Lockdown Dublin isn’t dead but it is a ghost town now
Once-bustling streets are haunted by joggers and empty buses, writes Nicola Anderson
SURROUNDED by sprinkled bird feed, a pigeon is nestled, motionless, on the footpath outside the church on Westland Row. Four passers-by in succession slow their steps to check if it’s OK. Because these days, we notice things. “Did you fall?” wonders a man aloud.
A house with a sugar-pink door on one of the Georgian streets still has its Christmas tree perched proudly in the window.
On the step of an office on Leeson Street, a neat stack of Racing Posts lies rotting.
And everywhere, the hanging silence is what gets you the most, punctuated only by the wheeling gulls overhead and the hollow glide and clank of the Luas as it faithfully continues on its tracks, passengers on board or not, reduced now almost to the status of a toy.
As we face into a potential four weeks of further lockdown, Dublin is a city that has slipped once again into deepest slumber after the brief – and now, admittedly, ill-advised – bustle of Christmas.
Its capital city status has melted away over the past year, meaningless now the international hordes of tourists have vanished and all the workers from the gleaming glass-fronted offices have retreated to their kitchen tables and spare rooms.
All our treasures have been folded quietly away, like flowers pressed between the pages of a book. The bog bodies of the National Museum, re-entombed. The impressionist paintings of the Hugh Lane Gallery and Jack B Yeats paintings of the National Gallery, the gleaming Islamic artefacts of the Chester Beatty Library, all in packing cases, almost, as they await their time to be rediscovered once again.
The clattery cafes and restaurants, the vibrant concerts, the gigs, the theatres, the warm cosy libraries. Everything, stopped.
And there is no sight in the city bleaker than those iconic names of our lively, historic, world-famous pubs that have been silenced and temporarily boarded up, graffiti embellishing the tough chipboard.
At the entrance to a cafe on O’Connell Street, a young man on a guitar sings the old familiar folk songs with piercing poignancy: “The hallowed halls and houses, the haunting children’s rhymes, That once was Dublin city, in the Rare Auld Times.”
Only the song seems to evoke the simple pleasures of 2019 rather than times long ago. We don’t long now for Dublin to be a village once again because it is a village once again, a greeting almost rising spontaneously to the lips when you meet somebody else out walking on this dreary, drizzly day.
The abandoned Debenhams premises on Henry Street provides a bleak shelter to five tents, erected by homeless people, their nylon walls covered in cardboard in a vain attempt at insulation from these bitter-cold nights.
In Arnotts, the empty escalators still move in ghostly fashion while other stores have been downgraded to warehouse status, their floors covered in boxes and plastic packaging to cater for internet shoppers, while bras and leggings have sprouted up at the tills in the food section of Marks and Spencer.
On D’Olier Street, an elderly man at a bus stop is telling someone that he got the vaccine. “So I’m wary,” he chuckled.
The new wildflower meadow in front of Trinity College is coming along nicely. Double-decker buses pass by: two people on board, six people on board, nobody on board.
Grafton Street is desolate, its wet flagstones a thoroughfare for joggers, cyclists, dog walkers and mournful window-shoppers; a dustpan and brush visible through the door of upmarket Brown Thomas.
The contents of some of the sports shops and swankier cosmetic stores have been removed for fear of theft, like a disaster zone. There are no flower-sellers and no cheerful hubbub of chatter.
“It’s eerie,” declares a woman called Angela who is sheltering from the rain having come into town to collect her mother’s pension from the GPO. Between them, she and her mother had 80 years’ service as cleaners in the old Screen cinema, now long gone.
She is “just getting on with things” – but tells of one day during the first lockdown when she was the only person on the whole of Grafton Street. “I was sorry I didn’t get a picture,” she says.
Her husband was a bus driver for 20 years and now works as a driver for the HSE. But she still worries about the bus staff. “I see them as so vulnerable,” she says. “And I don’t see anyone talking about vaccines for them.”
In St Stephen’s Green, valiant yellow crocuses have been flattened by the rain while outside the gates, a man in a tweed Sherlock Holmes cape cuts a majestic swathe through the streets before boarding a near-empty Luas.
The Fitzwilliam Hotel has been polished to within an inch of its life – the tiles in the reception area have a mirrorlike shine, the cushions on the sofas before an inviting fire in the lobby, plumped just so. But the lack of life is dispiriting.
General manager Fergal O’Connell expresses no small measure of frustration at the lack of clarity about the hospitality industry for the year ahead.
“You never get used to the quiet,” he says. “We’re social creatures in this business and we feed off the energy of our guests. Hospitality is about people, not paper. So we don’t have a purpose at the moment. We need to get that back.”
He wants a plan to get the country back in business as the level of risk gradually decreases with more vaccinations.
“If we don’t do something quick it will be a dead town,” he warns, pointing out the only people walking around Dublin now are just in for a walk with no real purpose. “Curtain twitchers,” he says.
“This is not our final bow,” declares a poster outside the Gaiety, where a homeless man lies sleeping, huddled, in the doorway.
And no, this is not our final bow. But it is all very, very sad.