A Plot of Land

By Dermot O’Sullivan:

In a suburb somewhere in Dublin, swarms of pebble-dashed houses clamour silently about the fringes of an oblong patch of land. Long ago, this plot was just one of the countless green fields that mantled the foothills of the mountains. Then it was the last one, lost among the new grey sprawl. Finally, it was flooded with cement and cinder blocks. 

For many years after this, a dairy and the HB factory coexisted here in convenient symbiosis. Their combined workforce was sufficiently large to make driveway blockage an issue for the locals, even though most of the employees walked to work from the nearby council estates. After bouts of letter writing and public representation, an overflow car park was built and peace returned to the cul-de-sacs.    

Then the dairy was shut down and demolished. The rubble was piled in heaps at one end of the flat wasteland and, within a week, the travellers had moved in. Bikes were stolen. Litter and faeces accumulated. Somebody’s son was struck on the cheek with a broken hula-hoop. In short, havoc was unleashed. Letters were written, words were exchanged and the inaugural residents’ association meeting was conducted in the school sports hall. Relief and disappointment mingled when the travellers left without warning one rainy Tuesday morning.

To prevent a repeat, the council constructed a pathetically low wall all around the site and so facilitated its transformation into a hang-out spot for local teenagers. The emerging generation drunk, smoked and fucked themselves through adolescence amid the tangled weeds and shattered masonry. Slugs nested in the slowly rusting cider cans. Cracks in the concrete of the former dairy floor collected a bedding of stained cigarettes butts. Within a couple of years, parts were totally overgrown and the drone of insects in the summer was loud enough to drown out the endless hum of suburban traffic. The overflow car park was decommissioned: its entrance was bricked up and the painted white lines began to dissolve slowly into the tarmac.

During these few years, the HB factory limped on partnerless until it too was shut and flattened. The whole site was levelled and the weeds and beer cans were swept away. The walls were raised and a security guard was appointed, fully equipped with a Beware of Dogs sign though not with any actual dogs. Baked teenagers gazing at headless dolls or rusted bicycles left by the travellers, and drunken ones rolling on the ground blocking orifices, were no longer tolerated. The land was worth something now and something was going to happen.  Then it happened: a block of retail units was built. Then a block of stylish apartments. A giant electrical goods store opened. A second block of apartments was planned. Then the calendar rolled on and hit 2—0—0—8.

The other retail units are still vacant: their big bellies of glass hold gloomy interiors strewn with pallets and plastic sheeting. The cement dust has settled in deep undisturbed drifts. Not one of the apartments has sold. Their silent rooms are full of unconnected bathtubs and unused floor tiles. Their unpainted grey windowsills are speckled with pigeon droppings. Beads of damp sweat gather in the high corners.

The security guard still sits in his little box, but soon he too will have to go. Perhaps, at the same time, the apartments will be boarded up or even torn down. Or perhaps not. In any case, it seems likely that one day the empty space will return and sober and stupefied brains alike will stare at the rubble or scaffolding or whatever it is that comes next.        

***

Dermot O'Sullivan is an Irish writer whose work has been published in various journals including The Honest Ulsterman, Causeway/Cabhsair, The Dalhousie Review and Fence. He currently lives in Brazil, where he recently had his first full-length play produced.

This City Street

By Hannah-Louise Dunne:

For Conn.

There is a place in the middle of the city, where seagulls greet the morning light with throaty squaks. Here, the burgeoning bright of the day will blink your eyes open, unwilling, though they might be. Below the seagulls, the city is a zigzag of bricks. A red hue where the wide Georgian streets lie. Or the cold grey of the fresh rain-washed roads and car parks that guide commuters around the corporate zones. In other places, glass flashes up and into the morning light. A brash presence, wrapping the ever-rising office blocks in bold illumination.

This is where we live, baby, before you arrive. Where we first imagined you into existence in the curved oblong surrounds of our small city-centre flat. Home now to our whole world, where each day we marvel at how much you’ve grown. 

At one time, the city centre all around us was home to lots of people. Teeming groups of humanity, packed into the small square footage of the heart of the city. There were families of ten or more packed with no consideration for their health or safety into small one-roomed tenements down near the Four Courts. While up around the city’s grand squares, the newly wealthy and established aristocracy vied for prominence in the surrounds of the beautiful red brick of their tall proud townhouses.

