sea

Moving Dublin explores the everyday world of movement in Dublin and its vast sprawling suburbs spreading out west from the coastal city. We look at how far the contemporary world of the Dublin commuter has strayed from the civic realm it constituted when Joyce wrote the Wandering Rocks chapter of Ulysses.

Moving Dublin is to be published in the form of a book and DVD in March 2009 by Gandon Editions

Moving Dublin has been commissioned by South Dublin County Council through In Context 3 and funded under the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government’s Per Cent for Art Scheme.

Vico Road. Extract 03’14” With Jobst Graeve

At 43 year of age I have not had a mid-life crisis... yet. But I do remember something like one. It was at the start of the summer in 1990. I was 25 years old and I was working in my first full time job as an architect in an office on Baggot Street. I had a terrible fit of despair when it dawned on me that, for the first time in my life, something important to me had slipped away and there was nothing I could do about it. For the first time in my adult life, I was not going to spend the three months of the summer sitting on a beach. Architecture studies are long, 6 years normally if you include a year out for work experience and travel, as I did. Every summer of those 6 years I spent working as a lifeguard. My first post was at Seapoint in Monkstown in summer 1984. I was 19 years old. I had been a passable competitive swimmer throughout my teens, training in school pools and competing on provincial and national level, smelling of chlorine and developing right-angled shoulders. During the summer of 1983 I had ‘goofed off’ after finishing my leaving cert, devoting myself (in as far as I was devoting myself to anything) to sea swimming and making some money as a gardener. I would swim at different bathing spots depending on the tide. Seapoint was the closest, a 10 minute cycle from my home, with a sheltered changing area wrapped around the outside of the Martello Tower and a freshwater shower (cold of course). But it was unpleasantly sea weedy at low tide. The public baths at Blackrock and Dun Laoghaire were unheated saltwater swimming pools on the coast. The two abandoned edifices are still there today, battered ruins in whitewashed concrete. They were crowded then in fine weather or at weekends, but a good option at low tide. If I had the time and the energy to go a little further I would cycle through Dalkey village, continue along the coast road, cross a pedestrian bridge over the railway line and descend a sloping path to one of the most beautiful spots in the world, the Vico Road bathing place. I generally avoided the famous Forty Foot at Sandycove, still a ‘gentleman’s’ bathing place back then, and always brimming over with middle-aged exhibitionists. In fact, as I would discover over the next 6 summers, South Dublin’s bathing spots were refuges for eccentrics and marginals, quite at odds with the comfortable middle-class suburbs that stretched along the coast behind them. The suburbs of Dublin, no less than the city, turn their backs on the sea. The railway line which runs along most of the sea shore creates a sort of coastal embankment that is scarcely broken by a few bridges and level crossings along its way. Of course Dublin is a northern town and the sea is cold and grey for most of the year. With the exception of some older neighbourhood swimmers who got in the water every day for a short therapeutic swim, the regulars at Seapoint and Killiney beach were mostly from other parts of Dublin, with hard accents and long stories to tell. One was “living with the priests” somewhere in the inner city. There was a docker from the East Wall who we called “the Bomber” because of his brawny torso and his aggressive swimming style. Another we called Kojak, because he was covered with hair except on his head. I was told to keep a good eye on him because he had what appeared to be an unhealthy fondness for children. I had one ‘lifeguard groupie’ (as she insisted on calling herself) who was also the only out-of-the-closet lesbian I had ever known. My job as a lifeguard was principally to listen to them and to give them cups of tea (the lifeguard hut had a camping stove). No one ever drowned while I was working the beaches, and the two rescues I made over the six years were largely for show; panicking children shocked by the cold water. There were precious few swimmers anyway, and most were much more experienced than I. Killiney strand, where I spent my last three summers, was mainly used by strollers, and any swimmers stayed close by the shore, as the sea got deep very quickly. If there was a heat wave, the beach was black with people and I would spend the day putting plasters on stubbed toes. On rainy days the beach was deserted and I read or gazed at the grey sky and the green sea. In January 2008 I took a plunge in the cold Irish Sea for the first time in ten years. Jobst, a German friend, cycles winter and summer from Denzille Lane in the city to the Vico Road bathing place to swim. We asked him if we could film him diving off the rocks into the sea in the middle of winter. The following summer we recorded a conversation with him in the heart of the city, recalling the wintery swim and the freezing cycle from Merrion Square through the comfortable neighbourhoods of Ballsbridge, Sandymount, Booterstown, Blackrock, Monkstown, Dun Laoghaire and Dalkey. Our planned play of contrasts was thwarted by the ambivalence of the Irish weather, which served us up golden horizontal sunlight over Killiney Bay in January and grey drizzle on Denzille Lane in August. Nevertheless, the steadycam film we made of the descent from Vico Road down to the rocks and into the sea was a beautiful shoot, after which I felt hot blooded enough to consider plunging in myself. The temperature was around about 7°C. Quite a shock really. Jobst was tactful enough to tell me only after that ‘its a little hard if you haven’t been doing it all winter’.That summer too, Anne, the twins and I took a trip the along the coast on the Dart to photograph the city’s maritime edge. A strange trip through a familiar landscape that has become ludicrously wealthy and was just beginning to show the first signs of imminent economic collapse: weathered auctioneer’s signs. The old coastal structures were still there: Blackrock Baths, a ruined bank of whitewashed concrete protruding into the bay, signalled by a rusty metal scaffold-like tower (I never had the courage to dive off the highest platform). The main reason, it seems, that the site has not been redeveloped is that its only access is a single pedestrian footbridge over the railway-lines. Passing Seapoint I pointed out the red and yellow flag beside the Martello tower. ‘That’s where Daddy used to work’. ‘Didn’t it have a blue flag as well?’ asked Anne. Not anymore. In 2007 Seapoint lost its Blue Flag status following increased bacteria levels in the bathing water and the amount of detritus on the beach. At Dun Laoghaire we got off the train and walked along the coast towards Sandycove. Remarkable how little the place has changed, the same Edwardian promenade in grey cement over the rock pools. Dun Laoghaire Baths, still the centre-stone in the arch of the bay, the derelict 19th Century bathhouse overlooking the whitewashed pools built into the rocks below. All trimmed with barbed wire.‘Daddy used to work here too’.Now that amazed them. They gazed down over the broken glass skylights, the algae covered walls, the crumbling steps down into the pool...‘Imagine if it was still open, Daddy!’ ‘You could walk in there and they would still remember you!’‘And you would still be a member!’ ‘... a member for life!’‘And they would let us be members. And Mummy too...’

“In winter great wild waves crashed up the sand at Portmarnock and broke over the road, and across from the dunes there was a little wooden pub and some holiday shacks, and then the fields. The road around the estuary to Baldoyle flooded quickly and silently in winter, and we ran along the grassy banks to school between silver sheets of floodwater… Everything was clean and bright”.

Nuala O’Faolain. Are You Somebody?