster advertising periodicals such as African Soccer, African Guardian, African Expatriate, Africa Today, Black Perspective, Okebe, Nigerian News and Nigerian Trumpet.

Make no mistake, this is a bona fide subculture, a social laboratory, the Parnell petri dish. And although it isn t a big African residential area, the handful of shops and cafes function equally as businesses and community centres. Like one cafe worker says: on Parnell Street, a black person might meet a fellow exile they haven t seen in ten years.
You get addicted to the buzz of the place. Most days, it s humming with young firebrands in regulation hip hop duds, the chain gang chic of baggy denims, trainers and football jerseys, all topped with beanies or wedge cuts or the odd dyed afro. 20 and 30-something males hang around outside the African shops and the Internet Exchange in small packs, a marked contrast to the wrinkled, tobacco-stained Irish blokes emerging from Paddy Power s bookie shop. At a nearby bus stop stands a tall guy with a close crop, dressed in Levi s and carrying a document bag, wearing the patented stern stare of the Young Black Intellectual. Ample mothers tote infants in toweling wraps. More than a few of the girls all enviable bone structure and blonde braids sport thick inner city accents. Many of these people are stunningly beautiful.
But they are also notoriously reticent. The recurring problem with any reporter chasing a grass roots story on the African experience in Ireland is this: when there s trouble, nobody wants to stick their neck out. When things are quiet, no-one wants to rock the boat. These new Dubliners have adopted Joyce s policy of silence, exile and cunning. And you can t blame them.
So when did Parnell Street become Little Africa? According to the @last tv segment aired on Network 2 several months ago, Tropical Superstore owner John was the first to set up shop here about three years ago. He chose a street regarded as seedy and tawdry by boomtown rats precisely because southside prices were prohibitive. His friends called him crazy. Parnell Street didn t have the best reputation, but at least it had a reputation, plus, it was just off O Connell Street.
As one local source (we ll call him Martin) who has lived in the area for the best part of a decade attests: They couldn t get tenants on Parnell Street that shop that John occupies was vacant for the last ten years before he moved into it. Nobody went there because it was a dodgy area. Now it s incredibly busy, Indian people running businesses, Italians, Chinese, Nigerians, Irish. It s a really interesting area. It s very eclectic. A record shop in the middle of Parnell St? Unimaginable a few years ago!
The record shop in question is Reverb, run by D1 records mainman Eamonn Doyle. The shop, which deals primarily in vinyl techno and dance releases, may yet cater to Nigerian tastes, although the street s black residents generally prefer CDs. Also, the African contingent don t as a rule socialise in the pubs and clubs of the immediate area, preferring instead to quaff bottles of Guinness in backrooms, or frequent the Temple Theatre or Temple Bar clubs.
According to Martin, the local social scene is divided roughly into three. There s the inner city heads, the lumpenproletariat, he claims. Then there s the kind of bohemian, student-y middle class. Then there s the Africans who socialise in the back of Infinity Ventures, and the only white people in there socialising with them are young inner city girls. A lot of them would go to places like Ri Ra, some of the nights in the Temple Bar Music Centre, soul nights in the Temple Theatre. That s where they meet all the Irish girls.
According to Eileen, another resident of the area who requested that her real name be withheld, black people don t feel that they can comfortably go into any pub, bar The Welcome Inn on Parnell Street, and sit down comfortably and have a drink. They have to go to other places in the city centre where it s more touristy.

