Dublin

Jul 21 20:22

Bog Standard to Standard

By: isabel Tags:

Great news for all potential flat dwellers if all new minimum standards for rented accommodation  listed in today's Irish Times are realised.  It does come as a bit of a surprise, however, that these new standards are an enhanced version of standards issued fifteen years ago. It's the first that I and possibly most other students of the Nineties have heard of it.  

My own Dublin flat renting lasted for a period of around 10 years and the hallmark of practically all dwellings was that they were dilapidated. What's more, we queued for the privilege. On one occasion, I was fortunate enough to spot an ad in Irish in the evening paper for bedsits off the South Circular Road. There was still a sizeable queue. The best thing about one particular bedsit was that the water immersion tank was in a cupboard in my room, so whenever the meter was cranked up a bit of extra heat was generated. This was needed, given the cracks in both windows and the hole in the ceiling. In another, the landlord reliably informed me that the heavy creatures I could hear hurtling alongside the water pipes at night were simply little field mice coming in from the cold! Family members have had equally insane experiences;  one person cooked out of a cupboard for two years, another had a chipboard structure cum bathroom bang in the middle of her only room. I have often wondered since why we weren't even half tempted to complain.  The reality of the situation was that there was very little choice until the late Nineties; it was squalor or nothing on a tight budget.

As students, we at least had the hope that one day the standard of our accomodation would move on to another level. However, for a large number of Irish people on low wages and newly arrived immigrants, there is no such reality in the Ireland of today. Furthermore, while the sub-standard dwellings of the nineteen nineties were reasonably cheap (stangely enough, given the demand), today's newspapers and online ads carry hefty rents for addresses which are still, patently, as run-down as ever.

So, here's hoping that in the very near future all rented bathrooms will be “provided in a room separate from other rooms by a wall and door and containing separate ventilation”, that heating will consist of “fixed appliances capable of providing effective heating and proper ventilation”, and that the facade and common areas of rented accomodation will “be clean and well maintained”. If not, let's hope the flat dwellers of today are more aware of their rights and less afraid of pursuing them.

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Dec 11 20:58

St Luke's Hospital

By: Ciarán Tags:

Via Twenty Major, I see that St Luke's Cancer Hospital in Dublin is set to close, with services being moved to a radiotherapy centre in the enormous St. James's hospital closer to the city centre. It's a sad thing to see a hospital closed. In my experience it's a common phenomenon that cancer centres are regarded with a seemingly strange level of affection on the part of patients and their families. This, I guess, is largely down to the incredible people in oncology departments who not only administer the technologies of medicine but the massive emotional impact that cancer can have on patients' families (often, in fact, the impact is greater for families than for the patient themselves).

Still, all that said, I think that the move to centralise cancer services is probably the one bright element in the monumental, world-historical, fuck-up that is Irish cancer care (see here, also via Twenty Major, for one example of how bad things are).

Cancer services are best provided in a centralised manner for two reasons. First, oncology is very very expensive (and set to get more so), so it's simply easier and more effective to pool resources than it is to have a radiology machine here and another one there etc. And it's better to have lots of experts in one place than to have them either dotted around the country or (as also happens) driving from hospital to hospital. Second, and I don't think people consider this very often, people with cancer tend to end up needing all sorts of other services - CT scans, dermatologists, pain management, kidney stuff and so on. If you don't have the resident expert or technology at your own small hospital, you're going to have to bundled at great discomfort and expense into an ambulance to be ferried to the scan or whatever. That is just not a good thing.

Given all this, while the Irish health services is an almost criminal disaster from end to end, I just can't bring myself to feel regret at the concentration of cancer services in Ireland. It's sad that St. Lukes will close, but it will probably make the lives of cancer patients (those who have got in the door anyway) just a little bit easier and, perhaps, a little bit longer.

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Dec 01 17:53

Slots

By: Ciarán Tags:

And they think it's bad in Westminster? They should go west for the real murk, involving a man whose rising wage is justified because the state doesn't buy him a house.

It looks like it's high time I abandoned my previous generosity...

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Jul 06 16:01

if you were to go postal, how would you do it?

By: Ciarán Tags:

As I explained last night, I was beset by noisy teenagers on my way down to Dublin yesterday. But it didn't end there. We had an alarm going off all night in one of the flats above and are now being entertained by a bass-laden broadcast from another flat. Don't you just love city living?

My esteemed fellow-blogger has spotted me giggling and rolling my eyes and, fearing that the neighbours might end up wearing her bodhrán as an Elizabethan-style ruff (or maybe she is worried about my imaginative intentions towards her cipín), is taking me off to Wicklow for the weekend.

Adieu.

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Mar 10 00:04

If these walls could talk

By: isabel Tags:

Maurice Craig's Dublin 1660 - 1860 (see below) has turned me into a bit of a buliding-spotting anorak; I now read the Dublin street atlas with equal gusto as Craig's book.

What if buildings could speak? I often remember Brendan Kennelly's lines on songs "All songs are living ghosts / and long for a living voice" when looking at old buildings in Dublin and wish the same for them.

One building with many stories to tell is the Smock Alley theatre off Blind Quay, which has existed in many incarcerations since 1670. It collapsed twice; once during a performance, and the main part of the building disappeared in 1815.

It is a church which now occupies the Smock Alley site, the SS Michael and John. The vaults of the church were easily constructed; the orchestra pit of the old theatre providing an ideal template. This marriage of entertainment and the after-life is not unique in the history of Dublin apparently. For a number of years in the 1940's the former City Morgue was the main foyer for the Abbey theatre.

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Feb 12 13:55

Bridge over the River Liffey

By: isabel Tags:

Good to see that another Calatrava bridge will be erected over the Liffey in the next couple of years. This will bring to at least three the number of new bridges in the past 10 years.

It was not always a desirable thing to have easy access from one side of the Liffey to the other however. Maurice Craig's Dublin 1660-1860 paints a vivid picture of the lengths that councillors went to in the 17 century to keep Dublin as free as possible of bridges. The reason for this was the hefty toll that they achieved from their ferry service.

Around 1674, Humphrey Jervis (who gives his name to Jervis street) got around the planning difficulties by telling the Viceroy, Lord Essex that he would build a bridge and call it Essex Bridge. This bridge would lead to a new road named Capel Street (which just so happened to be the family name of Lord Essex). Plus ca change on the planning front!

Image courtesy of Infomatique

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