Iveagh Markets
Martin Keane owns the Oliver St. John Gogarty, Blooms Hotel, and a handful of other sites across Dublin. But don’t judge him on the back of that. He’s nice – an old-school Dub who’s all business, with an ever-present hands-free set in his ear, in spite of the fact that he mysteriously carries an old Nokia around with him. Whatever his other businesses and intentions may be, he’s friendly and lets us into the site, where only in the past two weeks they have begun clearing and cleaning it.
For most Dublin 8 locals, Iveagh Markets has long been a site of fantasy invasions. Inside, the market is overgrown and wild, with shrubs and creepers crawling up in between what had once been the wet market and the dry market. The glass panels, and the original balconies are still all preserved and visible, and once again it’s shocking that a place with as much potential as this should be let go to such waste.
The indoor market was first built by the 1st Earl of Iveagh, or Edward Guinness, in 1890. The purpose of the building was to find a solution to all the street vendors and mess and dirt they caused by taking over much of the area around Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and Francis Street. To that end, the market opened and the vendors moved closer to the Francis Street end of the area. Keane himself remembers having to cycle down to buy fish outside the markets. While the site continued to be neglected, it was only in the 1990s that Dublin City Council decided to shut it down, since when it has lain vacant. In 2000, Martin Keane bought the property on the back of what he called a ‘planning competition’. The plan was approved in 2008, and Keane has received an extension on the amount of time for him to develop it.
Henry J Lyons Architects have the enviable task of designing and restoring the Iveagh Markets, a plan that will have to be implemented within the next three years. They’re the architects behind the RHA, the Criminal Justice Courts, and Dublin Airport’s Terminal One. Their plans, which TD saw, included a hotel, an indoor market, and a microbrewery to be located in the basement, all done in a style reminiscent of the English Market in Cork, although Martin Keane prefers to compare it to Harrods Food Emporium. It’s swish, let’s just say that. But along with being chi-chi, the plans are also on a grand scale. The hotel Keane is suggesting putting into the central open space next to the market, and behind the gorgeous coach room above the gate on Francis Street, is on the large scale. Modern, simple, and similar to many of the buildings on Cork Street, the new hotel is the only element not entirely in sync with the neighbourly tone of Dublin 8. Many of the salvageable features (including a Dublinia site that had to be dug out with spoons) must be preserved, so a healthy amount of skepticism and vigilance seems only right, to ensure that not everything is sacrificed to the gods of commerce and tourism.
Something is changing in terms of space in Dublin and it’s still at an embryonic stage. Being barred from spaces seemed to confirm that the public is not a desired presence nor spectator in the shaping of Dublin’s future cityscape, but only time will tell. Whether sites that merited love and attention are finally going to get what they deserve, and be developed in a civic-minded way, or instead fall into the same unimaginative cul-de-sac of pre-bust times, is hard to say. The value of these places however isn’t. They inform our mental and emotional map of the city. In their neglect and past glory they’ve rallied our sense of civic pride, becoming personal and public monuments to large and tiny injustices around space. And maybe, at a time of transition, it’s OK to talk about ideal situations and demand that policy makers take action more decisively this second time round the merry-go-round and protect the public’s interest as well as those of developers.
In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, one of the adult characters the Prince meets on his journey across the planets is a Geographer, concerned with writing down the facts of the world. When the Little Prince tells him about the famous rose on his own planet, the Geographer refuses to jot it down in his books, “because it is ephemeral” and “not a fact”. But maybe now is an OK time to speak of things ephemeral and not facts – to envisage space and property in a far less literal way, see it as holding up a mirror to community, cultural heritage, creativity, shared experience and history. A mirror reflecting things that are perhaps ephemeral.
