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Archive for the ‘dublin’ Category

I’m in the Market for Decline

16 Aug

When I think of the markets in Dublin, I think of overcast Saturday afternoons spent circling the deserted streets around the market buildings, camera in hand, recording the intricate stonework decorating the corners of the sheds. On walks such as this, I’d have made my way from Dawson Street, around the area surrounding St Patrick’s Cathedral, up Francis Street in the Liberties, down the hill from St Audeon’s Church, onto Church Street on the Northside, near the Four Courts. The streets at the back of the Four Courts, where the Luas runs along, have their own particular ambience: the terraced houses that adjoin Church Street provide a dense, atmospheric, network similar to the houses around Blackpitts on the South of the city.

Often, when walking near the markets buildings, I would stop and think about what they were like in their heyday, when surely they were busier than they are now: were the narrow corridors between fruit and vegetable stands constantly thronged by customers coming and going? Were the streets outside full to bursting with carts and carriages?

A lot of nineteeth century architecture in the central city forces me to think this way: what was it like back when it really mattered? Of course, this might just be a nostalgic projection provided by my own wishing that Dublin must have been relevant at some point in the past. The former Irish Parliament building on College Green, now the Bank of Ireland, was an illusory centre of Irish political life in the nineteenth century – the real power being vested in the Westminster parliament in London. It was an empty centre: Ireland was then a peripheral part of the British Empire, and now stands on the edge of Europe, both geographically and in terms of its political relevance to the wider European Union.

But what can you make of the psychological effect of this emptiness at the core, instituted perhaps by the shadow-puppetry of colonial assuagement, but nonetheless preserved meticulously, unthinkingly, right up to the present day? One aspect: an enduring scepticism about the real worth of institutions combined with a compulsive habit of tipping one’s hat to power, in the absence of anything else to do with one’s hat. Governmental, media [insert the name of the state broadcaster and major national newspaper you are currently thinking of here]: any institution gets it in the neck verbally, but no one knows what to do in order to occasion any tangible change. The net result: no change of any substance. This is the kind of impotence that makes Dublin, and Ireland in general, a circle of hell for anyone inclined to interrogate it in this way. Better to keep your head in the sand. Better, indeed, to get on with the business of living: commute expensively, accumulate, keep your taxes low and your house prices high; pave; re-tile; repeat ad nauseam.

 
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Posted in dublin, geography, history, ireland, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

The City’s Edge: Dublin in Fragments 3

13 Jul

Living in the centre of the city is both heaven and hell. Preferring the latter, I attempted to investigate the infernal underground workings of the area, drawn to the gloomy inky-dark streets of the south inner city. I lived just off a road called Blackpitts – its name a reference to the filthy puddles left by the River Poddle when its flow abated during the summer months. The street is built directly over the course of the river. I often wondered whether ‘Filthy Puddle’ wouldn’t be a better translation of Dubh Linn, one which would undoubtedly lend the city’s name a subversive undertow. Blackpitts is tucked to the west of Clanbrassil Street, down a short incline that hints at the presence of the river: the slopes on either side of Blackpitts are the valley, and the street itself is a substitute for the subterranean river that runs below.

Blackpitts is the gateway to a dense warren of streets packed with terraced houses and small factories, under all of which a complex network of man-made rivers runs. The houses date from different points over the last hundred or so years: the redbrick terraces grouped around Hammond and St John’s streets (this area was where I lived for a few years) are from the last years of the nineteenth century, and are the product of the Dublin Artisan Dwelling Company, who also built the terraces in Stoneybatter. Just behind the redbricks off Blackpitts is the area known as the Tenters, named after the ‘tents’ of flax fibres stretched out to dry on frames across the fields in the days when weavers were based in the locality. Houses were built here in the 1920s.

But it wasn’t just the history of the area around Blackpitts that interested me. Desirable as a place to live because of its proximity to the city centre, it was targeted in a serious way for redevelopment. It was an area that was far from settled: on a daily basis you could trace the changes as your footsteps drew you towards long-deserted warehouses, past fenced-off tracts of waste ground from which an old building had recently been cleared.

