REVERIES OF A SOLITARY WALKER: BLESSINGTON STREET BASIN
Jul 20th, 2007 by Conor McCabe
Last Saturday afternoon, having nothing more on my mind than a short stint of browsing, I found myself on O’Connell Street, watching the unfurling of two separate but equal banners. One was for a “Justice for the Bellanboy 3” rally, the other was part of a “know your rights” campaign by the Independent Workers Union. Town was by no means full, and both the protesters and campaigners found themselves slipping into a relaxed, laid-back, approach to matters in hand. Not one to rock the boat, I decided to take their example, and left them to protest while I strolled up towards the Parnell monument with no real sense of ambition other than to make it home at some point that evening. Now, normally, this being an Irish and a Dublin blog, my “stroll” would actually mean a tour of the various pubs from the Rotunda to Phibsboro - and I know that already the Dublins among you have picked off the best and booziest route - but as I don’t drink, I set off to imbibe the city instead.
Irish, sober, and working class: I belong in a fucking display cabinet.
Or… on a pedestal on O’Connell Street. The Independent workers’ Union had set up shop at the memorial to the most famous Irish, sober, and working class individual that ever lived: Big Jim Larkin himself.
The work of OisÃn Kelly, the statue was completed in 1977 and is based on a photograph of Larkin that was taken in 1923, the year of his release from a New York jail and his return to Dublin. Larkin’s return was eventful, to say the least, and a mixed blessing is the most charitable that I can be about it. Of the statue, it’s one of two by Kelly in the city centre, the other being the Children of Lir in the Garden of Remembrance, just up from the Parnell monument, which is where I found myself as I walked my long walk home.
Last March, when I was in Zaragoza, Spain, I remember saying to my friend, Miriam, that the great thing about cities in Spain is that people actually live in the city, and not just in the suburbs. “What are you talking about?” she said to me, “people live in Dublin city [centre] as well.” Absolutely true. I haven’t lived in Dublin since 1997, and even then my image of the city centre was still influenced by the 1980s, when nobody lived around O’Connell street outside of the corporation flats and dingy bedsits.
And a lot has changed in the last ten years. The Parnell Street area made it into the news last week, that according to one survey, the majority all residents in the area are non-nationals. The first point, I suppose, is the fact that Parnell street actually has residents these days. The second is that, like the majority of those non-national residents, I don’t see myself much reflected in what passes for Irish culture.
Not that I feel alienated, mind. I don’t at all. In fact, there are few places where I feel more at home than Dublin on a Saturday afternoon. Recently, the Central Statistics Office released a breakdown of nationalities in Ireland, as revealed by the 2006 census. It showed that about 10 percent of the population - and 14 percent of the working population - was comprised of non-nationals. Last May, RTE ran a pre-election special on the subject of race and Ireland. It was chaired by Mark Little, who kept on using the phrase “Irishness”, and this was picked up by one or two other Irish people on the panel, and they in turn began to use this phrase, “Irishness”. Eventually, one non-national said: “What do you mean by Irishness? I can’t see what it means to be Irish, apart from drinking a lot!” It was a wonderful moment, because none of the Irish had an answer for her. We talk about being Irish, and yet we haven’t got a clue what we mean by it.
Well, not exactly true. We know exactly what we mean by “Irishness”, and it involves, well, drinking a lot. The word “Irishness”, as used by Irish commentators, has a very mundane, but revealing, origin. Basically, we’ve heard the British press and politicians talking about “Britishness” as an anecdote to mutli-culturalism for a couple of years now, and decided to have some of that for ourselves, thank you very much. Doesn’t quite work that way. (As an aside, I once did a study of the use of the word “Irishness” by the London Times from the late 1790s until the late 1980s. In almost every case, the word was associated with either drunkeness, murder, and/or terrorism. But that’s another post.)
