"Them days was before the Africans came to Parnell Street"—so the character Janet introduces her story of life in Dublin in the early 1990s in Sebastian Barry's new play, The Pride of Parnell Street.
Them days was before I came to Parnell Street too. The street is one of the main axes of north inner-city Dublin but, before the Africans came, it had become a byword for dereliction. In 2003, after three years living in southern Africa, I moved into a flat around the corner from Parnell Street, on Mountjoy Square.
This grandly proportioned square saw its heyday in Georgian times, when Dublin was the second city of the empire. But by the end of the 19th century, the north inner city was already the site of the worst urban deprivation in Europe, with the same Georgian buildings housing whole families, and more, in a single room.
Some of these buildings have been elegantly restored—I was lucky to rent a flat in one of them, complete with its original dizzying proportions. One morning, I noticed a fellow malingering on the doorstep and went out to accost him. He was a designer from a theatre in London, he explained sheepishly, and they were staging Sean O'Casey's war of independence play, The Shadow of a Gunman, set in a building like ours—albeit then a tenement. He was hoping to have a look inside.
I didn't know it then, but the actual house where O'Casey wrote parts of Gunman and his other great Dublin works was just a few blocks away, on the North Circular Road. I found it late one night when I was a few sheets to the wind and having adventures. There was a discarded washing machine in the small front yard, and a weatherbeaten laminated A4 sheet on the door humbly admitting the house's flirtation with greatness.
As I stood on the steps peering at the house in the dark, two of the residents arrived home and invited me into a building that seemed as if it had barely been refurbished since O'Casey's time. They'd been here from Poland a year, but had little English. I did my best to convey my inebriated excitement at being in the room where, perhaps, O'Casey had stoked the grate while labouring on some of the greatest plays in the Irish canon.
It was the existence of such quasi-derelict buildings that, in part, made this area a locus for many of the immigrants arriving in Dublin in the mid-to-late 1990s. (By the 2006 census, this process was so far advanced that native Irish were in the minority in this electoral ward.) It was Parnell Street where the first African businesses were set up: shops, hairdressers and internet cafés. But by 2004, in what Sebastian Barry calls "fast-food history," the Africans had been replaced by Asians. There are perhaps a dozen Asian restaurants along a short stretch of street now, with every nook and cranny in the buildings behind and above sublet to Asian businesses; the Africans have largely moved elsewhere.
Barry is not alone in attempting to chronicle this change: immigration was the dominant theme of this year's Dublin theatre festival. Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun tackled JM Synge's canonical 100-year-old text, The Playboy of the Western World, and relocated it from a rural shebeen to a present-day saloon bar in Dublin. Into the bar walks the playboy, with his story of having murdered his father and fled his home… in Nigeria.
In Michael Keegan Dolan's James Son of James, another black man arrives unnanounced in an Irish village, where, despite an initial welcome, he is blamed for a series of misfortunes and lynched. In Gianina Carbunariu's play Kebab, three young Romanians in Dublin are driven by adverse circumstances to working in internet porn. This play, by a young Romanian, has no Irish characters at all.
Integration is a buzzword—we even have for the first time a minister for integration, an innovation following May's general election, which returned Bertie Ahern to power. The man appointed, Conor Lenihan, has form on the issue: during a debate in the last parliament on the underpayment of Turkish workers by a government contractor, Lenihan told one of the opposition deputies to "stick with the kebabs."
But integration is a lived issue, not one that is particularly sensitive to official policy and pronouncements. And Parnell Street, and the streets around it in Dublin, are at its cutting edge. There is racial discomfort, of course. And there is exploitation, sometimes by immigrants themselves. This summer, Olaitan Ilori, a Nigerian-born "immigration adviser," became the first person jailed in Ireland under trafficking legislation. There was nothing like that "before the Africans came to Parnell Street."
Sebastian Barry's play grew from his observation, while living in the area in the early 1990s, that the women's shelters were always full the night after a big soccer match. Now there are no big soccer matches—in the Polish sports bar on Parnell Street, multiple screens play matches from all over the world, with small groups clustered around each one.
So an old community is replaced with multiple new ones, and I don't fit into any of them. Am I "integrated"? But I'm a writer: I just want to watch.