While the boom years made Dublin a site of constant flux in terms of property development, nowhere was the tension between construction and destruction more obvious to me than in the area where I lived. One day, as I walked down the street, a row of redbrick houses were being knocked down, brick-by-brick. I had previously thought the houses to be occupied – there were bicycles chained to the railings outside, and they otherwise showed no more signs of neglect than did my own residence. Half-knocked now, the lower floors of their front facade stood, sawn off just at the sill of the upstairs window, a spooky reminder of what was yet to be erased completely. The clinical precision with which the operation was being carried out made the top of the wall seem as sharp as a razor’s edge, when glimpsed in silhouette against the dull afternoon sky.

At the end of Blackpitts is Newmarket Square, an immense windswept plateau bordered by anonymous redbrick warehouses used by multinationals for document storage, and, at the western end, a cluttered and uncomfortable looking apartment development. A shuttered pub, Grey’s of Newmarket, stands at the north centre, on a corner where a road opens onto the new Cork Street extension. This pub was the scene of a gangland killing in 2004, and is one of a number of pubs that have been shut down in the Liberties area.

At number 48 Newmarket Square was a rooming house where Lily O’Neill, a young woman known as Honor Bright, lived; she was murdered in 1925, her body found on a quiet mountain road to the south of the city. Working as a prostitute, Lily made her way from her lodgings on the night of her murder along New Row, past St Patrick’s Cathedral towards Bishop Street, and onwards towards St Stephen’s Green. That walk was less than a mile, but it bridged two sharply contrasting worlds.

One of the streets she walked down, New Row, had also been built over the Poddle river – an early version of the streetname was New Row-on-Poddle. The point where the street meets the western end of the Coombe also marks the confluence of two different branches of the river, where the network of streams rejoins the Poddle proper. This is where George Sala, on an assignment in 1853 for Charles Dickens’s Household Words magazine, had found ‘semi-continental picturesqueness’ amongst the dirt and poverty of the Coombe’s inhabitants.

Tracking the different branches of the Poddle could occupy someone for weeks. For a while I became obsessed with tracking it, believing that an unlovely, unloved and largely hidden river was more valuable than those more celebrated watercourses: the Seine, the Thames, even the Liffey. I believed that its very insignificance held the key to its significance. That it was banished from sight as a result of its unholy stench made it even more intriguing. Yet it also emerged above ground briefly in the oddest places.

One day, I went a few steps from my house, and tried to find an exposed stretch of the river that appeared on maps of the area. In the grounds of Warrenmount Convent, I asked a groundskeeper about the river, and he brought me to the point where it had appeared on the map. A forbidding stone wall of at least ten feet in height, marking the extent of the convent’s grounds, stopped me in my tracks. There was no sign of the river within the boundary of the convent.

However, when I stopped and listened, I could hear the unmistakeable burbling of water, and I decided that it must be coming from the other side of the wall.

On the other side of the wall was a yard, used as a car-park by an Irish telephone company. As I walked onto the property, a guard emerged from his office, and told me I couldn’t continue my trespassing. I explained my reasons for being there, and eventually he relented, and pointed me towards the far corner of the car-park, where the gravel surface broke into scrubby waste-ground, and where there stood a couple of trees, which must have been 100 or so years old.

There, flowing freely along the other side of the convent wall, I found the Poddle – or, at least, one of its branches – and after a couple of minutes spent admiring it, I walked away satisfied, and the river disappeared from view once again.

 
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Posted in Love and Death, dublin, endotic, geography, history, ireland, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

The City’s Edge: Dublin in Fragments 2

09 Jul

It’s hard to believe how important Tallaght was to the historical development of Dublin city – at least it was hard to believe something like that when I grew up there. Nowhere seemed further from the dense, decaying streets of the city centre in the 1980s than Tallaght, with its vast and oppressive open spaces threaded with sinister-looking electricity pylons that you could hear a low buzz from when you stood beneath them. Tallaght, with its anonymous industrial estates seemingly dropped in the centre of housing developments – estates that, in turn, seemed to stretch for miles without end. Tallaght seemed like nowhere.

