Another spin on Dublin’s property not-so-merry-go-round

I’ve been house-hunting in Dublin, capital of boom and bust.

Not for myself, you understand. I’m spoken for. More than a decade ago I signed on the dotted line for a modest suburban retreat that I’ve clung on to with the same gritty determination as the damp spores behind the wardrobe.

We bought into the burbs after moving out of a terraced two-up-two-down in Dublin’s north inner city, a solid and protective house in a well-established community. I used to bathe the baby in the deep old kitchen sink there, push his buggy over the cobblestones into the city centre. When he started running and swooping we brought him to the zoo (a stone’s throw away) to stretch his Batman wings. It was sad to leave, but I was pregnant again and working from home, and bijou had become bitterly cramped. Anyway, life is too short for real-estate regrets.

When we moved into the new house, we found that the previous owner had left behind a vat of sump oil in the kitchen; a raucous, chemical-green, long-haired nylon carpet in the yellow-walled bedroom; a blocked sewer in the cluttered back garden; and a rusting, padlocked chest freezer, sinister enough to invade your dreams, in the dank garage.

On the night of the move, having poured the sump oil down the gurgling drain and counted our neighbour’s shih tzus out the bathroom window, we sat still and quiet under our mortgaged roof wondering how we’d make the repayments, let alone find our way back to the rhinoceros enclosure. We’ll stay here for a year or two, we told each other, failing to appreciate that decades evaporate as swiftly as lion breath on a frosty morning.

Utterly changed

Anyway, an old friend turned up recently, looking to move back to the Pale. He’s creeping around the city from viewing to viewing, like a lost actor back on the stage of his youth. He claims that Dublin appears familiar to him, the geography, the narrow line of the river separating north from south, but what he is seeing is an illusion. The place has changed utterly since he left 15 years ago.

I found myself sitting in a cafe with him in my old neighbourhood the other day, waiting for an estate agent. (I’ve learned, in my unsought role as property sleuth/accomplice, that estate agents can be desperately prone to gridlock. An empty road, clear as a clarion not five minutes beforehand, suddenly seizes up with articulated traffic and herds of bison as soon as their bottoms hit the bucket seat.) In my unreliable memory of the area, the cafe used to be a convenience store, where you could find cigarettes and Red Bull and minimal chat. But that was back in the day when people still plucked their eyebrows and hot yoga meant standing on your head in your jumper.

The cafe, largely populated by earnestly conversational young people, and flyers for poetry slams and classes in whale preservation (okay, I’m making that bit up), is an establishment where the chef grates organic courgette into the home-made cheesecake and the lovingly baked flapjacks are so friendly and wholesome they knit bedsocks in your oesophagus.

Through the windows

My friend was edgy. The area was littered with “sold” signs and there was every possibility that by the time he’d digested his nettle-leaf and humanitarian sandwich, house prices would have jumped another grand or so.

Later, after we’d left the viewing (“a lad’s pad,” said the agent, which I think means you’re not supposed to worry that there’s no room for a kitchen table), we walked back through the narrow streets. I looked through the windows of the pretty houses we passed, while my friend calculated monthly repayments on his mobile.

Inside, the windowsills were small portraits of the residents’ lives. There were artily arranged beach stones, arrangements of bleached driftwood, a couple of copper-wire fairies with woollen hair, paperbacks, pottery, potted herbs.

In one net-curtained window, a Child of Prague faced out bravely on to the street. He looked a little fearful, his plaster face stoically surveying the tide of dreamcatchers that had invaded his neighbourhood.

“Nope,” said my friend. “Can’t afford it. What’s happened this city?”

“Re-regentrification?” I replied.

I winked at the Child of Prague. I should have told him not to worry – in no time at all he’ll be a collector’s item, another ironic statement of our sophistication while we scramble around in the dirt for the mortgage.

“You can stay with us,” I told my friend. “We’ve got an unopened chest freezer in the garage. You could even describe it as bijou-igloo.”