One Day on Parnell Street in Dublin
“A friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face.” Maya Angelou
Walking through big city streets thronged with people and feeling as alone as if on a mountain in the middle of nowhere always strikes me as kind of strange. We’re all absorbed in our own little bubbles, even though we all have the same fundamental desires and fears, many of us watch the same TV shows and listen to the same music, and everyone has a mobile phone in their pocket which we often spend more time looking at than the people around us in our immediate environment. We pass countless people in the street, and we do not even see them, nor them us. Looking at our little pocket screens is a crutch, a distraction from feeling uncomfortable amidst crowds of strangers when sitting in a café or on a bus alone. We get comfortable in our little bubbles and like to be left alone in them, sitting down in the evening to watch soaps or the latest Netflix show that everyone is watching. When walking along the road we listen to music, drowning out the sounds of the world around us, insulated in our preferred realities, perpetually cocooned in the words and beats of some creative which for some reason resonates with who we think we are. We wear t-shirts with prints of the bands and TV characters we like, signalling to the world something about ourselves and maybe part of us does it so that other people will know that we like what they like and so maybe it will be possible to form a connection. We style our hair, if we have it, and wear certain clothes for warmth but also so as to enhance or hide our body shapes to make us feel like we look better, chasing an ideal that doesn’t exist. We get attached to certain brands of clothing and become loyal to them, even when we can get the same, and sometimes better, quality for a fraction of the price. The problem with cheaper clothing, for a lot of people, is that when you buy mass produced fashions the likelihood is that you will see lots of other people wearing the exact same clothes which doesn’t make one feel very special or unique. No, better to pay 10 times the price for the label, and feel good that you will only see one person in the day wearing the same thing, as opposed to ten or more.
Arriving on Parnell Street on a cold January afternoon, I feel a cold breeze cut through me and quickly realise I didn’t put on enough clothing. There’s a woman parked on the footpath looking frustrated on account of the fact that she has a clamp on her wheel. I found out later that she had literally parked there for less than five minutes so as to pickup something from the antiques shop she was parked across the road from. Like a stealth bomber, the warden had descended and slapped a clamp on the wheel of her car and disappeared again like Batman before she managed to get in and out of the shop with her purchase. The funny thing was, it took her two hours and cost her, I was told, €140 to get the clamp off. It’s quite remarkable how obstructing the path for five minutes led to her life being obstructed for two hours; and all for a €40 purchase she was picking up from the antiques shop.
I read a little about East Parnell Street on the way up to Dublin and that it was popularly known as Chinatown, even according to Google maps, and so am excited about having a micro holiday in China, of sorts. But I’m cold, my body is cold and my hands are cold, and it’s not a good way to start a day of street portraits by walking up to people shivering with your teeth chattering. No, just no, what would they think? One would only be making them nervous. And so, I head into Penneys to try and find a cheap jumper and a pair of gloves. I head up the escalator to the man’s section and before long find myself trying on some thick, woolly feeling shirts and, finding one that fits, head to the counter to buy it. They’ve been reduced from €22 to €10 so there’s no excuse for my going cold today for the sake of a tenner. On the way to the checkout, I spot some green, sleeveless, fleecy body warmers that have also been reduced to €10 and when I try one on decide to ditch the shirt. The top of the body warmer comes right up around the neck like a big thick scarf. I pickup a pair of fingerless gloves as well and before long I’m heading towards the exit but get distracted by a “Vintage” section which I had not noticed in any Penneys before. I am drawn to it instantly before an inner voice says “No, Richard, you are not here today to go clothes shopping. You have some nice warm garments now so you really should get out there on the street and take some pictures of people like you came all the way here to do” and then I answer the inner voice “Okay, but I really must find a loo first. I can’t go taking street pictures when I am bursting to go to the loo”. And yes, I am aware that I have just here exhibited the first and second signs of madness which are talking to yourself and answering yourself, but I’m pretty sure everyone has internal dialogues, it’s called thinking, and it’s only when you start speaking your thoughts out loud that it’s considered madness. But anyway, I go out the back entrance of Penneys towards a McDonalds and wonder what I might buy so as to use the toilets which are probably locked to anyone that doesn’t have a code from buying something.
