Misneach, Dóchas, na Tobraichean agus an Portach Móna
- an amorphous reflection on Five White Women Walking Around Ireland (or parts of it) Together.
I.
It starts with an empty field
A misnomer
Overflowing with ideas, discussions, drawings from architects, reports, more discussion, planning applications, dissent, drawn out across time, across space, and the land grows long sheaves of grass now and a field flourishes in this liminal duration of waiting for the shopping centre that never appeared.
Good for the wildlife, the biodiversity
Good to have empty spaces in the environs of the urban
Not so good for the people on the housing waiting lists
Not so good for the children across the road looking out from their hotel room windows.
It starts with an empty field, filed away now on a city planners desk overflowing with reports of regeneration and consultative forums while just there at the corner a private student accommodation development managed to be zoned, planned, built and opened, along with a Lidl.
Managed to become, imagined into existence within this neo-liberal model of accommodation to the highest bidder, whether necessary or viable within this local biosphere.
It begins with an empty field (continuing the misnomer)
No space is empty
Where sheaves of long grass wave over on the diagonal to the Travel Lodge converted where families raise their children in spaces designed for overnight stays, adjacent to the airport for convenience.
In the window a child’s play kitchen peeks over the ledge, pink, wooden
Holding space for childhood in the overnight spaces where the owner of the kitchen continues to grow up.
On the table as we speak of walking, an array of handmade badges shines up at us
Red, black, white and green
We’ll each carry a handful back to our own neighbourhoods for distribution and wear them in Solidarity with the people of Palestine, comforting myself with the gesture, while another plane lands in Shannon airport laden with munitions destined to kill them.
Who am I to speak on this
A mere walker, walking in the mode of an observer, an outsider, perhaps even an intruder on the private spaces visible from the public paths we walk upon.
I’ve been struggling with meaning
Wrestling with grief
Everything marked now by the time before and the time after
Death.
Looping in and out of how to be useful with what I’m witnessing on my phone
Palpable anger, tears for the kin across the sea I’ve never met, for the kin here struggling to meet each day far away from their loved ones on the precipice of annihilation.
How can I even be writing that in 2025.
How is the world so different than the one we imagined together, how can never again become selective, the world watching live a genocide, no longer debatable, preventable with the political will.
I’m okay with the simplistic when the narrative of “it’s complicated” is killing people every day.
Grappling through the cognitive and emotional dissonance of daily life continuing between broadcast horrors and
More death.
Futility burns away with the sun
I try to do something useful everyday, even if it’s miniscule.
I buy another eSim.
I struggle with rage, with the worry of self righteousness. I demonstrate anyway.
Boycott
Like our ancestors taught us to.
Every action no matter how small guards against nihilism
I know it’s not enough.
From the play kitchen in the hotel window, there’s a road that curves around to the right
Swooshing, in my mind it swooshes, it always has
Swooshes around to the right
Another empty field, where once a child came in to do a workshop sooty because there’d been a fire there the night before, not the child’s home but adjacent, the soot seeped through and in the child came sooted from the experience, the child still came.
Now grass covers all the space
No shadow of the blocks remains
Above ground anyway
Anyway above ground
Further down the new builds beckon with front gardens thriving with personally selected foliage, carefully chosen plants, accessories that speak to individualisation of space, making one's place, one's own, each in their own way.
Wild Cherry
Native to Eurasia
All parts toxic but for the ripened fruit
Almost Global in its habitation from Morocco in the South to the East in Northern Iran
And in Ballymun this documented tree stands tall now, almost two decades on from planting
Stories of their genesis still readable, in part anyway
Telling of a past arrival to this land of hope and comfort and the greater hope still of this marked time when planted saplings intended another spring forth for this community
Words read now from their worldview then echo their origins
Intentions meeting across time in this
The present moment
Though the document connecting the planters of the trees with the trees themselves is lost in the miasma of the paperwork of regeneration
Still, some remain adjacent to the site.
Can yet be read, are, may yet be
Hope remains.