Tallaght never seemed part of Dublin, to me. It was distantly flung to the far south-western corner of the city, as if banished from the urban centre for some obscure crime. It was divided from Walkinstown by a large tract of farmland that subsequently, much later, became a park and a motorway. The road from Tallaght to the city – at least the one I was most familiar with – was the Greenhills Road, which runs along a high embankment between Kilnamanagh, where my family lived, and the roundabout at Walkinstown. As you travel north along the road, factories and warehouses stretch out below you to the left, as far as the eye can see. In the distance you can just about see the white papal cross in the Phoenix Park, but, at least from that perspective, that’s the nearest visible green space.

On our bus trips to the city – usually me, my brother and mother, on a 77 bus whose upstairs windows tasted of tobacco smoke when, one rainy day, I wiped my hand on the fogged glass, then licked it – you’d be introduced to the oddly fractured urban planning at work in the city, before reaching the snug terraced streets of the Liberties, the bus taking a sharp hairpin turn at the end of Cork Street before catapulting around the corner down the Coombe, past the disembodied doorway to the old hospital, preserved like an old limb in formaldehyde. Across from St Patrick’s Cathedral, a Dublin Corporation rubbish tip, where street cleaners dumped the refuse they collected along the city’s streets. The inner city intrigued me: it seemed everything Tallaght wasn’t.

Only later did I find out that Tallaght was flung there on purpose. Or at least part of it was. The extensive council estates located to the west of the village were, in part, the city’s response to a long-overdue need for proper social housing to allay the slum conditions in the inner city. Other building followed, as empty landscapes filled up with housing built by private developers on acres of rezoned land.

In the mid-60s, a master plan had proposed the development of a number of new towns in the west of the city, of which Tallaght was one. This expansion formed the western suburbs as they now stand, kept outside the city proper by the boundary of the M50 motorway, which serves as a link between suburbs, and to the roads out of the city.

When the M50 was being built, I still lived in Tallaght, and, before they had laid the road surface, I used to ride my BMX along the flattened earth of the motorway, as far, nearly, as the current interchange in the shadow of the quarry at Firhouse. At that point, there was an urban legend that a local gangster had buried a bag full of money from a robbery somewhere under the road. I cycled along, thinking about it: if you were to start digging, where would you begin? The roadworks were vast, and, by comparison, a bag full of stolen money seemed so small, no matter how much of it there was.

When they had put up a wall along the edge of the motorway, I was still drawn there – the strangeness of this incursion into everyday life had not yet abated. A small stream ran from the estate in Kilnamanagh under the M50. I was intrigued by the way a new concrete riverbed had been constructed to divert the river below the road, and I often pottered around there in the sunlight, watching the water trickle away into the darkness of a moulded cement tunnel. It was surrounded by a grubby scrubland pockmarked with spiky bushes and broken concrete blocks – the detritus of road-building. Discarded, presumably used, condoms could be seen here and there. The stream disappeared under the motorway, and I still don’t know where it emerges.

I went to school at the top of the Greenhills Road, near Tallaght village. Across the field – an open space, really, bordered on one side by an industrial estate, on the other by the Bancroft housing estate – was a small river that smelled like chemicals, but had a rich and intriguing history. The River Poddle had been Dublin’s first municipal water source, and ran from an unspecified source beyond the Belgard Road. It was spliced with a canal that drew water from the River Dodder further downstream, and supplied water to the city for many years. It had become notoriously polluted due to its path through teeming slum areas with virtually no sewage facilities, and had also been used for waste drainage by the tanneries in the Liberties, and, wisely perhaps, it had ceased to be used as a source of drinking water.

