I was on the Luas Green Line.
It was packed. We were sitting on each other’s shoulders. There was little room to breathe. All the over 70s were standing while young and middle-aged men sprawled wide-legged on the seats. Everybody was on their phone. Despite their immediate important connections nobody seemed to notice the discomfort and unease of the standing elder generation.
Lesson 1: Have no expectations of manners.
I got off the Luas in O’Connell Street.
The capital of Ireland’s main street. Grey and heavy and wide. But its not. It has now become an encasement of doom. Impending doom. Everywhere. O’Connell Street is the capital’s confrontation point. The marauding groupings congregate at the base of statues, intersections, off side streets, and around every alley way and vantage point. Anything can happen. There’s an ‘on the edge’ atmosphere and a need for a large shamrock sign; All visitors and walkers must ensure they are not on their own. All visitor and walkers must ensure they are in a hurry. Don’t dawdle. Don’t notice. It doesn’t matter what happens. Never notice. Keep moving. Noticing means trouble.
‘I’m fuckin ’telling you,’ he yelled at no one in particular.
I’m fuckin’ making it fuckin’ clear to you,’ he roared moving around blocking the middle of the wide pavement.
He had two friends beside him, one asleep standing up with his trousers nearly at his knees, the other reeling from side to side in a kind of trance.
‘Do you want a fucking fight, cunt?’ he bellowed at our visitors, male and female, our elders, the general passers-by and me, as he took down his trousers in full view, pulled down his underpants reached between his legs and produced a small see-through bag.
In shock, we all pretended we didn’t witness this extraordinary crudity or hear his coarse accusations. It’s the great gift of the city of Dublin. It is what the city relies on.
Pretence.
O’Connell Street has got away with it for decades. Nothing has changed.
We pretend Dublin is a wonderful city when we are embarrassed by its look and behaviour.
We pretend that we have not desecrated the most magnificent historical buildings on the street in favour of hundreds of processed burger joints. And a variety of packet sauces.
We pretend that we don’t notice the monuments to unending plastic. We pretend that the O’ Connell street square trees will hide the gaudy fronts and the already tired cheap modern facades and dereliction.
We pretend that we don’t mind not being able to come into the city at night to enjoy a night out in the open wandering around, loving the shop windows and the atmosphere, as our mothers and grandmothers did.
We pretend that the central city has a capital energy when all we witness is the energy of violence, abuse, accosting, street toileting, begging, loitering, disrespect, and the constant threat of an attacking kick off and a possible thump in the mouth, if you react as though you notice. We pretend that we don’t notice behaviour that would not be tolerated in any other capital city in Europe on its main thoroughfare.
We pretend that we can walk close to the river on the walkways. We cannot. It is a drug infused threat and a sleeping area.
We pretend that we are very liberal and that the city has a huge personality and everybody is falling down with friendliness. This is an excuse and a very high price to pay. It is called fat laughter and it has excluded me.
We pretend that it will get better and one day we will be able to walk up and down the great revolutionary O’Connell Street, and through its side streets, without fear and enjoy anything and everything it might have to offer. Maybe one day we will be able to stand, reflect, decide, look, photograph, have something to eat outside, sit outside – imagine – and communicate and enjoy the city as people in every other city in the world do, but we cannot.
O’Connell Street is generally filthy. A tired filth ingrained into the buildings and the general attitude but most importantly into our expectations of what it has to offer us.
We pretend that we don’t care that our central city is out of order. We have stopped coming in and that’s our punishment. We pretend that we do not understand that this is how the capital actually regards itself and regards us.
We pretend that the visitors don’t notice. They do. The ones standing and moving near me were aghast and speechless during the depraved trouserless behaviour and ran away into the rain of the evening. I was thoroughly ashamed.
Lesson 2: Keep pretending.
I walked down Abbey Street to get the Red Line to Smithfield.
It was packed. Once again, we stood on each other’s shoulders. A woman accused another woman of pilfering her bag. A fight began. The pitch rose to a screaming percussion. The language was worse than a row of unclean toilets. People around me started to quiver. Others unhinged and rearing to go joined in. More people got on. Some ready for a fight, others for a revolution. Shouting, screaming, pushing, and shoving rose to a final push of the accusers and the accused, as their gang of drunk and drugged supporters pulled each other from the carriages to the platform and ran into their pointless night.
The Lighthouse cinema was packed. A new and colourful civilised world after the out-of-control journey to get there. The film was the National Theatre production of The Motive and The Cure, a play by Jack Thorne directed by Sam Mendes based on the Hamlet rehearsals in 1964 when John Gielgud directed Richard Bruton as Hamlet. It was riveting.
After the film I returned to the Red Line.
‘Any money for a bed?’ he asked rocketing across the tracks.
‘I’m sorry I don’t have any cash.
‘You’re a fuckin’ cow’
‘Please stop.’
The accusations began. I won’t list them. His friends arrived out of the sky. More abuse. More crude approaches. The people shuffled and were silent.
The Luas arrived. The accusers got on. The carriage was full of terror. What would happen next? Who would be charged, intimidated or ill -treated? How should I react if they light on me? Maybe they’ll get off. Maybe they’ll follow me. All the lunacy thoughts that fear ignites. I felt my heart and the hearts of the carriages pounding. More shamrock signs. Never travel on your own at night in Dublin. Why did you bother? The city is not for me. It is not for any of us. It is ungovernable. I got off in Abbey street and walked over to the Green line. Potential passengers were standing very far away from the centre of the platform and ticket machines.
Five drug addicts were arguing, cursing, yelling and plaguing each other around the line. Their verbal abuse to each other was pitched and horrifying. We stayed away. We had given up.
On the journey home, I thought what I had witnessed over one evening is experienced every day by city dwellers and workers. But it is not tolerable in a cultured, developed, and educated country’s capital.
It is happening and getting worse because it is tolerated. It is expected. And in some way that acceptability is assured through fear, silence and pretence.
It is also redolent of a developing and allowable shocking lawlessness in Ireland. We have lost a sense of law and order. We are afraid to talk about it. To demand it. We don’t even argue that we deserve it. We feel it is out of our reach.
We don’t like to talk about control. We associate it with something conservative. All our effort goes into beliefs and speeches about freedom when we cannot even walk around in our own capital city. Law and order are a right and, in my world, as important as housing. I am so tired of the obfuscation and the ideologies choking the air, as though we are living in a theory world.
What the people – all of the people – want is to live without fear and terror in their homes and towns and villages and to at least have the possibility of enjoying their capital city – which their taxes pay for – without being treated to insult, violence, verbal abuse, physical abuse, intimidation and to breathe air well away from court trials and daily media reports of attacks on citizens which can be life-altering and sometimes, and many times, fatal.
Lesson 3: Expect trouble.
The author, Marie-Louise O’Donnell is an Irish academic, and later broadcaster and politician, who served as a Senator from 2011 to 2020, after being nominated by the Taoiseach.