FORGIVE US OUR PORTAL SINS
After a week of controversy, the woman who helped launch device linking NYC and Dublin pleads with authorities to lighten up and:
IT has sparked a week of ‘pearl clutching’ on the Dublin side but The Portal is just ‘a bit funny’ to New Yorkers – according to an Irishwoman in the Big Apple who helped officially open it.
After it was placed on the capital’s North Earl Street, it took all of six days before the art installation – a 24/7 live video link between Dublin and New York displayed on circular screens in each city – was put on stand-by mode after a slew of inappropriate interactions.
On the Irish side, it was bare backsides, drug-taking, and close-ups of images on phone screens – from pornography to swastikas and the World Trade Centre on 9/11. In New York, where The Portal stands near the iconic Flatiron Building, locals made famine jibes in return.
Later, a woman, who had already enjoyed 15 minutes of fame for licking an aeroplane toilet seat in the early stages of the pandemic, pulled her top up in another attempt to go viral.
That was seemingly the final straw, and The Portal was shut down on Tuesday evening, with organisers now figuring out a way to deter such off-colour behaviour.
And while a caller to RTÉ’s Liveline this
‘People there just think it’s a bit funny’
week said they were ‘totally shocked’ by the conduct on the Irish side, one Irishwoman living in New York told the Irish Mail on Sunday that people there ‘just think it’s a bit funny’.
Aedi D’Arcy, a mechanical engineer who moved to New York six months ago, was involved in the official unveiling of The Portal last week.
Her mother, Deri Flood, works for Dublin City Council which is overseeing The Portal on this side, and the two were among the first people to greet each other via the eight-foot installations.
‘There were loads of speeches and dancing and stuff, and then it was unveiled and everybody was cheering and happy out,’ Ms
D’Arcy said of the New York side’s innocent beginnings.
But when things went south, New Yorkers took it in their stride, unlike people on this side of the Atlantic who lamented the disgraced image of Ireland.
‘Older Americans probably thought it was offensive,’ said the 24-year-old from Rathmines, Dublin. ‘They’re a bit more puritan about stuff, but most of my friends are younger.’
And even the 9/11 taunts ‘didn’t cause that much animosity’ that Ms D’Arcy is aware of – ‘it was more just kind of groans,’ she said. ‘Not really anger from people I know.’
She said the ‘attitude in general was “What did they think was going to happen?”
‘Obviously people are going to be acting the maggot.’
And she said the reaction from other Irish people she knows in New York has been similar to many back home: ‘Why did they put it there, like?’
The Dublin Portal’s location in an area often described as a hotbed of anti-social behaviour just off O’Connell Street has been questioned by many commentators.
‘It’s not even a good view really, is it?’ Ms D’Arcy said. ‘It’s just giving a not great vibe and people are kind of doing their best to oneup the last person who did something stupid in front of it.
‘I saw one video of a girl on the Dublin end asked what New Yorkers would think of it and she said, “At least they’ll save money on flights to visit Dublin because the romantic notion will be gone.” Americans have this idea about Ireland and then you have that.’
And while many commentators on social media suggested that the saga encapsulates ‘why we can’t have nice things’, others were less scandalised.
Rory O’Neill, aka Panti Bliss, wrote on X: ‘The reason we can’t have nice things isn’t because of a handful of joyfully over-enthusiastic people, it’s because of overreacting pearl-clutching busy bodies with nothing better to do
‘You can’t be right there messing’
than get whipped up into a moral panic over nothing.’
The drag queen continued that the Irish reaction ‘encapsulates everything I hate about the dull censorious classist Catholic streak that’s alive and well in Irish culture despite the smug selfreassuring lies we tell ourselves about how we’ve changed’.
Dublin City Council told the MoS that the team behind The Portal, Portals.org, has been ‘investigating possible technical solutions to inappropriate behaviour by a small minority of people’. A mooted ‘preferred solution’ involving ‘blurring’, was ‘not satisfactory’.
It is hoped The Portal will soon be up and running again.
Ms D’Arcy said she has heard that the proposal in New York is to put barriers around The Portal there, ‘so you can’t go right up to it’.
She added: ‘You’ll still have a good view but you can’t be right there messing.’
There are similar portals between cities in Lithuania and Poland, where no such problems have arisen.