Una Mullally: Dublin has chance to be reborn amid Covid-19

For a couple of years, a mural proclaiming TOWN IS DEAD was the first thing you saw when you turned off Capel Street in Dublin towards the fruit, vegetable, and flower markets. It was a hangover from a 2016 play of the same title by Philly McMahon and Raymond Scannell, but for a while, no one bothered to paint over it, and it became a wry comment on who the upswing in Dublin’s bustle was really serving.

At the start of March, I wrote about how Dublin was especially susceptible to the impact of Covid-19, and how, when the pandemic hit, we would understand how the capital’s prioritisation of tourism and transience would expose the city’s vulnerabilities. That has happened. Even as many smaller local businesses remain shuttered, the delusion of continuing the development of hotels and luxury student accommodation has now become a public health concern, with building sites shut down as the virus hit workers on sites.

It's hard to weep for the kinds of publicans who want to get back to charging Americans €8 a pint

The impact of the pandemic on many city businesses is obviously devastating. The rallying cry of “town is dead” is back, but the nuances are being lost. Town is not necessarily dead. Parts of it were already dying, and many Dubliners were already feeling out of place in their city. For some, the “death” of town may also provide opportunities that were previously unavailable to anyone without deep pockets and international investors. In this context, it’s ideas and invention that will thrive, and the nimble and adaptable will survive, if they’re given the space to do so.

Collapsed model

Without sounding callous, it is hard to weep for the kinds of places who were raking it in with an average-quality product designed to extract money from tourists over the course of hundreds of covers a night. Their business model has collapsed, but they’ve also made their money. Of course these kinds of places fulfil a need in a city, but whether they add to the cultural fabric of the city is debatable, and also subjective, to be fair. It’s hard to weep for the kinds of publicans who want to get back to charging Americans €8 a pint. It’s hard to weep for the hospitality venues whose business model orientates around large corporate bookings, and now that tech company workers are sitting at home until the summer of 2021 – at least – they’re stuck. Although such a collapse is causing terrible financial stress for many, who will get sentimental about the corporate team-building infrastructure of Dublin collapsing?

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Many hospitality venues rely on a patchwork of incomes, and when aspects of that vanish it can create insurmountable losses. But the greatest protection against this for many cafes, restaurants and shops has been their connection to their customers, and providing something meaningful beyond a room with food and drink. Having a healthy base of regulars to lean on when things get rough is an invaluable safety net. If you prioritised the sense and intention of creating community around a business, that community will offer its support. As household budgets tighten, we must begin to see each euro we spend as an investment in the things we want to survive.

The pandemic is forcing us to reconsider what “local” means and what the benefits of it are. The much-abused term “staycation” – which used to be about taking a break where you live, as opposed to going on holidays somewhere else in Ireland – is nevertheless reacquainting people with their own country.

Late-stage capitalism

So what we need to talk about is local reconstruction rooted in something beyond mere transactions. This reconstruction will happen from the bottom up. The reconstruction that occurred following the 2008 economic collapse was largely organic and driven by the kind of creativity and ingenuity that flourishes when late-stage capitalism – which colonises cities based on who has the most money, not the best ideas – fails, as it does constantly in cycles of crashes, because as a system it is fundamentally broken and dysfunctional.

There is a worry that people will blame the failure of already-broken ideas in our capital on the pandemic

Out of that emerged Ireland’s social revolution. There are primarily three parts to that social revolution, all linked to identity. One was in rights: women’s reproductive rights, trans rights and the rights of same-sex couples to marry. Another was in food, as the ostentatiousness and bad taste inherent in the tackiness of the Celtic Tiger collapsed, allowing for the creation of contemporary Irish cuisine. And the other was in a benign patriotism, which dovetailed with the decade of centenaries and the confidence of a new generation who were eager to claim a new Irish identity as an anchor while futures were drifting away.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael fetishise the approval of outside forces, primarily the economic validation they achieve with foreign direct investment. This is a 20th-century Irish mentality: insecure and demanding affirmation from everyone but ourselves. The pandemic forces us to look inward and rediscover the power of indigenousness. The reason younger people respond to Mary Lou McDonald’s rhetoric, for example, is because they know that when she talks about her oft-repeated term “ambition”, she is talking about unlocking it, not importing it. When people in Ireland turn to localism, they find invention, meaning, dedication, sophistication, ingenuity and something that means more than accentuating profit margins.

There is a worry that people will blame the failure of already-broken ideas in our capital on the pandemic. Fast fashion retail was already in such severe decline, its failure was labelled a retail “apocalypse”. The viability of co-working office space was already undercut by WeWork becoming a laughing stock. The increase in generic restaurants and bars was not a successful financial model. These are bad ideas. So let’s instead focus on the good ones, the people who have them, and those who actually add to our local, urban culture.