There were times during the lockdown when it felt as if I had Dublin to myself. I would walk down the centre of deserted streets with no destination in mind, just because I could. On Grafton Street, the shopfronts were boarded up, only delivery cyclists passing me by, or the occasional lurking Garda car, watching for trouble. Seagulls shrieked overhead. Foxes wandered along next to me. All other noise was a dim hum in the background. It was a city without its people.
I couldn't write a novel about a struggling actor without considering her living situation in modern Dublin
In her poem, The Scar, Eavan Boland, writes: “Dublin rises out of what reflects it.” It’s a perfect description of the city’s relationship with its writers. Some of the world’s greatest literature is about Dublin and the city exists on the page as much as in reality. I like to think of it with its own fictional universe, in which the Dublin of Joyce, Beckett, and Dunleavy exists in the same world as that of Rooney, Enright and O’Brien. Sebastian Dangerfield might encounter Marianne Sheridan at Trinity College, while Baba Brennan walks past Leopold Bloom on O’Connell Street.
Without the people – real and imagined – the experience of Dublin was very different. It was a city reduced to its constituent parts, a set without the actors. I was confronted by the vacant properties and the building sites, the gaps in Georgian facades, filled with brutalist dentures. Christchurch and St Patrick’s Cathedral, ordinarily stone islands in the traffic, stood out from their surroundings again, the tolling bells louder without the muffling of engines. Closed to the public, Trinity was a bunker and, without the bustle on Dame Street, the electrical boxes and traffic signs on College Green stood like weeds growing through the footpath.
I would go home from these lockdown walks, sit at my laptop, and fill Dublin with people again. I was writing my first novel, The Truth Will Out, set in the contemporary theatre scene, in which the city is a dominant backdrop. It’s a natural setting for drama, because Dublin is a place of contrasts and conflict, tugged constantly between the old and the new, between the poverty and the privilege, between enterprise and culture. It’s a city always in a state of change and at war with itself.
When you’re writing about Dublin, it’s impossible to ignore the literary legacy bound up in the city. It feels as if you’re adding new detail to a map. You might find yourself asking, who am I to take part in a project like this? But, then again, who is anyone? There is always a risk that a literary history like Dublin’s might stultify those who come after, writers with a different experience of the city, writing about the fresh skin instead of the callus.
One hundred years since publication, Ulysses remains the great Dublin novel. But you see in every story of Dublin something of its unfolding reality, every generation of writers producing different depictions of the city. The housing crisis chokes the fictional city now, as it does the real. This precarity features in a number of recent works. In Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation and Sally Rooney’s latest, Beautiful World, Where are You, the central characters are in, or adjacent to, the Dublin arts scene, with the financial strain and disparities of life in the city weaving in and out of the plot. In Niamh Campbell’s We Were Young, there’s discussion of the closing of venues and proliferation of hotels in their place, the loss of cultural quarters. I couldn’t write a novel about a struggling actor without considering her living situation in modern Dublin and folding it into the plot.
This is not unique to Dublin, but we do have a tendency to lose our writers because of it. So many of the city’s great writers were emigrants from it – Joyce, Beckett, Shaw – and the city was the worse for it.
As a nineties child, growing up in north county Dublin, you only spoke of Dublin as a “kip” you wanted to leave. It was never spoken of with love or pride. There was no romance in it, except in old songs and in the bullet holes in the GPO. A little later, during the Celtic Tiger, the city was in flux again, churning around us. There were cranes, roadworks, a desperate rush to pull up the roots of poverty and sow the seeds of progress instead. Progress often meant business, enterprise, commerce, and jobs, but rarely culture.
In After the Races, Joyce calls Dublin a city wearing “the mask of a capital”. I think of it often when I look at the new developments designed to make us more like any other European city, like a mask over the mess and the chaos, the stories and the history. That’s not to overly romanticise the place, because it will break your heart as often as win it. It’s the great potential of Dublin that makes you love it, even as it lets you down. For me, it’s that quality that makes the city a gift to writers: the hope and the disappointment, the lost chances and the ever-present possibility. Stories emerge from it, from the change, from the fractures and the tension, both in places and people.
People talk about leaving again now, just as they did when I was younger. This time, it’s the lack of housing that prompts the idea. It’s also the erosion of the city’s culture, which continued through the pandemic.
There was the closing of the square in Portobello, the proposed redevelopment of the Cobblestone pub, the smaller and smaller pockets of space that feel as if they belong to the people who live here. Even the term “cultural spaces” feels packaged. It sounds completely the opposite of what people want, which is corners of the earth not dedicated purely to economic output, room for ideas and a little imagination. Space for stories. Dublin rises out of what reflects it.
The Truth Will Out by Rosemary Hennigan is published by Orion on March 17th