I push at the door of the toilet area and the door doesn’t budge but a woman on the other side of it opens it and there are half a dozen women there waiting to use the facilities and I ask which one is the gents and they promptly inform me that there is a queue. There are only two toilet cubicles, one with a cartoony looking man carved into the door, and the other with a similar woman. But they are both very open with empty space above and below each cubicle door, and so, while queuing, one can hear all the toilet noises from whoever happens to be in either cubicle and so designating each as “male” or “female” is actually entirely pointless. I remark to an elderly woman beside me that it’s a very unusual setup and that the world has gone very strange to which she replies “Tell me about it”.
And so, having acquired warm clothing and gone to the loo, I have no more excuses not to get on and start taking street photos. Except I find one. I read on the way to Dublin in a book called “Three Castles Burning” by Donal Fallon (1) that a car bomb erupted with no warning on Parnell Street East “at 5.28pm on 17 May 1974” and that 11 people were killed that day, among whom were a four-and-a-half-month-old baby called Ann Marie O’Brien, along with her parents and sister. They were “from a tenement in nearby Lower Gardiner Street,” and “had committed no crime beyond living in Dublin.” This particular explosion was one of three that detonated on that day in Dublin City, with a fourth that detonated in Dublin making it, as Fallon notes, “the worst loss of life on any single day of The Troubles”. All of the victims of the bombing that day are commemorated on a monument on Talbot Street, which is nearby, and so I head there to take a picture of it to start my day.
Parnell Street, as anyone who undertook history in an Irish secondary school should probably know, was named after Charles Steward Parnell (1846-1891), who was once known as the “Uncrowned King of Ireland” and was a key figure in 19th century Ireland’s struggle to politically achieve Home Rule, which would have meant a self-governing parliament under the British Crown. He was a Protestant, but interestingly his biggest supporters were Irish Catholics, for whom he sought land reforms such as fair rent, security in holdings, and free sale of same. However, his political aims came to a grinding halt when news emerged that he was having an affair with a married woman known as Katherine O’Shea, who at the time was married to a Captain O’Shea. Such an affair was such a scandal at the time that Parnell’s political career was over once the news of it erupted. Nonetheless, he married her on June 25th 1891 and died four months later, at 45, of pneumonia which is thought to have been caused by the stress of the scandal and subsequent crumbling of his political career and associated aims. Scandal notwithstanding, his funeral was attended by 200,000 people and, according to Fallon, one of the wreaths in the funeral procession read “murdered by priests”.
Back in the present day, I am after taking a photo of the monument which commemorates those that died in the four bombs that went off during The Troubles in 1974, when I start heading back towards Parnell Street. But on the way I decide to stop for a hot chocolate. On my way again, I suddenly hear two foreign voices calling out to me. One is running towards me shouting “sorry, sorry” and there is another from behind also trying to get my attention, and feeling a bit perplexed, I quickly learn that they were alerting me to the fact that my lens hood had just fallen off onto the ground, which would have been a pain in the bum to lose, and so I say to the guy that picks it up and hands it to me, “Thanks, that would have been a pain in the bum to lose,” and he just smiles and says “no problem”. A few minutes later, I splash hot chocolate on my jacket and so resolve to just chill out a bit and drink it so as not to spill anymore. I’m leaning against a roadside bollard when again my little bubble is interrupted, this time by a big black dude with an English accent, that says, “Watch out, mate” and I turn around and for some weird reason there is an empty trolley rolling down the path and is about to hit me. When I’m in any big cities I’m always a little bit nervous of having my phone or wallet swiped, but with the two experiences I’ve just had it feels like there are a lot of people out there that would automatically pick it up and hand it back to you if you happened to drop it, which is a reassuring thought.
On many streets in Dublin there are emaciated people, mostly men, sitting in doorways, nodding off, with paper cups in their hands, begging. They’re clearly on serious drugs and living for the soothing warmth of the contents of one syringe full of drugs to the next. On Capel Street, on my way to Parnell Street, I saw such a man out cold on a bench, the guards came along and gave him a shake to see if he was still alive but he was far away in Never Never Land. I always feel sad when I see such people. At some point in the past two people felt physically attracted to each other enough so as to become intimate and make a baby and that baby was born innocent into a world that somehow eroded its self-worth to the point where they felt the only thing worth living for was the same thing that was killing them slowly. I saw a program on TV years ago where a man slipped into depression because of some life tragedies, subsequently lost his job in IT, and then ended up in a homeless shelter where he came across, and ended up using, heroin for the first time, to which he quickly became hopelessly addicted. I think just about anyone could end up in such a state, though it is twice as likely to happen to men in Ireland, according to the CSO (2).
