Everyday Life, Debt and Death in North Dublin Caitríona Coen
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Everyday Life, Debt and Death in North Dublin Caitríona Coen Thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Anthropology Maynooth University Department of Anthropology October 2015 Head of Department: Dr Mark Maguire Supervisor: Dr Mark Maguire Contents Introduction: What lies beneath 1 1. Welcome to My Dream Home 3 2. Methodology and Thesis Questions 12 3. Outline of Chapters 21 Chapter 1 Buying Tiger Dreams 24 1. The Poetics of Imagery 24 2. Crouching Tiger: Hidden Boom 36 3. Closer to Boston than Berlin 59 4. Celtic Flaw 62 Chapter 2 The Politics of Protest in Priory Hell 65 1. Reclaiming Respectability 65 2. Irish Respectability 69 3. Evacuation 76 4. Accidental Activists 88 5. Santa Don’t Stop Here and The Spirit of Protest Past 100 6. Workers of the World Re-Tweet 105 Chapter 3 A State Without Exceptions 112 1. Desperately Seeking a Social Contract 112 2. Whither Mediation 120 3. The Supreme Court 139 4. Time Runs Out 143 i Chapter 4 The Gift of Suicide 148 1. Killed by the State 149 2. The Gift of Impossible Exchange 161 3. The Priory Hall Resolution Framework 168 4. The Big Howth Walk 173 Chapter 5 Living in an Altered State 178 1. A place that you could call home 179 2. Capitalism failed while neoliberalism thrives 187 3. There is no place like home 193 Conclusion: In Plain Sight 199 Postscript on a State Without Exceptions 206 Bibliography 209 ii Abstract This thesis is about the cultural phenomenon of homeownership in Ireland; a country where, historically, home ownership has particular cultural, symbolic content. It is also about the collapse of Irish property dreams using the key example of Priory Hall in Donaghmeade, Dublin 13. On Friday, 14 October 2011 Dublin City Council asked the High Court to evacuate the 249 residents of Priory Hall as it was declared a fire hazard due to poor building standards. My research considers how a group of some eighty-five families bought their dream homes in the Priory Hall apartment complex during the Celtic Tiger, only to find themselves a few short years later dispossessed and homeless yet still paying mortgages. Priory Hall is now one of the key spaces of representation for the follies of the Celtic Tiger era and subsequent economic collapse; it is also a key site in which notions of ownership, rights, responsibility and respectability are being hammered out alongside new modes of governing and new ways of articulating the relationships between the state and its citizens. iii Declaration I hereby state that this dissertation has not been submitted in part or in whole to any other institution and is, except where otherwise stated, the original work of the author. Signed ------------------------------ iv Acknowledgements I want to thank my supervisor Dr Mark Maguire for his advice, guidance and understanding. This research would not have been possible without his continual encouragement or without the generosity of the Maynooth University Department of Anthropology. At Maynooth University I wish to thank Ms Delma Sweeney, Academic Director of Mediation & Conflict Intervention at the Edward M Kennedy Institute. I would especially like to thank Dr Séamas Ó Síocháin for always making the time to discuss my research and progress. I am grateful to Denise Erdmann, Jacqui Mullally and Maria Heneghan for everything. I am indebted to my many research participants for their endless patience. They welcomed me into their lives. I am especially thankful for the incalculable time afforded to me by, Sinead Power, Ursula Graham, Niall O’Reilly, Graham Usher, George and Rose Finglas, Rosaleen Finglas, David Hall and Michael Dowling. I would like to sincerely thank my family and friends for their continual support. I am in the fortunate position of having too many people to list here. You all know who you are. Thank you. I would like in particular, to thank Silvia Habova because she supported me every step of the way. I am responsible for any errors within my interpretation of the Priory Hall experience. The research was funded by a John and Pat Hume Scholarship (2011-2015). v The Closing Album Dublin Grey brick upon brick, This was never my town, Declamatory bronze I was not born and bred On sombre pedestals- Nor schooled here and she will not O’Connell, Grattan, Moore- Have me alive or dead And the brewery tugs and the swans But yet she holds my mind On the balustrade stream With her seedy elegance, And the bare bones of a fanlight with her gentle veils of rain Over a hungry door And all her ghosts that walk And the air soft on the cheek And all that hides behind And the porter running from the taps Her Georgian façade With a head