"God help them," is the response in the North Wall Women's Centre on Dublin's Sheriff Street to the prospect of 25,000 new residents in the docklands over the next 15 years. They all want to visit the £1.6 billion development plan currently on show in the Docklands Marketing Centre on Custom House Quay, in which 40,000 new jobs are expected to be created. "The only jobs people here will get out of it is cleaning," one woman says matter-of-factly.
Most of the women grew up in the blocks of flats behind the new Jury's Custom House Hotel. These are now derelict and due to be demolished to make way for some of the new apartments for the projected incoming population. "The flats were brilliant," another woman says and the rest agree. Many of their families used to work in the docks so workplace and home-place existed naturally alongside each other. "My best memory of being a kid is of going to feed the seagulls at the docks on a Sunday with my father and my brothers." Many now live in the clusters of Corporation houses recently built in the area, but say the move fragmented the community even if they're all still in the neighbourhood . Why?
"We lost the communal playgrounds that went with the flats. The kids have to play on the street now. What we want out of the docklands plan is playgrounds and green spaces. And it's 25,000 more police we need, not residents."
There used to be well over 20 shops in this area. Now there are four. One of them is The Happy Apple grocery on Seville Place. Janice Hunt, who works there, is 17 and used to live in the same blocks of flats as the women in the North Wall Centre. "I wish they'd do the flats back up again," she says. "I loved living there." But don't her friends still live nearby? "Yeah, but it was better when we lived in the flats. We were really together then. That was the best thing about living there."
Up and down Sheriff Street and Seville Place the graffiti's stark mantra is repeated everywhere: "Drugs are killing our kids. Pushers out. Drugs out." Patrick Burke at the St Laurence O'Toole Day Care Centre for Old Folks eats dinner and reminisces. "We used to play handball against the gable-walls and when the police would come the kids would run. Now it's the police who run from the kids." Also having dinner is Thomas MacDonald, a clerk in St Andrew's church, who says bitterly, "We're a proud parish gone to the gutter." He attributes part of the problems in the area to the fact that few children now have married parents. "We only had two weddings in St Andrew's last year and there's just been one so far this year."
The dining-room is in a house in a courtyard. There are other houses in the courtyard, where elderly people live. One of the residents is Ellen Comiskey. "I haven't had a good night's sleep in years with the joyriders, she says. "The children is out till all hours." Mary Flynn, who works in the centre, says: "I used to love the Corpus Christi procession. We all did our houses up for it. That's gone now." They explain that the processions ended because the priests were being stoned by children.
Everyone wants to know where the thousands of newcomers will be accommodated. They do not believe they will integrate with the existing community. "They'll probably build another wall and block us off from them," is the consensus. The wall referred to is several metres high and runs along the perimeter of Sheriff Street. It was apparently originally built as part of the docks. It has been made yet higher by fencing of the kind one sees around football pitches. In Sheriff Street and Seville Place it's recently become known as "the Berlin Wall." Behind this wall is the new Custom House Harbour complex of over 300 apartments, built as part of the International Financial Services Centre.
The wall has been there as long as anyone can remember, but it is now arousing very strong feelings in those who live on the other side of it. "It's to keep us apart from the yuppies," one of the women in the North Wall Centre says with disgust. "They've made their own ghetto in there," says another. "But they need it," someone else argues. "If the wall wasn't there those nice flats would be wrecked once the gurriers got at them." They all collapse with laughter when someone remarks, "I know the postman who goes in there. And he says they're all weirdies."
Every urban area has its own shifting boundaries, whether created by postcodes or reputations. Rundown Seville Place, say the women, used to be the posh part of the area. "All those big houses were owned by the cattle dealers. We weren't allowed up there when we were kids, because we lived in the flats. Now they're the same as us up there." They consider O'Connell Street dangerous and agree with each other that they would never go there at night. But the wall that's run unnoticed along Sheriff Street for decades now seems to stand for something new: a tangible symbol of a divided community.
Sister Teresa Deasy of the Sacred Heart Sisters, who lives in a house on Seville Place, sums it up as she walks alongside the wall. "The people in those apartments," she says, "are part of this parish but we never see them in the church."
Sounding like a character from an O'Casey play, she wonders aloud: "What are walls for? To keep people in or keep them out?" A man out with his dog stops on the street after she leaves to ask how we like their Berlin Wall. We stare up at it together. Suddenly he starts to laugh. "Well, you know what happened to the real Berlin Wall. They broke it down in the end."
Gerry Fay is the chairman of the North Wall Community Association. He is very positive about the plans for the docklands. "We've been standing still for years in this community and now this plan is a great chance to breathe life back into the area. And we need more people to live here. The population has really dropped since all the jobs in the docks ended." Asked if he believes there will be integration of the incoming community with the existing one, he hesitates momentarily and then says firmly, "Well, integration is one of the main objectives of the plan, isn't it?"
Between the shiny glass towers of the International Financial Services Centre and the Sheriff Street wall, is the Custom House Harbour development. The complex consists of over 300 apartments, neatly stacked up around the deep square basins left over from the working docklands. There are electronic gates that open and close behind each person entering the complex.
In mid-afternoon, when most people are at work, the complex is eerily quiet, with not a soul in sight. Fastnet, Bailey, Kish, Eagle Island, Hook Head. Given the conversations earlier in the day, it seems a magnificent irony that each apartment block is named after a lighthouse, accentuating a sense of isolation from the mainland of the community that surrounds them.
Opposite Custom House Harbour, and in the midst of the banks and offices, there are a few other buildings. There's a bar called The Harbourmaster, a Spar, a newsagents, a Dry Cleaners with a sign outside that says `Your Shirt Sir', and a Munchies cafe. Susan Brennan, who works in Munchies, doesn't live in the area. She is enthusiastic about the new plans for the docklands. "It'll be great if it keeps working out as well as it is at the moment, with the mixture of offices and apartments. Still, she would never, she says, walk down Sheriff Street or Seville Place. "It's not safe. And I don't have any reason to go there."
If you stand opposite Jury's Custom House Hotel further down the quays you can see the derelict blocks of flats lined up behind it which Janice Hunt and the women of the North Wall Centre say they never wanted to leave. Inside the hotel a receptionist who asked not to be named says no official guidelines are given to guests about where or where not to walk in the area. "I thought there would be some policy to that effect when we opened last year but there wasn't." There has been a growing number of guests reporting snatched bags recently he says.
"Crime is definitely on the increase around here." He sometimes travels via Sheriff Street but says frankly "I wouldn't be aware of what the local community think of the hotel."
After several hours in the area I haven't seen even one policeman. When my own bag is snatched there's almost a fatalistic inevitability about it. It's the usual. Two young teenage boys run off with it: then within minutes a small band of eight and nine-year-olds bring it back, minus credit cards and cash.
The Dublin Docklands Development Authority cites one of the key elements of their plan as being the involvement of the local community in a meaningful way. The chairman, Lar Bradshaw, is on record as saying that any cynicism among local people about the development plan will "only diminish when they see tangible benefits." With the combination of both mutual distrust and mutual optimism that seems to exist at present on both sides of the Sheriff Street wall, it will be interesting to see how the DDDA successfully achieve their aims in the coming years.
The old Sheriff Street flats, with the new Custom House Harbour apartments in the background and, in between, the wall known to long established North Wall residents as the Berlin Wall.
Women from the North Wall Women's Centre on Sheriff Street. "What we want out of the docklands plan is playgrounds and green spaces. And it's 25,OOO more police we need, not residents."
