I return to the street at 4pm the following day, when the Saturday-afternoon shoppers are still about and the nightlife is just beginning.
At Beshoff’s Marjorie Woodman, who spent some years in Britain, is complaining about how hard it is to drive around the city.
“You should have stayed over there,” says her moustachioed friend, Ciaran Cullen, with a chuckle.
They’re in O’Connell Street most days thanks to their travel passes, he says. They go to Wynn’s Hotel or the Oval. Cullen has been shopping. “I bought snails’ eggs for Marjorie,” he says.
Woodman sighs. “They’re quails’ eggs,” she explains. “He thinks it’s funny to call them snails’ eggs. I’m allergic to hens’ eggs.”
Woodman doesn’t like how the street has gone. “All those grotty shops and fast-food places,” she says. “It’s a beautiful street and it has width, which is very important, but I’m old enough to remember the way it used to be, with beautiful shops and cinemas.”
“But it’s much more friendly to people walking than ever it was,” says Cullen .
“He’s just saying this to wind me up,” says Woodman. “Don’t listen to him.”
“It’s one of the best streets in the world,” says Cullen. “Almost as good as the Champs-Élysées.”
Sitting at the foot of the statue of Sir John Gray, across from Cregan’s news stand at the junction of Abbey Street, a homeless man called Carlow tells me about his girlfriend, Blondie, who died in November. She was 53. Carlow, bearded, weatherbeaten and softly spoken, is 49. “I was her toy boy,” he says. There are tears in his eyes. He sleeps at a place down near Busáras and begs around the city centre.
He is sitting here, he says, because he has nowhere else to go. He once upholstered sofas, then drove JCBs, but has been homeless seven years.
“Blondie used to say, ‘You need two things in this life: a good pair of shoes and a good bed. Because if you’re not in one you’re in the other.’ ”
This part of the street is a mix of mobile commuters and stationary street people: drug dealers, drug users and homeless people. (“Homeless people are usually victims of crime, not perpetrators,” says Michael Hennessy of the Simon Community, whom I bumped into on Friday).
Both communities try not to see each other, but when I sit with Carlow it’s as if I suddenly become visible. People greet us, pat his shoulder and ask, “Are you looking [for drugs]?”
We go over to the Londis, where I order Carlow a chicken roll and a cup of tea. “They’re good to the homeless here,” says Carlow. A very drunk young woman is singing loudly to the radio. Her name is Louise. She and Carlow know each other.
Carlow introduces me as “My cousin over from London”, but I explain that I’m a journalist. Louise tells me the Spire is like a big needle. She spent the past two nights in hospital. Her leg is “all f***ed up”. Why? “From injecting”.
Louise is 29. She sometimes works as a prostitute and has been on the streets ever since her mother died, more than 10 years ago. “If my ma was alive I’d be cooking her dinner now.”
She speaks in rambling non sequiturs and often breaks into song. “I hate being a woman,” she says to no one in particular.
Later she says, “I hate when people think they’re better than you.”
“No one is better than anyone else,” says Carlow softly.
Louise is waiting to hear news of a hostel bed and asks me to ring the council’s homeless-persons unit freephone number on her behalf. She thinks it might help. I ring. They’re very polite but tell me what they told her: to phone back at 10.30pm. Louise leaves.
Out on the street Carlow and I talk a little longer. Eventually he says, “I hate to do this, Patrick, but I am a tapper. Do you have anything you can give me?” I give him what money I have. We shake hands and go our separate ways.
Outside Funland, Adoosh from Somalia and John Michael from Kenya explain why they come to a casino instead of a pub. “You go to a pub, you can’t hear each other,” says John Michael. He fits carpets. Adoosh works in a warehouse.
They spend a little money on slot machines but no more than the cost of a couple of pints. Then they watch football on the big screen and chat to friends. John Michael is critical of other city-centre casinos, where he sees people betting away a few weeks’ wages. “I can’t believe the Government allows that. Those places should be out at the edge of town, where the rich people are.”
- DANCING WITH THE KRISHNAS
Some Hare Krishna monks are chanting and drumming outside Eason. A drunk man in a Bob Marley T-shirt is accompanying them on finger cymbals. “We gave them to him,” says Sundar Nitai Dasa, formerly a jockey, now an orange-clad monk. He was once named Seán Michael Thomas McNamara. “A name that’s even longer,” he points out.
