Mar 31 2017
‘MY RETURN TO DUBLIN…’
Heraclitus of Ephesus was a great Philosopher who said that “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it Is not the same river and he Is not the same man”. This is how I felt when I returned to Dublin from living abroad. My parents house, where I grew up, seemed so much smaller than it was when I had last seen it. My younger siblings were all grown up and some of them even smoked openly in front of my parents. Our neighbours had all grown old.
It seemed as if I no longer fitted into a space I once occupied. I had outgrown that space. The room in which I slept in with my five older brothers for almost 20 years, now only contained one small single bed and a wardrobe, there was no longer any room at the Inn. My parents no longer spoke to me as a child, because to them, I was now an adult.Even our old dog barked and growled at me as if I was a stranger.
I stood at the gate of our house and in my minds eye saw so many of my childhood pals playing ‘Kick the Can’ and racing down the road with their Hoops while my sisters and their friends played ‘Piggy Beds’ and were singing with their ‘Skipping Ropes’. But now, there were no longer young children playing out on the road or even on a swing tied to a lamp-post.
Even the bus into town had changed, whatever happened to the Bus Conductor? ‘But where’s my change’ I asked the driver of the One Man Bus as a ticket spat out of strange looking machine. I found myself surrounded by strange looking non Dublin faces with even stranger sounding non Dublin accents. The sounds and smells of my Dublin had gone
And now I walk around Dublin with my camera at the ready, looking for anything of my past times here. Slowly but surely everything is fading into history. Whatever happened to all the cinemas that I once went to and where are all the young couples queueing up outside in anticipation of spending time together in a darkened place. Moore Street is a ‘Ghost Town’ from my mother’s past, where’s Misses Conway with the purple lip from Cabra West who always gave my mother better fruit than anyone else?
It’s sad to say that the heart of Dublin is torn assunder by modernity, it has become someone elses idea of what Dublin should be, it’s not my idea. And once again I feel that I no longer fit into a space I once did, once again I feel that there is ‘No Room at the Inn’. Now, I do like the idea of change but only the kind of change that we as Dubliner’s want, not something that’s dictated by those who have no loyalty to our heritage or memories.
So, it is in some way with a sad heart that I have to agree with Heraclitus of Ephesus and say that ‘Martin Coffey can never step into the same river twice…’