Bowling Alone on O’Connell Street: Atomisation and Modern Irish Life

“Every Civilization passes through the same necessary phases. First, the organic unity of a high Culture, rich in meaning, belief, and communal purpose. Then, as it reaches its zenith, the Culture hardens into mere Civilization—mechanistic, intellectualized, and devoid of the deep faith that once animated it. In this final stage, the bonds of tradition and community dissolve, leaving only the lonely, self-interested individual, adrift in a world of calculation and mass anonymity.”

Oswald Spengler

The north end of Dublin’s O’Connell Street appears to foreshadow what Ireland may become by mid-century if we allow the future to slip away from us. A racial no-man’s land running the gamut from Somali cafes to residual native proletarians courtesy of the still homogenous flats, that patch of the city even before mass immigration was a lost world to so much of the city’s denizens outside of occasional trips to Croke Park or the Jervis shopping centre.

“It feels like another country,” was how one boomer relation reacted to a brief jaunt Guiney’s in the months after lockdown lifted with the social blight of Roma beggars acting as the most egregious anchor to passersby. 

Granted, the area was always a criminal hotspot where, even to this day, domestic guerriers still play a leading role in delinquency, but none of the recent TV analyses about ‘What Happened to O’Connell Street” make any sense without factoring in the demographic tidal wave that has hit the north inner city.

A casual watching of RTÉ’s Bachelor’s Walk from the 2000s reveals an almost alien all-Irish Dublin where noughties students struggle to find a renter for a spare room on the quays relative to the inner city’s favela-flat housing hybrid of today that leaves culchies priced out of the university rat race.

The pandemic lifted the lid on Dublin’s dirty secrets and hellish urban planning, culminating in pitched battles between Irish hoodlums and Brazilian delivery drivers in an episode of inner city lore unbelievable to most outsiders.

Ahead of a likely deflation of the city’s Big Tech profile, one wonders how Dublin’s decaying Silicon Dreams will interact with a racial cauldrom bubbling away ten minutes stroll from Facebook headquarters. While West Dublin appears to be following a standard banlieue pattern of ethnic displacement and leafier quarters of the soutside can carved up by foreign buyers the inner city appears to be a racial flashpoint between still robust native communities.

Outside of the demographic doom and gloom, conversations with older members of my family reminds us all of an alternative, albeit poorer Dublin where fiscal poverty was masked over by an organic culture and vibrant civic space.

My jaw was on the floor driving down parts of the inner city with geriatric members of my family, all recounted a lost world of dance halls, prayer groups, and book clubs populating the now-Americanised bombshell of a city we still call Dublin today.

The idea of at least several dance halls where the grandparents of the reader of this essay likely met and fell in love with each other existing on or near O’Connell Street strikes me as fanciful as there existing a secret Gaelic moonbase.

Before mass immigration struck the inner city like the 46A bus, communities were broken down by a combination of suburbanisation, narcotics, and general social breakdown caused by many of the supposed benefits of the 20th century. In many respects this is the final testament of Gaybo’s real revolution where the multitude of non-screen social activities were replaced first by the TV and now the phone leaving a social wilderness outside of your front door.

Sterile commuter belt suburbs and rotting Midlands townlands all bear the scars of Ireland’s atomised present, but the inner city is where the social dysfunction of postmodernity comes to bite.

The take-home is this: although there is no return to the past, any reconstruction of not just the Irish nation but its capital city must look beyond replacement migration and into the wider phenomenon of atomisation that has bled the country dry the past half century.

The working-class fightback we have seen since East Wall can be seen less of a glorious revolution than of a late stand of the Dublin proletariat already hobbled by decades of social degeneration, family decline, drugs, and a general withering away of the civil fabric that kept an underdeveloped Ireland ticking over post-independence.