When you were out in the field, and you were a primary school child sweating in your uniform on a summer day, you smelled the river before you saw it. It ran down behind the cigarette factory that stood on the other side of the Greenhills Road, before running under the road and through a ditch that directed it eastwards towards Templeogue. The sweet smell of tobacco being rolled into cigarettes wafted across to the school most days – usually in the summer months when the windows were opened in an effort to cool the classrooms.

My abiding memories of Tallaght focus on how separate it seemed from the rest of Dublin. This was partially because of limited public transport, but it was also undeniably physically separate. It still is, to a large degree, thrown off to the edge of Dublin by some powerful centrifugal force.

 
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Posted in cycling, dublin, geography, history, ireland, modernism, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

The City’s Edge: Dublin in Fragments 1

08 Jul

Viewed on a map’s surface, as the city embraces the Irish Sea and lazily asses itself out towards Ireland’s midlands, Dublin appears curvy and welcoming, but, in person, it’s spiky and wants you to go fuck yourself. The Spire, a stainless steel needle that reached 400 feet into the air on O’Connell Street, is often nicknamed the Spike by those wishing it to stand humorously as a symbol of hard drug use in the inner city, but I prefer to think of it as a representation of the metallic, unyielding, non-stick attitude of Dublin and Dubliners in general. The city has an edge. As an additional point of comparison, it’s difficult to get a decent view of the Spire in the city centre. You can wander around the low-rise centre without ever seeing it at all; the same goes for Dublin. It’s simultaneously there and not there. For me, Dublin is still a great unknown, and I’ve lived here nearly all of my life.

This realisation led me to set myself tasks: would I be able to describe Dublin – not neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood, and not necessarily through its history – in a way that reflected what I think I already know about it, while also acknowledging that there are things about a city that constantly change, that you know only briefly before they’re spirited away, and there are things that you may never know.

Dublin is a place I hate; Dublin is a place I love. Both feelings jostle around inside of me as I make my way around the city’s streets by foot, by bike, by bus. I’ve never committed to either love or to hate the city, but often I decide on a position, before changing my mind later. I never really thought I did love the city, but sometimes I find myself doing so, before stopping myself. Sometimes the late evening light catches a stubby Georgian street a certain way, and you’re transported briefly to a transcendental city, one where you haven’t just stepped in someone’s vomit.

Dublin, most of all, is a city of fragments. It’s been broken into pieces. These pieces are spread around the map, and often, no matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to connect them all. Sometimes it’s impossible to connect any. This is partly a product of bad planning, partly because our minds rebel against the overwhelming experience of city life, and all we have left are fragments of urban experience to hang on to.

And this is the way I want to approach Dublin: through fragmentary glances down its streets and alleys, through midnight rambles in its industrial estates and exploratory hikes amongst its suburbs. Dublin is knowable through its fragments, or it’s not knowable at all.

In a way, all cities are the ruins of past civilizations, and Dublin is no different in this. The city, especially at its threadbare fringes and its sharp edges, testifies the recent death of a dream that consisted of full employment and house ownership for all. Incomplete developments that loom over country roads and adjoin supermarket car-parks concretize the optimism once felt about an ever-expanding property market, an optimism undermined by economic collapse. These estates are at times melancholy places, at times sites of a pioneer optimism. They are undoubtedly part of Dublin, but are also isolated fragments cast to the North, South and West of the city, thrown there by cheap land, the greased wheels of planning and good transportation links.

Dublin: pointy, sharp, steely, desperate, broken into pieces. Coming to a town near you, or it would be if you weren’t already there.

 
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Posted in dublin, economy, endotic, geography, history, ireland, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

Empty Spaces: The Case of Bram Stoker’s Plaque

08 Jul

A while ago I mentioned, in an article I wrote for the Guardian’s Comment is Free, that the commemorative plaque bearing Bram Stoker’s name was missing from the front of no. 30 Kildare Street, in the centre of Dublin. It’s still missing, and, as far as I can tell, no action’s been taken to retrieve it.