We just have to stop looking to the Brits for our ideas, and start thinking for ourselves. We don’t have to invent an “Irishness” because, first of all, we don’t have an identity that’s under such a threat from “others” that we need to invent a political solution. Aspects of our ancient culture are under severe threat - and by that I mean regionalism, and language, the oldest written vernacular language in Europe - but both have been under threat for generations at this stage. The Irish experience, though, of the past ten ears, of seeing so many young people from across the world arrive here having English for work, and their own language for home, may yet prove to be the savior of the Irish language. The impetus to speak Irish among ourselves has never really been there. Now we have one, albeit one that comes more from embarrassment (what? you can’t speak your own language?), than out of the realization that the way you speak, the words you use, and the syntax that holds it all together, actually forms part of your identity as a human being. A language is for life, not just the Gaeltacht.
As I made it up to the top of North Frederick Street and Dorset Street, instead of turning right I decided to head on and call into the Blessington Street Basin.
Completed in 1810, the basin draws its water from Lough Owel, north of Mullingar, via the Royal Canal. Originally designed as a reservoir for the city, from 1868 to 1976 its waters were used exclusively in the production of whiskey in the Smithfield distilleries. The basin was refurbished in the 1990s, and reopened as a public amenty in 1994 by the President Mary Robinson, and the then lord mayor of Dublin, and current leader of the Greens, John Gormley. Today, it’s one of Dublin’s best kept secrets: a small lake with an inland island, less than one kilometre from O’Connell Street.
So. Who are we, then?
One of the problems in answering this question - I mean for us Irish - is that our cultural identity is still suffering from the rotten fuck of a hangover caused by the highpoint of late 19th century Irish cultural nationalism (roughly 1880-1922) We needed a separate cultural identity in order to prove to the world that we were a nation, and because we were a nation, we needed our own State. All well and good, but come 1922 and the establishment of the Free State, where did that leave our cultural expression? I think that the function of culture in independent Ireland was at a complete loss because it never developed a true relationship with the reality of the society it came from.
What I mean is, so much of what passed as cultural identity from 1880-1922 was in fact a facade. Now, that didn’t really matter as long as it played its part in the “we’re a separate nation” debate, but once that was over, and attempts were made to develop a culture out of the realities of society, cultural expression seemed to have shut down, or was exiled.
And this brings me back to my earlier statement that Irish cultural identity is not under threat by “others”. I would argue that we haven’t yet reached even a working understanding of ourselves through culture, of what it means to be Irish, for it to under threat from anyone apart from ourselves. For a start, there’s the whole realm of Irish working class identity, something that we’ve only ever touched upon in the briefest of ways. There’s the Irish experience of being governed by ourselves, the experience of emigration, the North, rural working class, regional identities, wealth, poverty, family, school, work… the list goes on.
Every thing that I write, every pronouncement that I make, is in constant struggle against the expectations of what it means to be Irish - in my own head, i mean, rarely on the page. And that is a fucked-up situation for a culture to be having. That belching, beer-gut, bedazzled little bollicks of cultural nationalism, is still in the front room, the last remaining guest at an otherwise empty party.
That question: who are we? It is the one question that every generation has the privilege of asking of itself. And, hopefully, no two generations will ever have the same answer. The style and methods of expression may crossover (language, musical styles, theatrical structures, etc), but the answers rarely do. In Ireland, we react not to the situation on the ground, but to the facade, giving an antithesis to something that didn’t really exist in the first place.
And then we go on TV and delude ourselves that the crisis in our identity is being caused by immigration, when, in fact, the crisis in our cultural identity dates back to the formation of the State. Immigration, if we’re smart about this, can allow us to focus on our cultural, historical, and contemporary, realities, all of them, not just the Joyce to hold it up, and the Yeats to make it rise. We can actually come out of this with a real and dynamic cultural identity, one that’s reflective of who we are, multi-faceted, multi-cultural, and multi-irish. Not just multi-drunk.
Of course, we always were multi-Irish, but the political constraints of a cultural nationalist hegemony really left its mark, you know? Catholic, conservative, and drawer-room middle class. Those political constraints are dying, if not dead already. The loosening of those ropes is happening at the same time as an increased dynamism from the arrival and long-term settlement of other cultures on these shores.
I can’t help but think: what a beautiful time to be singing.