The stories of this street are plentiful, even if the facts often get obscured by conspiracy theories and urban myths. Stop me if you ve heard the one about black men preying on ugly Irish girls and marrying them in order to get citizenship, or worse, pimping them. Or if you ve heard rumours of Nigerians going into North Inner City pubs and demanding protection money.
Or, on the other side of the colour bar, tales of faceless Caucasian cabals wearing pointy hats and robes, exchanging secret handshakes and plotting how best to mobilise the tabloids and the great unwashed to root out the seeds of a burgeoning multiculture before it undermines the economic foundation of a northside awaiting Temple Bar-like rejuvenation. Or local property owners lobbying to erect gates between Parnell Street and North Great George s Street for economic rather than aesthetic reasons.
Then, of course, there is pure old-fashioned Irish racism. Roddy Doyle s oft-quoted Commitments quip about the Paddies being the blacks of Europe never acknowledged the dog-eat-dog hostilities meted out by Irish exiles against Italian and Afro-American rivals on the social ladder in turn of the century Boston and New Orleans.
Even today, xenophobia (the new PC term for prejudice) is often excused as concern about welfare swindle; the disgruntlement of poverty stricken paddy seeing his dole drawing black counterpart wearing ill-gotten designer gear. It s a reverse negative image of America. There, the race card is played to divert attention from a class war. Here, monetary issues are used to validate bigotry.

Such tensions are bound to bubble over, and there has been some big trouble in Little Africa, most notably last April 30, when there were widely reported violent clashes between some customers in The Blue Lion pub and Infinity Ventures. According to Eileen, the current atmosphere on Parnell Street is stable, if occasionally edgy.
There s been nothing to the scale obviously of what happened a couple of months ago, she says, but basically there s kind of an agreement now. As I saw a couple of weeks ago, there was some bit of hassle between a black guy and a white guy on the street, and what happened was the barman in The Blue Lion at the time came out and calmed it down. The feelings are all still there, but there s an unspoken agreement because they just don t want any more hassle from the guards.
Some say the locals aren t concerned with the race element so much as gangs of any kind hanging around. Another local suggests that both black and white sides of the street are guilty of antagonising each other. And the older folk just don t understand it at all first their pubs got turned into theme parks, and now the neighbourhood s changing faster than they can follow.
These are the birth pangs of a new kind of Irish nation. Spend a few days loitering in the area, and you might witness hot flashes as vivid as a scene from Do The Right Thing.
Case in point: it s four o clock on a sweltering July afternoon. As always, there s a bunch of young blacks hanging around outside the African shops. Into their midst comes an elderly blind Irish man, white-haired, face knotted with bother, tapping his way down the path with an ivory-coloured cane. As he becomes aware of the black men s voices, he hesitates. The cane bumps off a leg. One of the African guys takes the old man s hand and attempts to guide him through. The old man takes exception to this and begins whipping the cane around him, shouting, Get these shaggers out of my way! The black man throws his arms wide and protests, I m just helping you, man! A young Irish girl intervenes, trying to mediate, ushering the oldster through while trying to make it clear to the black guy that she s knows he was only trying to help. I was just helping him! the guy repeats, incredulously.
Blind Irishmen. Blacks. Racial tension. Make up your own metaphor.
There s no integration, testifies one resident of North Great Georges Street. No-one s talking. The blacks and the Irish aren t talking to each other. And the Polish aren t talking to anybody.
And no-one s talking to the press. Infinity Ventures owner Kola Ojewale declined to be interviewed for this article. At the Tropical Superstore, staff willing to talk hadn t the time, and those with the time hadn t the inclination.
The media can be a useful ally when racism flares, but otherwise, businesses like these don t need the publicity they ve got their own clientele.

And yet, for all the cultural convulsions, the vibe on the street is open and alive and vibrant. Little Africa isn t exactly the sixth province of Ireland (the fifth one belonging to Mary Robinson s diaspora), but the area has more character and colour than the trendiest of southside enclaves. The radio blaring in the corner of any cafe tells its own truth: Samantha Mumba has been number one for a month, and in this neck of the woods, young female role models are as apt to sport a surname like Kareswaren as Corr.
Parnell Street may or may not become Ireland s first full-blown ethnic quarter, but either way, there s no going back. The sound you re hearing is the last gasp of a monoculture. The inscription on Parnell s monument might be re-interpreted to fit a more invisible kind of republicanism:
No man has a right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation. No man has a right to say to his country thus far thou shalt go and no further. We have never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to the progress of Ireland s nationhood and we never shall.