This article is part of Ireland’s Changing Suburbs, an Irish Times series exploring our fast-growing new towns, changing older neighbourhoods, and shrinking rural landscapes.
In James Joyce’s early short story A Painful Case, the rather haughty Mr Duffy chooses to reside in Chapelizod because “he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious.” Joyce captures in a single sentence two of the profound ambiguities of suburban life.
One is that the sense of distance from the urban centre is not fixed but ever-changing: Chapelizod, 6km from O’Connell Bridge, would now be considered, not far away from, but conveniently close to, “the city”. The other is that every suburb except one’s own is always mean, modern and pretentious. Where I live is a buoyant community – where you live is a soulless wasteland.
As far back as the 1940s, the brilliant music hall comedian Jimmy O’Dea satirised this attitude: “There are some quite decent suburbs, I am sure./ O Rathmines is not so bad or Terenure./O we’ve heard of spots like Inchicore,/ But really don’t know where they are;/For, thank heavens, we are living in Rathgar.”
RM Block
The conceptual problem of suburbs is that they have always been defined by what they are not. They are not part of the urban core of a historic city. And they are not out in “the country”.
In our own culture, the classic locations for representations of Irish life have been what we might call in shorthand the Synge/O’Casey duopoly: remote West of Ireland villages or the teeming tenements of a crumbling Georgian Dublin.
The only cities that really matter to John Synge’s people are those of North America. In Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars the suburb-dwelling Woman from Rathmines wanders into the scene as an absurdly out-of-place intruder, too incomprehensible to be given a name.
Perhaps suburbs have always had this dual aspect. On the one hand, the historical geographer Ruth McManus has noted that “In the medieval period ... potentially dangerous or unpleasant activities such as tanning took place beyond the walls of towns and cities. Suburbs were also places where outcasts, underprivileged or suspect members of society lived, outside the protection of the urban walls and the rights that the status of urban citizenship conferred.”
In early maps of Dublin, the suburbs, too shameful to be represented, were literally rubbed out.
And yet, as areas like Montenotte and Sunday’s Well in Cork, Newtown in Waterford and the old villages on the Dublin coast, from Malahide to Dalkey, were developed as refuges from urban squalor for the well-to-do, suburban residence also became a status symbol. It came to signify, not dirt and danger, but pleasure and prosperity.
This contradiction was never really resolved: suburbs remain in Irish culture places to look down on and to revel in. They can be celebrated for their vibrancy, as in the Barrytown novels of Roddy Doyle, or given an almost gothic bleakness as in Eavan Boland’s Ode to Suburbia, where “the claustrophobia/Of your back gardens varicose/With shrubs, make an ugly sister/Of you suburbia.”
As with so much else in Irish life, it usually comes down to social class – it is money, not geography, that determines how much “sub” there is in suburbia.
Suburbia, in other words, is a state of mind. Distance from the urban centre is measured, not in miles or kilometres, but in social dislocation. Southhill and Moyross can seem much further from the centre of Limerick than, say, Castletroy or Annacotty. Darndale is less than 9km from O’Connell Bridge in Dublin; Dalkey is 14km away. Yet there is little doubt about which of them feels “outside the protection of the urban walls” and which feels deeply centred.
Equally, places can move in and out of suburbia over time. Distinctive villages like Stoneybatter or Cabra became suburbs of Dublin – but now they are “urban villages” again. (This hasn’t yet happened to my own native land of Crumlin, but it surely will.)
I am old enough to remember being bussed out to Tallaght to play a football match and being amazed to find myself in the countryside. Yet within a few years, Tallaght had become a suburb – and now it is, surely, a town or even a proto-city in its own right. Likewise, Swords is a very old medieval town that became a borough that became a suburb and that is now officially envisaged as an “emerging city”. Presumably, within the next few decades, Swords, like an exoplanet that has acquired its own moons, will have its own satellite suburbs.
I grew up in what was then unquestionably a suburb: the big Dublin Corporation housing estate of Crumlin on the southwest edge of the city. It was beyond the Grand Canal, which marked a very definite border separating us from the place we called “town”. And in turn, beyond Crumlin, there was the other visible boundary of the Dublin mountains. Into this in-between place, the city decanted people like my parents who were born in overcrowded substandard housing in the Liberties and the docklands.
The sense of disorientation was profound. Jim Larkin, the great hero of the Dublin working-class, complained that these people had been “dumped” into “areas to which they are not acclimatised” – as though ours was a distant tropical colony or a Himalayan settlement. A senior Corporation official admitted that “a lot of people” who had been moved to Crumlin “declare that the air is so strong that the children eat them out of house and home. They cannot afford to keep the children in food.”
The Behan family, who involuntarily became Crumlin’s most colourful residents when they were moved out of the north inner city, shared this sense of alienation. They called it, in their various writings, the Wild West, Outer Siberia, Barbarian Land, Comanche Country and, in Brendan’s lurid coinage, implicitly comparing the place to a gulag, Kremlin’s Crumlin.