Lovely piece, Conor. A few observations; those who worry about the threat to our ‘Irishness’ posed by immigration rarely seem bothered by the much more sweeping changes brought to our cities by global capital; the replacement of our city centres by a generic British high street (how many second hand book stores can you think of in Dublin now? compared to even 10 years ago?), the creation of what, if i were David McWilliams, I might call the donut city, the semi- circle which has, as its inner edge the M50. If you live in Adamstown, work in Leixlip or Ballymount and shop in Liffey Valley are you still, really, ‘from Dublin’ ?(do you care?). Dublin between the canals is fast becoming a place to which perhaps the majority of ‘Dubliners’ never go. Maybe you live there in your ’starter home’ but apparently bringing up children is impossible without a semi-d and an SUV, so once you have kids you take yourself off to Swords and when they’re teenagers you don’t let them into town because its ‘dangerous’.
The inner city is left to the young, immigrants and a few stubborn working class communities; a more stimulating social mix than Adamstown certainly, but one that brings with a few problems too, since for two of those groups, there is a feeling of passing through the city on your way up and out.
And you’re damn right about ‘Irishness’ as a synonym for drinking a lot and not much else. A city that prides itself on its literary heritage has no bookshops anymore, theatre is largely the endless regurgitation of the canon, there are no venues for a local music scene and nowhere to rehearse; we were never as cultural as we like to pretend, but what we had is disappearing fast, not as a result of immigration, but as a consequence of the property bubble (only clothes shops can afford centre city rents, and no one with a family can afford a house anywhere inside the M50).
Finally, only semi- related to this, but relevant to previous stuff; on Soul Britannia, repeated last night on BBC 2, Van Morrison talking abou how the blues and soul he was attempting to reproduce with Them seemed to him to reflect, not an abstract notion of Black America, but ‘white working class life in Belfast’, a point which Eric Burdon put in almost exactly the same words. Why did Dublin never produce a band like Them or the Animals? why, instead, did working class Dublin produce Dickie Rock and Sonny Knowles?
cheers for that sonofstan. The second-hand bookshop thing is true. Two months ago, even Greenes closed down its city centre set-up. It’s gone all internet and wholesale. The last one that’s an actual second-hand bookshop is the Secret bookstore on Wicklow Street. (I have to admit I really like Chapters, and almost always buy something when I’m in there, but it’s a supermarket.) If I was to do an inventory of my books, I’d say a good proportion of them came from the years-ago closed Dandelion books on Aungier Street.
and yeah, the trend of Dublin between the canals becoming a carve-up between entrenched working-class communities, immigrants, and transients, can really go pear-shaped, especially if there’s a serious downturn. I mean, even today, when I look at Moore Street, I don’t see “cultural diversity”, i see a lot of shit businesses chasing the same low-income customers. Is that the future of the city centre? One big no-go area while the masses shop outside the M50? I dunno. I still think we have choices, options - at least for the moment anyway.
As for “Irishness”, oh man, it makes me laugh so much! This country spends the last decade defining itself in terms of its property portfolio, only to realise that you can’t bring that up as a unique cultural trope, as”Irishness”, while at the same time, it has systematically closed off room for genuine cultural growth - in other words, risk-taking. almost half of the government’s arts budget goes on the Abbey. ultra-conservative 19th c. cultural nationalist behemoth. Puking up the classics for the Yanks, and it STILL CAN’T MAKE MONEY!!!!!
Fuckit, think it’s time to start a thread on “Irishness” We really could have some fun with this! I must dig out the London times’ use of “Irishness” - I did it for a class I gave up in Derry when I was tutoring there. It was great fun.
The Van Morrison thing is spot-on. Now there’s a man who, if you called him middle-class, he’d fucking punch yea. I don’t know enough about Belfast, though.
“no one with a family can afford a house anywhere inside the M50″
Ah, come on. Coolock is inside the M50, Artane, Killester, Whitehall, Marino, Glasnevin, Finglas, Drumcondra, Palmerstown, Templeogue etc. Plenty of families living there.
The city centre is thriving as demonstrated not least by the success of Fallon and Byrne which is full up every evening with prosperous looking locals getting some goats cheese and kangeroo steak for that night’s dinner party. Myself among them.