Dóchas
(we’ll pass that later on).
Somebody was born
Somebody died
A government ended
Another was elected
The genocide continued, almost unabated
More than one of these things happened in the same timeframe, in different places across the planet as we walked one foot in front of the other in a globalised world of everything happening at the same time.
A Young Woman on horseback, inverting through art the traditional display of colonial soldiers
She offers an alternative role model for the children passing her on their way to school
Misneach set solid on the main road in correlation and in defiance.
II.
Slugs in a bucket
Soaked now in cheap beer
Fill the container
They’ll lap it up and leave the plants alone
We walk outside and beyond the continuous embedded urgencies of post capitalism
Yet we remain within
At the sign on Infirmary Road, Dublin 7 we begin
Opposite the Phoenix Park (which is actually in Dublin 8)
North Circular Road stretches out in front
Tall trees, big houses, mostly flats now.
Looking South into Stoneybatter I misrepresent the location of my great Uncle’s pig farm
He did live there, but kept the pigs somewhere else
Grandmothers feature heavily in our conversation
Walking present - walking passed on through Phibsborough
The Dóchas women's prison in front of Mountjoy Gaol for men and opposite the Mater Misericordiae Hospital now takes up an entire block stretching right around like an island onto itself
My Mother died there, my aunt too four years before, as we pass I reach for something other to think about and find a house towards the intersection with Dorset Street with model ships of the Spanish Armada in the garden, I don’t know why
In the silence I think about
Public space
Public time
And remember that a scientist artist once told me that there is no
Time
It’s a concept
There is however duration.
I can’t find anything to buy in the Charity shop, and I feel guilty, there’s some lovely arm chairs but we are only about one third the way through our walk so that’s not a goer.
She shows me a portrait of James Connolly and I consider buying it, but what will I do with it if I do
We continue
On down Portland Row, the Boundary Wall to the right, dividing the Irish Financial Services Centre from the Community
They never, to my knowledge, got the jobs they were promised
Under the train bridge passed the Boxing Club
The local shop where they took the posters for the Community Festivals closed now on the triangle, another version opened up further down where we stop to buy a sandwich.
It’s all meat so I don’t bother.
So far I’ve bought nothing.
The remnants of the old Crane crossing Sheriff Street Upper looms above us as we cross over
Echoes of Dock Workers and tertiary trades
The Traders
The Weavers connecting both sides of the city
Rows and rows of women sewing in factories
Walking all the day along the newly fashioned Royal Canal Greenway we pass Luke Kelly’s severed head, more a likeness than the diddly-I version on the South side but still a strange choice to put into the north inner city
I can see why it was vandalised
We are about to cross over, a monumental action in Dublin city terms
From the North side to the South
I can’t go on
I’ll go on
It’s an unusual route heading via Misery Hill where Robert Emmet’s associates were hung, and on to the landscaped contemporary Grand Canal Square where we stop for sandwiches acquainting ourselves with the multitude of starlings giving the seagulls a run for their money
From Royal to Grand
We’ve crossed over now.
Someone was born
Someone did died
I stop a moment at the place of TT’s departure
In the almost silence of the dip in the Canal below the road.
Up along Adelaide Road, passed the Eye and Ear across from the office block I did the industrial cleaning in, good money and flexible timewise.
The for fuck sake of another hoarding around a previously loved site of collective gathering
A ‘We Work’ Office building
A whole building
Empty
No sign of life
But they are earning more leaving the building idle than if it was actually occupied
It’s not zoned for accommodation so it wouldn’t change the numbers on the housing list but it’s all interconnected with the Vulture Funds and the REITs.
For fuck sake
The whole city could be a map of FFS
South Circular road mirrors North
Tall trees, big houses mostly flats
Oldschool
We loop back through Islandbridge where my siblíní went to school
Cross over the Liffey and climb into the Phoenix Park
Arriving back to the sign on Infirmary Road, another mark of our colonial almost past
Its boundary wall matching that of the enclosed park.
