Artists Gary Farrelly and Oisín Byrne, the masterful auteurs behind the Radical Science Guide To Dublin – complete with state-owned department stores and penance machines -has been shortlisted for the Uniquely Dublin competition – initiated by The Little Museum of Dublin and Dublin City Council to find unique or novel ways of celebrating Dublin today. You can watch and vote at the link. Intrigued by their novel (and fictional) attitude to the city, Totally Dublin took the bus to their headquarters in Pickering Forest, Marina Guinness’s dog-and-creative-friendly country house near Celbridge, to find out about their ideas for civic improvement.
Make an Olympic bid
GF: The city needs to make an Olympic bid. It needs a significant external expectation – only really an Olympic bid or a bid for a World Cup can generate the kind of expedition of infrastructure that is required to really make this this city work.
OB: Dublin did bid for the Olympics.
GF: Dublin did bid for the Olympics in 1936. You could actual do a tour of Dublin and bring a lot of things to people’s attention. There was an international airport planned for the Phoenix Park. It bid for the Olympics in 1936. Because the airport at the time was still at Baldonnell, the athletes were to be bussed onto O’Connell Street, and for the Olympic ceremony, hinged doorways were to cover the River Liffey, making a paradeway up the River Liffey, and the athletes would parade up to the Olympic Stadium in the Phoenix Park. Scant detail about this Olympic bid, but I think if you look it up you’ll find it’s actually a fact.
Detemplebarisation
GF: The idea of branded city quarters is great, but government initiatives as city quarters is a disastrous idea, and Temple Bar, as an example, is very problematic. We need to de-Temple Bar-ise Dublin. We need to stop trying to create nodes of activity and allow these nodes of activity to emerge in a more organic way.
OB: There was some proposal to turn Temple Bar into a bus station.
GF: There was. Temple Bar was proposed to be parking-lotted as a bus station by Charlie Haughey, and I don’t think that’s the worst idea in the world. It needs to be looked at again. I think that Temple Bar would better serve the city as a bus station.
OB: As it is now, it’s just a place for hen nights. That brand is too strong and it needs to destroyed. It’s going down the road of those holiday resorts.
GF: Yes, so point one is to revisit turning Temple Bar into a bus station.
Jam The Signal
GF: We’ve gotten so off-track in marketing our capital city. You arrive at Dublin Airport, Sky News is playing. What we’re supposed to be marketing is our great drinking establishment, but they’re all chrome counters and Sky News is playing behind the counter. The brand of the Irish pub is absolutely destroyed. It was the unassumingness of an Irish pub, you know, stool chairs, pictures of the landlord’s daughter’s debs behind the counter, just an eclectic collection of objects and people conversing. And now there is no conversation in pubs.
The core brand of Dublin is the Dublin pub. Televisions should be banned. Generally I advocate small government, but in this particular case I can make an exception. No televisions in pubs. There should probably be no televisions in the city centre full stop. And also, all electronic equipment and communications equipment should cease to exist in the city centre. Because we don’t have skyscrapers, and we don’t have really great historical buildings, what we do have quality of communication and this great character that’s being flattened by televisions in pubs and people tweeting on busses. People are constantly engaged in some form of electronic communication and just in the very centre of Dublin, there should be some sort of jam put on the signals.
Make Things Seedy
GF: Dublin is a seedy looking place. We need to encourage seedy economic activity in the city centre. Dublin would like to pretend it’s a place of Michelin star restaurants and luxury boutiques, but it’s not. It’s a shithole on the western edge of Europe, so it needs to embrace seediness: more sex shops, more prostitution, more gambling and that kind of thing. As a policy.
OB: To encourage low-level business, you have to end the upward-only rent review as well.
GF: Dublin has maintained this weird city-centre oligarchy by having this upward-only rent review. Really, the city never had to face the seediness of its own commercial existence because of the rent review.
