You don't get to hate Coolock. You don't get to hate it unless you love it.
The tools that have been used to oppress us for decades are being handed to us by the far right, and it’s our responsibility not to use them to beat down people who are more vulnerable than us.
If you did not grow up in a place like Coolock, I am sure it’s probably very hard to wrap your head around what has gotten people to this point. I am fairly certain that most of the people commenting on this situation have absolutely no idea what people in the area have had to put up with for their entire lives.
From the outside, the easiest thing to do is to look at everything that’s unfolding and conclude that there’s just something fundamentally wrong with these people. Coolock has never had a great reputation around the rest of the country – and the escalating situations in areas like Coolock, Finglas and Ballyfermot are furthering the disdain that people on the outside have towards these communities. The historical Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil voters are ready to wash their hands of these people entirely, viewing them as a lost cause. And their parties have been way ahead of them for years. From the outside, the only answer is to quash this discontent with more police and more violence.
That’s the easy thing to do. And it’s incredibly shortsighted.
Writing people off as “scumbags” and contributing to further dehumanisation is certainly easier than reflecting on how you may have directly or indirectly contributed to these problems; how your family’s voting habits might have played a role here; or pausing to think about how you might even be benefitting from the policies that have created these problems. As a country, we’ve spent decades getting defensive and angry when things kick off with working class people. We rarely take a step back and apply a bit of empathy to these situations, and that’s something that is necessary. Both inside of Coolock and outside of it.
Compounded generational trauma
The reality is, you are looking at people who have been surrounded by addiction, violence, abuse, and poverty for decades. This is not an exaggeration. If you have not grown up in an environment like this, there’s no way to understand what it’s like to have the constant hum of this stress in the background of your life. Think of all of the problems you already have in your life: trying to make ends meet in a housing crisis, worrying about your job security, worrying about the health of family members, trying to save for a mortgage while inflation pushes the price of a bottle of deodorant up to €9 in Tesco. Life is extremely difficult for the majority of us right now.
Now think of trying to deal with all of the same shite while living in a community where violence, drug use and crime have been completely normalised. On the outside, these are such abstract concepts that it’s difficult to do this in theory, which is why I have decided to write this: so people can begin to wrap their heads around the amount of trauma that is intertwined in people’s everyday lives that is just accepted as a fact of life. I’m reluctant to contribute to the type of “trauma porn” that we associate with working class areas, because at the same time, there is still so much hope and joy within these communities. As far as people’s upbringings in Coolock go, I was very lucky with the circumstances I was born into, but even at that, I have witnessed a staggering amount of pain, violence, and a complete disregard for human dignity. Much of this is enforced on an institutional level, but it feeds down into how people see and value themselves, the people around them, and how they respond to perceived threats. Neoliberalism has finally delivered on trickle down something, I suppose.
I spent the majority of my life thinking that abuse, violence, crime, and poverty are normal. When I got to secondary school and started to meet people from outside of the initial radius of my home, it was clear that Coolock isn’t the only place with these kinds of problems. There are a great deal of people in areas that are considered to be slightly quieter, like Swords, Artane, Raheny, Donnycarney, Clarehall, and Santry who are seeing life through a very similar lens. But in Coolock, it is significantly intensified.
It’s going to seem as though we’re going off track here as I explain how people in Coolock have been failed on every level, from public spaces like parks to resourcing in schools. I promise you that this will eventually tie back to where we’re at today, but I think it’s very important to try and convey the hostility experienced in Coolock on an infrastructural and social level.
I want you to think about these things and see every person on the streets in Coolock this week as human beings, who at best, have had a rough go of things. You might not like them, or what they are doing, but please remember that these are people who have never really been given a productive outlet or framework for their frustrations – and when they have, they have been ignored or subject to violent retaliation.
A walk in the park…
I’ll start with some observations from my own upbringing in Coolock in the 1990s and early 2000s. Even as a young child, it was clear to me that the infrastructure has been designed, destroyed, and redesigned with crime mitigation in mind above all else. What way is that to live?
Before I had even gotten into primary school, I had questions about what was going on in the world around me. How many kids in Coolock go to the playground with their nannies and grandas, full of questions about why you can’t even take a pram into the park without lifting it over a railing that has been put in place solely to stop scramblers or robbed cars from driving into the park? There are so many of these measures put in place that the parks stop working for the people who are meant to enjoy them.
A park is a basic public service that anyone should be able to enjoy. Curiously, I’ve grown up to find that’s the case in Dublin 4. There are no barriers impeding entry for people with prams or wheelchair users at certain entrances in the city’s wealthier suburbs. But in Coolock, it’s hard to take a walk in the park without feeling like nobody gives a shit about you. I’ve seen throughout my life that the Stardust Memorial Park, at the focal point of this community, has been marked by reminders that on a local and national level, your comfort, peace and safety will never truly be taken into account. Looking back at the early 2000s in particular, I see the Memorial Park as a microcosm that perfectly represents how the state views any area like Coolock.