At her kitchen table we drink tea (again) and plan another walk as an alternate O’Devaney Gardens springs up behind.
Legs tired now, our chat meanderings beyond the practical
Walking offers another form of communication to emerge and I note to myself the privilege of freedom of movement as we each depart
Returning to where we travelled from this morning
Stretching our temporary collective into the singular once more.
When will we five meet again.
III.
I’ve been wanting to find a Spider Plant since my Mother died
In Ennistymon, as we sip coffee, she hands me a clump
Taken from the plant flourishing in the window of The Cheese Press
Nodules edging off the stalk, perfect as a ‘slip’ wrapped in a paper towel for transportation back to the urban from which I’ve travelled by train that morning
Take a slip off that and put it in water
Let it germinate
In the light
Watch the roots begin to edge out from the centre
When they look stoic enough, plant it in the soil.
Black lamb, lamb of God, held in his arms
He walks the aisle telling us stories
That Brigid was made a Bishop by accident, the one who said the prayers over her in conference was suffering with dementia
This is other than what was taught in school
Her cloak placed on the field in agreement with the farmer that he would bequeath her land equal to its circumference, it grew
And grew
And continued growing until it covered land vast enough for her to raise her convent
“All were welcome at her door, no one was turned away”
Born as she was on the crossing point between the land and the homestead
On the threshold.
He’s borrowed this black lamb from the local petting farm, welcoming spring as a Pagan might have inside this bastion of catholicism on the fringes of the South West coast.
On up the road, a stone’s throw only, passed the Rock Shop and around the bend, her grotto is falling down with relics and remembrances placed careful within the cave from which we draw her blessed water.
Bridgid’s Well, Liscannor, Co Clare
Where the islanders would travel to annually and the Travellers made sure that it was tended to, cared for, remained.
Someone has placed a photograph of Sinéad. Sinéad with her son Shane, embracing wholeness together in the dim netherworld where Christianity meets the pre Celt meets the Tuath meets the Good People revered and heeded still, marked by scrags of rags tied carefully on branches just above the opening of the well. Bridgid Goddess, Brigid Saint, Brigid nun, Brigid advocate for social justice, for class equality, Brigid leader, Brigid warrier, Brigid bridge builder and inbetweener
Irish, International, Universal, three in one.
The flood had come and they’d been without electricity and water for days, we were lucky on our arrival that most homes had been restored by then
Private space and public place opened to allow us in to learn how to make Bridgid’s Crosses, a collective action in a small town knitted together by artists, farmers, publicans and hoteliers.
Later that evening a tribe gathers with their children to process from the Community Centre to the town square.
The Morrigan meets Bridgid
Samhain carries the light within the darkness and lets it go to Imbolg as the children
“Sing a song to Brigid
Bridgid brings the Spring
…
She loved the poor the sick and the sore
She helped them on their way”
There’s a problem with the wool
We’re exporting it raw and importing it refined for want of a machine
A framework we once had access to in our homes
We are Burren walking within private land held sacred by the custodian from the Netherlands
He provides walking sticks carefully cut to support the walkers on his land
Tending to the trekkers who meander well marked pathways across ancient stone chiseled by rain, by wind, by ice ages and ages ago
Another Faerie Tree aside a stream, rags dip with the ebb and flow of the weather into the water below, stones slippy, the branches offer a means to steady
Temporarily
I’m slower this day than anyone else
I can’t help it. I can’t go any faster
At the opening we stop together, separated by the mini ravines between the rocks
Sit sipping water taking in the vista
We’ve climbed
We’ve climbed without noticing the height
Other than the twinges in my knees
A phone call shifts the energy and we continue on emitting solidarity without recourse to any practical action we can offer
We continue
Together along the grey-white ancient rock
Except I am slower this day.
I can’t help it.
Along the path ahead they stand talking and
It feels nice to be waited for.
