“It seems I’m happier writing away from, rather than towards, something. I arrived here at the height of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and therefore into an awful lot of smugness, which didn’t mix well with the country’s inherent parochialism and insularity. The smugness seems well and truly smashed now… A lot of the poetry written in Ireland appears far too preoccupied with the idea of ‘Ireland’. It places huge emphasis on place in rather territorial terms. And there’s generally an aversion to experimentalism. Poetry that uses ‘unpoetic’ language or plays around with convention is looked upon (at best) as an entertaining oddity. With few – but striking – exceptions, the ‘scene’ is dominated by a small number of established organisations which have an interest in maintaining the status quo.”

From an interview with SJ Fowler in 3:AM Magazine here.

When you get to the Pigeon House Road, a road that seems to lead nowhere, you see a bank of containers in a commercial shipping yard to your left, and a tall barrier shielding the site to your right. Behind this barrier is the bulldozed site of the Irish Glass Bottle Factory, one of the most controversial property purchases made during Ireland’s boom. Intended as a mixed-use, high-rise mini Manhattan, it’s now little more than a muddy field churned up by heavy machinery.

I went straight ahead at the end of the road, which I learned is not the way to go: it leads to a dead end, where railings and gates block your path towards the grassy wastelands that border the south side of the peninsula.

I returned the way I had come, then turned right, past the entrance to the container yard, where juggernauts were queuing up to deposit their loads. Cycling along this road, you’re immediately assailed by the smell of sewage, which has been processed and expelled on this site for about a century. As you can imagine, the stench is pretty disgusting. Nevertheless, I stopped to take a photo of the canal of effluent that emerges from under the road, then runs parallel to it before joining the Liffey just before it reaches the generating station. Opposite me at this point was the site of the Poolbeg waste incinerator, another oddly-located site of controversy on this peculiar outcrop.

Canal of stench

Poolbeg incinerator site

Straight ahead, the looming towers of the Pigeon House, and in front of them a large redbrick building dating from 1902: the first electricity generating station in Dublin. James Joyce mentions it in Ulysses (set in 1904):

‘the flags of the Ballast office and Custom House were dipped in salute as were also those of the electrical power station at the Pigeonhouse, and the Poolbeg light.’

Generating station (1902 station in foreground)

A large granite building next to the generating station was built as a hotel in the late 18^th century, then converted into barracks soon after the 1798 rebellion, when British troops were stationed there. Essentially this tip of the peninsula remained military property for around a hundred years, after which it was sold to the corporation and used for electricity generation, feeding the substation in Fleet Street in central Dublin.

Cycling past the gates to the Pigeon House, you come across an incongruous line of cannon, which obviously reference the site’s military history. Taking a sharp right turn down a narrow roadway, you emerge at a wide stretch of sand dune, providing a view of the south county and the Dublin mountains.

Continuing on along the road, you pass the generating station, then reach the sea wall, a mile-long construction that was built in the eighteenth century as a means of clearing the mouth of the Liffey of the sand and silt that had made it such a danger to shipping. At the end of the wall, the Poolbeg lighthouse was built (it became operational in 1767).

As I walked along the rough granite of the sea wall, I watched the activity in the surprisingly busy shipping lane, as passenger ferries and container traffic came and went. I thought of how, when in the centre of the city, you never thought about Dublin as a port – you carried on oblivious to the continual traffic just a couple of miles down the river.

The Pigeon House area is an intriguing place, full of surprises and traces of Dublin’s industrial and civic past. It also smells, really badly.

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.

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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