Written out, it sounds like a clunky, heavy-handed metaphor, but it is true: In one corner of the park, you’ve got a playground that has often been burnt out, full of broken glass, and subject to the theft of its swings. Clear signs of antisocial behaviour within the community. There’s a frustration that can often only be expressed through destruction. I’ve felt it myself. It’s not unlike self-harm, in the big picture of things. In the other corner of the park, there’s a solemn stone monument dedicated to the 48 local young people from the area who were killed in a fire – none of which received justice until this year, 40 years after their deaths. This is another clear, albeit extreme, reminder of how the people of Coolock have continuously been failed by the state. While justice has been closure for some, these are people who have had to dedicate their entire lives to this cause and have received the bare minimum in return.
And if you needed any evidence that the harm the community often inflicts upon itself is tied to something much bigger than all of us… Well, it’s worth noting that the Stardust monument itself is kept under lock and key within the park, to prevent vandalism. I guess when you have nothing, nothing is sacred.
Parks aside, there are immense problems with litter and dumping that not only take away from people’s enjoyment of the area and sense of ease within their communities, but they also present a hazard to people’s health and safety. If you walk the two kilometres from Coolock Village to Clarehall Shopping Centre up the Malahide Road, there is an astounding absence of bins along the footpath. Presumably, these have been removed as they have been abused with illegal dumping or arson. Yeah, sure, we can keep redesigning every aspect of the area over and over again to dissuade people from crime but at what point do we accept that this isn’t the solution to any of these problems?
But at the end of the day, the upkeep of parks, recreation, and municipal facilities is of little concern to a population that’s struggling to keep its head above water.
Set up for failure
When you’re growing up in an area like Coolock, or the other suburbs like it across Dublin, every aspect of your circumstances can be make or break. Even with the best support network and familial situation behind you, there is exposure to horrific social issues that have a profound effect on people. Even if you manage to keep your children shielded and sheltered from addiction or crime, chances are, they will pick up on other people’s trauma within the community, and likely take a lot of it on.
By the time I got to primary school and started mixing with other kids from different corners of Coolock, it was very apparent how much suffering people within the community were shouldering in the early 2000s. I saw my classmates come to school beaten black and blue, with burns all over their bodies, and nothing packed in their bags for lunch. There were kids riddled with head lice, kids who could barely read by the time they got to sixth class, and kids who were already smoking cigarettes before they had hit a double-digit birthday. There were kids behaving in profoundly concerning ways that I now understand are reflective of serious abuse and behavioural issues were abound. Teachers wouldn’t make a fuss, covertly pulling these kids aside for conversations at lunch time or when the bell rang at home time. But these were recurring issues that I certainly never saw resolved. I saw very few of these children get any help – with teachers instead turning their focus to the kids who they felt they could help. I’m honestly not sure how many of these children have made it to their 30th birthday, but I have bumped into some of them in the city centre, in a heap on the ground strung out on heroin or begging for money to stay in a hostel. These people were once children. I sat beside them on those tiny little colourful wooden chairs in my classrooms in Kilmore. Every time I see those chairs as an adult, I find myself a bit shook by how small they are and how small we all must have been back then.
Many of the children in question were in families with relatives and guardians in and out of prison, where their caregivers were suffering with addiction. These people were not in a position to be raising children, never mind engaging with the school about the behavioural issues their kids were displaying.
A skewed sense of normality
When I look back on my time in primary school, there were incomprehensible tragedies endured within the school community. A girl in the senior infants class above me was murdered by her dad. When I got a bit older, there was a party in one of my classmate’s houses where someone was refused entry, so they returned with a gun. This resulted in the senseless murder of a young mother, who had previously been a student at the secondary school that shared a grounds with my primary school. She was a young woman, who lived very close to the school before her murder. Her death had a chilling impact on the community at large, and I’m certain it’s something people are still very affected by. I do not bring these stories up gratuitously, but rather, because I don’t have any recollection of these scenarios being formally addressed by the school. Nobody ever stepped in and said: “This is not normal.”
People have always faced significant trauma in areas like Coolock, where everyone knows each other. Yet, the mental health resources are among the worst in the country. This community bears witness to regular instances of extreme physical violence, murder, and events that would leave towns in the rest of Ireland reeling. People in Coolock must always move on as if nothing has happened. We are told: “This is normal.”
