James Galvin

At last I have escaped from the chaos of Dublin’s south inner city. No more will I be lulled to sleep by the constant sound of rockets being fired at some guy’s head. I knew the place was a zoo from day one, but, with Halloween approaching, the area really lives up to its local nickname: “Beirut”.

I will miss my Cork Street pals - the insane security guard, the heroin dealer on the corner, and most of all - the toothless old man. The toothless old man walks into the Centra of Death with his bicycle. The insane security guard stops him and says no bicycles are allowed in the shop. The toothless guy replies: “But I have no teeth!”

I have to say though, there are plenty of characters this side of the canal. So far I have encountered an Elvisman, complete with 99 Micra plastered with stickers and slogans of the King. On the same road, I came across a middle-aged man driving along in traffic eating a kinder egg. Next thing he finished the chocolate, and started assembling the toy while booting along at 30mph.

At the moment I’m savouring the tranquility and enjoying my free wireless broadband, Irish Broadband 1meg it seems. Given their reputation, my expectations were very low, but I am pleased to see that not only is this connection working, it is working well. Certainly head and shoulders above Clearwire, who do things the American way - patriotically blocking your bittorrent. I’m not a downloader - I have neither the patience nor the inclination to download movies or anything but the odd mp3, but I have come to rely on bittorrent for legitimate uses; for example - the World of Warcraft updater, installers for programs like cygwin, and access to the occasional legal file which is only distributed via bittorrent.

This isn’t a major issue for me though, and having seen in the past how bittorrent can kill a network, I wouldn’t complain… assuming they made up for it in the other areas. Not the case - you get low bandwidth (1024/256 in theory, much less in practice), Clearwire is expensive (€40 per month), a long minimum contract of 12 months, and a low download cap (10gb). It is handy that it is not dependent on line of sight, but this just leads to high latency and packet loss making the product unsuitable for gaming or VOIP, even with a full signal. I have seen other Clearwire users in different areas with reasonably low and stable ping, but in my own experience, I could only barely manage World of Warcraft, which is playable even on 56k modem or with 800ms lag. I realise that it’s unfair to compare UnClearwire with fixed wireless… the only similar product in Ireland would be Irish Broadband’s disastrous RipoffWave, which I have had the displeasure of using in the past.

This Irish Broadband connection, on the other hand, is cheap and fast with low latency:
PING games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=6.85 ms
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=96.9 ms
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=13.6 ms
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=10.2 ms
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=5 ttl=56 time=70.1 ms

A bit of jitter there, but you’ll get that on most wireless connections. I realise that when things go wrong with IBB, they go very wrong, and I have dealt with their lack of support in the past… but for now I’m not complaining. Despite the apparently solid performance, FPS games are still unplayable, so I have ordered a phoneline to get DSL in too. With a bit (lot) of luck, I won’t have to battle with Eircom every inch of the way, and I might even be connected in time for the Quake 3 TDM Nations Cup, where Ireland has been drawn in a group with:

	Poland
	Czech Republic
	Italy
	United Kingdom
	Hungary

It was an eventful week in beautiful Cork St., Dublin. On Monday, an elderly neighbour of mine was found murdered in his apartment. Sounds like theres more to the story - “the retired traffic warden was convicted in 1998 of stalking and terrorising the parents of a four-year-old child”. The “parents of a four-year-old child” is this bad journalism or am I supposed to read between the lines?

Minor incidents and arrests provided intermittent entertainment outside my window for the rest of the week - a drunk guy causing hassle throwing his pint glass at a passing car, he got arrested. Later, an on-street row between “Jimmy” and his sister’s scumbag boyfriend. The boyfriend had allegedly hit Jimmy’s sister, and the psychotic and wired Jimmy was not happy. The violence increased as the drama unfurled.. turns out the boyfriend had hit Jimmy’s sister in the past - in fact once he had even held a knife to her. Jimmy was going to end it now, and the death threats emerged. Thats when Jimmy’s sister arrived on the street and things got confusing. No resulting arrest on this occasion.

Friday night takes the biscuit though, because I made the stupid mistake of not having enough money for a taxi after the pub. This meant I had to run the gauntlet and traverse the Flats of Dodginess all by myself late at night. I made it through unscathed, but the same cannot be said two other guys who got shot 15 minutes later in the same place that I had just been, just off Cork Street. One of them died in hospital, but the other was only shot in the leg and survived. Taxis from now on I think…

I was in the Guinness Storehouse yesterday, since my brother and his wife were here on holiday. On a Saturday afternoon in July it was always likely to be busy, but this was a queue of Madame Tussauds proportions. As a result, this item on Bernie Goldbach’s Sunday paper round-up does not surprise me:

10. What is the most-visited fee-charging tourist attraction in Dublin? The Guinness Storehouse, with 780,851 visitors in 2005, according to Failte Ireland.

