‘Talbot Street is known as Tablet Street now’: Will a €2m makeover be enough to turn things around?

In the coming days, various maintenance work will begin on Dublin’s Talbot Street; focused on improving its public lighting, footpaths and road surface. A budget of €2 million has been allocated to the street by Dublin City Council for this purpose.

Talbot Street has always been a key artery through the centre of the city, originally anchored at one end by the Italianate entrance of Connolly Station and Nelson’s Pillar at the other. In recent years, in common with other parts of the north inner city, it has, as Graham Hickey of Dublin Civic Trust says, “faced a number of challenges, and been generally disimproving”.

Hickey continues: “There are so many marginalised people being housed in adjacent streets, in emergency and homeless accommodation. Dublin 1 has a disproportionate number of these beds. And those people have to go somewhere during the day, so they make their social life on the nearby streets, including Talbot Street.”

To walk up and down Talbot Street on a sunny weekday morning is to immediately notice the diversity of those both working and walking there. I hear a number of different languages; so many I can’t identify them all, but among them are Arabic, Romanian, Mandarin, Polish and Hindi. There is a multitude of restaurants and takeaways serving food from all over the world; Indian, Turkish, Asian street food, Eastern European, and Italian fare.

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There’s a Tesco, “Serving Talbot Street’s shoppers a little better every day”, a Lidl, a Spar and a SuperValu. There are several vape and phone shops, barbers, tattoo parlours and places offering massages. There are also a number of shuttered premises, including some for sale. Independent Newspapers has a prominent presence on the street, and there are a number of long-established independent businesses, including hardware shops, a shoe shop, a paint and wallpaper shop, and a cobblers.

I go into one shop where one of the two employees tells me that he doesn’t want to give his name, but when asked about his experience of working on the street, he says: “It’s a hellhole. There are fights all the time. Junkies fighting with other junkies; with the police. The further down the street you go towards the bridge, the worse it is. It’s like a battlefield out there, at all times of the day and night.”

At Gerry Keane Paint and Wallpaper shop, Billy Corr says he has worked at this premises for 51 years. “I was here when the bomb went off,” he says, referring to the 1974 loyalist bombing on the street.

Corr is weary of hearing negative things about the street where he has made his living for half a century. “We have some very loyal customers who have kept us going, but a lot of our customers are older, and some of them are intimidated by the antisocial behaviour. The street has a very bad name, and it has become very depleted. Henry Street is going downhill too.”

He’s unmoved by the Council’s plan to install more lighting and mend paths. “It’s coming at the wrong time; the traffic is going to be disrupted, and it will discourage people from coming in. What we need are extra gardaí, more security cameras, and a few flowers.”

At Tara Leathers, Ladislaw Daczo is behind the counter, mending a boot. “I’m not sure if we need more lights, but we could do with more people cleaning the street,” he says. As it happens, during the hours I spend there this week, I see virtually no litter the entire length of the street. “The problem with the street is that it is full of people who have no jobs and who don’t want to work. For a capital city in Europe to have a street so close to the centre looking like this one; it’s a big problem.”

Talbot Street is bisected by Gardiner Street, Moland Place and Store Street. I cross over and back several times before realising that even for a city where many people tend to jaywalk everywhere, virtually nobody pays any attention to the pedestrian lights, nor the oncoming traffic. People simply walk out in front of whatever is coming down the streets that lie perpendicular.

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During the time I spend there, I see one Garda patrol car. As it happens, it passes less than two feet from a classic scene of antisocial behaviour, and does not stop. Four people are sitting on the circular granite seat under one of the street’s lovely lime trees. One is a dishevelled woman who is missing four of her front teeth, drinking from a vodka bottle. A second is a man drinking from a large bottle in a brown paper bag. The other two are looking into each other’s hands, and it appears something is being passed from one to the other. From their unsteady movements and body language, the four of them seem either drunk or high. It’s 1.30pm.

At a nearby shop, the man working behind the counter, who has been on the street a long time, asks not to be named, nor his shop identified. Why? “I don’t think those people over there read The Irish Times,” he says, pointing to the quartet at the circular granite seat, “but their overlords do, and I don’t want anyone intimidating my business as a result of something I say.”

This man would like to see all the circular granite seating removed. He doesn’t see these as an asset to the streetscape, but instead as providing meeting places “for doing business – drug deals. Talbot Street is known as Tablet Street now.” The gardaí, he says, often don’t intervene. “For a while, the guards would stop and go over and take their bottles and pour the drink away, but I haven’t seen them doing that for a while now.”

Vladimir Shugaliya is working in his well-stocked and eclectic antique shop, Under The Bridge, which is under the railway bridge. “I have been living in the city centre for 20 years, and working here on this street for 10, and every week I see a crime happening in front of me.

“There is often chaos on this street, and it’s all to do with drugs – people injecting, fighting, doing deals. I have seen it all. It’s a game of cat and mouse with the guards. The guards come. The people run away. The guards go. The people come back. Some questionnaires came into the shop, asking would I like to see more live music on the street. I said I didn’t want music: I wanted there to be more security.”

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Will Dublin City Council’s €2 million help address the challenges Talbot Street faces?

“Given that it is specifically being spent on street maintenance and lighting, I do [think so],” Hickey says. “It could definitely do with a separate fund to maintain the shop facades.”

Richard Guiney is the CEO of DublinTown, a non-profit organisation representing 2,500 businesses in the capital. “We very much welcome the investment in Talbot Street, which is a really important entry point into the city,” he says. “Over the years, it has probably lost some of its identity.”

What does Guiney think Talbot Street needs?

“I think it could do with some changes of use,” he says. “We want to encourage more arts use there; we could have craft spaces, and artists’ studios. I think that would encourage more engagements with tourists. We need to make it more of a district to engage tourists. There is real scope for more restaurants, for instance. We want to sustain the night-time use of the street, so more night-time lighting is needed, which the street is now going to get. The street has been declining for a number of years, and we have to turn its fortunes around.”

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