“Prosperous looking locals”
Thinking you’re making my case for me……
I was exaggerating a bit with ‘inside the M50′ but not much; even on a 35 yr 100% mortgage, a couple with say 1.5 time the average industrial wage (and 2/3 of people in this country still earn less than 34k pa) is going to be pushed to have more than 250k at their disposal without parental help - i suggest you look at daft and find how many 3 bedroom houses you can find nearer than Kilcock or Arklow for that (even with the landing gear engaged for the ’soft landing’)
How many of the goats-cheese locals are sending, or are going to send, their kids to the local inner-city schools? will St. Paul’s CBS on North Brunswick Street see a boom from the new Smithfield flats?
The city centre is thriving in certain spots with the amount of apartments being built in the sections of the city with access to the Luas. However, these are not family orientated dwellings, but rather starter homes for individuals and couples eager to move up the property ladder and out to ‘burbs once the nippers come along.
There is a hubbub, specifically in many of the new eateries, but this does not provide a thriving community or a particularly diverse culture.
But I don’t think the city centre is losing out to US style malls and mega supermarkets being built around the M50. Its changing certainly, and the closing of second hand bookshops is to be lamented, but its still a very busy and thriving metropolis.
I think this an exciting time for Dublin, in that it can still go either way. The potential for a cultural and literary upturn is there, but whether Dublin is up to the challenge remains to be seen.
Obviously my tongue was in my cheek about the goat’s cheese, but the fact remains that a lot of what is being written about here is hysterical, vis sonofstan’s comments about life inside the M50.
He also suggested completely outrageously that
“A city that prides itself on its literary heritage has no bookshops anymore”
WTF?!
While it might be true that second hand bookshops have closed their doors in the city centre (Greens had gone utterly shite and I never bought a book in Dandelion that didn’t give me something nasty when I opened its musty pages and inhaled whatever horrible bacteria had been stored within), Dublin has an unusually good selection of well-stocked bookshops for a city of its size.
And while there are problems for independent bookshops and one can have many issues with the selections of your average Waterstones, these have nothing to do with Dublin per se but reflect international trends and structural problems within publishing and retail bookselling as an industry.
“No bookshops” in Dublin include
H&F, Waterstones, Easons (Hannas and Reads) and Murder Inc on Dawson St, plus an antiquarian bookseller upstairs somewhere and the theological bookshop near Cafe en Seine. Cathach Books on St. Anne Street. Dubray on Grafton Street. Hughes and Hughes in Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre and the children’s bookshop up at the top. Books Upstairs on College Green. The antiquarian guy in George’s Street Market. Oxfam books on Parliament Street (2nd hand by the way). The theological place on Abbey St, and the one in Cathedral Place. The pretty interesting specialist selection in Cultivate on Cows Lane, Chapters, obviously, on Parnell Street. Connolly Books in Temple Bar across from the Clarence. Just outside the city centre in Rathmines, Hanna’s has a great selection of stuff, the Oxfam Books is superb and there’s still a second hand place beside the Stella.
I hear there’s a bookshop in the Northside shopping centre and one in the shopping centre in Coolock or Clarehall. Losts of the southside suburbs like Blackrock and Dun Laoighaire have them- the Hughes and Hughes in DL is very good. And of course, there is the excellent Borders at the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre which is open til ten every night and only ten minutes drive from most northside and west-Dublin suburbs.
No bookshops my hairy arse.
I just remembered there’s a Waterstones in Jervis Street too.
And I there are two foreign language bookshops, one on South Frederick Street and the other on Westland Row.
Are you still taking the piss? Greens had not gone utterly shite. I picked up a copy of J.A. Gaughan’s biog of Thomas Johnston there about two months before it closed down - and that book has been out of print since its first (and only) run. In fact, almost every time I called into Greens I was able to pick up something that you can’t get in Hannahs, or, indeed, specialist language bookshops. (I think you ARE taking the piss! I’m just not picking up on it!)
And that’s the thing about almost all the bookshops you mentioned. They’re only good for books that are still in print. Even Cathach books saw fit to close its “Half-Price” section there after Christmas, leaving the out-of-prints to the collectors, at collector prices.
You didn’t mention the best second-hand bookshop in the city centre - the secret book store on Wicklow street, where only last week I picked up “A Future For Dublin”, which was written in 1979, for €15. I’ll be scanning some of it over the next few days and throwing it up on the site. Just stuff that you can’t get in Waterstones.
anyway, any thoughts on “Irishness”? I’m thinking of starting a thread on it at the weekend.
