FROM DESPAIR TO WHERE?

“Out of the total population of say Summerhill, Ballybough, Seán MacDermott Street areas, I’d say probably 75% are long-term unemployed,” community worker Paddy Malone explains from his base at 20 Summerhill Parade. There, with Fergus McCabe, he runs a drop-in centre for young people at risk. The centre’s facilities are minimal. There’s a television and one of those small home-style pool tables, and that’s about it.
In 1991 the population of Dublin’s Inner City was 76,112. This population has seen a steady, long-term decline, even though the population of Dublin as a whole has been steadily rising. Ironically, even during the boom period of the 1970’s, when Ireland had its largest population increase in recent times, the Inner City showed its biggest decline. In many other ways, the Inner City is exceptional. Two thirds of accommodation is rented there, in comparison to the one third rented in the rest of Dublin, and one quarter rented for Ireland as a whole.
There are more old people living in the Inner City; in a 1986 survey it was found that 33% were aged fifty or over, in comparison to 23% for the national average. 36% of births are outside marriage, compared to a 11% national average. In 1986, 43% of Inner City young people left school before the age of 15, compared to the national average of 29%. The picture for Third Level education is entirely bleak, as Paddy Malone points out. “To our recollection, over the last ten years, there’d be only one person who went onto Third Level education. And he doesn’t live in the area anymore.”
All the statistics are bleak when it comes to the Inner City. People there have a mortality rate which is 10% higher than the national average. Admissions from the area to ‘public beds’ in psychiatric hospitals are three times the national average.
Drugs are a particular menace. As the 1991 Religious Community And Social Justice report, prepared by Kieran McKeown for the Franciscan Friars, points out, “Between 1986 and 1988 an average of 16.9% of all Eastern Health Board (EHB) cases attending the Drug Treatment Centre came from the North Inner City of Dublin, even though only 5.4% of the population of the EHB area come from the North Inner City. In other words, the proportion of drug users from the North Inner City is three times higher than would be expected from its population size.”
For Paddy Malone the present drug problem in the Inner City is worse than the ‘epidemic’ of the early Eighties. He senses an air of disillusionment among the local population. They had fought the drug pushers for many years, with local groups such as Concerned Parents at the forefront of the struggle. By 1986/87, it had seemed that things were under control. However from 1990 on a far worse problem has arisen. Paddy Malone strongly believes that had the Gardaí/authorities acted early enough, the crisis could have been averted. “The attitude of the authorities is, it’s in this area, it’s contained, it isn’t spreading, let’s keep it there,” he states. He goes on to point out that, “One of the most serious sides of what’s going on is that there’s far younger age groups becoming involved because of the free availability of the stuff. It’s much more readily available now than it was in the eighties . . . Naturally, a lot of people will say, why don’t they get up off their fuckin’ arses and do something. Anytime the people took action themselves, you know they were either radicals, or they were criminals or they were vigilantes or whatever.”
Drugs are an escape. An escape from the despair of unemployment and the almost total lack of recreational facilities and opportunities for self-development. As Paul Hansard puts it: “People in this area . . . their grandfathers didn’t work, their fathers didn’t work, they don’t work. Not because of choice, but because there’s no work. It’s a total write-off by society. And that’s why they turn to crime.”
About the only time the Inner City gets mentioned in the media these days is in relation to crime. The evening papers, particularly, seem to thrive on crime time news. Their front page headlines loom large, screaming out about muggings and robberies. Reading all these horror headlines it would be easy to assume that practically everyone in the area is a criminal. In fact, less than two in a hundred people within the Inner City are involved in crime.
The 1991 crime rate for the Inner City population is more than twice that of the Dublin Metropolitan Area and four times the national average. A 1984 report on crime in Dublin, summarised its findings in relation to the characteristics of those arrested by stating that, “A syndrome of early school leaving that culminates in unemployment, emerges as a characteristic of young men coming to the attention of the Gardaí and the courts. By the late teens all have left school, most are unemployed. Of those over seventeen, the generalisation can be made that eight out of every ten male individuals about whom a decision must be made within the criminal justice system are unemployed at the point of the initial decision making . . . But the most troublesome implications of the socio-economic situation of those before the criminal justice system is not their marginal labour force status, it is the preponderance of that population that are in the years just before adulthood. This was most pronounced for those residents in the Inner City, more than a third of whom were in the four-year interval of 17-20. It is to that age group that the criminal justice system is least prepared to make a response.”
In 1978 a brief survey – little or no historical data is available on Inner City living conditions, lifestyles, etc. – of fifty, 12-16 year-old male offenders from the Seán MacDermott Street–Summerhill area was carried out. It found that 98% were unemployed. That 80% of their parents were unemployed. That none of them were going to school and that 70% of them could neither read not write. For almost 70%, their fathers had been in prison, with over 90% of them having one or more of their brothers in gaol. These young teenagers had very little hope for the future; 94% of them felt that they would end up in prison too. In 1993, little has changed.
Society has created economic prisons out of the Inner City. The much ballyhooed re-development of the area seems to be attempting to solve the problem by moving the native population out into suburban reservations. The Docks and other office developments and the many up-market housing/flat complexes are certainly not designed for those with poor education and negligible incomes. In fact, looking at things from a broad, long-term perspective it would be easy to surmise that what is happening is a clearing out and cleaning up of the human ‘waste’ of the Inner City, so that tourists may have a better/safer time, and so that yuppies can live closer to their jobs and their night life.
When talking to Paddy Malone, you sense an element of world weariness about him. That’s not surprising, considering the enormous problems he faces every day, as he tries to keep young people in Summerhill out of trouble. But more than anything, you sense from him a quiet determination to make the best of whatever the situation is. He is ultimately hopeful, however, believing that the community is beginning to develop a better sense of awareness of the many problems which faces it.
New groups are being formed, and he is particularly excited about a recently established umbrella group called ICON (Inner City Organisation Networks), whose objective is to co-ordinate the activities of education, unemployment, workshop, women, tenant, community, youth worker and community worker groups, etc.
“The whole idea is to try and get some sort of centralised approach to getting more structured ways of developing the community, rather than the haphazard way it has been going on over the years,” he explains. “I would be very hopeful, if the ICON organisation . . . If we get our act together, as we have up to now and continue that way. Certainly some of the feedback from the Departments we’ve met has been positive. And the Corporation have even included an area plan in their own application. Which is a positive sign, because no way would they have done that sort of thing years ago.”