And yet, by the time I was coming to consciousness there in the early 1960s, it was just home. It is people that make places – displacement was followed by place-making. Families got on with life. Kids turned the streets into playgrounds. Sports clubs and women’s groups and drama societies and rockers and showband fans and religious devotees formed their own clusters. Just as they have continued to do in every alleged Outer Siberia beyond every Irish city.
But after this placemaking comes a new displacement. The simple fact is that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the people who moved into Ireland’s new suburbs in the 1930s and 1940s could not possibly afford to do so now. Public housing was sold off. It became a commodity. And gradually, Crumlin, once so far from the city, came to seem ever closer to it and therefore – with the holy trinity of location, location, location presiding over the market – more desirable. (Our end of the estate, being close to the canal, is practically Portobello now.)
On MyHome.ie two-bedroomed Corporation houses in Crumlin like the one my family inhabited have current asking prices of €375,000 for mid-terrace and €400,000 for end-of-terrace. The real prices will be significantly higher. There is one similar house for rent “from” €2,100 a month.
There is no way today’s equivalents of my parents – a bus conductor and an office cleaner – could aspire to buy or rent such a home. And thus, not just in Dublin but across Ireland’s cities, the suburbs created by slum clearances in the early decades of the State’s life are being inhabited by white-collar workers and those whose parents can afford to give them deposits for mortgages.
Meanwhile, no new working class suburbs have been built to take the place of the old ones that are being lost to the kind of people for whom they were originally intended. This absence, paradoxically, is one of the forces that has made so much of Ireland suburban. It is arguable that most of the eastern half of the State has become a giant suburb of Dublin. The State’s five biggest towns – Drogheda, Dundalk, Swords, Navan and Bray – are half urban areas in their own right and half dormitories for the capital’s commuters.
Or, if we define a suburb by its newness, the picture is similar. Of the twelve officially-defined “towns” that have come into existence since the 1990s, eight (Saggart, Kinsealy-Drinan, Newcastle, Enfield, Stamullen, Kilcock, Tullyallan and Rathnew) are exo-suburbs of Dublin; three (Watergrasshill, Rathcormac and Carrigtwohill) of Cork and one (Baile Chláir) of Galway. Few of these towns have industries or business hubs on a scale large enough to employ most of their own inhabitants – which is why Irish people have some of the longest commuting times from home to work in the European Union.
One of the stranger aspects of this transformation is that it seems to be changing some of the most basic aspects of what it means to live in a suburb. The old idea, which certainly held through most of Irish and European history, was that cities were crowded but suburbs were sprawling and spacious.
In contemporary Ireland, this is being reversed: because of the prevalence of apartments over houses, many of the new towns are much more densely populated than the older places. In the 2022 census, Dublin city and its official suburbs had 3,659 people for every square kilometre. But burgeoning Balbriggan had 5,481 and the new town of Kinsealy-Drinan had 8,401 per square kilometre. Arguably, if you want to experience a 21st century equivalent of teeming inner city life, you have to go quite far out of the city.
How should we think about these changes? First by clearing away the thick undergrowth of snobbery. Suburbs are not innately soulless. They’ve been around long enough for us to know that, given half a chance, the people who come to live in them will animate them with their collective energy, their creativity and their desire for belonging.
But to give them those opportunities, we might start with a truth articulated by the great (and very much non-suburban) geographic writer Tim Robinson: “It is the attention we bring to it that makes a place out of a location”. And, in the words of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, “Attention, attention, must finally be paid.”
Most of us live or have lived in one or other kind of suburb. It is the norm of Irish existence. Yet far too little attention has been paid to the need to make places out of these locations.
Developer-led planning has meant that growth has often been random and poorly co-ordinated. Some of us are old enough to remember the National Spatial Strategy that was launched with great fanfare by then taoiseach Bertie Ahern and was meant to provide a blueprint for development for the twenty years from 2002 to 2020. It was ignored both by the government that launched it and by most local authorities and was ignominiously abandoned in 2013.
It has been replaced by a much vaguer National Planning Framework. We lack an overall sense of where people should live, how they can commute efficiently, how they can have within easy reach all the things they need for a good quality of life, how their communities can be sustainable, how they can have communal public spaces that give them a sense of local pride and belonging, how they can have the democratic power to make decisions about the things that affect them. We lack a real national commitment to place-making.
This great failure has to be reversed. We have to accept that suburbia, even if it is a moveable feast, is where most of the foreseeable Irish future is taking shape. Mr Duffy’s dismissal of such places as “mean, modern and pretentious” is merely another form of wilful ignorance. The real pretence and the real meanness lie in the continued insistence on defining suburbs by what they are not. These are not liminal spaces in between the romance of the countryside and the historic richness of the city. They are where we live now.
