The other morning, walking into Dublin city centre, I decided to take the scenic route along the Grand Canal. When I got to Leeson Street Bridge, I saw that the canal’s banks were lined on either side with metal fencing all the way down to Baggot Street. The fencing was composed of large interlocking metal panels, about two metres in height: the sort of thing you see used as crowd-control barriers at festivals and other large public events, or to cordon off construction sites.
I walked a little way along Mespil Road until I came to an opening in the fencing, allowing access to the path along the canal. The narrow paved walkway was enclosed on both sides by these high fences, barring access to both the bank of the canal and the grassy area between the path and the street. As I walked toward Baggot Street Bridge, I found myself so appalled by this new development that I actually laughed out loud. The whole thing was so ugly, so farcically crude, that it verged on the comical. At one point, I stopped and marvelled at the spectacle of a single tree cordoned off by three of these panels, with their ungainly weighted rubber bases. I felt like I was looking at a particularly uninspired work of conceptual art. I half expected to see a little white card on the other side of the tree, explaining how the work “forces the viewer to confront an unstable ontological hierarchy, interrogating the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ structures” or whatever. It was horrible, and bewildering, and weirdly arbitrary.
But this was not the work of a contemporary artist struggling to say something about the world by fencing off a canal; it was, of course, the work of Dublin City Council struggling to do something about the presence of asylum seekers in tents – by fencing off a canal. The fencing was an attempt to address the issue of dozens of migrants, having been forcibly moved from the area around the International Protection Office on Mount Street, setting up tents in the relative seclusion of the canal walkway.
Aside from the sheer ugliness and stupidity of this “solution”, what struck me most about it was its apparent ineffectiveness. What happened is not that the tents have disappeared from the canal, but that they were all clustered together in a small encampment down around Baggot Street Bridge for a few more days, until they were moved again. But even if the canal had been completely cleared of asylum applicants and their tents, could this be deemed a success by any reasonable measure?
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The Grand Canal, and particularly that stretch of it, is among the most beautiful parts of the city. To walk along it, especially at this time of year, can be quietly sublime. Patrick Kavanagh, the Dubliner most associated with this part of the city, and whose statue takes its wistful ease on a bench down by Baggot Street Bridge, wrote of it with lightly mock-heroic grandeur: “No one will speak in prose/who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.” If anyone ever spoke in prose, though, it’s Dublin City Council, whose fencing off of the canal is like the redaction of a poem by a censor with unusually poor reading comprehension.
There seems to me to be something almost spiteful about the approach. In preventing homeless people from finding a place of temporary shelter, the authorities have wrecked a particularly lovely public space in a city that can’t really afford to sacrifice such things. There’s a concept in urban design known as “hostile architecture”, whereby urban spaces are made deliberately inhospitable for certain kinds of use –– studs on flat surfaces, for example, and benches that are sloped, or have armrests in the middle of them, to prevent homeless people from using them to rest or sleep. Such strategies contribute to a sense of ambient ugliness in an environment, a kind of heedless free-market cruelty and authoritarianism. But the fencing of the canal lacks even the insidious sophistication of hostile architecture. There’s no architecture, in other words, just hostility.
The whole thing seems indicative of the Government’s flailing response to the problem of homelessness, which of course long predates its current failure to deal with rising numbers of asylum applicants. The presence of tents along the canal is not a new phenomenon, nor is the State’s dire failure to deal with the problem. (Let us not forget Elias Adane, the homeless Eritrean man who, in 2020, was left paralysed by the mechanical claw of a heavy construction vehicle attempting to remove his tent, which he was still inside, from under Leeson Street Bridge.) This whole fencing mess is clearly the work of a Government that has no idea what it’s doing in this area, and which only recently started to realise that it had to do––or be seen to do––well, something.
Hence recent absurdities such as the Government, having failed to provide any kind of emergency accommodation, providing NGOs with funding which is used to give asylum seekers and other homeless people tents, only for Dublin City Council to come along a couple of days later, destroy the tents and pile them up in a massive dump truck. The fencing-off of the canal seems like the ineffectual effort of a Government, looking rightward over its shoulder at an increasingly extreme anti-migrant movement, to appear “tough on immigration” –– to inject what Simon Harris called “a degree of common sense” into asylum policy. (Of all the concepts beloved of centre-right politicians, few seem to me to be more abstract, and even vaguely mystical, than “common sense”.)
Fencing off the Grand Canal, rendering it ugly and unusable for all the city’s residents, homeless or otherwise, is not common sense. Forcing asylum seekers into a Kafkaesque charade –– giving them tents, then destroying them; piling them into buses and driving them halfway up the Dublin Mountains –– is not common sense either. What that is, I’m afraid, is common stupidity.
Anticipating these problems in advance of their becoming crises, and providing desperate and vulnerable people with emergency accommodation: that would be common sense. And an electorate parting company with a Government that has for so long failed to deal with, and in so many ways exacerbated, the problem of homelessness in all its forms: that, certainly, would be common sense.
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