There’s a paradox to walking in a group especially one framed within a project about walking that we are together, and we are together, but at the same time each one of us is on their own, with their own thoughts, their own observations, some of us recognise the terrain, some of us have never been here before, some of us will never be here after. We share this duration. We share only this
The present moment.
IV.
We meet in the Organic cafe and shuffle in around a table watching the rain
It’s bucketing and we wonder if we’ll get to walk at all
She buys us bread, a loaf each and we sip our coffee waiting.
One of our party of walkers can’t walk today, we observe her absence and miss her presence
In the castle garden I send a photograph of the crocuses blooming neath a tree, as we pass by the moat surrounding the family house
The family castle.
Below the bailey, Brendan’s Well is nestled in a modernised enclosure, nothing of the tiered offerings of Liscannor here, but it’s easy to climb into
I dip my hands anyway, anyway I dip my hands and wipe my face with the water.
Oak
Divided into Old World and New World clades
(Though clades is not a word I’m familiar with really, and the Oak Tree holds an entirely different history when framed within Mythology, another kind of history )
A keystone species into the bark of which a child was placed as a blessing
Auspiciously names Ériu
More than eight hundred years old connecting a pre colonial past within our present moment
Ironically walled inside still occupied land framed as a castle, where people pay to walk inside and where a giant telescope facilitated the first encounter with the Spiral Nebula adjacent to these spirally arranging leaves.
Clann for Clan
Through the weavering branches of this magnificent tree I see
A family flag fly from the turret
Still
What exactly happened in 1922
Somewhere on site is an unmarked grave where three young men were shot during the Civil War
To serve as a warning to other young men
IRA men who were murdered “to set an example, to be made an example of”
Shot by their own allegedly for some petty theft
Deartháir against Brother
I wonder as we walk this enclosed land noting uprooted trees from the storm if they won’t resurrect themselves, show themselves now like the church on Inis Oírr
Like the Bog bodies risen, preserved in time and now on display in the National Museum
Is that how they expected their life to be remembered
Leaving Birr, we arrive by car to the bog
Deserted by Bord na Mona their traces remain, reframed by artists taking both inspiration from the landscape and their leftovers to make their work
Three triangles made of discarded railway tracks offer a vista
Steel feet rise up into the sky dangling steel leaves with bases playable to create music in this space
An old train lobs across an embankment shaped into a hillside following the journey to take the peat out, a gathering of upturned dead trees creates a sort of natural maze, stone upon stone forms a tiny pyramid which she climbs upon to survey the horizon
The most beautiful aspect remains the landscape itself
Hedges and hunks of trees wildly wild either side of the path, a stretch of actual bog that I want to put my feet into but don’t
If it was just the people, the local people gathering the turf would there be a problem
I ask, naive in my urbanism
No, no is the simple answer, it was when we extracted it on masse that it became an issue
She answers and tells us about the town now decimated by the loss of the industry, the jobs, the work removed wholescale
The vision of sculptures morphs into a type of natural art washing as we approach a clearing with a Thomas the Tank Engine ride for children
Roots of a tree set onto a large stone named The Celtic Knot.
We walk towards the light
Individually and collectively
A beam so bright we think we must be walking towards something other
We walk towards the light
Arriving into dusk.
V.
It ends with an empty field
It’s difficult to capture nothing
He tells me, but to me it’s absolutely full
Like a film layered upon a film upon a film
Translucent history moves across this space as the children of the British soldiers intersect with the children moved into Keogh Square with the children scared of going to school in Goldenbridge with the children climbing the stairs in St. Michael’s Estate when the lifts were broken with the children today crossing the X, the desire path across this empty space, on their way to The CORE.
Towards the main road the empty halting site is overgrown and no one can say where the Travellers who stayed there once have gone, except maybe they moved up to Labre Park, a site of another regeneration process going on twenty five years.
Don’t just call it a field, she tells me
This is St. Michael’s Estate, this was people’s homes
But now not even the development ever pending is called St. Michael’s
Reframed as the Emmet Road Development, a mixture of social and affordable rentals with the piece de resistance a commercial shopping unit (yet to be designated) underneath the apartments, the peoples homes.