In secondary school, I’d sit in my class at 8.30am listening to girls telling me stories of violent feuds from the night before. “Yeah, a guy got shot in his van and he had to get out and run down to the petrol station to ring an ambulance. He was bleeding the whole way up the Malahide Road. Then I heard that someone went into the halting site and slit all the dog's throats,” this girl said, casually shrugging it all off. Immediately after, I watched her pull her maths book out of her bag to try and catch up with the homework she didn’t do the night before so she wouldn’t get another note in her school journal and end up in detention on Friday. Move on. “This is normal”.
As I got older, the cruelty, violence and harm that I witnessed only got worse and worse. While I want to convey just how much people in Coolock are carrying with them every day, on top of the other problems they face like everyone else in the country, I’m mindful of co-opting anybody else’s stories or trauma, or indeed, just incriminating anybody. It took a long time for me to really break out of the bubble I had been living in to realise that most people don’t live their lives like this, under a constant and enormous amount of stress. I left secondary school and went to UCD. If my memory is correct, there was just one other girl in my base class (upwards of 30 students) who went to university besides me. As far as I’m aware, she left her course. While she was studying, her brother was killed in a hit and run while he was outside jogging, which I’m sure derailed whatever chance she had at making it through the rest of her degree. The car was abandoned by his killer and burnt out at the top of my road.
Meanwhile, when I was starting meeting people in college, I realised there was a world of people out there whose lives were entirely untouched and unaffected by heroin use, poverty-induced mental health issues, or insecurity related to housing.
Issues like sexual assault, domestic violence, suicide and crime affect people in every corner of this country. Resources are difficult to access everywhere – but in Coolock, the cards truly are stacked against people and everyone’s left fighting for scraps when it comes to the limited resources on offer.
What I have painted so far is a very bleak depiction of Coolock. It’s ugly, but it is accurate. With that said, it would be negligent to ignore the resilience of the people I have grown up with. Misery comes in bucketloads, but people maintain their wit and sense of humour. It just takes a stroll through Northside Shopping Centre and a few chats with the workers in the shops to see that. Within the chaos, there is so much hope. There is joy. People have so much love for their family and friends. They look after each other to the extent that they can. People are proud of themselves, their work, their crafts, and what they bring to the table.
There is truly nowhere in the world I love more than Coolock on a sunny day. There’s nothing like it. As frustrated and afraid as I feel about where we are going to end up, I feel extremely protective over Coolock and the people that inhabit it. I never had the words to describe the complexity of my relationship with Coolock, my home, until I saw that scene in The Last Black Man in San Francisco where Jimmie Fails’ character says: “You don’t get to hate San Francisco. You don’t get to hate it unless you love it.”
The same Stardust Memorial Park that serves as a stark reminder of our lot in life, is simultaneously home to some of my favourite, most simple memories. I spent many cloudy days there with my grandad feeding the ducks as a child (before we were taught not to carb load wild animals), and as many sunny days down in the banks of the stream catching minnows and bees in jam jars with my cousins, enjoying unsupervised freedom at its purest.
Funnily enough, the Memorial Park was the first place I ever witnessed a real sense of “community” as a child, when I saw groups of families gathered in the highly impractical, concrete 5-a-side pitch one summer. People came together to hold a party in public, blaring somebody’s Ministry of Sound CD and cracking open cold bottles of Budweiser. I remember seeing topless sunburnt men, and copper-skinned women in boob tubes, smiling their heads off on a sunny day and sharing contagious laughter while kids piled on one another in a bouncy castle – not a care in the world. Footlong rats and trolleys in the river aside, it’s a beautiful park and in recent years, there has been a clear effort to maintain its upkeep. So I guess, change is possible.
The need for intervention
When I first spoke about parks earlier, it might have seemed unrelated to the current crisis Coolock faces. I see these things as very interconnected. We have two complex issues where meaningless, short-term bandaid solutions have been applied to gaping wounds that exist within the community. The Government never wants to go to the core of these issues because it requires a level of long-term thinking that isn’t conducive to the short-term profits and the benefits they can reap by doing the wrong thing.
Crime, vandalism, and destructive behaviour within the community existed before the recession, and they have only been intensified by wilful neglect and austerity. Nobody cared before this, but now that we have all eyes on Coolock, can we accept that at a certain point, a real, meaningful intervention is needed? You cannot blindly throw gardaí at this problem, allowing them to unleash extreme force on people without expecting this to push them further into the hands of the predatory far right ringleaders maliciously centring themselves in these issues.
This isn’t just Coolock’s problem. As long as the Government continues to obliterate public services, refuse to build affordable and social housing in order to placate vulture funds and landlords, we are going to continue to see people lashing out.
There are decades and decades of frustration and anger in communities like Coolock and people have reached breaking point. Injustice, suffering, uncertainty, fear, and poverty ring in our ears constantly like tinnitus that has gotten to be too much. I can see why people are compelled to destroy something and express their frustrations outwardly as violence. Materially, so much has been taken away from the people of Coolock. More abstractly, they have been denied so many opportunities afforded to others around the country. How can people be continuously expected to regulate themselves under these conditions?
