Part One: A Relegated Ship, Run Aground & Derelict
She was an old merchant ship, the oldest remaining in Ireland, moored to rest along the banks of the Grand Canal. She was named the Naomh Éanna (Neev Ay-na). Completed in Dublin’s Liffey Dockyard in 1958, sailing in her prime as an Aran Islands ferry, she laid now in her graving dock back in Dublin, overdue for demolition since 1989. Some local petitioning had campaigned to list her as a heritage vessel with little success. Throughout the quibbles and competing ideas on restoring her purpose, ranging from river ferry to museum to boutique hotel, she waited patiently and hopefully leaning crooked in a muddy embankment. She was enclosed by barbed wire and graffitied walls on a restricted lot of wild grass. Her metal rails were rusted, her bones were frail. This lonely derelict now wears a fresh badge of spray paint, pleading simply, ‘Don’t Scrap Me.’
Discarded and struggling to remain relevant. You know a thing or two about the feeling, and find comfort gazing upon this old relic. Since the last pandemic, life has felt a bit stalled. Dublin has always been a symbol of risings and renewals in your heart. Moving here just before the centennial of the ‘Easter Rising’ for Irish independence, you immediately felt the spirit of rebellion and resilience among the native born Irish. Maybe you had missed ‘The Troubles,’ and three decades in conflict, but you felt their shadows in every pubside chat. Maybe you arrived too late to see the rise and fall of a booming ‘Celtic Tiger’, but you felt intrinsically linked to Dublin’s new rising, rebuilding a new hope for endless prosperity.
He was a houseless tattered man, the most tenured local denizen to live off the sidewalks near the Grand Canal. He was named Adam, like the first man, or so you’ve been told by local store clerks who know him best from his daily routines. His territory for scavenging loops along the South Wall, Pearse Street and Ringsend, ending in the protected basin where the Naomh Éanna also sulked each evening. And no one shared Naomh’s discarded abandonment better than this broken man, the rough sleeper who camps under her chipped feet and rusted bones, in the same walled off land owned by the same national asset manager who took over all the disenfranchised lands of the prior housing crisis. Adam’s whole demeanor, from his bulldog walk, mud caked sweatpants and cut up hands, to his long greasy hair and twitchy outbursts, all shout, “I’m here, I matter.”
Discarded and struggling to remain relevant. You know a thing or two about the feeling. You had been an observer of Adam’s from afar for over ten years now, fascinated with his lifestyle, his routines, his survival instinct. Adam was known well in this neighborhood, a mascot of sorts, regarded with small tokens of kindness by some and treated indifferently by many. He cut a frightening path to many families in the neighborhood, who veered away when they saw him approaching or digging through the rubbish bins. He wasn’t a meth addict, or a drunk, or a beggar, or a criminal. As the local shop owners have told you, he doesn’t speak English well, but he shows respect and appreciation for his surroundings, always paying dutifully for his modest purchases when he has the coin. He is chemically off-kitler, maybe a little deranged, or just dialed into some other layer of reality the rest of us can’t access. Everyday he walks the open town square with his stout gate, making his rounds, seemingly shaking out bad thoughts, muttering loudly and sometimes even laughing hysterically at the rich conversations in his head. Your life feels entangled with his. And anytime you catch yourself in your own head, lost in your seemingly important problems, there he appears, conjured up, a force of nature, like a mirror in everyone’s face, reminding us of our fragility, nudging us towards a quiet gratitude. And you desperately wished to know him, to commune by coin or kindness, or just to help him feel less invisible.
You have been an outsider looking in, you’ve seen remnant fragments and fractures in a city that had grown up in a big old hurry. Your name didn’t matter much, you’re just another foreign national riding the wave of Dublin’s new economy. But the name of your neighborhood is the Grand Canal, often referred to as the ‘Silicon Docks’ in deference to the pipeline of technology money that Ireland invited from Silicon Valley’s tech firms. In your decade living here, you’ve seen many changes washing over this pale city divided by the River Liffey. And like that mighty river, the city flows both ways, changing often with the tides of the time.
Despite the bubble bursting after 2008, there was no slowing down the juggernauts of the tech companies like Google and Facebook, occupying this modernized neighborhood of Grand Canal Square. You were a part of this employment boom, welcoming diverse talent from near and far with open arms, but you’ve never really felt like the protagonist in this story, just an extra in the broader redemption arc of Dublin, just a splash of color in her narrative. You watch the rising tides with awe and wonder, nonetheless. Banks started dishing out cheap loans again, rebates, free money. Everyone propped themselves up on these precarious stilts of wealth, whilst proudly shaking their fists at history, crying defiantly ‘this prosperity will endure for all of time! This time, this time it will last.’
Arriving in those resilient days, you found a city scarred and jaded, but licking its wounds in hopeful fashion. The famed Irish concrete and construction industry had been very busy gobbling up the old and discarded. New bridges and commercial highrises stood proudly, the moguls liberally scattered the hastily assembled hotels and condos, and everyone scrambled for their piece of the fast selling pie. You moved into one of those posh condos slapped together in a hurry, luxurious but a little slanted at the seams. A grand panoramic view across the Liffey, it was not hard to imagine your view as a historical storyboard. From left to right, you glance across the North Wall Quay, telling the tale of the harp shaped Samuel Beckett bridge, the large pint glass shaped Convention Centre. And off to the east, you see the stalled construction plans of Point Square; a planned mall, hotels and a concert arena. Punctuated deadcenter along the storyboard was a derelict tower that was commissioned to be the new headquarters for the Anglo Irish Bank, the institution that led to the last financial collapse. This embodiment of a destitute district stood solitary, stripped bare and exposed to the elements. A phantom reminder of the past, telling her foreboding lesson on the impulse to overreach. Just like the Spire of Dublin, also erected in surging times, this old relic knew a thing about tempting fate with its notions of ‘prosperity stretching to the heavens, unshakeable and endless.’
ORDER ‘STRANGELY FIERCE FABLES’ for the full story and more:
Paul Carreo 