In the graveyard we perambulate between the old and the new
Etched words remaining visible across time, the weathering effect perhaps diminished by the protection of the trees
Lamb of Gods carved into the joining depicting the belief system of the deceased
The Buzzard doesn’t show her face today, but has not yet flown away
This is the part of the walk where we witness “Regeneration” in an urban context
It ends with an empty field about to be hoarded up, the remnants of St. Michael’s Estate exposed beneath a couple of feet of topsoil about to be turned, about to be, nearly, almost, soon to be for almost twenty three years.
Further along and across the canal the epic buildings of Dolphin House stand firm in their depopulation
Not all
Some are lived in and beautiful and home families on the precipice of the new, access to homes drawn out beautifully for tiny little models to be built, but the process remains drawn out too
Children waiting
Watching out of their windows at the now derelict buildings where their friends used to live.
On we go, over Dolphin’s Barn bridge remembering the Ice Rink where some of us had our birthdays, passed where Eithne lived RIP
Dereliction all along the path opposite where the babies are being born
Our Special Cafe, my Mother’s and me, boarded up and emptied of the post swimming in Markievicz, (sometimes the Iveagh), Apple Tart and Cream
Passed my Montessori, closed, opposite a place in the D8 that’s actually still weaving
A weavers adjacent to Weavers Square, now an anomaly.
We don’t see St Teresa’s Gardens but it’s over there to the right behind the Lidl
Empty.
Somebody was born
Somebody died
And the genocide continues almost unabated
(More than one of these things happened as we walked)
As the road widens I remember a sign that read
EAT YOUR RENT
Facing on to the road, perhaps the beginning of all this ‘modernity’ was the widening of this road, the fire in the rubber factory a precursor, and all of us in school there had erasers for months
We were delighted
Not realising then that our desire paths between each other, how we navigated our small world together were being rubbed out.
I trace a path I’ve long walked before but everything is different now
We detour up Francis Street to see the sign
Kind of ridiculous but it epitomises something about all this
Stay City apartments Square where once Street and Graffiti artists painted murals that people travelled to see
An outdoor gallery now hemmed in by rubbish bins
The promised ‘artist space’ part of the Planning permission to replace like for like
Empty but for the cardboard boxes stacked inside
A memory of an epic night to launch Dublin Fringe Festival
In the past, the energy, the connection, the community marked now by the placing of the salvaged sign
TIVOLI
Hanging on the wall.
We enter the Grotto on Meath Street and note the sliver of light that will remain on Bernadette’s head if the two planned hotels get built. I wipe my face with the water the way I always do, always have since sitting here with my Granny and my aunties and my sister and my Mother
It’s the only Holy Well that I knew growing up.
On we go passed Robert Emmet’s last stand then down the hill and through the newly fashioned park, open plan, no gates, no walls, no fences, up the back of the towering Apartos to where the oldest Pear Tree dwells between the concrete located tween the Digital Hub and Diageo adjacent to the derelict Rupert Guinness Hall, where we all loved performing and spectating in equal measure.
We turn up passed the filled in swimming pool, cobblestones underfoot
A sculpture made from reclaimed railway track embedded in a fashion unintended yet remains of a night when art sprang forth through the smogginess of eighties Dublin and I was brought to witness the colour seeping in
Cut through to Pimlico, along Taylor’s Lane sandwiched between School Street and Marrowbone Lane Flats
In front my
London Plane
A hybrid born in Spain or Southern France
Potentially in Vauxhall Gardens south of the river Thames
Deciduous
I can’t look up towards the flat where I lived with my Mother in case I cry
Instead I settle into the rage of grief and deflect and reflect on the little farm house being demolished to my left
It’s been there all my life under the shadow of my tree
Capitalism fused with Covid and we emerged into a place almost unrecognisable
Heights above us unreachable, casting shadows across communities
Our two up two downs
Our top floor fourth floor flat dwarfed now by modernity that
Uachtarán na hÉireann warns us to be careful of in art as in life.
