Squalid murder of a dying man is no surprise

WHEN I heard on the radio last week that a supposed drug dealer had been beaten to death in Basin Lane by a group of men with iron bars and baseball bats, I didn't really want to know.

I grew up close to Dolphin's Barn, and for me its landscape has long been obscured by the unreality of fond remembrance. Where the junkies' now wait for their deals I saw my first film, from my first bag of chips, got shirts and socks from the draper's shop. In the supermarket, now long closed, my mother once got a cheque for £100, having found a prize coupon in a packet of Omo. In the pub opposite, I had my first official drink with my father.

Basin Lane, where a branch of the canal opens out into an urban bay, where barges once unloaded grain and hops for the Guinness brewery, seemed, to a child, a romantic place, and on weekly walks to Thomas Street library it was the bit of the journey I always looked forward to most. Now, cosy memories of the place will always be invaded by thoughts of a squalid and brutal murder.

Confronted with something as horrific as the beating to death on the public streets of a six stone man already dying from AIDS, it is natural to measure outrage against nostalgia, to try to understand a brutal present by contrast with an innocent past. We want to believe a new thing has, descended on our lives, that the way we are now is not a development of the way we have always been.

Yet that desire has to be resisted, not least because, in one sense, it understates the horror of an incident like Josey Dwyer's death. For the really awful thing about that incident is not that it represents some new degeneracy in our midst, but that it is merely the latest expression of a squalor that has been allowed to exist for at least 50 years.

LEAVING aside the myths of innocence, there has been enough misery and violence on the streets where Josey Dwyer to make his death predictable. The truth is that we have so much practice at ignoring them that it takes an act of spectacular brutality to make them visible.

In school we were always told that Dolphin's Barn took its name from a "good Protestant" who allowed Catholics to use his barn for saying Mass during Penal times, and this legend probably contributed to a false feeling of cosiness about the place. And maybe Dolphin's Barn really was once a quiet little suburban village at the end of the tram line. But Fatima Mansions and Saint Teresa's Gardens contain neither mansions nor gardens and inspire no ecstatic visions.

Thinking about my own warm memories of Dolphin's Barn and Basin Lane, I realised just how selective they are. If I try to be more honest l can remember, on those same walks to the library, seeing groups of spectral children huddled around a vat of boiling tar that was being used to resurface the road. Their mothers had brought them out to breathe the fumes because they were believed to be a cheap way of relieving the symptoms of chronically congested lungs.

And I remember that while Dolphin's Barn was a great place during the day, you took it for granted that you didn't wander about there after dark.

Cosy memories like the ones I would like to have obscure the fact that violence, even the wild, drunken mob violence of the sort that was inflicted on Josey Dwyer, has been in the area for much longer than the nostalgia for a more innocent time suggests. Violence like the Battle of Dolphin's Barn in June 1955, when a crowd of about 300 people surrounded two gardai who came to investigate the smashing of a plate glass window.

Two youths "of the Teddy Boy class" who had been grabbed by the gardai called on the crowd for help, shouting: "In two years the Russians will be here and we'll deal with these fellas." The crowd responded by throwing stones and bricks at the gardai, whose lives were in serious danger until baton wielding reinforcements arrived and regained control of the Barn.

In the late 1950s, teams of gardai had to be posted outside the Leinster and Rialto cinemas every Saturday night to keep order. In 1963, there were vicious gang fights almost every night in St Teresa's Gardens. In April 1967, a gang went on a rolling rampage between Dolphin's Barn and Camden Street, using flick knives, steel combs and what the newspapers described as "James Bond type umbrellas with the end sharpened to a point" to stab seven people, leaving five of them unconscious.

ALL of these incidents, like the killing of Josey Dwyer, were big news at the time. Many of them provoked "why oh why" editorials and memories of better days.

And all of them were soon forgotten, as Josey Dwyer's death will be.

They were moments at which the violence of Saint Teresa's Gardens or Fatima Mansions spilled over into the public realm and seemed to threaten the order of the city as a whole. When that violence retreated to the ghettos, it was no longer especially significant. The things it spoke of poverty, squalor, alienation - were not heard.

This is not to deny that things have gone from bad to worse in south inner Dublin. The arrival of heroin and the persistence of long term unemployment have both helped to upset the balance between sporadic violence and mundane order.

Guinness, once a huge employer in this area will, by the end of this decade, have a staff of just 450. The biggest employer in the inner city of Dublin now is the Community Employment Programme.

Unemployment in the area, the highest in the country, has risen by 20 per cent in the course of the 1990s. Heroin has pumped its own special kind of despair into the heart of a community which is now, in a metaphorical sense, at the end of a terrible tram line.

But even these modern refinements to squalor are no longer really new. Mass unemployment has been with us since the late 1970s and heroin hit the Dolphin's Barn area in the early 1980s.

What happened last week was neither sudden nor unprecedented, just a particularly brutal expression of a violence that used to be sporadic and has now become normal. It has been a long time coming, and we should not allow its horror to obscure its perfect predictability.

Predictable doesn't mean inevitable. In the last 20 years, over £750 million has been invested in Dublin's inner city. But as the Dublin Inner City Partnership pointed out last month, almost none of it has touched the flats and estates where the long term unemployed are concentrated.

While the State invested £37 million in Temple Bar, for instance, it put just £2 million into community facilities in the whole of the inner city in the same period. Why, when that is the case, should blood on the streets be all that surprising?