Hide The Liffey
GF: I like the idea of putting a weir or dam on the Liffey, because it spends half the day as a low, tidal river with shopping trolleys and dead bodies and needles and picnicking otters visible in this quagmire of mud. One of our friends, Sophie Von Maltzan, who is a landscape architect, advocated this idea of putting a weir on the Liffey so you could keep the water level artificially quite high. But then environmental fanatics pointed out that this would be detrimental to the ecosystem of the river, so I say just brick the entire river over. It’s not a particularly attractive river anyway.
OB: Or the hinged doors are not a bad idea.
GF: Hinged doors would be a great idea, because that way, we would have a new thoroughfare running from the sea up to Heuston Station and the Phoenix Park. And for the half of the day when the tide is low, the doors would be lowered, creating a new type of thoroughfare that we would call a paradeway. We could call it the Somnambulist Paradeway, or the Jennifer Garner Paradeway, or the Benito Mussolini Paradeway, or the Dame Edna Everage, it doesn’t matter.
Rename The Streets
GF: We’ve got this excellent proposal for Dublin, and they don’t need to stack one brick on top of another brick. All they have to do is change a few plaques on a few walls.
OB: We want to make a project to rename 600 of the streets. There are a whole load of street names that are defunct and useless. A whole rebranding. Which would also garner a load of international attention.
GF: Every downtown city street in Dublin has to be renamed. Grafton Street? What is a Grafton? I don’t know. Out with the colonial, out with the Celtic Tiger, in with this.
Unite The Transport System
GF: They need to bring all the branches of Dublin city transport under the DART brand. Why do they have a Luas, a DART, Expresso busses, Airlink, Aircoach. This all needs to be brought under the banner of Dublin Area Rapid Transport. In Dallas, the busses, the trains, the trams are all under DART. In Paris they’re all under RATP. That needs to be done, and there needs to be a unified cartography, there needs to be a recognisable transport map that people can use. Dublin really is being strangled.
It’s part of the mentality that Dublin still sees itself as a dormitory town, and people don’t live in town. But people need to cross town and people need to get around town as well. So they need to encourage public transport as the circulatory system in a living organ, and that’s so important. The British have this new thing in London, they’re infrastructure-heavy and they’re spending £2bn on Crosslink, which is for twenty years from now to ensure their city doesn’t clog. It’s all about getting people around the organ as opposed to in and out of the organ.
Monumental, Phallic Buildings
GF: It’s quite a mundane one, but I think the ban on tall buildings in Dublin should be removed.
OB: That’s a huge one, that’s really important.
GF: I think because of the traumatic history, Irish people have kind of a small-willy mentality, and I think we do need monumental phallic constructions in the city centre to reassure us and to promote augmentation of the ego-space. So, more tall buildings.
Fluoride Out
GF: To make a politically relevant point, for years I’ve been talking about the fluoride in the water, and that’s become topical. People told me to wear a tinfoil hat, ‘they’re putting fluoride in the water for our teeth’, which I never believed was the case. Dublin is famous for its banter and for its literary creativity and it’s lost its way, but it’s lost its way not because the Irish mind has become syphilitic, it’s because there’s fluoride in our water. If we take the fluoride out of the water, I think we’ll find some of that imaginative abundance returning.
Secede
GF: There’s certainly an argument for Dublin seceding and becoming a city state. I think city state’s the way. Clearly, government for large catchment areas doesn’t work. I think Dublin with its fertile farmlands, in the longer term, in the 20s, 30s and 40s. we will see a movement for Dublin to become its own autonomous coastal city state. Agricultural self-sufficiency could be guaranteed, we have the airport, we have the military on our side, the government’s here.
If you’d like Farrelly and Byrne to win the €10,000 prize that they need to buy huge doors to hide the Liffey at low tide, go forth and celebrate your franchise. If you’re living abroad and think Dublin could learn from wherever you are, mail karl [@] totallydublin [.] ie.