He tells me that this is the religion of the age. “Doesn’t that man look happier now?” He has a sense of humour. When a man stops to get a book and mentions he lived in a hippy commune, Sundar says, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” and winks.
When he lived in London he was poked in the eye and hit over the head with a box. He hasn’t experienced quite the same aggression in Dublin. And he likes O’Connell Street. He likes the clocks. “It’s good to be conscious of time,” he says.
He leaves me with some Vedic wisdom: “Inside everyone there’s a good wolf and a bad wolf.”
Who will win?
“Whichever one you feed the most.”
As I walk off he’s joined by a street dealer I recognise from earlier. They dance together as if they haven’t a care in the world.
A Garda car pulls up on the footpath near Londis, and two plain-clothes gardaí start to disperse some of the people who have gathered. A woman garda wearing a stab jacket confiscates some beer cans and pours them down the drain. “Ah f***off!” says a man whose beer was taken. He calls her by name. They seem to know each other.
I’m in Starbucks drinking a coffee when two women stumble in. One asks for the key to the toilet. The security man says the toilet is out of order.
“There’s no need to lie,” says one of the women. “Danny Dyer! Don’t lie to me. I can read you like a book . . . with those dimples. Don’t lie to me!” They storm out.
The security man, 24-year-old Peter McAnaney, is impassive throughout. He’s a former journalism student who hopes to study criminology. He sees the opportunity to watch the street as “a great experience”.
He explains that the drugs being sold outside are usually prescription medicines, “zimmos” and sleeping tablets, and that the dealers hide their stashes in the bamboo enclosures around the new trees. “O’Connell Street is a powder keg,” he says.
The street is quite empty now, and a dishevelled man asks, “Where’s McDonald’s?” We’re right beside it. Then he adds casually, “I got stabbed.”
“Will I call you an ambulance?” I say. I can’t see any blood.
“Nah, I’m meeting my girlfriend at McDonald’s. She’ll sort me out.”
He walks to the door. The security man refuses to let him in.
“Are you sure you don’t want an ambulance?”
“It’s not that bad. My girlfriend will sort me out.”
He tells me his name is Adam. He asks to borrow my phone to ring his girlfriend. I give him my phone. The security man looks at me with concern.
There’s a bit of preamble to the phone conversation. “Where are you now? What are you doing?” and then he says, as if as an afterthought: “I’ve been stabbed four times in the chest. It’s really bad.”
He winks at me. He really doesn’t look like he’s been stabbed.
“I’m serious. Come get me.”
The conversation is interrupted at this point because a group of people go by, including a woman pushing a child in a buggy. And, for reasons I can’t fathom, they start shouting at Adam and he shouts back. In the midst of this I take my phone back and put it in my pocket.
“My girlfriend’s coming to meet me,” he says confidently.
“Are you sure you don’t need an ambulance?” I ask.
He tells me he hasn’t been stabbed that badly and suggests he may be stretching the truth to get back with his girlfriend, who kicked him out recently. “If she doesn’t come, then we’ll call an ambulance,” he says and winks again.
I go into Spar to buy a drink. I feel odd about Adam manipulating his girlfriend, so I text her to say that he doesn’t look as if he’s badly hurt.
Moments later Adam comes in with two men I recognise to be part of a group that was dealing earlier. Adam has a naggin of vodka he didn’t have before.
“We need tissues,” Adam says to the security guard, who doesn’t obstruct them as they grab a handfuls of napkins and coffee stirrers from the closed coffee stall.
“Are you okay, Adam?” I ask.
“I’m grand. I’m with my friends now. They’ll look after me.”
I follow him out to the street, where one of the friends is making himself vomit and the other is searching through the sick with the napkins and a coffee stirrer.
“Why’s he getting sick?” I ask Adam.
“He’s sicking up . . . personal items.” Then he cautions me, “Ask no questions.” I walk away.
Outside the Gresham I talk to five glamorous women who are attending the Marks & Spencer post-Christmas dinner dance. Christy Dignam’s daughter is singing, apparently. It’s lovely, they say.
I sit at the statue of Father Mathew, the temperance priest, for a little while. I notice his fingers are broken. The street is pretty deserted. There are fewer people and more seagulls.