Imagining how the past can guide the future, by way of a flourishing social housing project born at the height of the Irish Civil War... For Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, listen to The Tenters by Henrietta McKervey above...
As spectator sports go, looking on while a man from Dublin city council climbs a ladder and unscrews a street sign from the front of a house doesn't sound like it would be up to much. But it’s unexpectedly moving to watch him carefully remove the hundred-year-old green and white enamel sign (one of the few remaining original Cló Gaelach signs, complete with distinctive Gaelic revival flourishes) from the wall.
He goes to stow it in his van. Wait! I say. It’s okay, he replies. Don’t worry! It’s only going to be restored. We’ll bring it back after. No, it’s not that, I say. Can I take a photo? He holds the sign up, his arms wide, the words Oscar Square in Irish and English captured between his hands. An angler showing off his catch.
When he’s gone, I take a second picture: the rectangle of grey, unpainted space now revealed on the white wall. This is the first time daylight has touched this small part of the façade in a hundred years.
A centenary is quite something for any estate. Where I live, in the Tenters - an area in Dublin 8 roughly the same size as Saint Stephen’s Green park - this centenary marks something else too: Ireland’s first ever tenant purchase scheme. The name comes from the area’s previous incarnation as a crucial part of the weaving industry; cloth was stretched by hand and strung out to dry on vast wooden frames. The word 'tenterhooks’ has the same origin.
Imagine, at the height of the Civil War, Dublin was building social housing. Making homes for working families. Creating opportunities for future generations.
Listen to more from Sunday Miscellany here.
