As Ballymun's towers begin to be dismantled next week, the residents start new lives on level ground, writes Shane Hegarty
Ballymun's flats look weary. The towers are smothered in graffiti, inside and out. As they empty, windows and doors are boarded. The once intimidating blocks are losing a battle for the skyline with the cranes and new office and apartment blocks. A civic centre now hogs Main Street. The hoarding and roadworks will soon unveil a gleaming new leisure centre. A pharmacy has opened, its shopfront a dash of colour against the dirt and dust of development. Ballymun is a town emerging from a cocoon and its towers are about to be shed.
Next Saturday the demolition of Pearse Tower will begin. After the presence of asbestos threatened serious delays, half of the blocks are now considered safe to dismantle. They will not come down in dramatic detonations, but be gradually eaten away over a few weeks. The small chunks of debris will be ground down and re-used. The new Ballymun will be built, in part, from the bones of the old.
Still hidden behind the towers are the first of the newly-built houses and apartments. Already 600 families have moved in; whole blocks transplanted, with residents choosing their neighbours in advance. In total, 5,000 new dwellings will be built across the five existing neighbourhoods.
Rose Comiskey is in the landscaped front garden of her new three-bedroom house ("Comiskey Villa"), set in a quiet cul-de-sac that, for only a few weeks more, has a view of the Shangan flats that were her home for 32 years.
"It's a new lease of life. To have the garden and front and back doors after waiting so many years. I love it." She and her husband hope to buy the house soon, but she says that she'll have mixed feelings when the flats come down. "I was only 19 when we moved here. They were beautiful flats then, like luxury. It'll be sad in one way to see them go, but it's a better life now, especially for the kids around here. They really appreciate it. They go out with black bags and pick up the rubbish. It'll get us away from the stigma of Ballymun, when people saw the flats and not the good people living in them." It is mainly forgotten that the area was originally seen as a triumph.
Without any apparent sense of foreboding, the first sod was turned on April 1st, 1964. Bono, who grew up down the road, saw "seven towers and only one way out", but alongside the seven 15-storey blocks are 19 eight-storey blocks, 10 four-storey blocks and 400 houses.
They were a solution to Dublin's inner-city tenements that had begun to take lives as they crumbled. Ballymun gave them large homes in skyscrapers overlooking green fields. "It was the mind-set of the time," says Seán Kearns of architects Murray O'Laoire. "Down on the streets it was bad and dirty, with congestion and no sanitation. So they built these gleaming towers in green space with a view of the sun." He grew up on the edge of Ballymun. When his parents bought a house there in 1962, they had a view of the farmland of what was then UCD's Albert Agricultural College. Soon, it had been replaced by sprawling concrete. Kearns now designs high-rise buildings for a living.
"It was an interesting place to grow up. We were the first generation of children in Ballymun. There was a semi-rural element that people don't remember now. We had slides and a fort made of timber posts. There were trees and a small river. But by the time I was about 13, it had all been vandalised. Nothing worked. They had intensive landscaping programmes, and every year they were ripped out." After the towers were completed a few days before Christmas of 1968, problems surfaced quickly.
The heating system and lifts broke down often. The promised cinema, skating rink and dance hall never transpired. A swimming pool was built only after a lengthy campaign from residents. The sole retail outlet was the shopping centre, a mile from some blocks. Enterprising "van shops" sprung up about the area in response.
Kearns believes it's hard to pinpoint exactly why the project went so wrong.
"The flats get blamed because they are so prominent, they're the thing that makes Ballymun different." As European schemes have shown, high-rise living does not automatically mean urban deprivation. He is currently working on a proposed 19-storey apartment block in Cork's docklands and believes much of Ballymun's problems came from having huge areas of unsupervised land open to anti-social activities and very little sense of ownership. Meanwhile, parents couldn't supervise their children from several storeys up and, in moving from the city, they were leaving the grandparents who might have provided support.
"They were also car-dependent," says Kearns. "Ultimately, the Ballymun flats were anti-Dublin and anti-urban." As unemployment rose and the population decreased during the 1980s, the flats became increasingly isolated. This current regeneration is bringing existing and new jobs to the area, as well as services, such as the Motor Taxation Office, that will bring outsiders in. "It is much more urban and urbane."
In a newspaper specially produced for the week-long "wake" to mark the demolition, one resident, Eileen Dennan, details the things about the flats that "we don't like talking about because we feel like we're letting ourselves down". She writes of the drugs, graffiti, litter and violence.
"Kids sleeping rough on landings 'cos they've been kicked out of home. Piss and shite in the lifts . . . Little fluffy dogs thrown down chutes . . . And the worst legacy of all - bodies in a heap at the bottom of the flats like bundles of carpet that someone threw over the landing." But Dennan also writes about the "beautiful" side of the flats - the views of Dublin, the sense of community and the people: "their kindness, humour and generosity. The heroism of people, struggling to do their best in spite of everything that life throws at them." Raymond Marsh (68) was given a flat in Ballymun after the break-up of his first marriage.
"At the time I was devastated. I had just gone through a horrific time and had come from a house in Drimnagh to this eighth-storey flat in Ballymun, which everyone talked about as having this problem and that problem. Yet, when I went in, I found that the people were the salt of the earth, the loveliest people. I never had a bit of hassle from anyone." He lived there for 13 years before he and his wife recently moved to a new ground floor apartment, downstairs from their old neighbour. "I have some happy memories of Pearse Tower, but I'm certainly happy to be out of it." The people of Ballymun have been consulted regularly since Ballymun Regeneration Limited was handed responsibility for the project in 1997. The five communities will remain, with each designed separately. Meanwhile, the transition to the houses has been helped by such things as gardening classes.
According to Eamonn Farrelly, projects and contracts liaison manager of BRL, the idea is ultimately a simple one. "Ballymun should be seen as an attractive place to work, live and play. I want it to be managed and maintained just the same as any other area in the city." Meanwhile, wider lessons have been learned. Modern social housing is built on a smaller scale, with the public areas overlooked and a sense of ownership fostered. It doesn't automatically mean an end to urban disasters. "They're addressing Ballymun, but they're not addressing other problems," Seán Kearns points out. "Wait until you see the future of the vast housing estates of Dublin's satellite towns. They are time bombs." Next week, though, is about Ballymun.