As the regeneration programme slows down due to funding cuts, some 600 families still live in ‘third-world’ conditions in the remaining blocks – and though some are delighted with the new housing, others complain of old social problems dying hard
‘THE STENCH makes you gag if you aren’t used to it,” I’m warned. And it’s very dark. “The lighting is often vandalised,” comes the explanation. The graffiti speaks for itself. I’m told I have a choice between gagging on eight flights of gang-occupied stairs, or braving a minute in a lift that’s likely to break down. I choose the lift. Inside the flat, the multiple locks have a reassuring click.
I’m now safe inside the home of Kevin O’Higgins in one of Ballymun’s 14 remaining eight-storey tower blocks. “When I came to live in these Ballymun flats 10 years ago, it was more alien than the slums of South America,” says Kevin O’Higgins, a Jesuit priest who runs Just (Jesuit University Support and Training) and has been robbed at knifepoint in the flat where we’re now standing on the balcony, looking at the view of the Spire in the city centre and the Wicklow hills beyond. “These were third-world conditions 10 years ago and today they are even worse – especially in the past year or so. The blocks are half-empty, so the gangs have taken over. It’s intimidating, it’s open to anyone to walk in, there’s no security,” he says.
Six hundred families still live in one of these remaining 14 tower blocks more than a decade after Ballymun Regeneration was launched in 1998, with a completion date of 2008-2009. The revised goal is 2014-2015, if Ballymun Regeneration can continue to claw back the resources it needs, having seen its funding cut by 40 per cent this year.
Maybe you’ve seen these half-boarded-up “third-world” flats from the M50 on your way to Ikea, and didn’t realise people lived there. If you’ve seen the architects’ rendering of the €800 million town centre announced this week by Treasury Holdings you could assume that the money was pouring in to Ballymun, when, in fact, the funding has yet to be secured.
A SERIES OF photographs of one of the towers being demolished takes pride of place in Sharon and Michael Keating’s new home. Until three months ago, these young parents of two boys aged two and six, and with a third boy on the way in November, were living in one of the blocks.
“The difference here is everything – the quietness, there’s no harassment, there’s no getting robbed, no being caught unawares,” says Sharon from her new kitchen in her little gem of a Scandinavian-style home with inner courtyard. “When you’re living in those conditions, the fear just becomes part of your life. The smell becomes normal.” Perhaps her most telling observation is this: “Since we moved to our new house, our two-year-old has started talking.” Michael says quietly: “I always felt guilty for bringing Sharon from Skerries to Ballymun.”
The half-abandoned towers have become hot spots of vandalism, petty crime and public- order offences, admits Ciaran Murray, managing director of Ballymun Regeneration. “There is common access, and open stairwells are attractive to youths to congregate and provide shelter at night-time. We have arranged for more frequent foot patrols and we are looking at the possibility of controlled access to the blocks so only residents can access.”
However, community meetings, Garda initiatives and so on may have limited impact. O’Higgins suggests a quicker solution: “Get a Government minister or a bishop to live here for a weekend.”
BRIAN KENNY HAS lived in the towers since he was six months old in 1969, and his 24-year-old daughter Sandra grew up here too. As we look out over Dublin, the Kennys don’t want to talk about conditions in the block, for fear of repercussions.
With support from O’Higgins’s project, Brian has a psychotherapy degree from Dublin Business School, and Sandra has a degree from DCU. Brian, who left school at 15 and re-entered education at the age of 39 with the help of Just, is doing an internship at the Stanhope centre for people with addiction issues, while Sandra, unemployed, is hoping to get a job helping children with special needs in a school in Ballymun. “With all the cutting back, the prospects are not good, even though this is the area where children need it most,” she says.
Three per cent of people in Ballymun go to third level, compared with 75 per cent nationally. Ballymun’s unemployment rate is four times the national average.
Brian describes an idyllic childhood growing up in the flats, when there was plenty of green space to play in. Stable family units in the blocks, ruled by mothers who saw everything on the landings and on the green space below, made sure kids had freedom and friends without getting into trouble. Sandra, a generation later, saw the years when heroin became a Ballymun commodity that people took the bus out from the city centre to buy, but she herself was protected from it. Growing up in Ballymun today is “completely different”, she says.
Billed as Europe’s ideal example of regeneration, some believe that Ballymun has something missing – the sense of community. “From inside, Ballymun is not as good as it looks,” says Brian.
Ciaran Murray agrees that the new housing is not enough, and cites a long list of education and community programmes that run in tandem with the building of new homes, such as the Atlantic Philanthropies-funded programme for children up to the age of 12, though a lifelong learning centre, muted in early versions of the regeneration, hasn’t materialised.
On the ground, some community workers are concerned that their own grassroots education and community programmes, built up over years, are under threat. “It’s a time of huge uncertainty. Four community organisations have received significant cuts in the last six months, with serious impacts, and more cuts are feared,” says community worker Audrey Meehan.
“My own view is they put a lot of effort into the physical regeneration but not enough effort into the social regeneration,” says Mick Creedon, of the community organisation Ballymun Partnership.
O’HIGGINS’S TOWER overlooks lovely new housing, Sillogue Park. Apart from a proud young girl on a white pony, there is a nine-year-old boy, on a bike, with a black eye. He says he bought the bike for €30 a few days before knowing it was stolen, but then, people had stolen his previous bikes and so – so what? It’s 12.30pm – still school hours. Why is he out on his bike? “You get bullied in school and the teachers are narks.” Do his parents have a car? (There’s an Alfa Romeo parked nearby.) He says no, they rent a shopping trolley for €20 from Tesco to get the shopping in.
Only a few footsteps away and yet a world away in terms of aspiration, lives Cathy Kenny, whose front garden boasts tiny plastic wood-effect signs: “Private Property” and “Bug Off”. Kenny is proud of her five boys, two still in primary school, two at third level, and the eldest, aged 21, looking for a job rather than education because he’s just become a father. Sports are the key to keeping your boys on the straight and narrow, she says.
All six live in a new four-bedroom house that’s straight out of a magazine – state-of-the-art kitchen with black appliances, big flatscreen TV in the sitting room. Kenny, who’d like to do an interior design course, has a flair for combining blacks, burgundies and coppers against a minimalist white background, without making the place look dark and fussy. When asked where she bought the funky brown plastic chandelier in her sitting room, she answers: “From a guy in a van.” Kenny also buys her daily bread and milk from “the vans”, but does her weekly shop in Finglas, which costs her a taxi fare of €10 each way.
A perfect house, yet nowhere to shop. This is why so many of Ballymun’s 17,000 residents feel that their town is unfinished, despite the shiny new civic buildings. Ballymun Regeneration wants to finish the job that it started – not just in terms of physical living space, but in regenerating mental space and potential.
But with the towers rapidly stagnating in “third-world” conditions, can Ballymun be rebuilt fast enough – both physically and psychologically?
A five-year-old child in this no-man’s-land today could be 10 years old, a 10-year-old 15 before it’s done. “Five years is a long time in a childhood. For Ballymun Regeneration to ultimately be successful, you are going to have to have the building finished in human time,” says Brendan Taaffe, principal of Virgin Mary national school.
Near the bus stop, a grandmother pushes a buggy. Asked if Ballymun’s regeneration project has improved people’s lives, she answers: “Not really. You can give people new houses, but it’s still the same old yobbos.”
At the bus stop, another woman says: “A new house doesn’t always bring a new mentality.”