Great pubs, colourful characters... and you might see Michael D at a match. Yes, I love Phibsborough
:: It’s no wonder ‘Time Out’ rates the suburb, writes Campbell Spray
ILIKE edgy – places, friends, lovers and jobs. It’s for the challenge, fun and just that bit of fear. And perhaps that’s why I love Phibsborough. But my first time there was different: I felt pretty cool and superior having arrived a year before for a great newspaper job, there was a new woman on my shoulders and pints-a-plenty in my belly. With my booming West Brit accent and white hair I probably looked like I was, a flounder among cod.
But did I care? Nope, it was 1980 and summer in Dublin. I had travelled over from Ballsbridge and Bob Marley was on stage at Dalymount Park.
Little did I know that 30 years later I would move to Phibsborough and a house backing on to football’s sacred ground. Even then it wouldn’t have occurred to me that in 2020 the north city suburb, just 2km from O’Connell Street, would have picked up the Time Out magazine award as one of the world’s coolest 40 districts for the second time in three years.
Until my wife and I had, out of the blue, decided to view a Victorian house on the North Circular Road, Phibsborough was a traffic annoyance going to the airport or Cavan.
When we moved in, the postcrash decline was growing by the day. Much was shuttered, the pubs could be forbidding and I was wary of back lanes. It was a strange place and sirens kept wailing. Very edgy and no wonder; it is bound by Mountjoy Prison and the Mater hospital, the Royal Canal, Blessington Basin, Kings Inns, Broadstone, Smithfield, and what had been the Richmond Lunatic Asylum.
The area was home to James Joyce, Éamon de Valera’s wife Síle and their children; while the great novelist Iris Murdoch was born here, as was Frank Duff, the founder of The Legion of Mary.
That is history – way before many of the lovely Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian houses faded into bedsit land.
Yet something has changed in the last decade to make Phibsborough such a feature on Time Out’s Coolest list where it now sits in 27th place.
Recently, BC (Before Covid), you were as likely to see a Morning Ireland presenter on the streets, a finance minister in shades and sandals fetching a coffee, or the President attending a football match as you were eccentric men in kilts, women playing Nora Barnacle or people on release from various institutions walking the streets. The influence of Phizzfest is always around, channelling its artistic soul.
Two massive investments happened at much the same time. The Luas Green Line was extended from the prosperous southern suburbs through the city centre to Phibsborough and onto Broombridge; while the 73-acre Grangegorman site, of the old and feared mental hospital, was developed into a single campus now housing much of the Technological University of Ireland.
But infrastructure is one thing, heart is another. Even in the darkest days that organ kept pumping around Dalymount as Bohemians Football Club, which celebrates its 130th anniversary this year, dug deep to involve the most challenged parts of the community.
Time Out’s Amy O’Connor paid tribute to the suburb as “combining old-school charm and contemporary buzz… once lived-in and lively”. She added that “what sets the area apart… are the local fixtures that are so quintessentially Phibsborough: the Bohemians FC murals, the snooker halls, the punk collectives, the brutalist behemoth that is the shopping centre. If you’re looking for signs that Dublin’s heart is still beating, look no further than this brilliantly unhurried, unvarnished part of town.”
Daily, I step out from the house we bought from the widow of Dr Christopher Macken, the notoriously strict film censor from 1964 until ’72. To my right, I see the magnificence of St Peter’s Church and its Harry Clarke stained glass, a well-established sex shop, and a large Simon shelter.
I cross to Noms, the archetypal tofu-and-brown-rice sustainable neighbourhood shop. In the same terrace, politician Joe Costello held his clinic and Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe still has his.
I go into the Costcutter for a paper before coming to the chemist where I had my flu shot yesterday and where Richard Collis’s family has been in situ since 1905.
At the crossroads American Jimmy Wiley has opened the funky Loretta’s restaurant in The Old Bank. Across the road is Doyle’s, which gives the corner its name. Opposite is the famed McGeoughs The Bohemian, where, on our first visit, a woman of a certain vintage pulled up her top for us to view a life of scars. Like Doyle’s, it is closed, as is The Hut, the Mountjoy local. So is the Woodstock café which will reopen as Monck’s Green. Hopefully lonely souls will still be allowed to gently fall asleep over their food there. Around the corner the Two Boys Brew hipster café has legendary queues while a stroll brings you to Bang-Bang, a more earthy version. Step across the canal to the transplanted George Bernard Shaw pub and Hedigans of Ulysses fame. Elsewhere, the Back Page pub has super pizza and, of course, McGowans, is the scene of many a students’ shift.
It’s a buzzing village for all ages and classes, beggars and posers; perhaps too much for some, but I love it.