of yellow cream -The catcalls and the pain, And Nelson on his pillar The glamour of her squalor, Watching his world collapse. The bravado of her talk. The lights jig in the river She is not an Irish town With a concertina movement And she is not English, And the sun comes up in the morning Historic with guns and vermin Like barley-sugar on the water And the cold renown And the midst on the Wicklow hills Of a fragment of Church Latin, Is close, as close Of an oratorical phrase. As the peasantry were to the landlord, But oh the days are soft, As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish, Soft enough to forget As the killer is close one moment The lesson better learnt, To the man he kills, The bullet on the wet Or as the moment itself Streets, the crooked deal, Is close to the next moment. The steel behind the laugh, The Four Courts Burnt. Fort of the Dane, -- Louis MacNeice, 1939 Garrison of the Saxon, Augustan capital, Of a Gaelic nation, Appropriating all The alien brought, You gave me time for thought And by a juggler’s trick You poise the toppling hour – O greyness run to flower, Grey stone, grey water, And brick upon grey brick. vi Introduction: What lies beneath I think that this is the last time I will come back to Priory Hall. It is too painful and the worst has yet to happen. I really believe that something drastic will have to happen before any definitive action will be taken. – Nuala, Priory Hall resident, December 2012 On the 4 September 2015, journalist Tim Lott published an article in The Guardian newspaper entitled, ‘How I crushed my eight year old’s innocence at Dismaland.’ The Dismaland-Bemusement Park was orchestrated by the British street artist Banksy at a derelict seafront in Weston-Super Mare, England.1 Banksy asserted that, “It’s a theme park whose big theme is theme parks should have bigger themes” (Lott 2015). The themes provided by Bansky and fellow artists indexed senseless death, insidious debt, abandonment, crumbling capitalism and a broken social contract. This macabre inversion of Disneyland included a Cinderella pumpkin carriage crash, complete with frenzied paparazzi, a trip on the dodgems with the Grim Reaper, a statue of a killer whale jumping out of a toilet and a duck pond filled with miniature migrant boats chock-full of asylum seekers. One installation on the site—billed as only for children—featured a trampoline and a stand offering small loans with interest rates of several thousand percent. As a visitor to the theme park, Tim Lott, worried that he had prematurely plucked his happy child from her beautiful world, shattered her dreams and roughly catapulted her into irony, cynicism and delusion. As her father, he considered that she does not yet “see below the surface to the stark reality of things” (Lott 2015). He was surprised to discover that ultimately his daughter seemed to take their visit in her stride, and happily accepted her ‘I am an imbecile’ balloon as they left this unsettling location. Perhaps the child nonchalantly took her visit and balloon because she does 1 not yet have the great expectation of what it means to be protected by a social contract. Bansky’s art is a striking comment on the effects of contemporary capitalist society and the manner in which this social contract has been redrawn, yet no one appears to have noticed. Life and its everyday realities and experiences can be starker and more dismal than art. My thesis offers a comment from within society where actual eviction, debt, suicide and abandonment render Bansky’s anti-capitalist art mundane. My research explores the experiences of a group of people who bought their dream apartment homes in Dublin 13 in 2007. They believed that they were in control of creating their dream homes and lives during the so-called Celtic Tiger through the purchase of property. Historically, in Ireland a key feature of owning property was a belief in the existence of the home as a safety net that is always capable of protecting a family’s future. These people believed that they were ‘respectable’ members of society protected by regulation, pro-consumer policies and state agencies. Indeed, they thought they were protected by a social contract, one that would be there for them if anything were to go wrong. I consider how this group of some eighty-five families bought their dream houses only to have to admit, within a few short years, that their homes were resoundingly unsafe. These families felt that they had followed and checked all of the required bureaucratic procedures yet, simply put, their homes were fire hazards and in no way fit for purpose. In addition, they discovered that they were fully expected, by both their banks and the state, to repay their mortgages in full.