When the album Kid A by Radiohead was released in 2000, I recall the exact moment one of the song’s lyrics stopped me in my tracks. On How To Disappear Completely, Thom Yorke sang, “I float down the Liffey”. I was taken aback by how this gigantic band, a band that always seemed otherworldly to the point of alien to my teenage self, knew about my hometown river. The Liffey was famous! Of course, the river was already famous, immortalised in Irish literature, paintings, and other songs, but I cared about Radiohead.
The river is important to Dubliners, even if we’re not quite sure why. It’s part of the rhythm of the city. A constant. It’s a source of literal and figurative reflection. It creates a divide. And like many city centre rivers, it feels somewhat amputated from its beginning and end. The Liffey is the Liffey. It just is. But the Liffey also “isn’t”, in that it’s not used, not outwardly loved, not celebrated. Its presence, as fundamental as it is, can feel flat. At what point are we going to show it some care?
One of the chronic issues Dublin suffers from is a lack of use of what we have, compounded by too much of what we don’t need. The commercial property crash – people will baulk at crash, but mass vacancy, the collapse in value of buildings, and an abundance of unwanted, unneeded offices is just that – will define the city for the next while, and I’ve yet to hear a single Government politician say one meaningful thing about it. Were dereliction tackled, the housing crisis would be much less acute. Were AirBnB banned – because the “regulations” don’t work and aren’t policed – there would be many more rooms, flats and houses to rent. Were vacant retail spaces offered to cultural and community entities, street-life would be thriving and so on. We actually have a lot of what we need in Dublin, the place is just mismanaged. It suffers from poor leadership, little strategic longterm thinking and an obstructionist attitude permeates so much, instead of a facilitatory one.
The Liffey just “being there” is part of this myopia and lack of imagination. The Liffey Swim is considered a sort anachronism, instead of a point of inspiration to make the river swimmable in the city centre. We should have public baths at multiple points along the river in the city.
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The Liffey is an element of nature and it is also an amenity. But it’s an amenity in spite of its infrastructure, not because of it. For as long as I’ve known, in the summer months, young people who live in the city centre use it as a swimming place. None of this is properly facilitated. They leap and dive and splash and laugh, but ultimately, they’re using this watery part of their urban landscape as it’s presented to them: bare. In order to amuse themselves, they have to operate in the cracks. They have no changing areas, no public toilets, no lifeguards, no pontoons, no diving boards, no one tasked with helping them perfect their skills, no coach to admire, instruct, or encourage their daring and skill from the sidelines. For this need alone, a public swimming and diving facility at George’s Quay would be such a great addition to the city.
Utilising the Liffey should not just be about commercial enterprises. Sure, we’d all love to see bars and restaurants and performances spaces in barges – in fact, that would be magical – but we need to think more about providing a quality of life for people that doesn’t involve paying hand over fist for a night out. That means making the Liffey swimmable, clean, safe, and open to all, not another public space monetised or curtailed upon “regeneration”.
In 1996, my dad brought me into the city centre to see the Millennium Clock, a large slab of a digital timepiece that was submerged near O’Connell Bridge. We got a postcard for 20p from a machine that printed the time of the day on it. That project became one on a list of famous Irish screw-ups, the kinds of things we use to kick ourselves, the obstacles we evoke that deny us ambitious ideas, but at least someone was trying to do something.
As a teenager, I loved Dorothy Cross’s Ghostship, a 140ft decommissioned light ship, covered in phosphorescent paint, glowing in the dark February sea and sky off Dun Laoghaire. In 2010, the artist Fergal McCarthy, whose work often centres around the Liffey, undertook his first large-scale installation on the river. Liffeytown featured glowing floating Monopoly-style houses, as the property crash tanked the Irish economy. The following year, his incredible No Man’s Land installation appeared as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, with McCarthy himself living on a makeshift almost cartoon-like “desert island” on the Liffey for two weeks, a barefoot, disorientated man in a suit, cast out from the IFSC. McCarthy’s dedication to engaging with the river is rare, but it’s beautiful. I wish there was more of that.
Early one morning a few years ago, I was crossing the bridge at Heuston Station, when movement in the river caught my eye, I stopped to look and saw an otter. Even in the grime, the potential of an urban river abundant with wildlife was obvious. How great it would be for the wellbeing of both people and animals to be foregrounded in the river’s future.