Welcome to the frontier-land
More and more, the places and the spaces we occupy feel like a frontier, with all the opportunity and lawlessness the frontier brings.
Often there were much stronger ties to those on the other side than those on your own. There were sizeable minorities, people who felt betrayed, unwanted and discounted, peopled denied a voice in the new dispensations. They languished in that liminal space that all frontiers become, hoping that somebody would notice and make things better.
…
The Clones Agricultural and Horse Show dominated the local farm and town calendar each September … The showgrounds at the edge of town straddled the border, and, when there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain in 1967, livestock entries had to be presented in their own jurisdictions, separated by a rope barrier.
— Hard Border: Walking Through a Century of Irish Partition, Darach MacDonald
Today, for the first time in several years, I drove into Dublin city on a weekday morning.
A family member had a hospital appointment at 9am on Monday, and we set off early, knowing that the 45-minute weekend drive would likely be at least twice that with the typical commuter traffic.
In the past, whether hyper-impatient about sitting in traffic or just hyper-afraid of being late for whatever it was I was traveling to, I might have set off shortly after 5 to get there at 6, congregating on the early city streets with milk delivery drivers and bakers and Indian men rolling up the shutters of tiny convenience stores.
Maybe, in the intervening years, I’ve become, at last, the holder of a more mature, more grounded mindset. Maybe I have a greater sense of faith or confidence. Or maybe it’s just the fact (selfish) that it was someone else’s appointment and therefore I did not have to bear the consequences of lateness. Maybe I’ve got lazy. Whatever it is, we took our chances with the rush hour and joined the motorway at 7am with the rest of the countless single-occupancy commuter cars and attractively liveried corporate vans heading for another day’s productive output in the city.
The hospital — a sprawling giant of a building, extended each decade for generations, with entrances on two streets a quarter of a mile apart — sits in an old part of Dublin. A hen’s race away is the place the media call “the north inner city”, a four-word label inflated with everything you might imagine from the world of lawlessness and fear.
The lampposts today are adorned with election posters as the campaigners seek what little power resides in the offices of local councils; one of the smiling faces is the Brazilian Deliveroo driver who became the poster-boy of the pro-immigration people — or maybe the anti-anti-immigration people, as there might be a subtle difference between those two cohorts — when he stopped a knife attack (by another immigrant) on young children on a similar weekday just a few months previously. Caio Benicio is now running for Fianna Fáil, the political party that has been slowly but steadily losing its grip on political power in Ireland. Benicio was quoted in a newspaper at the weekend, saying he knows some people are saying he’s exploiting the party, and others that the party is exploiting him. Such is life in modern Ireland, where someone always seems to be on the take.
Caio Benicio is far from the only “foreign” name on the election posters. Dublin, and the rest of Ireland, has become a sort of everywhere: the home of every global multinational corporation worth its salt; the only fully English-speaking country left in the European Union; the country that accepted so many Ukrainian refugees (more per capita than any other country in western Europe) that many hotels and guest houses around the country left tourism behind and became government institutional outposts, for a couple of summers at least.
As I sit writing these words, in a coffee shop in the middle of the city, a gentleman beside me — almost identical to me in every way: unshaven face, jeans, shirt, laptop, headphones, shoulder-bag — sits typing in Arabic on the WhatsApp desktop program. Across the way, four people sit at a long table, a woman and man in their 50s and two girls of around 20, soft-spoken, with hard to pin down accents. These four — parent-age and grown-up-children-age — give off none of the vibes of family. A business transaction of some sort is progressing, and something in the older woman’s choice of hair and clothes, something in the older man’s silent aloofness, something in the unspoiled attractiveness and tentativeness of the young women, suggest that it is a transaction that skirts the boundaries of legality.
There’s a line in a story by John Updike, “The Persistence of Desire”, where Clyde, the narrator, bumps into a former lover:
Clyde had never met [her husband], but having now seen Janet again, he felt he knew him well — a slight, literal fellow, to judge from the shallowness of the marks he had left on her.
Looking at these four people, that line springs to mind and I can’t help but wonder about the marks that might soon be left on these two young women as they move, suspectingly but powerless against the tide of situations and events, through their own unknown but relentlessly emerging world.
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