TODAY MARKED THE reopening of the refurbished Clerys clock, a Dublin landmark in the centre of O’Connell St known to generations as a meeting place.
Speaking at today’s unveiling, Lord Mayor Caroline Conroy said that “it is a credit to the skilled craftspeople who have worked so hard on its renovation that Clerys has been restored with such painstaking care and respect for its past”.
Covered in an eye-catching veil of red velvet, the clock was still set to midday when it was unveiled at 12.15pm, prompting one keen-eyed spectator to exclaim “It’s slow!” to a chorus of laughter.
Horologist John Stokes, whose father Chris worked on the previous iteration of the same clock, told The Journal: “The quality in this clock is good enough for one hundred years if it’s maintained, but it does need to be maintained. People forget that it’s out there getting fairly hammered by the weather.
“You only realise how many people look at the clock once it’s stopped.”
A stopped clock seems an apt metaphor for Clerys department store, whose sudden closure in 2015 remains something of a precedent for concerns that have rumbled through Irish society in the years that followed.
The immediate dismissal of the 460 workers. The subsequent fight by workers to receive anything more than the statutory redundancy paid out by the State (Siptu eventually settled this dispute with Natrium in 2017). The loss of an institution that many thought of as an indelible landmark of Dublin.
Conversations around workers’ rights, the cultural privation faced by Ireland’s capital, an ever widening divide between the ideas of what and who Dublin should be for, have only intensified in the intervening years.
O’Connell St itself has been the subject of high-profile complaints in the last few months alone. Speaking in Dáil Éireann, Fine Gael TD Paul Kehoe described the capital city’s main thoroughfare as “ “full of druggies, crime, anti-social behaviour, robberies, take-aways and alcohol”.
To others, this criticism was seen not just as overblown and indelicate, but as missing the mark of the true problems that are plaguing Dublin – the lack of outlets for cultural and social activity, the inadequate housing supply, the glut of hotels and office space.
The plans for what will now be known as the Clerys Quarter include a large high-end retail department store, Flannels. Another major tenant will be H&M, whose flagship store exists no more than a 10 minute walk away on Dame St.
Sitting atop the new building will be the Clerys Rooftop Restaurant. The bistro will be owned by hospitality group PressUp, which already owns dozens of hotels, restaurants, bars and cinemas in the city.
While these ventures will open in late spring, the current foyer of the building is hosting an Clerys Archive exhibit, showcasing documents from the store’s history, including profit and loss sheets from 1916.
Historian Caitlin White, who curated the archive, offered the perspective that today’s concerns are not unique to this era: “I used to think that, but looking through the archives you can see that when it first opened in 1853, there was a lot of opposition to it.
“It was said that a monstrous store like this would put ordinary Irish stores out of business, that indigenous companies wouldn’t survive, so that kind of controversy has been part and parcel since 1853,” told The Journal.
White is right. We can’t suggest that Dublin was a perfect version of itself in 1853 when Clerys was founded, or in 1916 when it was destroyed in the Easter Rising, or in 1941, when Guiney’s bought the store out of receivership, or 1990, when the previous clock was installed.
And no clock, however well-refurbished, can set the hands of time in reverse.
What the commitment to maintaining the Clerys clock does tell us, however, is that there are evidently things about Dublin that we consider to be essential elements of the city’s authenticity and identity. Things worth keeping, things worth restoring, things worth the painstaking care, things without which Dublin becomes less Dublin.
The two-faced timepiece attached to what is perhaps Dublin’s most iconic storefront hangs over a new city once again. Minutes after its unveiling, its hands were wound to the correct time. It is Dublin itself that must not become a stopped clock.
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