Buses wind slowly through deserted streets, summer rain bouncing off the windows. Everything seems slower; everyone seems resigned to their lot; radios chirp with the voices of the discontented. Newspapers are filled with bad memories: dead babies, bank bailouts, property prices, shootings, water taxes. Are people sad here, or happy? How should I be? I left Dubai, a sprawling city of ambition, to come back to Dublin, even more sprawling, but with little ambition. Someone tells me that the Irish are not doers; that they write, or shout, or sing or moan, but they don’t do. I could see 56 lanes of traffic from the balcony of my apartment in Dubai; here there are two. Here is a small suburban cul-de-sac, almost noiseless at night. I see hedgehogs and foxes sometimes, as I lean out my childhood bedroom window smoking. The Irish in Dubai told me to keep my head down in Dublin. Don’t talk about money made or property bought, they said. The Irish don’t like it. I was gone for more than a decade: Dubai, Hong Kong, three years in South Korea before that, every summer for four in Israel during college. Any excuse to leave – and now I am back.
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I walk through the city, to parts I have never been before, streets I had never crossed: Infirmary Road, Morning Star Avenue, Empress Place and Mary Street Little. Hours spent walking and photographing, wary of strangers, my defences up, battered by the realities of this city. There was a safety in Dubai, a feeling of unreality. Dublin, in comparison, is very real, and its rough edges brush up against you as you venture through it. The newspapers seem unrelenting in their gloominess – welcome at first given the retardation of the Dubai press, but soon it becomes wearing. Are things that bad? Are we all screwed? Nothing in Dubai seemed ominous – everyone was making money, everyone was dining out; everyone was satisfied, at least superficially.
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