DUBLIN'S little shops have been on their way out ever since the city centre began to change a few years ago, when the people with big money went back into property. And they're being finished off by the Anglicisation of the shopping industry.
It is only a matter of time now till the last of the old leases falls in, and shops that sold lisle stockings or loose sweets or tinned peas or a few rashers or distemper brushes are turned into more lucrative operations.
The streets on my way into town are gentrifying at speed. Crooked houses where mysterious old people lived behind grey net curtains in bedsitters over shops are demolished overnight, and a hoarding promising desirable apartments goes up over their rubble.
A "For Sale" sign has gone up over The Kilkenny Dairy and will soon go up over all the dairies, with their rows of cornflake packets on wooden shelves lumpy with years of gloss paint. Further on, I pass a shop that sells men's suits. The tickets on them are homemade - felt pen on cardboard.
Further on there's a shop that sells men's hats and caps, in orderly rows on their little mushrooms. Often in these old shops there is a smell of gas from the Superser. The lighting is dim. They still have money drawers with wooden hollows, instead of cash registers.
But it is not just the passing of variety that is to be mourned. It is that these shops were centres of the local community. Now, although the city is full of new housing, it is not full of new communities. Maybe some restaurants and bars are creating new local tribes out of the young people who adopt them.
Shopping is the central activity of the First World. It is what the masses will enter the next millennium doing. And shopping used to have a human, and therefore a potentially moral, dimension. Increasingly, the way capitalism is organising shopping strips it - without our even noticing - of that dimension.
Last week I saw a terrible thing. On O'Connell Bridge a teenaged beggar was sitting on the pavement rocking back and forward like a demented person. He seemed to be deformed. His legs were stretched out in front of him and his poor dirty feet were bare and blue with cold. I am hardened by the years of seeing children beg. But this was the worst I ever saw in Ireland. (And yet I'm glad that there are beggars everywhere at the moment. The guards must tacitly allow them to ply their trade where they can, in the weeks coming up to Christmas when money is sloshing around the city. I hope, anyway, that that's what happens.)
No one paused beside the boy, because of that tunnelling intentness, that fervour of Christmas shopping that makes people speed past everything else, muzzles down like greyhounds after hares, is already infecting Dublin. I was on my way myself to the latest cathedral, the Jervis Street Centre. I'd heard breathless stories about it. Boots the Chemist simply could not keep the shelves supplied, so fast were the lines selling out. Security people were trying to control the crowds fighting to get into Debenhams.
Traffic was stretching back half a mile from the car park, as it does from the Stephen's Green Centre car park. The tales about Jervis Street must be not unlike tales that swept medieval Paris, or Isfahan, or Benares, when another great place of worship came into use. "Have you been down to Jervis Street yet?" people are saying. Or, "Have you been out to Blanchardstown?"
The interest and pleasure people expect from these places is completely out of proportion to what they deliver. They look shiny and spacious and luxurious. They play the same part that Victorian pubs played when cities were darker and colder and much more desperate than they are today: they are centres of fight and heat. They make the visitor conscious of being sheltered from an inclement world.
But behind that brightness, they are mean. Try to find the Ladies in Jervis Street, for instance. There are no directions on the ground floor, presumably to discourage use. When you find it it isn't altogether pleasant, because the buttons for the flushes are stiff and in the toilet paper dispenser the roll is so tightly encased that a leaf can't be pulled out without shredding.
Anyone could have told the designers these things, and got them to put a little more thought, into such matters. But that would involve thinking about shoppers as people, not consumers.
In Blanchardstown, there aren't even any toilets in the Bewley's Cafe in the shopping centre. And in Blanchardstown, there is hardly anywhere you can sit down for free. As in Jervis Street, the few seats are packed. The idea is to keep you moving, keep you shopping. Even when the shops are nothing much. The acres of shiny terrazzo distract you from noticing that the emperor has no clothes - that the most dowdy of English merchandise is largely what is on offer. In Blanchardstown the management appears to have put coins in the water to manufacture a bit of magic. Magic isn't so easily conjured.
THE distraught boy beggar, and the shortage of places for shoppers to sit down, belong on the same spectrum. There is no room in a city given over to buying and selling for human altruism. One of the comforting things about shopping, even, is that you forget that you are a human. In a shopping mall, there are no humans. Whereas there were humans with power and responsibility in the old sweetshops, newsagents and dairies.
Whoever owns all these chain stores isn't there, and no one cares if you're a pound short of the full price or your feet hurt or you can't read the labels because you've forgotten your glasses. Nob one cares about you. And yet your personhood is being exploited. The modern anonymous, ordinary, person is never more valued and potent than when deciding to buy A rather than B, in X shop rather than Y. Everyone wants you when you're spending money.
I was so depressed by the Jervis Street place that I went in to the Ritz Cafe in Middle Abbey Street, a cavernous, family run, fish and chip cafe which is one of the best places in the city for a hot snack, and where there is that air of tranquil rest and reflection which used to belong to pubs and has now all but disappeared.
An old man had finished his meal and came up to the serving counter to fumble out the price of it. He should have paid in advance, of course, and he should have been paying down at the cash desk. But he was old. So commerce came to a halt while the old man was gently helped.
I don't know the people who run the Ritz. I've never spoken to them. But I'm grateful to them for that small moment. Only how long will such values last? Down the street, there are plans for a "food court". Will family run chippers survive? Will "food courts" help slow old men? Or must we look around for new sources of moral vitality, now, as even the memory fades of how rich the interplay between individuals and the world of goods and services used to be?