30 Kildare Street. The space where the plaque had been attached is visible between the two ground floor windows.

The plaque had been erected by the Bram Stoker Society on 27th July 1983, and Albert Power wrote recently, in his excellent history of the Society that it was ‘without doubt [...] the most significant achievement of the Bram Stoker Society in these early years’. (The Society had formed in 1980, and was based in Trinity College.)

Present at the unveiling were Leslie Shepard, Chairman of the Bram Stoker Society, Ann Stoker, the author’s granddaughter, Ivan Stoker Dixon, great nephew of Stoker, and the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Michael Keating. According to the Irish Times report on the occasion, two coachloads of schoolchildren passed by during the ceremony, shouting ‘Up Dracula!’ Stoker Dixon, an actor, then performed a portion of his one-man-show, ‘From Clontarf to Castle Dracula’ for the crowd.

Dublin Tourism were heavily involved in the unveiling (the organisation was responsible for the erection of plaques within the city, and each plaque bore the Dublin Tourism name), and its chairman, Gerry Byrne, gave a brief biographical talk at the ceremony.

The plaque, photographed in September 2006

When I rang Dublin Tourism in November to ask where their plaque had gone, they said it wasn’t their responsibility; that I should talk to someone in the city council.

I eventually established a narrative of the plaque’s disappearance: the building, which had been occupied by a solicitor’s firm, was sold in June 2006 for €2.3 million. In the adverts in the property section prior to the auction, the auctioneer emphasised that the building was ‘of historical note’ because of its association with Stoker, and showed a close-up of the plaque.

The building was sold to the Shelbourne Development group, who acquired the adjoining buildings at 31 and 32 in the same year. Their properties on Kildare Street are blurbed on the Shelbourne website here. The building is now occupied by a plastic surgery clinic, which moved in to the property in September 2008.

I attempted to contact Shelbourne Development, who, as my Guardian article pointed out, have many pressing problems at the moment; they failed to reply to my correspondence.

The plaque disappeared at some point between September 2006 (when I photographed it) and September 2008, when the clinic moved into the building.

The responsibility for the plaque lies with the owner of the building. Astoundingly, however, it seems that a plaque can be removed from a building by an owner at his/her own discretion. I have heard this several times, both first-hand and second-hand. However, if a building is listed as a protected structure, the owner must secure planning permission before making structural or cosmetic changes to a building.

The building at 30 Kildare Street is listed in the Dublin City Development Plan as a protected structure:

Planning permission was never sought to remove the plaque, nor, presumably, would it have been granted. Therefore, the plaque was removed illegally, and should be reinstated.

 
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Posted in Literature, dublin, history, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

Keep it concrete

24 Jun

I’m currently sitting on a sofa in an apartment in the Clongriffin development, to the far north of Dublin city (the dividing line between Dublin City and Fingal County is almost literally visible from the front windows of the apartment, across a vast expanse of scrubland that had been marked for development, but is now, quite excitingly, being reclaimed by nature as wetlands, the area’s natural state).

This zone has, to some commentators, become shorthand for the mistakes of property developers right at the end of the boom. And, in many ways, it is something of a wasteland (the half-built main street, is one notable example). However, in terms of transportation links to the city and beyond, Clongriffin is excellent. Recently, a DART station opened (see facile broadsheet colour piece here) at the east end of the development, and this serves commuters to the city well. A bus service, the 128, which runs through the city, terminating at Rathmines, runs every ten minutes during peak hours, and last night, when I jumped on one in Rathmines, the next bus was due only 20 minutes later.

The 128 bus

In addition, there are many good things about the place: the large park, located fairly centrally in the development, that locals run and cycle around; the decent positioning of the apartments in relation to the street, which resembles a small boulevard, or narrow dual carriageway. There’s no doubt that many residents like it here.

However, because of the comparatively low density, shops in the development are few and far between: there’s a small Centra shop, an off licence, and a chemists. Numerous commercial units stand unoccupied along street-level, and a large building near the DART station, which was to have been occupied by Superquinn, remains spookily empty. At night, no lights shine from within the building, and the image is disarming.

