I walk down O’Connell Street in Dublin every day. With its lovely width, trees and monuments, it should be a destination, but most people are passing through, as I am. Shoppers, clubbers, tourists and commuters generally go there on their way to somewhere else.
There are different worlds on O’Connell Street. Groups of foreign workers socialise in the casinos dotted between the disused buildings on the northwest side of the street. Well-heeled people visit the Gresham hotel across the road. There’s an unofficial drugs market on the stretch between North Earl Street and Lower Abbey Street. Homeless, addicted and heartbroken people congregate there during the day and disappear at night. Across the road religious people of different denominations evangelise, philosophise and debate at the GPO.
These groups interact only occasionally and seem invisible to each other. At night, between the hours the pubs close and the nightclubs end, it’s a surprisingly lonely, quiet place.
There are some hopeless people on O’Connell Street, but there are also a lot of kind people there: the flower-seller I met who buys food for young homeless people every morning, the McDonald’s security man who checks if passersby are okay at night, the old woman who recited a poem for me. As the newspaper seller Austin Cregan says, “All human life is here.”
Well, all human life is funny and strange and dignified and debased and moving . . . and, after 24 hours, overwhelming. Like O’Connell Street.
