The Spire, Ireland’s vertiginous homage to the Celtic Tiger, soars up to the sky in Dublin Central, the four-seat constituency in the heart of the capital.
To one side of it stands the GPO, the cradle of the State’s conception. Beyond the other side, further, to the east of the constituency, are warrens of side streets devoid of trees and pockmarked with dilapidation. For many people, this is the grim reality of life in the heart of the nation’s capital city.
Just a stroll from the Abbey Theatre, the Dublin Writers Museum and the glittering International Financial Services Centre, the landmarks here are those of a modern day Strumpet City: a methadone clinic, steel barriers, boarded doors and windows steamed with condensation.
“We call it the Homeless Hub,” says Belinda Nugent, a project leader with ICON, the Inner City Organisations Network.
“There’s a lot of asylum seekers, as well as people who moved here from the north side and the south side for accommodation. From the top of Gardiner Street to the Custom House and in Mountjoy Square, there are 4,000 private rented units. If there are two people living in them, that’s 8,000 people.
“The tenements were better than what people are living in now. One woman has a hole in her flat so big she can see her neighbours on the other side. An 86-year-old woman opened a press and a rat jumped out and she fell and went to hospital. She’s still sleeping on her sister’s couch three months later.”
ICON’s office is in Buckingham Street in the north-east inner city where tit-for-tat murders in the Hutch and Kinahan gangs’ drugs feud culminated in the 2017 Mulvey Report entitled “Creating a Brighter Future”. It chronicled low rates of employment, high levels of lone parents, education decline after primary school and, repeatedly, the damage caused by “false [political] promises”.
Nugent says one of the biggest social ills is “cuckooing”, whereby criminals take over a flat and force its occupants into drugs and sex work.
“Drug-related intimidation is huge in this area. We’re seeing kids as young as 10 being recruited to carry drugs – being given the coat and the scooter,” she says.
“If you’re given €600 at the end of the week and your mother’s in poverty, of course it’s going to look attractive.”
At the bottom of a cul-de-sac off Buckingham Street is Corinthians Boxing Club, made famous by double Olympic gold medallist Kellie Harrington from nearby Portland Row.
The building was bought in 1998 by Gerard Hutch, the criminal better known by the media moniker “The Monk” who was last convicted in 1980 and acquitted of murder in the Special Criminal Court last year. Currently on bail in connection with a Spanish money-laundering investigation, he lets the building to the club on a 99-year peppercorn lease.
His online election video shows him sitting on the side of the boxing ring, the same one that featured in the movie In the Name of the Father, and holding up pieces of paper with handwritten links to his social media.
“Vote number one Gerard Hutch,” urges his election poster on the club’s facade. “We need change and I’m your man.”
Hutch and Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald will be competing for big tallies in this part of the four-seat constituency. Next Friday will have to be an exceptionally good polling day for the party if her running mate, Janice Boylan, is to take one of the seats.
Fine Gael minister Paschal Donohoe, the only centre-right TD in the constituency, and Gary Gannon, the local Social Democrats TD, are expected to retain their seats, while Neasa Hourigan could be a casualty of any backlash against her Green Party.
The candidacies of Fianna Fáil’s Mary Fitzpatrick, former MEP Clare Daly, Labour’s senator Marie Sherlock and anti-immigration advocate Malachy Steenson will decide who lands the fourth seat.
In the Bridge Tavern in Summerhill, friends Keith and Johnjo halt their midday darts game to discuss the election. Neither man will give his last name.
“I’ll be voting for Gerry,” single father Keith says. “He’s given us confidence.”
He tells a tale about how, as a youngster, he was expelled from Corinthians for kicking an opponent who was “getting the better of me” in a bout. The club relented after a few weeks and allowed him back in. It was, says Keith, “a life lesson” and the club “has kept a lot of kids off the streets”.
Hutch is getting Johnjo’s vote too.