A view of the wasteland wetlands, with the Superquinn building beyond

 
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Posted in dublin, economy, ireland, recession, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

The Poddle: Dublin’s Unruly Underground River

14 Jun

Firhouse weir

I’m standing on the edge of a stone precipice beside the weir, peering down into the water as it violently crashes and breaks on the rocks below. Behind me, the hiss of tyres is audible: the ancient weir on the river Dodder in Firhouse is now concealed by the M50 motorway, and stands in the shadow of the imposing Tallaght interchange. On the hill immediately above me looms a concrete works, a landmark of the area, visible from miles away.

The view from the top of the weir at Firhouse

The area around the weir has changed a lot since Henry F. Berry, writing in 1891, suggested that his readers take a walk down to the weir from the main road, noting that ‘a steep irregular lane-way leads to it from the Blessington high road’. Now that lane leads from a network of footpaths that run around and across the motorway.

This weir played an extremely important role in the provision of Dublin’s first municipal water supply, and dates back in some form to before 29 April 1244. It was on that date the Lord Justiciar of Ireland, Maurice Fitzgerald, issued a writ seeking the establishment of a reliable source of fresh water to be carried to the city via the river Poddle.

The Priory of St Thomas owned Firhouse weir, and the city authorities soon came to an agreement with them: water would be redirected from the weir via a small canal to join up with the course of the Poddle in Templeogue.

As I stood at the top of the weir, I could still see, among the sprawling undergrowth, how the system of sluice gates would have diverted the water into the canal and towards the Poddle, a mile downstream. These still visible features date from the nineteenth century, when Andrew Coffey, the waterworks superintendent, reconstructed the weir. The channel in the direction of Templeogue is also discernible, although it’s now overgrown with wild flowers and weeds.

A sluice gate

The rerouted flow joined the Poddle, but ran with it for only a few miles until it reached ‘Tongue field’ in Kimmage, near Mount Argus. At this point, the river was divided by a cutwater called the ‘tongue’ or the ‘stone boat’. The Stoneboat pub on Sundrive Road is named after this feature.

The stone boat, which still exists, looks like an overturned clothes iron, a flat surface with a sharp point facing upstream. One sunny day over the summer, I sat on it and watched the water flow by. Now refurbished – presumably by the developers of the housing estate that now surrounds the river – the stone boat divided the flow of the river, allowing two thirds to flow north along the main course of the Poddle.

The Stone Boat, Kimmage

The other third flowed west along what was known as the City Watercourse, under the Grand Canal, through Dolphin’s Barn and into the City Basin, near James’s Street. The Basin served as a reservoir, with fresh water being channelled along James’s Street to the city. Initially the Basin only supplied Dublin Castle, but within ten years it also catered for most of the citizens.

The city watercourse formed part of a labyrinthine network of diversions from the main course of the Poddle that flowed through the area between James’s Street and South Circular Road. The diverted streams brought water to the mills that were once so numerous in the area. These streams still flow, but they’re now underground, so you need to know where to look: one flows above ground next to a car park off Donore Avenue, another flows through a derelict site against the back wall of Warrenmount Convent, near Ardee Street.

When I went to find these locations, the streams still flowed with quite a strong current, and the babbling sound made by the water seemed to impose for a moment a contemplative quiet on the wholly urban scene it flowed through.

Channelled and culverted for around 800 years, the Poddle can still bare its claws from time to time, when the wildness of nature reasserts itself and this little river, for so long apparently tamed, overflows. The river is for the most part covered over from Kimmage to the city centre, and as a result it is usually ignored by many, but periodically – forcefully – it makes its presence felt to the people who live and work along its course.

The heavy rain that fell on Friday April 4th 1823 caused a flood ‘so great on Saturday morning that the water flowed over the Street in Thomas Court and Pimlico’, an inspector’s report of the time recorded. The storms that lashed Ireland in October 1987 caused the Poddle to swell and flood the gardens of houses under which it flows on Lower Kimmage Road. The following January, one side of the road was closed so that the Corporation could re-cover the unruly river.