We have all been subjected to institutional violence for too long and nobody can live under these conditions forever. It is unfortunate that we cannot aim this in the right direction, however. The people who should pay for what they have done to the people of Coolock, Tallaght, Ballyfermot, Finglas, Crumlin, the North Inner City, and every other working class community in Ireland are never going to face the music when we allow ourselves to fall victim to the misinformation spread by right wing agitators preying on our communities.
What is the end goal?
If you’re finding yourself agreeing with the far right voices that are getting louder across our communities, I implore you to please ask more questions. Where is this information coming from? What is it motivated by? Will this really solve the issues we are facing? Coolock has been facing all of these issues for generations. Our problems existed long before the conflicts that are driving refugees to Ireland for safety and a better life. If we continue down this path, our problems will continue to exist for much longer again.
Let’s say people are successful in this campaign of hatred and violence towards refugees. Then what? Chances are, you’re next on the list of the far right’s targets. If the strictest possible border restrictions are put in place to block any further international protection applicants from entering the country, what happens next? In a socially and economically conservative political environment, it’s all too easy for these same far right political figures to turn on you next. It’s easy to blame problems on people in social housing, people suffering with addiction, single mothers, and the unhoused.
Think about the rhetoric knocking around right now about migrants and refugees that has been pushed and perpetuated by the far right:
“They come here, get given free houses, and sit on social welfare for the rest of their lives doing nothing.”
“The state hands everything to them, while the rest of us have to get up and go to work everyday.”
“Why should they get free houses while the rest of us have to work? They contribute nothing to society.”
“We’re treated as second class citizens in our own country, while others get free medical cards, children’s allowance, and all the benefits you can think of.”
“They’re having more kids just to get a house off the Government.”
Not too long ago, these are the exact same things that well off people in Dublin would say about those living in Coolock, or Cabra, or Blanchardstown, or Tallaght, or any other disadvantaged area you can think of. PR campaigns pushed by the Government over the last few decades have tried to plant seeds of resentment and discontent between us. We have always been told we should be suspicious of people from the flats, people on social welfare, people who have struggled to maintain employment.
This harmful, dehumanising rhetoric was never true when it was pointed at us, in Coolock. People have fought tooth and nail to get housing for themselves and their children on a housing list that is 20+ years long. We have always been told it’s easy for the working class to game the system, commit welfare fraud, and trick the Government into handing them everything in life. If it’s so easy, why don’t we see the white collar criminals in more affluent parts of the city doing this? Why don’t the people who gravitate towards corruption want anything to do with this, if it’s such an easy scam to pull off? If it was as easy to land a council house as people say it is for refugees or people on social welfare, every TD in the Dáil would be living in one. Regardless of how you feel about welfare fraud, just remember that it costs the exchequer a lot less than the blatant and brazen tax evasion we’ve witnessed from Big Tech and the giant consumer brands that are eroding Irish culture and furthering the housing crisis.
If you are skeptical of this rhetoric when it’s directed towards people in working class areas, you should be equally willing to question its legitimacy when directed towards migrants and refugees. The migrants and international protection applicants coming here have lost everything. They are often moving here without their families, without their friends, oftentimes even without the ability to communicate with locals if they don’t have a grasp on English by the time they get here.
The tools that have been used to oppress us for decades are being handed to us by the far right, and it’s our responsibility to not use them to beat down people who are more vulnerable than us. If you choose to punch down, congratulations. In the eyes of the far right and our Government, who’ve historically seen us as the lowest of the low, you’re a little bit taller than you were before – but you’re standing on someone else’s neck.
Refugees and the people of Coolock need the same thing: Empathy
We should not feel hopeless. There are things we can do to stop our grandparents’ problems from being our own grandchildren’s problems some day. Across Ireland, we have all hardened in light of our circumstances, but the only way we can move forward is with empathy. This applies both within Coolock, and in the context of immigration, as well as in Ireland more broadly.
Please remember that behind every single international protection application is a human being – it doesn’t matter whether in your eyes, they are an unvetted male or undeserving of our help. There are many, valid reasons why we often see single men arriving here in search of sanctuary – often taking extremely dangerous journeys that women and children aren’t surviving without being killed or sexually exploited. If you are worried about their ability to work and contribute to society economically, then turn your attention to the inhumane direct provision system that many essentially end up imprisoned in.
Do not let the far right dehumanise refugees and migrants any further because I promise you, there are many people outside of Coolock with their own prejudices and biases who see all of us in a similar way. To the people who are enforcing and upholding institutional violence, we’re all unvetted scroungers. We have far more in common with refugees fleeing war than we have in common with any millionaire or landlord TD.