The annual celebration that is Culture Night is many things to many people but for one group of teenagers in Dublin’s north inner city, it will be a chance to reclaim some public space in a place that often has negative connotations.
This Friday evening, the area next to the Luke Kelly statue on Spencer Dock will be transformed when a group of local young people will play music, recite poetry and offer home-made cakes and pizzas to passersby.
The pop-up event is the culmination of a six-month programme put together by social enterprise A Playful City together with Swan Youth Services. “I hope this programme will challenge the rhetoric around young people in this community,” said Eibhlin Harrington, the head of Swan Youth Services. “There is huge potential, talent, resilience and kindness among young people which I feel gets lost.”
Harrington leads the programme which gives young people in the area the chance to develop practical projects, which they can showcase in their local community. The initiative included workshops with the nearby community garden at Mud Island and chefs Jennie Moran from Luncheonette and Avril Murphy from One Fine Mess. It gave the teenagers opportunities to make their own food, using some of the produce from the garden. They also hosted pop-up clothes swaps, nail bars and hairdressing sessions in Liberties Park, the bank of the Royal Canal and other local spots. And they made and decorated the props which will be used again on Culture Night.
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“This is the first group that I’ve been involved with,” said 18-year-old Janis, one of the 11 participants of the project. “We had to work in a group which can be a challenge. We’ve all grown up a bit and are not the same people we were when we started.”
She credits the programme – which also included a workshop with tech company Hubspot – with now being a first-year business and management student at the National College of Ireland.
Speaking about the negative perception of the north inner city, 16-year-old Graeme said it’s an everyday occurrence to see broken glass bottles, nitrous oxide canisters, drunk people, and drugs being sold and taken. “I live here. It’s normal but if you’re not from this area, it might be scary or threatening.”
We need to be celebrating young people, not demonising them.”
— Eibhlin Harrington
Poetry workshops were another element of the programme and poet FeliSpeaks came along to offer some tips. Some of the teenagers will read poems they created.
Jennifer (18) gave a sneak preview of the poem she will read on behalf of a friend who is too shy to read in public. Titled, Red Tellytubby, it includes the lines, “crying out for help but no one seems to hear, lost in a sea of emotions, drowning in fear”.
Harrington said that “if a lot of adults faced the challenges of the young people in this community, they wouldn’t be able to remain as positive and solution focused. We need to be celebrating young people, not demonising them.”
Swan Youth Services also have a team who are out on the streets, day and night, across the northeast inner city. “It’s about responding to the needs of young people and building bridges. There are lots of complex needs – housing, addiction, the grooming of young people into the drug trade, mental health issues.”
Harrington believes a key to keeping young people engaged is to listen to their ideas about what they want to do and then get these programmes up and running very quickly. “They need to be consulted and when they come up with ideas, these ideas need to be acted on, Six months is massive in terms of their lives.”
Aaron Copeland, one of the directors of A Playful City said a lack of space is a huge issue for young people in Dublin’s inner city. “There are thousands of young people here and each of them has about an A3 sheet of paper each in terms of outdoor public space.”
Quoting a British architecture firm who exhibited at the 2021 Venice Biennale, he says, it’s hard to socialise at this age as vPPR Architects said in their exhibit, Play With (Out) Grounds – “they are too old for the playground, too broke for cafes and too young for the pub”.
Copeland says programmes like this not only offer young people a chance to spend time together safely, but also a way to reinhabit the outdoor spaces in their communities. “Young people are pro-social. It’s only when something negative happens that all hell breaks lose. It’s about taking the spaces that are already here and using skills to develop entrepreneurial devices such as the folding service station that they will use on Culture Night and can use again for other events.”
