Nuala O Faolain on tax-free developments in Dublin: From the Archives, April 11th, 1994

Dublin has changed more in the last few years than at any time since its Edwardian era ended back in the 1960s. The accumulated wealth of the developers formed a relationship with the tax-breaks offered by government, and the cement-mixers moved in. First it was offices. Then there were too many offices. So then there was housing.

For decades, a student of James Joyce would have been able to walk streets as threadbare and desperate as those Joyce knew himself. Suddenly, cheery little enclaves have interrupted the grey. Behind their walls, a new way of Dublin living is being invented. Down Town living. Starter-home living.

The change is huge. Most of Joyce’s Dublin is “designated area” and within those areas more than 1,500 residential units have been or are being completed. A further 3,000 units are at planning stage. That is the equivalent of planting the population of Athlone, say, or Wexford, between the two Dublin canals.

Is this best understood as an event in fashion and marketing? Is living in one of these inner-city units a style choice, like choosing an after-shave or joining a health club, which successive waves of young people will make, inconsequentially?

Or does it signal an important rejection of the way things have been? Does the California-style thinking of owning your smart little place presage a new relationship between the individual and the tribe?

Owning a home, in Ireland, was, until this, something you did for the family, not for yourself. You lived with your Mammy and Daddy till you bought a three-bedroomed place for being Mammy and Daddy yourself. Homes were for rearing children in. Flats were for students. You learnt how to make babies in a flat. But the actual babies had to have their own front door.

It wasn’t consciously admitted until recently that houses are property. They belong to the world of interest rates and tax-breaks. They’re not mystic wombs; they’re wealth. And therefore all the enclaves sell security. Old people and children, who mightn’t be able to operate the security devices, don’t live in these places.

But whether all the ingenuous devices will win the battle for inner Dublin is a question. This territory has been the preserve of the poor and disadvantaged. An element within that society preys firstly on its own people, and then on others. Will that element hunt the new people from places such as the Liffey quays? Or will more and more territory be cleaned and brightened and made unsafe for urban guerillas?

Plenty of people in Dublin grew up in large families in one or two rooms. Perhaps the domestic mechanisms that made this possible will be rediscovered up and down the quays and out to Phibsboro and along Gardiner Street and around Saint Patrick's and on the canal banks. Perhaps ancient Irish imperatives will burst through the yuppie facade, and nappies will fly from the dinky little post-modern balconies.

Perhaps it will be discovered that the family you rear in the suburbs can be no less well reared in the centre of the city. Which would be wonderful for the city, and would give Dublin a chance to develop like Paris, instead of facing central dereliction and an ever-expanding suburban tundra.

The dream of having a house with a patch of land in front and back is never more seductive than at this time of year when the fingers itch to plant, and the first blossom beautifies even the most boring roads. But the city parks are lovely beyond words, too.

So though the new housing is sometimes mean in conception, and though there are huge questions over how it will age, the combination of it as a base and the city as livingroom, playroom and garden is a pretty promising one.

It is indubitably good for the rest of us, who want a vibrant city even though we can’t or won’t live in the centre of it. Whether it will be as good for the pioneers – the new urbanites – we’ll have to wait to find out. It is a deep-rooted thing to think that if their lifestyle isn’t making them suffer it must be bad for them. We don’t know how to judge them. Their like, after all, has not been seen before.

Read the original here.

Selected by Joe Joyce; email fromthearchives@irishtimes.com