The following is an essay extracted from Sunday Miscellany, one of the books shortlisted for The Journal Best Irish Published Book of the Year category in this year’s An Post Irish Book Awards. You can vote for all your favourite books from this year here.  

Living in a Ghost City by Aoife Barry

When my two younger sisters were in Dublin recently for a brief visit, I clicked into older-sister mode. They booked an aparthotel in the city centre, and after 14 years living in the capital I proudly gave them some local tips. On their final day, we ate brunch in a restaurant where the high ceilings made it feel like we were in a loud and buzzing festival tent. Though the price of a chai latte made me splutter, it was a relief to be in such an energetic place not so long after Covid had kept the city quiet.

When we headed back to their accommodation, I led the way up the newly pedestrianised
Capel Street, now wide and welcoming to wanderers like us. But when I went to turn right, my siblings steered left, and I realised I was a clueless older sister after all – I hadn’t even known the hotel they were staying in existed.

We entered a neat new-build that I’d never registered before, one of the many fresh hotels which have appeared around town over the past few years. It felt like this one had been dropped on the spot overnight, fully formed and with guests inside. I now had to recalibrate my sense of that part of the northside, to replace what I once knew with this newcomer and its boutique rooms, floor-to-ceiling windows and tasteful signage.

The hotel was pretty, but I felt like we could have been anywhere in Europe – the only sign we were in Dublin was the white textured facade of the Hacienda pub across the street, an institution that’s weathered many economic storms.

A few months before, I’d gone for a drink with a colleague in the Liberties. On our way up Francis Street afterwards, we shared an unexpected moment of confusion in the summer dusk. At the top of the street was a grey building, with mid-century furniture and soft lighting visible beyond its large windows.

I couldn’t locate it on my mental map of Dublin, yet I knew I’d been in that spot many times before.

And indeed I had, because until a few years ago this new aparthotel was the Tivoli, a long-running venue that, by the time I started frequenting it, wore an air of impending dereliction. The floors were sticky with old beer spills, its outer walls a millefeuille of graffiti.

I went to cinema screenings and DJ sets there, and enjoyed a glittering, bombastic gig by the musician Perfume Genius, accompanied by a much-missed friend who has since gone back to Australia.

Now, this place full of memories had been erased. I wondered if, while tucked up in their
cosy hotel beds, some of the visitors in this replacement building would hear ghostly beats pulsing in their sleepy ears.

The clanging alarms telling me Dublin is changing keep coming my way. Swiping through Instagram stories one idle evening, I saw a photograph on a friend’s account that made me wince. It was of the place I’d known as Crawdaddy, a venue in an old train station dating back to 1859, on Harcourt Street.

As a young music journalist, I interviewed bands at Crawdaddy; as a fan, I watched beloved acts and up-and-comers play in the tiny venue. It held a special meaning for me as, when I was 18, I brought my younger brother there to see the Irish band JJ72 play.

While I’d felt very grown-up bringing him on my own to a strange city, I was so naive that we stayed in an airport hotel, an expensive thirty-minute taxi ride from the venue.

Now, instead of gig posters, on the front of Crawdaddy was a sign announcing the imminent arrival of a Pret A Manger café. And next door to the former Crawdaddy, what used to be the Tripod venue is being advertised for rent under the name Station Building Two. Soon, the feet of office workers will stroll over a former dance floor.

You might say don’t get too attached to bricks and mortar, but locations where culture blossomed will always remain meaningful to the people who used them – because they understand that the ‘value’ of buildings isn’t just something to be expressed in euro signs. Stumbling across a gig venue only to realise it has been replaced feels like a sledgehammer has obliterated the energy and art once created behind its doors.

I know my peers and I are not the first or last generation to watch places we loved disintegrate, left alive only in photographs and memories – but it doesn’t mean the changes don’t hurt.

I know, too, that the new hotels will provide memories to the people who stay there, and I hope they find their own treasured spots as they explore the city.

Time will continue to peel back and add layers to the city where I live – but there will always be, for me, a ghost version of the capital, hovering just above the newly constructed bedrooms and foyers, filled with dance floors and stages that I will never see again.