Residents of an apartment block in Newmarket Square weren’t aware their building was built on the river until the underground car park flooded in December 1997. Water from the river flowed into apartments and flooded Mill Street, including the basement of the Tenters’ Pub. ‘There was water up to the bonnets of the cars in the streets,’ one witness observed.

As the name suggests, Mill Street had for a time been the site of a millpond, recorded in 1829 as belonging to a Mr Busby. The eastern corner of Newmarket Square is also sited above the confluence of a number of streams, which then flow under New Row towards St Patrick’s Cathedral.

The meandering and subterranean character of the Poddle lends it much of its charm; the river’s numerous diversions and hidden courses imbue it with an enigmatic quality, ensuring it remains, as one Irish Times journalist labelled it in 1901, ‘that mysterious underground river.’

 
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Posted in Travel, dublin, endotic, geography, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

A Death in a Lonely Spot

09 Jun

Crowds at the Green Street Courthouse; the grey car to the right of the picture belongs to the accused. (Source: Irish Independent, 4/2/1926)

oOo

Lily O’Neill left home just after sunset on a warm summer evening in 1925. By the time the sun rose the next morning she lay dead, her corpse abandoned on a lonely mountain road, a bullet hole through her right breast.

Her body was found at around 7am the following day, Tuesday June 9th. The young woman was fully clothed, dressed in a grey dress and a black hat. There was an old scar on the left of her face; by her side, a partially smoked cigarette. Her left foot was bare, the shoe missing – it lay some distance from the body, as if it had been thrown.

The investigation into her death was followed closely by the newspapers of the time, who sought to communicate in sensational detail the excitement their readers craved. Eventually, when the case went to trial, the courts were filled by fascinated onlookers who had queued for hours, waiting for the doors to the courtroom to be opened.

A journalist covering the story described the scene of the crime, at the crossroads in Ticknock near Lamb Doyle’s pub: ‘the place […] is sparsely populated and in a lonely spot. Nearby is a disused quarry, and stretching towards the mountain is a large gorse-covered tract. Within a few yards is a thick fence of briars, towards which the feet pointed, the head resting on the grass-margined roadway.’

In addition, the same journalist noted that the bullet had made a hole ‘almost the size of an egg’ in the road surface ‘after ripping through the body.’

Over the next few days, details about the crime began to emerge, and interest grew in the chain of events that led to murder. From early on in the investigation, it became clear that O’Neill had worked as a prostitute, and that on the night she died, she had been seen on the north side of St Stephen’s Green, opposite the Shelbourne Hotel. And one other detail: she was known to all as ‘Honor Bright.’

Reports initially referred to the murdered girl as ‘Lil’, ‘Lilly’, or even ‘Lizzie’. Eventually most papers simply stuck with her pseudonym, which had the effect of making her seem fictional, of keeping the realities of the incident at arm’s length. People responded to the murder, and ensuing trial, as if she was a character in a novel who had met an unfortunate end. Plot and suspense were everything, and the Honor Bright murder trial delivered both unrelentingly.

Witness depositions made during an afternoon’s court session were swiftly written up for that evening’s newspapers.

On 4th July, two men were arrested, charged with Lily O’Neill’s murder: a medical doctor, Patrick Purcell, from Blessington, and Leopold J. Dillon, an ex-superintendent of the Civic Guards, from Dunlavin, Co. Wicklow. They had driven to Dublin in a grey two-seater car on the night of Monday 8 June, returning to Blessington in the early hours of the next morning. Both of the accused claimed innocence.

Lily lived in a tenement house at 48 Newmarket Square in the Liberties, and, on the night of her murder, had made her way from her home to Stephen’s Green, clearly used at the time by prostitutes as a ‘promenading ground’ where they could meet potential customers.

At around 2.30am, a cab driver had seen the girl he knew as Honor Bright called over by two men who fitted Purcell and Dillon’s description. Their grey car had pulled up between Kildare Street and the entrance to the Shelbourne.