Another empty Halting site at the back of Guinness’s no one can say where the Travellers who stayed there have gone now either
On up the filled in canal along the Luas line through the linear park newly built in the basin where barges once turned on their way back to Offaly, now an amphitheatre with a particularly steep slide she slides down as she did at Oliver Bond
Observing the regenerated Fatima as we pass
Photographs depicting commercial units in the downstairs windows
Unopened
Like The Spaceship (as the new Children’s Hospital is called)
Swarming the horizon as we cross Rialto Bridge
Unfinished, unbudgeted
Still
As we near the crossover point of return to St. Michael’s Estate, a woman with her dog stops to chat
Querying our choice to walk here
‘You could have found somewhere nicer
We’ve been on to the City Council to deal with it for years
But no…’
(The woman uses an unusual word beginning with D, I wish I’d written it down
It’s a word I understand the meaning of when she says it, although not everyday parlance)
Despot
Disheveled
Decrepit
Dilapidated
Dismal
Debauched
Despoiled perhaps
I don’t know this woman but I take it personally
We both live in Dublin 8 yet seem to exist in entirely different kinespheres, Universes even
It hurts my feelings
Already tired from the day walking
Already drained by this street level review of overwhelming change
A disparaging comment about my home feels like it’s about me
And I despair at the chasmic disparity between her class and mine
The blindspot that is classism rising like the new buildings matching the deprivation index in the same locations.
It can’t be a coincidence.
It ends with an empty field, and,
It remains a misnomer
Nothing is empty.
Even a void serves a gravitational function scientifically speaking.
From Holy Wells to unharvested bog land to urban sprawl
Tháinig misneach dom (I took courage)
In the democratising practice of walking this land together
Five walks - Five women - Five perspectives
Within and yet beyond on some ethereal level the reach of post capitalism when
It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of it
Somebody was born
And again,
Somebody died
And the genoicide continues, now completely unabated
In the miasma of this ritual practice, while walking alone together, there’s a distancing from the prevailing narratives of nihilism
The land speaks of a returning to a time we can no longer remember
The land speaks of return
Yet
Ye can never walk the same path twice
Something else is emerging, now, that’s all I know
It’s open ended
Tá dóchas agam
Ach
Continuous action is needed
It’s never over
We walk on, humans have been walking since before we could talk
A different kind of communication
Crossing by foot great land masses, when we can, when we have to
Walking forward into the unknown and,
Returning
Each with our own needs and our own intentions
I’m hoping that they can align collectively in time
For the good of all
But
There’s no glib way to bring this to a close.
References
https://libertiesdublin.ie/remembering-rosc/
https://offalyhistoryblog.com/2017/02/25/the-rosse-papers-in-birr-castle-archives/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI09WMkrZXs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prblm9sCLZo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g7DTPaCiks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfSnsogTM3E
https://youtu.be/7pnvJGfkB6k?si=Mlrhj_xmcTEJO_po
https://sites.google.com/view/project-repeat/home
https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/wool/reporter/irl
https://www.teagasc.ie/publications/2021/irish-wool-is-at-a-crossroads.php
https://eriu.eu/pages/farm-to-yarn?srsltid=AfmBOorxAXo8fdY-PqncksFSRD6ad1Ah1VocM2ChLEH-ycnCa9QO6tT-
https://trendeconomy.com/data/h2/Ireland/5107
https://connachttribune.ie/nearly-e100-million-worth-of-irish-wool-sold-by-retailers-is-imported/
http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/detail.aspx
https://data.pobal.ie/portal/apps/storymaps/stories/5cf638fb421a40778f5c2cfcd108abc3
https://archive.waterwaysireland.org/history-of-the-waterways/9/the-history-of-the-grand-canal
http://ait-place.ie/projects/st-james-linear-park/
https://humanorigins.si.edu/human-characteristics/walking-upright