“Why wouldn’t I? The Government has f**ked us over. Nobody gives a flute about the people. All that money being pumped into bike sheds and phone covers. We’re struggling. We’re not looking for privileges,” he says.
Willie Gifford (82), father of the pub’s landlord, declines to talk about Hutch because he is “a friend”, except to say that “where he grew up, you’ve no options”.
Stoneybatter lies on the western city side of Dublin Central. The neighbourhood oozes cool with its traditional pubs, street names such as Viking Road and Lucky Lane, and cafes serving salted-caramel cannoli pastries amid posters advertising yoga, dog-walkers and jazz nights.
In Walsh’s pub, no customer will reveal his full name but several are happy to talk about the election. One man sitting alone says he normally votes Sinn Féin but this time he is going with Hutch.
“I was involved in boxing and I knew him when he was in Cabra boxing club. I think he’ll make it. Friends of mine are saying: ‘We’ll give him a bash.’ I’m self-employed and the levies I pay are unreal. Prices in Dublin are ridiculous,” says the man.
Conceding that Hutch left the constituency a long time ago and “has a big house in Clontarf, another in Lanzarote”, the man argues that whatever Hutch might have done in the past was “that was the way it was back in the day”.
Across the bar, two younger men are checking the election odds for the constituency on the Boyle Sports website. McDonald is odds-on 1/20, followed by Donohoe in second place at 1/7 and then Gannon at 1/4. Daly is fourth, at odds of 8/11, and Hutch is fifth, at even money.
One of the customers is a self-described “leftie” and Sinn Féin member.
Lots of people are still living with their parents or, like me, living with strangers. We need change. I’ll give Sinn Féin one and Gerry Hutch two
“Gary Gannon will do well here. Neasa Hourigan too. There’s a lot of people around here involved in the arts. I wouldn’t vote for Hutch. He’s said he’s been talking to Steenson and [former Olympics boxer] Philip Sutcliffe [the anti-immigration candidate standing in Dublin South Central]. I don’t see him doing well here. This is a pretty leftie area,” says the customer.
The man is a quantity surveyor and says Labour’s promise to build 50,000 houses annually is unfeasible because of the labour shortage in the construction sector.
“Rent is a big issue here. It’s €2,000 for a basic two-bed flat.”
Across town, in Bertie Ahern’s old bailiwick of Drumcondra, Kennedy’s pub, one of the former taoiseach’s locals, is starting to fill at the close of the working day.
Ahern’s old constituency office of St Luke’s across the road is no more. Instead, new bakeries, cafes and restaurants abound among recently gentrified period terraced houses. Here in this pub too, none of the customers will agree to be named, but they are happy to talk.
“I come from a Fianna Fáil family and I’m Fianna Fáil all my life but I’m sick of them. I don’t think Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael should get back in,” says a man sitting with friends at the bar counter.
“I’m 39 years of age, I’m a single man, and I’ll never own a home in Dublin. I live with strangers, [sharing] with a guy from Spain and a woman from Sligo. We don’t know each other. It’s not a nice thing to have to go home to.”
The man works in Beaumont Hospital on the north side of Dublin; staff there, he says, are “all struggling to get on the property ladder”.
“Lots of people are still living with their parents or, like me, living with strangers. We need change. I’ll give Sinn Féin one and Gerry Hutch two. I believe he would be a man of the people and wouldn’t take bulls**t. I don’t judge people by their past,” he says.
On hearing his friend being challenged that Hutch has reportedly been involved in drugs criminality, another man interjects with feeling.
“Gerard Hutch has never tolerated drugs,” he insists. “I’ve known him a long time and I was present when he caught fellahs doing drugs in the gents and he blew them out of it, telling them to stay away from drugs.”
At the bus stop across the road, people are dressed for a night on the town. On the lamp-post beside them, a poster for Steenson states: “Take back our nation. The time is now.”
In Dublin Central, where a potential first woman taoiseach is in contest with a long-time finance minister, a convicted criminal and an anti-immigrant activist, the election outcome could point the direction the nation takes next.
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