Nowadays, the city streets are quieter. There are more offices and hotels here than people. More space for cars, conferences, tourists. Money, and more money, as the city reopens after the strange events of the last year and a half, and the streets slowly fill up with lines of traffic again and car horns beep into the midday stretch.

But if you look beyond the main streets, you can still catch glimpses of ordinary life. Of generations of families living together in the dark red brick of the flats close to Holles Street. Or families still dotted in the surrounds of the grand old houses of the city all along the tree-lined roads to Donnybrook. There are students and workers too, carefully sequestered from view in the shelter of mews houses, in unexpected apartments and studios situated above office buildings, down side-streets, and in the back of office buildings where you’ll find our small city-centre home.

It’s a funny looking place. I think most people who pass by are surprised to see a house there in the midst of the zig zag of car parks and cranes. But don’t let that shock you. There are many surprises to be found around here. Just down the road lies one of Dublin’s private parks. A sanctuary for the fortunate then and now, which we eyed with envy during the lengthy lockdown, where the lucky few could unlock the gate and luxuriate in all of that green space, as they snapped open cans of designer craft beer.  

Around that square, there are tall houses that once served as homes to some of our greatest artists. We have a print of one on the wall of our sitting room. He was the younger brother of W.B. Yeats. But truthfully, I like his work best of all the Yeats family. The bold colours of his paintings sing to me as I walk past their vast canvases on the calming walls of the nearby National Gallery. Just down the road from Jack B. Yeats along the side of Fitzwilliam Square, Mainie Jellett lived. She was one of Ireland’s first abstract painters. She saw the world and made sense of it in shapes of peculiar beauty. 

It’s not all grand houses here though. Outside our building, a charming man comes to sit each day to collect spare change from passing drivers. He mans the parking meter come rain, hail or sunshine and knows everything there is to know about what goes on around here from his perch at the bottom of the steps. When we go for our daily walks around Merrion Square, to admire the louche grandeur of Oscar Wilde’s statue once more, he regales us with tales of the street and keeps a close eye on your growth, telling me every now and then; ‘You’re getting bigger every time I see you.’ 

This is our part of Dublin, where we have watched the streets change each season.  The place where you emerged into existence.  It’s waiting here to welcome you home.

***

Hannah-Louise is a former journalist, turned advertising executive and writer, who is interested in the way our past and present intersect to form and shape us. She has written about family, places she loves, and formerly, celebrity culture, for national press publications, and is currently working on her first long-form fictional work (and growing her first child). You can follow her on Medium, or catch her avoiding books on the reality of childbirth as she searches for calm waters to swim in around Ireland.

Borders and their consequences: Introducing 'the corridor'

Image: Vera Drebusch

The Corridor is a new project from Ireland exploring borders and their consequences. One of the founders of the project is the Elsewhere Books Editor Marcel Krueger, who we asked to introduce the project and the first events and actions that will be taking place in the coming months:

Who needs borders anyway?

For a year now, my wife Anne and I live in Dundalk in Ireland. We moved here for a variety of reasons: to live and work in a smaller town away from the molochs of Berlin and Dublin (where renting out has become impossible anyway), to live by the sea, to be close to my office. We knew that we would be moving next to one of the main Brexit-faultlines, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The longer we live here, the more we've become fascinated with the history of our new hometown and worried about what the future might hold for the communities north and south of the border. As a writer & journalist and a curator & arts manager coming from a country which was defined by a border for several decades, we now want to explore the area through both our fields of expertise, and have created 'the corridor'.    

'the corridor' is an interdisciplinary and discursive project that which explores borders and their political, social and cultural consequences through a series of public talks, screenings and exhibitions. With artists from all fields, historians, sociologists, contemporary witnesses and other experts we want to discuss the history of the Irish border and the future challenges of the upcoming EU border for this area. Our first event series is a collaboration with the 1. Deutsches Stromorchester (1st German Electrophonic Orchestra), and you can find more details on our website. Coming events will include a fish dinner with fishermen from both sides of the border initiated by German artist Vera Drebusch, and an exchange about walking borders between Elsewhere editor-in-chief Paul Scraton and Irish writers Garett Carr and Evelyn Conlon. 

To paraphrase Jan Morris, if race is a fraud, then nationality is a cruel pretense. There is nothing organic to it. As the tangled history of the corridor between Belfast and Dublin shows, it is disposable. You can find your nationality altered for you, overnight, by statesmen far away. So who needs borders anyway?