I take your point about out of print books and it’s something I’ve been thinking about in relation to second-hand shops and copyright law but really Greens was not exactly a trove of those either - it was a trove of Freddie Fosyth hardbacks and Princess Diana froth - whether or not you could pick up the odd interesting tome in there. It had nothing on Kenny’s in Galway, a much greater loss to the Irish book scene. Hannas in Rathmines actually has quite a significant stock of out of print books.
The out of print thing again is an issue with the nature of modern publishing and marketing and not the result of a supposed cultural diminution of Dublin as suggested here. I don’t think seizing on the fact that you could get some interesting stuff in Greens if you looked hard enough is a convincing riposte to the extensive list of thriving bookshops still extant in the city (no I am not taking the piss). It’s also the case that Green’s stock is still available to you albeit online, which is admittedly not as enjoyable an experience as shopping in a dusty old bookshop, although vastly more efficient.
I have plenty to say about Irishness and the contrasting treatment on the blog of evocations of it in contemporary media discourse and (tendentious) evocations of working class identity here. But I don’t think I can manage in comments to properly express a complex, delicate and nuanced point, at least not without seeming argumentative.
Listen, test tube contraception is a vastly more efficient way of making babies, but nowhere near as enjoyable an experience….
Thanks for the list Copernicus: here’s another one. Fred Hanna’s, Webb’s, Greene’s, Dandelion Books, the 3 Collectors Corners (Parnell St., Marlborough St, Talbot St.), Portabello Books, The Phibsborough Bookshop, Manor Books in Stonybatter, Anthology in Temple Bar, The Alchemist’s Head, The Yellow Bookshop on Dorset St, there was a shop on Harold’s Cross Bridge I can’t recall the name of, further back again, there were the stalls by the Liffey between O’ Connell Bridge and the Ha’penny…… They’re the ones i can think of off the top of my head first thing in the morning.
The point I was making *tendentiously* was not that there are ‘no bookshops’ but, for a city that takes a lot of pride in its literary heritage, and supposedly literate public, there are very few that aren’t either chainstores (Waterstones, Dillons) or pile ‘em high remainder bins.
I lived for a year recently in Colchester, in Essex, a county taken to exemplify a certain kind of awfulness in metropolitan eyes; it’s about the size of Galway, but with soldiers replacing Macnas; and its also home to three excellent - and big - antiquarian/ second hand bookshops, an Oxfam book and record shop as well as the obligatory Waterstones. I also spent a fair few afternoons in other Essex and Suffolk towns (and in Cambridge, but we’ll leave that out as atypical) and in all of them, there were interesting bookshops. Now, i don’t think that East Anglia is more literate than Dublin - my point is that, with the most expensive commercial rents in Europe, only clothes shops with their huge mark up can afford to locate in the centre city; market capitalism, which is supposedly driven by the demand for variety and which is supposed to offer ‘choice’ ends up homogenising what Brits call ‘the High Street’.
Being honest, i know bookshops and record shops everywhere are closing at a fierce rate thanks to the seductive lure of being able to buy anything you might want from your computer in the middle of the night; Dublin’s not a special case. I do think, though, that, compared with other medium sized European cities, we have been less careful in preserving a distinctive city centre. A related point would be the absence of any centre city markets - the Iveagh has disappeared, as has the one in Rathmines, Mother Redcaps and Cumberland Street is a shadow of its former self. A comparison with Amsterdam in this respect would be instructive……
I take you point that in comments such as these, its tempting to point score rather than discuss; and that ‘the complex, delicate and nuanced’ gets lost a bit; I would be interested to hear why you’re moved to defend Dublin now against the charge of it being a less interesting city than before; my sense that it is may well be a function of my age…….
Yeah, most of what Copernicus cites are sort of ‘generic’ bookshops - all rotating the same shagging stock that you’ll find in any generic bookshop in any English-speaking city. Feel the quantity, never mind the width…. Can’t resist the pun but given yer moniker, you’re obviously fond of astronomical prices too…..
