How Rentier Capitalism Is Destroying Dublin
Dublin is sold as a modern city that is home to the world's most dynamic industries – but for its residents, daily life is scarred by one of Europe's worst housing crises and rampant workplace precarity.
When I was a teenager, we used to build shacks. I grew up on the south side of the city, in a fairly nice suburb on the edge of a large industrial estate. There were pockets of scrap land, what are known as ‘brownfield’ or ‘greyfield’ sites, dotted about the landscape. They were behind hedges and fences, beside tram tracks and in between commercial buildings.
The one I remember best, where I spent much of my time age 14-17, was just beside the Luas lines, between Sandyford, Dundrum, and Kilmacud. A nothing place with no name we were aware of. It was covered in gently undulating scrub, accessible through a hole in the fence one of us had made with a pair of bolt cutters. A red Toyota appeared there once, stolen or abandoned. It was used for a shelter from the rain, slept in once or twice, and then it was gone.
It was there we built shacks, from pallets and lengths of chipboard. Once we levered an entire empty wooden shipping crate from a dump over the fence, nearly landing it on our heads in the process. These shacks each lasted a few weeks at most. They would inevitably be burned down some time in the night and we would find them after school, a pile of cinders and little more.