Dr Purcell reportedly said to another cab driver, James McCabe, that money had been stolen from him by a girl earlier in the night, and that ‘only I had my £1 note in my pocket with my gun it would have been gone also.’

Purcell told McCabe that the girl responsible for the crime had bobbed hair and wore grey clothes. Then, Purcell was reported as saying that ‘if he got her he would put a gun through her mouth and bring her to the country, where no one would find her, and, if he did not get her, some other girl would fall a victim.’

Purcell had apparently also shown the gun to Madge Hopkins, a friend of the deceased who also lived in the Newmarket tenement. Later Dr Purcell would claim that the only thing in his pocket was the stethoscope that he always carried.

Lily O’Neill went from the Green in a cab, and was dropped by the driver at Leonard’s Corner – the junction of South Circular Road and Clanbrassil Street – less than five minutes walk from her home. As the cab driver headed back towards the Green, a grey car similar to Purcell and Dillon’s raced past him, towards where he had just left the girl.

The grey car was then spotted by a guard between 3am and 4am in Harold’s Cross. Two men and a woman, who had been talking at the side of the road, jumped into the car and sped off in the direction of Terenure. Soon after, Lily was dead.

When the case came to its final day of trial, on February 3rd 1926, interest was at fever pitch. Newspapers noted that ‘an unusual amount of public interest was centred in the proceedings.’

Crowds thronged outside the Green Street courthouse where the Central Criminal Court was sitting, seeking admission to hear the shocking evidence. Witnesses, and even some court officials, were delayed in getting past these crowds. The courtroom itself was full, and the attendance included ‘several well-dressed women’.

The counsel for the defence characterised the two men as having fallen victim ‘to the lure of wine and women’, but stressed that this did not make them ‘moral degenerates’ and asked that they should not be treated as ‘human vampires’.

Instead, he suggested that Lily ‘must have fallen into the hands of the police’, and that she was murdered ‘by some of those sinister societies that had arrogated to themselves the power of life and death’. This suggestion was subsequently rubbished by the prosecution.

Soon, though, the crowds outside got the sensation they had been seeking: just after 9pm, after it had deliberated for three minutes, the jury found the defendants not guilty. And with that, Purcell and Dillon walked free, Honor Bright passed into myth, and Lily O’Neill was forgotten.

 
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Posted in Love and Death, dublin, history, ireland, wicklow

 

Shifting Gears

15 Nov

On Saturday night, Graeme Souness asserted that the French football team ‘had another gear’ to shift into. Cue much noisy disagreement from Johnny Giles and Eamonn Dunphy, followed closely by me switching off the telly.

Lately, I’ve been trying to shift gears, although not a swift, elegant shift up exemplified by the likes of Thierry Henri and Nicolas Anelka. Rather, my shift in speed has been akin to a blindly galloping Paul McShane attempting to stop short before he collides with an advertising hoarding. It’s more an emergency stop than anything. It’s not pretty, but it’s necessary.

About three weeks ago, I finished and submitted my thesis. Since then, I’ve been attempting to balance the inevitable phases of doing absolutely nothing with a routine that helps me adjust to the dramatic change in circumstances occasioned by being almost completely done with something that occupied my time and drained my finances for the last…umm… 215 weeks.

This has included: an attempt to watch the entire 5 seasons of the Wire, trying to catch up with reading piles of magazines that sit at the end of my bed and remain unread, carrying out some research into journalistic articles about the cultural history of Dublin, writing endless lists of stuff I intend to do, and much sitting about.

It’s a slow, strange, jolt-ridden transition. But it’s not bad, not at all.

 
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Posted in dublin

 

25 Aug

The first issue of The Kakofonie is launched tonight in the Pygmalion Bar, South William Street, Dublin (near the Powerscourt Centre). Events begin at 7pm, and at around 7.45pm I’ll be interviewed by the journal’s editor, John Holten, on my thoughts about urban space and memory.

 
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Posted in Literature, Paris, articles, arts, dublin, ireland, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 
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