I don’t think Dublin has anything to compare with Mollat, that I showed you in Bordeaux, Conor - probably due to the fact that a bookshop that size in Dublin would be a property impossibility (i.e. about the size of Cleary’s). Witness the last time I was home, looking for Faulkner all I could find was f@@@inf Faulks…
Actually test tube contraception is less efficient.
Let’s not forget the excellent bookshop in the National Gallery. Portobello books is gone.
And I note that no one wishes to acknowledge that they were wrong to identify the people who live in the city as the reason shops have closed or stock isn’t as heterodox as one might like. They’d rather talk about test tube babies.
Actually, sonofstan put it down to spirling costs and property maddness, not people. We are witnessing / have witnessed the macdonaldisation of bookshops in Dublin. That seems to suits you. fine. Enjoy your harry potter and fries.
Actually, he didn’t put it down to that. He simply said a city that prides itself on its literary heritage has no bookshops anymore.
Thanks for the personal insult. Much appreciated. Presumably if Sean whatsit simply asserts that “most” (whatever that means) of the bookshops in Dublin have the same generic stock (not true in my extensive experience), it must be empirically true enough for you to base a fatuously contemptuous remark on.
sonofstan said: “my point is that, with the most expensive commercial rents in Europe, only clothes shops with their huge mark up can afford to locate in the centre city; market capitalism, which is supposedly driven by the demand for variety and which is supposed to offer ‘choice’ ends up homogenising what Brits call ‘the High Street’.” comment 13.
and your own comment:
“And I note that no one wishes to acknowledge that they were wrong to identify the people who live in the city as the reason shops have closed or stock isn’t as heterodox as one might like. They’d rather talk about test tube babies.”
sonofstan also said, in the same comment:
The point I was making *tendentiously* was not that there are ‘no bookshops’ but, for a city that takes a lot of pride in its literary heritage, and supposedly literate public, there are very few that aren’t either chainstores (Waterstones, Dillons) or pile ‘em high remainder bins.
The list of bookshops in this thread indicates to me that this is simply not true. From my experience both working in a ‘corporate’ chainstore bookshop, although one with a long history in Dublin and from spending a good chunk of my spare time looking around all the bookshops in Dublin, I can’t agree with sonofstan’s comment.
I work in Blackrock, admittedly a prosperous south Dublin suburban town. But there are four bookshops that I know of providing an enormous wealth of material. De Burca books provides many rare collectors items, many admittedly expensive, but it also supplies Hodges Figgis and not everything in it is expensive. Carraig books is also there and although closed during lunch (bloody inconvenient) sells lots of cheap second hand books. Then there’s the bookshop in the Blackrock Market, which has plenty of Irish history books going for a song. Then there’s also Dubray books in the Blackrock shopping centre, a decent enough shop selling mostly recently published stuff, but not shabby by any means and Book Stop in Frascati Shopping centre which I never go into, as its tiny.
While working in the large Dublin bookstore, we, the booksellers, always complained about the pile them high direction that the chain, in conjunction with the publishers, were moving things. Certainly, buying of books is much more centrally controlled now, where the chains work in conjunction with the major publishers to bulk buy certain titles and these are given prominance on the shop floor. But this is far from the whole story.
The demand for books and for a diverse range of books in Dublin has increased hughly and this is being supplied, despite the ease and often lower price of buying books online. Part of this has to do with the expansion of Education at third level in Ireland.
My attitude is before I can complain about the homogenization of stock in Irish books shops I have to have already read the hugh wealth of what was available in many of the sections I usually enjoyed browsing in.
Judging by Copernicus’ Library Thing list he likes to browse alot in Dublin bookshops. He might buy, he might not.
Point of fact: Dillions (represented in Eire by Hodges Figgis) are now part of the Waterstones group, which (or at least were) part of the EMI/HMV group.
Remaindered books are a godsend. You can often get great new books cheaply simply because the publisher decided to change the books cover because the book wasn’t selling too well with the old one. For example, get Steve Poole’s Unspeak in Chapters on Parnell Square rather than paying the 12 euro for it in Waterstones.
Yeah. so he made two points. I don’t see how being selective about his comments helps to explain them. He made both points, not either / or.
