Fintan O’Toole: A tiny area of Dublin is Ireland’s most segregated district

Every time an especially nasty crime of violence is committed in Dublin’s north inner city against someone who does not live there, the area briefly occupies a corner of the national consciousness. Taoisigh comment, Ministers visit, reporters venture into the Badlands.

What tends to get lost in these fitful moments of attention is that this area has attracted one of the State’s most concentrated campaigns of social engineering. Vast public resources have been used to reshape it – just not in the interests of its traditional inhabitants.

The poorest part of inner city Dublin has long been the North Dock C ward, a triangle roughly formed by the Custom House, the Royal Canal and the north wall of the Liffey.

But in the Celtic Tiger years, something remarkable happened in this place. In 1991, 75 per cent of adults living there had only a primary education. By 2006, that figure had dropped to 20 per cent.

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Conversely, in 1991, 1 per cent of the adult population had a higher education. In 2006, 46 per cent did so.

This sounds like a story of spectacular success: as the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger years filtered through to one of Ireland’s most deprived communities, there was a kind of miracle.

If you believed in trickle-down economics, it would be hard to show a transformation so profound, so rapid and so benign.

Except the transformation was, from the point of view of the existing population, largely illusory. What was happening was not that the life chances of the people living there had been suddenly and massively enhanced. It was that new people were moving into the area – and many of the traditional residents were being moved out to Ballymun, Coolock and Darndale to make way for them.

This population movement was directed by the State. It created the Irish Financial Services Centre with very large tax subsidies. It established the Dublin Docklands Development Authority. Between them, these public bodies managed to gentrify of much of the area, especially the parts closest to the IFSC and the Liffey quays.

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But this process was based on a policy of segregation. In his seminal study for the Dublin Inner City Partnership in 2009, the social researcher Trutz Haase pointed out that the result of all this social engineering was “a patchwork of highly disadvantaged and highly affluent neighbourhoods at the micro level and in close proximity”. *

On the one hand, the most deprived of the families who were not moved out were instead concentrated even further in small blocks of houses and flats around Seville Place and Lower Oriel Street. On the other, five grand new gated communities of upscale apartments were created at Custom House Harbour, Lower Mayor Street and North Wall Quay.

Thus, the State deliberately created a physical division within this relatively small area that is as stark in its own way as that between the Falls and Shankill Roads in west Belfast. The principle of separation is not religion or ethnicity but social class.

Haase described the new apartment complexes as “amongst the most secluded gated complexes in the city” and noted that “not only are these complexes completely shielded from the wider area surrounding them, but they are literally segregated from their neighbouring constituencies through a Berlin-like wall which is unrivalled anywhere in the country”.

This was quite something for a supposedly egalitarian republic to do: purposely to create Ireland’s most starkly segregated social space. It is defined by the walls and gates through which the descendants of the area’s traditional inhabitants may not pass.

Any notion that the influx of better-educated, more affluent people might lift the entire population of the area was brutally contradicted by the construction of a six-metre-high wall, surmounted by a wire mesh fence, to separate Sheriff Street from Custom House Dock.

This was done to a community that had recently been hit with two hammer blows. One was the rapid disappearance of its main economic base – the Liffey docks.

By the early 1980s, docking was mechanised and containerised, warehouses were moved to the outer suburbs and the port was developed further downriver. The small manufacturing industries that had clustered around the docks also closed. By the mid-1980s, Sheriff Street flats had an unemployment rate of 83 per cent.

The other, and strongly related, disaster was the influx of heroin – which, along with cocaine and benzodiazepines, remains endemic in the area. Work and meaning were replaced by the drug economy and the somnolence of addiction.

Just as nothing was done by the State to deal with the economic consequences of the loss of the docks, the heroin epidemic was largely ignored for a decade.

And the State’s ultimate response to these disasters was, in effect, a form of colonisation: move in a new settler population who would bring their customs – sushi bars and health clubs – with them.

For the communities who live on the wrong side of the wall, there have been projects and initiatives, but nothing on the scale of the docklands developments that made their position in the social order so brutally clear.

The quiet hope, presumably, was that the original residents would die out. Which, thanks to heroin, many of them did.

* This article was amended on July 31st, 2023