Over 3/4 of a million visitors, and what was the price? €14.00 each for adults! You spend an hour willfully absorbing pro-Guinness propoganda, and get a “free” pint at the end of your tour with a nice view of the city. Fair enough, its interesting to see how the drink is made, to see the hops in particular (did you know they can grow to 15metres tall?) but I was struck by what a goldmine Guinness have here. All these Americans and Germans and Australians will go back home and tell their friends all about Arthur Guinness and his interesting brewing techniques.

It says a lot that the highlight of the tour for me was watching all the old Guinness ads (which I could just as easily watch on YouTube on a screen which is not covered in fingerprint smudges). Guinness should be paying us to visit their store house.

Still shellshocked by Tuesday night’s activities outside my Cork Street window (almost equalled on the Wednesday and Thursday), I dreaded to see what my first Friday night would bring in this pocket of madness in Dublin’s south inner city. What transpired was beyond anything I would have predicted.

The ambulance arrived, as it does every day. While the paramedics went into the flat, their ambulance was hijacked.

The ambulance was stolen in Dublin city centre last night as the crew were treating a patient in an apartment block in the Cork Street area of the city.

The vehicle was driven around the area and was damaged extensively. A number of cars in the area were also damaged.

I used to think Farranree was bad… where bored kids would throw stones at you and occasionally burn down houses for a laugh, but joyriding with an ambulance takes it to a new level (I blame GTA). Last week I was only joking about putting up the webcam, but my God… you could sell this stuff.

When I gave an account of my adventures in some dodgy parts of Dublin’s south inner city, I had no idea that I had been right outside my sister’s apartment. Today I started working in Dublin, and I am temporarily using her empty room overlooking Saint Theresa’s Gardens (flats from hell), a very dodgy vacant lot, and a centre-of-the-universe Centra. I have been hearing stories the past few months regarding the entertainment provided by this Centra at night, far better than anything the television can offer. I assumed the stories of drug dealing in the vacant lot, and nightly fights and arrests outside the Centra were exaggerated, but it seems this place is as crazy as promised.

My first night’s entertainment was provided by a drunk guy getting thrown out of Centra by a security guard and two paramedics, and being taken into an ambulance. I don’t know what happened inside the shop, but twice he put his arms around the security guard and kissed him as he was being dragged away. The shutter was drawn on the shop, and the staff spent the following twenty minutes I guess cleaning up whatever damage the man had done.

They were still at it when the man returned, and shouted through the shutter “Come here you fucking bastard, do you want to start a war?” over and over again. Just before the police arrived, the man scurried off and hid in the vacant lot. I observed the unmarked Garda car do a few laps of the area trying to find him, while some other Gardai ushered the staff of Centra out of the shop.

A few minutes later the police were gone and the man reappeared at the shop and started trying to kick the doors in. Defeated by the shutter, he eventually gave up. I’ve got to put a webcam up here, this place is nuts.

I have a bone to pick with you. You’re losing me sleep. I’m holding you directly responsible for my current situation, one of domestic anguish. Because of the relentless gunshots and sirens, I stayed up until midnight frantically drilling rawlplugs, filling cracks, boarding up the back windows with sheet steel. I then lay awake stewing over the perfect Crown colour to hide the bloodstains in my living room, ruminating over where to place the mirror to give that perfect illusion of depth to make my 700sq. ft. flat seem large enough to house my 14 illegitimate children.

I think that painting my tiny hallway with a burgundy suede will match the listless colours of the rundown neighbourhood. Maybe I’ll add some uplighters. Back to Woodies tomorrow, I guess. Perhaps if I leave at 6am I will beat the traffic and be home by nightfall. Thats assuming my neighbours don’t decide start another riot or something.

YOU made me like this, Dublin. My television works, but I am huddled behind my comfortable couch waiting for the man in the Celtic jersey to arrive and take it all away.

But my little house has POTENTIAL. Potential that simply isn’t being realised when I’m sitting on my arse. One of these days I’m going to take that bus PAST Inchicore and find out what all the fuss is about. So now, instead of sitting comfortably, relaxing in my sitting room, I’m standing at the window, observing the heroin addicts in the gutter below, as my 35 year old son struggles to read the classifieds in The Sun to find some place to live that he and his pregnant 14-year-old girlfriend can afford.

With a paintbrush in hand the remote control is relegated to my arse pocket, because I still can’t figure out how to use it. Last night I watched The Matrix Reloaded. It was really good but I still don’t understand who those guys with the sunglasses were.

If only you were more like Cork. I’d be able to keep my paintbrushes in a shed where they belong. For my €330,000 I would be living in a bigger house, with a nice garden, in a safer area, without having to deal with the traffic and the living cost and the ignorant locals who think that Laois is something you hang your dog with. There’d be peeling paint and rising damp, because I’d be enjoying life with a can of Murphy’s, waiting for my rugby team to come on the telly and win the Heineken Cup. Instead, I spend my days painting the walls, because I have nothing else to look forward to this summer.