I was talking to the owner of the secret book store recently (in dublin city centre) and he was saying that the main reasons for the closure of second hand book shops in Dublin (city centre) are rentals, dublin corporation rates, and changes in public buying trends - people want books. He’s hanging on himself because it suits his lifestyle, he makes enough to get by, and he’s a stubborn fucker. He cited the closure of mother redcaps market, where the small traders were priced out of trading by Dublin corporation. It seems to be policy, and a crazy one at that. In other words, puclic buying new books, or wanting new books, isn’t enough to explain the change in the bookshop trade in Dublin. Dublin city council also has to be brought into the picture, as they’ve been aggressively hounding smalltraders out of the city for years. (and look at the recent clash between Dunnes Stores and the Henry Street traders.)
How does that help choice? How is that down to “people”? why set high rates for small traders? Is it because such a policy suits the generics? (and not just bookshops of course, but in all spheres of retail).
I agree that Blackrock is pretty well served - I go out there some saturdays just for that reason; but it doesn’t really invalidate my original point, which is that interesting, smaller shops are being driven out of the city centre and the inner suburbs due to higher commercial rents. I would still contend that Dublin has fewer good bookshops (and bookstalls in markets) than in many similarly sized - and smaller - British cities. I realise any such impression will be subjective and partial, and it may be simply be a reflection of the fact that in my usual subject area, philosophy, only HF carries anything like a reasonable stock; and that - a real irritant - in many other shops you’ll find Derrida for Beginners, something by Richard Kearney and the complete ‘works’ of Alain DeBotton filed under ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ (I think its the lack of an ‘and’ in that heading that is most annoying!)
Anyway this discussion has wandered far from Conor’s original post about the failure of post- independence culture to engage with the actuality of Irish society rather than a perpetual harking back to a brief golden age from 1880 to 1922 and his suggestion that now, finally, some stirrings might be discernable in response to the fact that Irish society has become something so flagrantly at odds with its founding pieties as to force some kind of reappraisal. Does anyone have any thoughts on that? I’ll surrender on the bookshops if we can talk about that.
the rates, man, the rates. The dunnes Stores debacle is the key to it. It’s about pricing small traders out of the city centre, and this has knock-on effects for second-hand book trade, but the real focus for the corpo is all small traders. They don’t want them because they can get more money from the larger shops - and rates are now of the few income-earners for Dublin corporation. It’s not just big bad shops, but the fact that Dublin corporation is so badly funded, that is at issue here. It all dates back to the disastrous decision by the FF majority governemt of 1977-1980 to scrap home rates. A populist move, but we’ve been paying for it ever since.
By the way, I noticed that nobody listed any of the wank shops on Capel Street. “Lactating Wives” - now there’s something you couldn’t get ten years ago.
and what does that say about Dublin? There’s now more wank shops than second-hand book shops.
No second-hand porno shops, though. Mind you, would you really want to use second-hand porn?
Damn! I was thinking the exact same as Conor about rates and the corpo but got distracted before commenting. The law of Unintended Consequences strikes again..
I was in the Winding Stair yesterday but it has not got nearly as good a second hand selection as the Secret Book store. It is probably not a very significant factor but I do think public libraries have improved a lot in Dublin over the past decade.
Would you believe I’m just about to head down to the library now? I agree, Dublin city library is quite a decent service.
‘Pay your Rates-ah’….. (a Mark Smithism I find myself roaring at inapprapriate times)
Interesting that Irish central govt. seems to have inherited Tory England’s distrust of strong local government - FF afraid that a successful and popular Labour (or left alliance of some kind) city council in Dublin would be a springboard for national power?
sonofstan’s initial comment - as opposed to his hyperbole about city centre commercial rents (nonsense, by the way, but then why bother to query that despite the evidence of your own eyes rather than make a nasty, stupid and contemptuous comment about my taste - which you obviously know nothing about but feel very qualified to comment on) drew a very ironic - and frankly sarcastic - comparison between the pretensions of the Dublin populace and their actual buying habits.
One of the reasons I’ve refrained from commenting on posts here has been a suspicion that any dissent would be met with chippy and irrelevant straw men. I assumed it would be reasonable to point out that the analysis of the bookshop scene in Dublin is at least debatable and that therefore hysterical prognostications were somewhat out of place. Alas, it seems that rather than engage the points, you’d rather pretend I only like McDonalds and Harry Potter leaving you free to dismiss my contributions. So I won’t make any more.
