Elizabeth Platt ([email protected])
Mon, 21 Sep 1998 09:49:39 -0700 (PDT)
--eaplatt]
Posh Dublin is a million miles from its backyard
Michael O'Toole on Thursday
IF IT was an apartment block in plush Ballsbridge or Blackrock, there would
be riots in the streets.
But it's okay.
It's only the high rise towers of Ballymun where thousands of tenants have
been left without lifts for months, causing unending hardship. These
working class people can easily be ignored.
U2 sang about the depressing, cold, grey towers of Ballymun in their 1987
hit Running to stand still.
Bono referred in that song to the drug abuse then sweeping the city:
"I see seven towers, but I only see one way out". Now there's only one way
up for the beleaguered residents - the stairs.
They are the innocent victims of an increasingly bitter dispute between
lift companies and unions representing maintenance staff, who have been on
strike since the end of June.
Lifts are out across the entire city as all the companies have been
affected by the strike.
But it is Ballymun, on the northside of the city, that has been the worst
hit area.
It's strange: a car park in the trendy Temple Bar recently had its two
lifts out of order because of the strike.
Posters were put on the doors saying the lifts were out of action for the
duration of the strike - within a few days they were in perfect working
order.
Yet, the people of Ballymun still have to clamber up steep stairs.
Of the 73 lifts in the entire complex less than half are now working -
three months into the strike.
And there is no sign of the dispute ending: the maintenance staff have just
rejected a pay deal from their bosses.
The situation is now so bad that the Irish army has been called in.
The soldiers are not allowed to fix the broken lifts, so they are
restricted to helping pensioners and mothers carry heavy bags up the stairs.
If the residents were living in one of the posher areas of Dublin there's
no way this lifts dispute would have been allowed to fester for months as
it has done.
But who cares, it's only Ballymun.
"IT'S far better than any Patrick's day parade".
What can this be about - some Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, or the
Carnevale in Venice, perhaps?
Actually, according to one of the Republic's leading writers, the sight
which outstripped the annual celebrations for St Patrick was the 12th of
July Orange parade in Belfast.
Irish Times columnist Nuala O'Faolain - who went up to Belfast to live but
came back to Dublin after seven months - was raving about the Orange
parades when she appeared on the Gay Byrne show on RTE radio yesterday.
She beamed: "One of the good things was the Orange parade in Belfast on the
12th of July."
But that appears to have been one of the few things that the columnist
liked during her stint north of the border - or "up there" as it's known.
Ms O'Faolain went up to get to know the real Northern Ireland - the
Northern Ireland behind the newspaper headlines that people in the Republic
never see.
In the end she came to the conclusion that there wasn't much else to write
about.
She also came away with the altogether shocking conclusion that there is a
lot of bigotry in Northern Ireland.
She said yesterday of the Republic: "We are lucky we don't know about
hating people because they are the other."
What Ms O'Faolain realised is that there are bigots in Northern Ireland who
don't like Catholics.
Oh, the shock of it all.
She spoke of her shock at going to the Ballymoney estate where the Quinn
children were murdered and seeing the indifference in people's faces.
What's new?
Look at the ordeal of the Hamill family in Portadown and the almost daily
taunts they are forced to endure by loyalists who mimic their son and
brother getting kicked to death in the centre of the town.
Nor can she quite get her head round the fact that Catholics aren't welcome
in some places or that they can't walk around the centre of some towns at
night.
These, as Irish News readers know, are the daily realities of being a
Catholic in some parts of the north.
Far too many people in the comfortable parts of Dublin simply refuse to
believe that bigotry, discrimination and naked sectarianism exists in the
north ... preferring to claim that it is all some republican plot.
It's just the same way that they claim nobody in the north found marches
offensive until Sinn Fein started stirring things up.
But, when they actually spend some time north of the border, they realise
bigotry is endemic.
Maybe all of them should come north for a few months and get a real eye-opener.
It's not only Ballymun that's a million miles from Dublin 4
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