On the way up to Dublin, I was reading about East Parnell Street in the book which I already mentioned and which I have referenced below. But I am a bit confused about which side of the street is the “East” side, more confusing was the lack of Chinese people on a street which I had read is referred to as Chinatown. There was one eatery I passed which appeared to be run by Asians, but that hardly constituted calling the area Chinatown and insofar as I could tell there weren’t many Chinese people about at all. I go back to the start of the street and half think about going home, but then I decide to ask a couple of guys that look like they are local. They turn out to be Taxi drivers and are having a chat while waiting for their next fare. I ask if I can take their picture, to which they agree, and then I ask them which side of the street is supposed to be “Chinatown” and where are all the Chinese. They inform me that what is referred to as “Chinatown” is on the other side of O’Connell Street and I have a bit of a facepalm moment as I thought the entirety of the street lay between Capel Street and O’Connell Street, and I vow to do a smidge more research in the future before going off on one of my spontaneous expeditions.
After about two hours of messing around, I haven’t really taken any portraits of strangers which was one of my main intentions for the day. I’m annoyed with myself for procrastinating and decide that the next interesting looking person I see, I am going to ask to photograph, and same happens to be an African American girl called Sharon that has really interesting glasses and funky looking braided hair. She’s super friendly and chatty and so we end up having a good chat. Further up the road, I see an older gentleman with a cane and so I ask to take his picture and he also agrees, and we also have a chat. I then spot a very glamourous looking Asian woman and ask her if she might mind if I take her photo, but she says “no thank you” which makes me realise she is trans. This was my first “rejection” but I’m unperturbed now, and decide I’m going to approach every single person that I think looks uniquely stylish or interesting in some way. Close to the O’Connell Street divide, I am again alerted by a foreign voice that I dropped my lens hood, and this time I tell the person I am doing street portraits and ask her if she’d like one, and so we have an impromptu 5-minute modelling session which is a lot of fun.
At this point, it feels totally natural to just walk up to anyone and ask if I can take their photo. Of course, I am more comfortable in my own bubble, and people are generally more comfortable in theirs also, but most people are quite content to be politely approached with a request to have their photo taken and even the people that say no are usually a little amused, and possibly a little bit flattered, to have been asked.
But we all have a touch of stranger danger. Streaming platforms like Netflix are full of real-life stories about serial killers, and I remember reading some article about less people going to Paris after Liam Neeson’s Taken was released and became a box office smash. The movie made 226 million dollars worldwide from a budget of 25 million, and, for those that don’t know, was the story of a CIA agent that goes on a murderous rampage after his daughter is “taken” in Paris. Fiction or no, movies influence one’s perceptions of the world and the people that are in it. Similarly, TV shows that we love to watch, some of them based on real life serial killers, make us think that there are far more murderous monsters about than there actually are. Even the evening news gives us a distorted sense of the dangers of the world. When we hear of a murder in Dublin, our brains think that it must be a very dangerous place, whereas if you looked at the statistical likelihood of being assaulted, I reckon it is considerably less than, say, being hit by a car or ending up in hospital with food poisoning, but we don’t worry about these things as they are “normal”.
After making portraits of close to 10 people, I finally get to the side of Parnell Street known as Chinatown. But it doesn’t seem to me that it’s as Chinese as I was expecting. I walk past a barbers that is quite clearly full of Africans, and a couple of shops that is clearly full of people from the middle east. But I have arrived in the place that some call Chinatown and I want to photograph at least one Chinese person. And that’s when I see Esther. She’s walking towards me with a Tupperware box of some kind of food and I ask to take her portrait. She’s a little embarrassed and says she has never been asked such a thing before, but she agrees in the end and we have a bit of a chat, by which time it’s starting to get a little bit dark.
I must have been chatting a bit more than I intended as I missed two trains that I meant to be on. But it was a good day, as refreshing as any holiday could ever be. In our age of multiculturalism, one doesn’t need to travel too far outside of one’s own front door to experience other cultures, one just has to be open to the experience and unafraid to step outside of one’s comfort zone a little bit.
I start walking back to the train station with my camera hanging off my hip, but then I decide to pack it away in case some no good thief, emboldened by the darkness, comes out of the shadows and tries to steal it off of me. As enriching a day as I feel myself to have had, you can never be too careful.
:)
References
1. Three Castles Burning by Donal Fallon