Sonofstan’s “point” about city centre rents (which you say didn’t appear til comment 13) was certainly not remotely clear from his hyperbolic initial contribution. My reply was reasonable in the circumstances. Conor’s dismissiveness was contemptible.
I mentioned high rents as a factor in the homogenisation of the city centre in my first comment - 3rd para.
So I won’t make any more.
Well, from a personal point of view I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve been reading your stuff on Midnight Court and numerous other blogs Copernicus, for a good while now and often agree with your viewpoint. So for you to decide to no longer comment here is a pity.
There is a danger in threads for comments to veer close to personal attacks. When things do get personal then that is contemptible and isn’t tolerated here.
I’m not going to defend any of the comments above. That is up to the people who made them. However, reading Conor’s comment I don’t think that it was so personal to be considered offensive. Cheap point scoring maybe, but for a start he doesn’t know you at all, so he was just reacting to what he perceived to be your defense of the larger bookshop chains. That’s how I read it, Conor might say different. I don’t want this to spiral into a ‘you said this/I said that’ thread.
I hope to hell that dissent is not met with chippy and irrelevant straw men. For a start, I’d like to see more people adding comments and for different and dissenting view points to join in. I don’t think it was in this case.
However, if you’re not going to comment again, your not, and nothing else can be done.
The rest of this comment is going to appear as a post.
The Irish Senior Civil Service distrust of local government goes back to the 1920s and the disbandment of local councils deemed inefficient or undemocratic by the Free State. This usually meant Sinn Séin controlled councils, such as in Kerry. By the 1930s this paractise had been put into legislation with the establishement of the county managers, enforced again in the 1940s.
Post-colonialists would argue that all the Free State did was embrace a Dublin Castle view of Ireland as full of dragons, not to be trusted, and carried on without even drawing breath. You cant give Paddy - sorry, local councils, - democratic authority ‘cos you won’t know what they might do with it. Best to keep all decisions centralised. What Paddy doesn’t realise, as Winston Churchill once said, is that he’s part of an Empire. and what these bloody councils don’t realise is that they’re part of a State. The Irish Free State: Dublin Castle with a fada.
[…] by this thread I went out to Blackrock and was just in time before Carraig Books closed for lunch. I got two […]
I meant I wouldn’t comment on Conor’s posts rather than on the blog per se.
sonofstan’s comment about homogenization referred to a perceived “plague” of clothes shops (that’s all there is in the city centre apparently) not the content of bookshop shelves. The point he made was wildly oversated - it is not the case that only clothes shops can afford city centre rents - that’s a problem generally restricted to shopping centres. I saw a lease for a Dame St. restaurant for sale this year for 45k pa - a steal. Its shopping centre equivalent in Limerick is about 250k. And bookshops don’t need to set up on main thoroughfares like that.
The commercial property market is not the same as the residential property market - different zoning practices and use restriction apply for a start. Commercial rents in town are reasonable away from Grafton and Henry Street AFAIK and at any rate most commercial leases for bookshops will have been signed long before the Celtic tigger took off.
As has been pointed out here, the antiquarian market has moved online. And while it’s nice to come across an interesting book in a second hand shop, no matter how many such shops there were in the city, their stock could never represent more than a miniscule fraction of all the books which have been in and are now out of print.
Changes in the Dublin book scene reflect international trends in publishing far more than the short-comings of Irish society.
I hardly think such an assertion is a charter for Harry Potter and McDonalds freedom fries. But obviously others disagree.
Copernicus, I think you have read more criticism of supposed shortcomings of irish society into my comments than has actually been there. The lack of fit between image and reality in terms of our cultural life was not to do with a contrast between the ‘pretensions of the Dublin popualce and their actual buying habits’ but between an image we have of what it means to be Irish and cultured and what it could mean in a society not in thrall to its past. My point was that certain economic trends have been inimical to the kind of urbanism that might sustain such a culture - bookshops were only one example in the original comment; remember i was responding to Conor’s original post- which you should read in conjunction with my response; they are conncted - not trying to start a fight of my own.