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Stoneybatter, Dublin's inner urban village

Kevin Corrigan Kearns

Glendale

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Oh, cheer up, Kevin

Kevin Kearns' book on the inner Dublin area known as Stoneybatter has ambitions to be a work of serious social history, documenting a district that has retained a sense of organic community despite the massive, and frequently utterly insensitive, work of private developers and city planners.

It's true that much of the older, inner Dublin has been insensitively knocked down and replaced by more or less ugly and unimaginative modern and feebly postmodern architecture, and that the fabric of old communities has been damaged as a result. The problem with this book is that Kearns is completely seduced by a dream that the Stoneybatter he is interested in - a community based in the residential area of artisans' dwellings, built mostly in the early decades of the 20th century - was some sort of organic and really, like, yunno, wondrously real and authentic place that defied the awfulness of progress. In short, that he failed to see that even as he was writing this book (in the late 1980s), that same area was becoming a prime site for relatively cheap rented accommodation, and that the largely elderly population that he chose to interview for this book was not representative of what Stoneybatter was likely to become, but representative of a past that was liable to disappear.

In other words, Kearns is fixated on the past. He fails to understand that any urban community is likely to be continually in flux, and he is only interested in the still-living traces of Stoneybatter's past, not in its future. The fact that people might move into the area who were just as keen on preserving its admirable architectural features (i.e., sorta cheap high-density housing) has not occurred to him. As a privileged visitor, he also failed to notice that Stoneybatter in the late 80s was a pretty scary place to visit, if you happened not to be from the area. Not only did it butt onto one of Dublin's major red-light districts, it was also snuggled up to Arbour Hill prison, a major military installation and a mental hospital, which didn't make new residents like me feel all that safe.

Kearns' deep emotional attachment to what he imagines to have been the wonderful sense of community that the place had also blinds him to the basic level of poverty that the inhabitants lived in (and to a certain extent, still do). He also failed to notice that the explosion in the Irish real estate market meant that even a modest house in the area can now expect to sell for more than a quarter of a million Euros - roughly what you could pay for a more-than-decent condo in Miami.

The fact is, the shift in demographics and the death of the largely elderly population of Stoneybatter meant that somebody else had to move in. I am one of them. Kearns is not interested in the future of the area, just in preserving its past. This is a pity, as the truth is always more useful than a consoling fiction. Stoneybatter has a future still, arguably at the cost of its period quaintness, but there is no lack of a sense of community just cause most people here can no longer remember when milk was delivered by horse cart. I have lived in the place, on and off, for the last ten years, and I have no intention of letting anyone knock it down while I have a say in the matter.

There is much value in the oral histories that Kearns has preserved here. But his book was out of date before it was ever published. It so happens that the bulldozers have not yet demolished the artisans' dwellings, if only because they sell for such ridiculously inflated prices. They are still ludicrously small and shabbily built dwellings, every one of which had to have an extension in order to incorporate an inside toilet. This book is, in the end, just another sentimental lament for a vanished Dublin. The only difference is that Kearns got to see it, briefly, before it vanished.