Róisín Ingle: Aged 10 she learned being from Sheriff Street meant she wasn’t good enough

They say there was a secret code. The code, if you were from Sheriff Street in Dublin 1 was that you didn’t tell people where you came from. You kept it to yourself because of what people might assume about you when they heard the address. The other day, as spring sunshine warmed the infamous inner-city street, glinting off buggies lined up outside houses and flats, Maria McGrane, who grew up with her family in Mattie’s sweet shop on Sheriff Street Lower, told me about the day she first learned about the code.

She was 10 years old. Her savvy mother had decided that her daughter’s inner-city accent would go against her in life, that it would limit her opportunities. So she walked her daughter down Sheriff Street, around the corner to Sackville Place and on through the North Strand and Fairview to what was then the private Holy Faith school in Clontarf.

The nun who greeted them was welcoming. She said there were plenty of places available at the school. That was the story at first, anyway. Then the nun asked for Maria’s address. She left to consult with a superior and returned again to inform the mother and daughter that in fact there were no places at the school. Not for people like them. People from Sheriff Street. That last part was left unspoken but to Maria and her mother, the message was loud and clear.

Just as had happened in London and New York, the once vibrant working-class waterfront community around the Sheriff Street area was devastated

Maria, now a retired psychotherapist, group analyst and talented amateur photographer, told me she learned two things that day: “One was that organised religion didn’t include kindness and empathy, and the other was that being from Sheriff Street meant I was neither good enough nor wanted. It was my first experience of shame.”

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By the time she turned 16, little or nothing had changed. Her mother had to ask the local priest if she could use his address in Maria’s job applications because she couldn’t find employment using her own address.

Maria was full of information about this area as we walked around. Geography, she told me, is not, as some mistakenly believe, about places but about people. She told me why Sheriff Street is so named – the Sheriff of Dublin bought some of the land here, reclaimed from the sea. Nearby Mayor Street has a similar story. She knows that there are an estimated 250 shipwrecks in Dublin Bay because a sandbar, which gives Sandymount its name, made the port a notoriously treacherous one to enter.

The story of Sheriff Street and surrounding areas is the story of the docklands when it was a bustling, highly industrialised area, when an estimated 20,000 people were working on the docks and related businesses. She points out the corner where Macken’s hotel used to stand, and the place near the Samuel Beckett Bridge where the Liverpool boat would come and go, carrying cattle and people. She described local children waving off lone travellers, little white handkerchiefs fluttering, showing compassion to strangers who had nobody else to see them off on their travels.

All that activity disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s with Ireland’s economic collapse and the introduction of container shipping. “With economic collapse comes psychological collapse, and that’s not something you hear about much,” she said. Just as had happened in London and New York, the once vibrant working-class waterfront community around the Sheriff Street area was devastated. Maria remembers dozens of shops and businesses in the area closing almost overnight.

These days, in the minds of many, Sheriff Street is only associated with criminality, poverty, unemployment and antisocial behaviour. The rich community Maria grew up in, a community that still exists, is not part of the narrative. She is hoping to change that with a photography exhibition that’s now on in the CHQ building down the road.

She had a clear aim with the exhibition. She wanted to “redress the imbalance that a bad reputation creates”. Most of all she told me she wanted to challenge the myth surrounding the shame-filled story that has followed Sheriff Street for as long as she can remember and celebrate the other side of the story, the one that doesn’t make headline news.

The story of a sweet shop, for example. The one she grew up in on Sheriffer, as the locals call it. Mattie’s, which is now demolished – as is the birthplace of Luke Kelly across the road – was in her family for three generations from 1958 to 1978. The exhibition features portraits of people who went to the shop as children, who bought sweets there or who were sent there to get the “messages”, with notes scrawled on bits of paper by their parents. After her dad, who ran the shop, died, Maria found 60 of these notes that he had kept and cherished through the years. The notes and other bits of shop memorabilia were the inspiration for the project.

They talked about how the local school was being renovated but that drug-dealers were threatening to smash up the school if security cameras were installed

Earlier, by the canal, across from the sculpture of Luke Kelly’s head, we had bumped into two of the participants in the multimedia exhibition. When I asked what it was like to live in the area now, they talked about how the local school was being renovated but that drug-dealers were threatening to smash up the school if security cameras were installed. “Imagine threatening that,” one said, exasperated. As we left them, Maria described the despair and helplessness of a community forced to live with criminality. “It’s very difficult to climb out from under the weight of shame, especially in marginalised communities, and we can’t expect that to happen by itself.”

Maria’s work on the exhibition has connected her back to the community, to the triumphs and traumas of Mattie’s best customers, to the children queuing for penny sweets who are now artists, home makers, engineers, factory workers, playwrights, sculptors and Olympic athletes. “It has opened a door for me,” she said.

Before we said goodbye, I asked Maria if she still lived by the secret code. “I did for a long, long time but I don’t any more,” she said. “Now I tell people I am immensely proud to be from Sheriff Street.”

Pride of Place, Growing Up in Sheriff Street, 1958 to 1978, runs in CHQ, Dublin, April 4th-9th as part of the Five Lamps Arts Festival. A talk, The Impact of Shame on Marginalised Communities with Maria McGrane in conversation with Róisín Ingle, is at 7pm on Wednesday, April 6th, in the Liffey Corner Room, CHQ

[ roisin@irishtimes.com ]